47 on 55

Piles of snow still lurk about, dirty and shrunken, like the aliens at the end of an alien invasion movie, when they're dying in sad heaps. But the air is warm enough, and the sun bright enough, to get me out on a protracted bike ride — the most protracted bike ride I've ever taken in a single day, in fact! I covered about 47 miles in 4 hours — here is a map of my route. I basically went to the end of the Minuteman Bikeway, then followed a big, picturesque triangle through Concord and Bedford.

I saw many things: the North Bridge in Concord, site of the Shot Heard Round the World, where a cheerfully exasperated teenager and his terrible-at-canoeing father first banged into the underside of the bridge, then got caught in the branches near the shore, and finally capsized; a young lady on a horse practicing dressage off Monument Road, which winds peacefully past scenic old farms and farmland; Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, where Thoreau and Emerson and Louisa May Alcott are buried; mulch mountains being turned by a backhoe; a man made all out of terra cotta pots. The wild areas are all still brown, but little blue flowers and yellow-green shoots of skunk cabbage are pushing up through. There must be a hive of springtime activity buzzing just below the surface of all the dead-looking spots.

All kinds of traffic were heavy on the bikeway, but I don't mind sharing with pedestrians, provided they don't walk four abreast. (I also don't like cyclists who ride three abreast, of which I saw more than a few, all wearing Spandex and faux-sponsorship jerseys.) I am a little less tolerant of in-line skaters, because they swerve side to side in the lane in a difficult-to-predict fashion. It's like level three of an old-skool video game, when the enemies that move in a straight line are replaced by ones that wiggle in S-curves. Much trickier!

In an appealing graffiti development, last time I passed a certain stop sign on the bikeway someone had spray-painted OBAMA below the word STOP. Since then, someone else has added YOU CAN'T above it. Ha!

I've missed this — biking makes me feel joyful and exuberant and narrational, though for the last 15 miles or so I was feeling pretty tired and eager to be done. My legs are not too happy with me at the moment. But I must get back to Concord soon — there are some nifty historical sites I didn't get to check out, and apparently I was only a mile from Walden Pond at one point during my trip. Sad to have missed that, though I did have to hurry back to meet adfamiliares for dinner at Redbones, so perhaps it's best.