This kind of riding has the great pay-off of mood alteration, although I try not to think about this directly. There haven't been all that many times that a book has profoundly affected me. One such example was the chapter in John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, entitled "My Mental Crisis;" he concluded that mood is a result --not the cause-- of pursuing some powerful interest. This is certainly true on my bicycle. The physiology of outdoor exercise is the Cause.
Actually, there is a sweet contradiction. On one level outdoor exercise, such as bicycling, is very personal; you're concerned with your senses, breathing, and observations. But paradoxically you can feel strangely detached from yourself as you melt into the environment. I felt this most intensely once while riding in the summer rain back East, and felt it again recently on a dry New Mexican day while approaching an old mining area.
It wasn't even a minor tourist trap, but it could have been. For the mood I was in -- and yes I had been climbing uphill and had the joy juice flowing -- a little scenery was more than enough. There were some fine old wrecks to moon and swoon over, but not enough to develop into a Bisbee, AZ or even a Jerome.
There was an old basement nearby that had something different about it, a greenish cast to the surface. I dismounted to find out if it was old paint or green copper oxide. All of the rocks lying nearby had green copper oxide surfaces. But the green could have gone all the way through. I wanted for a hammer.
Rightly or wrongly, I imagined the green oxide growing on the rock's surface after they were cracked and exposed to air and sun, as part of the basement wall. It was a geologically-living creature.
When you think of nature reclaiming her own, you usually think of a wooden structure decomposing in a humid climate. But here a copper mine gave birth to a building, they both decayed, and the remains have started to look like a copper mine again.
The nature that reclaimed her own here is what Thoreau would have called a crystalline biology, on the same page that he wrote of the "frostwork of a longer night."
It was so empty there. Empty of people. My mind pedaled off, away from the old mining town, to an America that wasn't so crowded. Perhaps because this place could have been a crowded tourist trap, but wasn't, it seemed vast and free, like one of the grasslands of the Great Plains or West.
Soon I was distracted by something off to the side: common litter uncommonly presented. A piece of soft plastic film or tissue was death-tangled in cholla. Photographs don't do it justice. The plastic was so frail and innocent, so ephemeral. To see it blown by chance into that cholla captures something fundamental about the human condition. It is reminiscent of, but more universal than, those famous photographs of the carcasses of infantry grunts hung up in barbwire during the Great War.
If I were a sculptor or painter I would avoid making ornaments for rich women's living rooms, choose a theme like this, and then strive to make the visual image evoke what shelves of books would fail at. (Then I'd starve.)
While mulling this over, and drifting off to subjects somehow related, I "awoke" to find myself on the outskirts of town, already. There's nothing like reveries of the wheel to make the miles click by faster.
