My Third Favorite Thing
About riding a motorcycle
Microclimates.
The color and the hardness of the ground bounce different temperatures back at you. The heat, the coolness, the moisture of the surface you roll over, it washes up your legs and tickles your sides. It leaks into your clothes and dissipates into the ether.
The scorching breath of the concrete jungle, no relief in sight: no trees, no water, stop and go. Joyless. Every hard angle, every flat slab of concrete, and all the asphalt radiates heat, cooks you, melts tar-dripping tributaries into snakes.
The air is dead inside a tiled tunnel. The closing walls threaten to suffocate you, Everything is coated by invisible, killing fumes. This world has no seasons.
But seasons cling to highways, snippets of whatever happens in the blur beyond the guardrail. On a cold morning, the fog gathers in dips. On a hot day, even a hilltop shrugs unapologetically—you thought it might be nicer up there, but it’s not. This length of land was paved to shorten a distance, but it pushes back at the world outside the windshield.
The highways here lead to blasted roadside cliffs barely holding back the earth. They perpetually spring leaks that cry down rocky faces. They offer coolness, a suggestion of hidden life, maybe a hint of mist for a moment. The off-ramp becomes a slingshot, through the cleaving walls, to where the roads return to the wild.
Headed for twisties now. Half-tall vegetation casts a quick chill with its shadow, half on your body, never reaching on your face. The wide heat of farmland pulses like a bubble on the brink of bursting and you can feel a pressure change when you roll inside.
It is dry and dusty. The sword of a distinctly American Damocles balances between farm food and chemicals for killing. Sometimes it feels fecund. Sometimes it feels like death.
There’s a difference in wind and temperature when the corn is new and when it is high, when the crops are dense or sparse, and when irrigation systems spring across the growing green horizon.
Poisoned by agricultural run-off, a puce air stagnates by neglected ponds never meant for swimming, . Any temptation for a refreshing dip turns to revulsion in the clinging ick.
Finally (finally!) there’s an otherworldly ether under arboreal tunnels. Rows of trees begin to reach their arms over the road to clasp one another. Their shade embraces you, welcomes you in, suggests there’s magic ahead. This is a living portal.
On through a covered bridge, where the air is lively, like dancers taking a rest and chattering happily. When there’s water rushing below. It’s a tickle, a giggle, and always too brief. A flirtation.
Swooping into winding woods, the coolness comes to stay. The world slows. There’s humidity and dancing shadows. Leaning into curves near steep earthen walls, the gravity plunges you through puddles of rich air that swirls like golden dust motes, every atom an essential ingredient to build this big world and the little you that rides through it.
Love it!
Glorious writing :-)