Lichen and Leaves Beneath

You can’t ride on the rail with your bike when the path is covered in snow.  Drizzling all day.  I can’t see beyond one hundred yards. And new gloves arrived last night.  I lost my last pair in Shanghai, somehow and I’d ordered these so I could bike.   so I suit up and open the garage and ride down to hill to the trail.  The yard, the woods have lost much of their snow but the bike path is still inches deep in white.

Arriving on the trail a snap a few photos and try to start my pedaling. I set out push the wheels and go nowhere..  The wheels don’t catch.  I try again.  Throttling the gears down to their least resistant I find a worn patch and try again but can’t progress more than a few feet.  I wonder, if another bike, that one with the exaggerated fat tires I saw at the store . . .  Might that allow for more snow traction?  I had, of course, wanted not only to get exercise but tp repeat the autumn ritual of riding down the trail towards the spot I’ve defined as the turning point, past all the dense wood and steep ravines. 

I leave my bike back up in the yard and consider the flow of water down from our house into the trail side channel and under the trail through a shaft I’d suspect was built at least seventy years ago, out into the main channel of the creek on the opposite side that always flows whether there is melting snow or not. 

I photograph lichen and leaves beneath ice.  There are also leaves that have held on to their branches, defiantly, tiredly.  I photograph them as well.  Walking there are many more views that capture my attention.  So do the animal tracks that are so clear now, here in the snow. 

Reluctantly, if I’m honest, I set out to plod along the trail and take in some exercise.  If I'm not going to pedal I need some other way to make the heart pump. A women is walking a dog on the path ahead.  It yelps and yelps.  Fine time to pause and consider the house across the way.   It’s slow going but I proceed on to the wooden bridge with a view of the cows.  That’s enough for now.  I haven’t any reliable benchmark for walking.  On the way back my wife calls and says she saw a coyote.  I immediately disregard what she says and joke about how she can upgrade to a new husband if I don’t get home. Later, she shows me the video footage she shot with her phone and I apologize for my cynicism.  Up at our gazebo, in her grainy film footage was an animal I could describe in no other way than as a coyote. 

Saturday, 12/14/19