It’s early Sunday evening, could be any Sunday provided the sunlight is hitting the city in a perfect, golden slant and birds are conversing rapidly between trees. This particular Sunday I am riding down Bryant Ave., cruising leisurely, heading home. My legs are covered with dirt and my shins speckled with cuts. My Alterra t-shirt is shredded at the shoulder. In my backpack I’ve got a loaf of Brownberry 12-grain, peanut butter, Huber’s strawberry jam, and a quart of soymilk, typical dinner stuff for the single vegetarian. Under the food is an empty Nalgene water bottle and strapped to the outside of the bag is my helmet (the battle having been won).

I had ridden across town earlier to Wirth Park, a vestige of Midwestern woodland, golf course, and gathering place for lonely, swarthy men, all wrapped into one mosquito paradise. I was meeting a friend and his bike shop co-workers to ride the maze of trails that seem to connect all kinds of random points throughout the wooded areas.

The ride coalesces in typical fashion: a bunch of guys pull up, their cars covered with stickers from recent trade shows. Bikes are pulled from roof-racks and truck beds and preened (tire pressures checked, fork seals wiped clean). We all start gabbing, one guy tries a bike trick and topples ungracefully to the ground and we groan jovially. It’s a pretty basic and universal routine.

Finally someone sounds the bugle (figuratively) and we are off, snapping into pedals and clicking gears down the pavement to our first loop built into the hillside between Brownie Lake and Target World HQ’s parking lot. The trail is only two or three miles, but built with both economy and severity in mind. With hairpin turns seemingly in the billions, sandy washes, boggy patches, and steep climbs, these are hard-fought, arduous miles. The humid air and insistent mosquitoes makes rest inadvisable.

We regroup back at the street. There’s a bloody nose, scrapes and cuts, and we lost one rider to a trashed wheel. Oh, the loneliness of the walk back. I pull the Nalgene bottle from my bag and it gets passed around to those without water or without enough.

We’re all friends now.

Back into the park, into the hills and the woods, a tight trail rolls down a slope, tall pines loom over our heads. The sun shines through in brilliant patches. It’s beautiful here: a slight well-worn trail, barely a foot wide cuts through the dense vegetation of the forest floor: such a small footprint, but then our tires are only two inches wide. My mind wants to linger there but the pace of our fearless leaders is fast so I remain focused on the trail ahead.

I used to think it was unfortunate that so much of riding is done for the exhilaration of speed, the triumph over obstacles rather than to commune, to linger and ponder the natural setting. However, the bicycle provides a means to throw yourself, so to speak, into the fray of the wild laws of the universe. To concentrate on motion, on maintaining and gaining momentum requires the innate ability to read the trail, a blurring of the distinction between mind, body, and machine. A clarity occurs at speed, when the rhythm of your breathing finds the tempo in your legs which vary with the irregularities of the Earth’s surface; momentum builds like water flowing and you feel like riding forever.

Back at the parking lot, we mull around, dodging mosquitoes, talk about food and beer. Every one packs up, I’m offered a ride but decline. As I leave down the parkway, a car honks as it passes. The two guys inside wave out the windows and I wave back. Good feelings.

I head to Rainbow in uptown to buy dinner, and we are back where we started. I am Bike Man. I am feeling jaunty and I smile broadly back to sidewalk-walkers and porch-sitters that watch me as I cruise by. Time to shower, time to eat sandwiches of low nutritional value, "This American Life" is on tonight—ooh, almost time for that too! This is why I ride.

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