A Place

December 11, 2021

A Place

When you are only nine miles worth of pedal rotations out from the front door, can you find adventure without hike-a-bike?

Adventure. Hike-a-bike. I am not sure the one is a requisite part of the other, but... I mean you can experience adventure on a road, or trail, that does not require you to push your bike past, around, over, or through some obstacle keeping you from riding past, around, over, or through. At the same time I am pretty sure that being forced to resort to the latter contributes to a greater sense of the former. Hike-a-bike. Adventure.

The mountains, the canyon called, and I heeded the call this morning - the first of the season's up-canyon forays, on a bright and sparkling December day. I was searching for a place - and I use the word "a," rather than "the" or "that," because I seem to remember from last winter that there are more than one such place deep in the canyon - a place where outside sounds cease to intrude, a necessarily small place trapped in a bubble, a place where nothing exists outside a narrow confine. When I have found these places before, recognizing them for their uniqueness, the bubble keeping out the shifting, straining engines of slot car racers on the road above, the family sedans, even the airborne props.

I did not find one of those places today, almost but not quite. The places where the stream talks, the places were the breeze rushed through the branches upon which leaves were still changing, the places where critters, unseen, rustled along where leaves, fully changed, littered the ground, those places were around every crooked elbow and outstretched finger of canyon. But so too were the overbearing sounds of motor and transmission, whine and roar.

Well, the first foray of the season means that there will be many more opportunities to search for those places in the weeks to come. Who's in?