Biking Sensations

Biking is fun again this year.

I think it was last summer that my enjoyment for riding my bicycle seemed to wane.

This year I have a new bike... it's a mountain bike.  It has a little more suspension than my old bike and balloonier tires.

I am enjoying the ride - off and on the rode.  As I mentioned in other posts, my approach to biking is different from a lot of folks:  I enjoy the speed of down hill coasting, but I am really in it to take in all the sights and sounds around me.

For this post, I thought I would list some of the sensations I have enjoyed lately:

• The thrill of spotting a Red-Winged Blackbird  lighting on a pasture fence post; surrounded by the scent of freshly mowed hay and the fading sunlight of a warm Spring day....
• On that same day, in the same pasture that is bordered by a little country road, I looked across the pasture, just in time to see a half dozen deer bounding across the crest of the field.  Like waves rolling backwards - their raised white fluffy tails forming the trailing whitecaps.
• At the end of a very hot day, where two roads intersected, I caught the faint scent of hot tar:  the kind that used to form little gooey gelatin-like puddles, on a similar intersection near my childhood home in Cedartown.  That fleeting aroma brought to mind hot summer afternoons riding our bikes in criss-crossing figure eight patterns and sifting through the finely ground pebbles at that sleepy intersection in search of the mysterious "rock-glass".  I also remember a blue bathing suit I had that forever bore the tell-tale sign of my having sat in one of those hot tar puddles.
• One evening recently, I rounded the corner of a wooded trail at a fast pace - just in time to scare up a wad of unsuspecting turkeys.  Their wings can sound monstrous in such a situation.
• I believe it was the same evening as I sped through a spot where the trail presents a somewhat smooth downhill grade through the woods and then out onto a meadow trail, my horizon was suddenly darkened by the figure of a fleeing deer as she leaped across the path clearing a fence and springing out of sight. They seem a lot bigger when they are that close and moving that fast!
• The stale smell of grass that has been cut and left to dry out in the sun can quickly send me back to our neighborhood football games in Morristown, Tennessee.  There was a vacant lot across the street from my house, pretty much the entire neighborhood would gather there often. Apparently it belonged to the couple that lived in an adjoining home.  I suppose they kept the grass cut regularly, but I never remember them telling us to get off their property.

For some folks, bicycling is serious business:  they have the proper gear.  But for me - just think what I would have missed if all I heard was my latest downloads on my MP3 player, or all I saw was my odometer or just the road ahead of me.