Having vaguely formed this plan and then vaguely began it and now having vaguely arrived at it, I vaguely realized the impossibility of it. I monitored some mysterious interior corner of my body where I keep my intuitive sense of whether something is actually possible given the current conditions and my judgment of them and my overall emotional state. State: not confident. Conditions: baking sun. Judgment: imagining myself flying round the arc in the baking sun feeling my insides become more heated and wobbly by the moment, mind flailing for some sort of Christopher Columbus like confidence which would make more tolerable that point in the ocean where Italy is another lifetime and America doesn't even exist yet.
Without pause I turned the corner on to FH anyway. I did not visualize myself making it past the first side street, across from the cornfield, where I always stop and turn around. Perhaps I would make it to the first set of lights before the arc. Not impossible, that.
Out among the cornfields, FH is quieter, and the sky more open. My body settled into a slower pace, a steadier pedal, my mind emptied. The wind came over the cornfields and I looked to where it had come from - a mile or more of corn, banks of trees, a hill, and above all, the wide sky. I felt I could pedal forever in this stillness. I looked around the arc and tried to imagine where the road s, hidden in between the corn and the trees. I tried to see where the intersection is that marks the entrance to the bicycle trail, and I couldn't see anything but green.
I longed to pedal into the green. To breeze down the arc, wind down the arc. The trees looked cool, the shade, I imagined, inviting. My mind emptied into it. The Conservation Area is behind the arc, and behind that, more cornfields, only partially colonized by subdivisions. And beyond that, more fields, more, the endless quiet stillness of the not-city. Every part of me longed to empty myself into that void.
Instead, on the baking warm road, I turned the bike at the first cross street, across from the cornfields, and pedaled calmly back down towards Columbia St. I felt peaceful, unafraid. I wanted to feel like a failure but I didn't. Some part of that stillness was coming back with me.
When I reached the lights on the corner of Columbia and FH, I was moved by a sudden burst of confidence and turned right, further down Columbia. I was now entering the limits of my current known universe again. Within a few blocks I was back on the ocean. I could see clearly to the end of this road, where it stops at Erbsville road in what was once a stand of trees and empty fields and is now an entire neighborhood. I recalled for a moment a bikeride I had on a balmy summer evening in the year 2000. On that ride, I took Erbsville St all the way to Erbsville proper, and there was nothing out there but a few houses and a couple collecting rocks from a shallow pit a the corner of the road, one of whom said to me, "This is the best place to collect rocks" a statement on which I had no formed opinion to agree or disagree. Today I think there is a high school in that spot.
Coming out of my memory, I again turned, crossed the road and directed myself towards the lights of FH and Columbia. It was still baking hot and I was hotter than ever.
I not unexpectedly came up to a fine gravel path that left the sidewalk and headed away in a shallow parallel triangle from Columbia St. Awareness of this path had been lurking in me along with the question of whether I would venture it. I pulled up in the blessed shade beside the path and weighed the question. I imagined myself lost on this path, hot, disoriented, lost, unable to find my way back to FH, although I had the very vaguest of memories that it did indeed connect somewhere. I recalled my enjoyment of this peaceful little path in my University days. I weighed peace and battle in my mind.
I realized that I was genuinely afraid of hurting myself - of overheating, causing my body too much stress. It was more than symbolic, although it was also symbolic. I didn't know if it would hurt my body and my soul to take this path and possibly become lost and too hot and deranged in some way. I realized that I sincerely wanted to help myself to be a happier and healthier person and that was fine. I felt somehow connected to the idea of the book, Our Bodies, Ourselves. Feminism rose in my head, colouring my fears with a sense of proud and personal duty to ensure my own health and wellbeing. Or, to put another way, I felt a profound sense of unsentimental caring for myself. I felt like a pioneer in the field of self-respect, protecting myself from situations where I was not confident I could handle myself.
After which train of thought I entered the path with a confidence born of a good present feeling, rather than a certainty or even idea of a positive future. Shortly I encountered a woman and her daughter, and I asked the woman whether the path came out at FH. She said yes but gave me unclear directions and described unfavourably the condition of the path leading there. Though now I cannot say why, I took this as encouragement. I followed the path in a mild euphoria of physical confidence, based solely in the desire of my body to move forward in space. I saw a little man in a long Islamic robe mowing his law with a gas mower and in just his unique existence in this time and place he gave me more confidence or at least fellow feeling. I came to the place where the path became rough as the woman had described and was delighted to discover it wasn't bad at all. Feeling a surge of power, I turned a corner to discover that in fact the trail had turned completely to grass and meandered around a corner into what looked like a marsh, blowing cattails in the sun.
My heart dropped and a rush of terror came through me as I saw the only other way out was a concrete path going up a hill into the neighborhood (there seemed no time at all to think of going back). Dear god, it had come to this - to be forced into tangled suburbia. I imagined myself lost for minutes-like-hours on unmarked roads, going up and down hills, unable to find my way out and indeed getting further from my goal as I continuously but mistakenly thought I was almost at it. In my imagination the weather was both blustering and cold and about to rain, and bakingly sunstrokingly hot. There was nothing for it in my mind but to go up the hill which I did under a cloud of fear and trembling. Extremely old memories of this route as a means of exit to FH were all that kept me from moving from what I knew to be irrational anxiety to true terror.
At the top of the hill a small Indian man was crouched in his garden behind a fence beside the path and I asked him if I could get to FH from here. He said, turn left, 300 yards and indeed he was right, for after turning left, and a moment of brief terror at discovering those 300 yards were distributed around a corner, I was back on FH.
Making the turn, my seat swiveled a little and in putting it back into place using my thighs, I hit my knee on my bike and started to cry, in pain, fear and relief. I whizzed down FH with the kind of sadness that can only arise in a safe place, not unaware of the fact that a year ago I was terrified to even be on this street.
Shaken, I drove blindly and despondently for a while, all sense of adventure gone, until I found myself, hotter than ever, entering nearby Clair Lake Park. Coming over the hill I was sobbing and couldn't even get fully into the park. I sat at the entrance way, where the path goes over the river, in the shade by the side of the path, where I was soothed by the rush of the river over a little waterfall, which was not in sight.
Crying, shaky, unsure of whether I should go home, I drank some water and let the emotion pass through me.I felt sad for so many things and perhaps most for my lost sense of adventure. People passed back and forth on the path, and, sitting in this pool of feeling, I watched them and grew more and more still. A couple came past, old, with matching bad posture, the man stepping firmly but not ploddingly, the woman with her wrist delicately out to hold her dog's leash. I took some scraps of paper out of my bag and wrote some of the things I was feeling. I watched a white moth flutter about, I I noticed the blueness of the sky. My body hurt, my heart hurt, my heart ached. I ached for the loves I wasn't confident of. I ached from the freedoms other people enjoyed. I ached not to go home, and I ached not to go forward. I ached until I was still, very still, and then I drank some water, and wrote some more, and the same couple came back again and smiled at me again, and then I smiled from far away at a family having a family bikeride, and then I thought about what might lie at the other, unexplored end of Clair Lake Park, and what Columbia Lake was like under the bright sun today.
So I got up and packed all my papers and bottles away and put back on my bike helmet. And told myself it was hot and getting to mid day and that I should turn back towards home, and then I directed myself to the far end of Clair Lake Park and had others adventures in the hour that followed, which eventually culminated in me sitting under a small copse of trees on an old bridge, watching a flutter of red in the trees as a cardinal made his way through his afternoon.
This took me back to moments when I was on my bike riding on trails, only to have them end at pavement and banality... and how I felt trapped in my own matrix of decision-making and the maze of suburbia, trying to find a path that kept me flying through the lush green unmapped wilderness.
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