Two snow scenes

Snow had barely started falling when I got up yesterday so I rode to work.

But they had been predicting snow, so I chose the bike with nobbies, not the road bike.

I'll spare you all the other details, but there were two moments that were pretty extraordinary.



After I parked in Conshy and found my way to the trail, the snow had started to accumulate and it was starting to snow in ernest.



Hitting the long dark stretch of trail after Spring Mill, I was just riding into the snow. Coming at you like the stars on that screen saver, like driving down the highway at night in a blizzard. Only it was dead silent in my little bubble and there was no danger. The world having shrunk to a bubble about 15 feet in front of me, the sphere defined by how far my light would penetrate.



I was just staying on the trail, but it was more like riding a trainer. I was doing work, but nothing was moving, nothing was changing, there was zero evidence of any progress. If I had been anywhere else, a highway in Kansas or out in the woods in Alaska, it could have been scarey. But I knew I just had to pedal and sooner or later I would come out of it. Amazing.



Later in the day or morning it stopped snowing and got a little sunny, then a little warmer. But by the time I left work, it had started to get cold again.



Returning on that same section of trail, the walkers and runners had left footprints that were now frozen. There weren't a lot of them, but a couple of folks had gone through. (One long section had no bike tracks other than mine from the morning.)



The riding was a little easier than it had been in the morning. Again, the sections of the path without footprints were silent. No tire hum, no nothing.



But the frozen footprints crunched when I hit them. And so there was this rat-rat-rat-rat-rat sound whenever I hit them. And when the spacing changed, so did the pitch. rat---rat----rat---rat. The prints from the walkers were closer together and higher in pitch. The runners' less so. And when I clipped just the left foot prints of the duck-footed runner, the frequency dropped even lower. Hitting different tracks, mixed the different rhythms together. As TW once said, it sounded like "the ghost of Gene KrupaWith an overhead cam and glasspaks."



Playing a game like that, you almost forget you are working. Just buzzing along like a kid on a bike, in the moment, forgetting that you are riding to school or that you have fifty cents burning a hole in your pocket on your way to the drug store or the five and dime.



No wonder B indulges me in my riding... Thank you.