Gravel Roads to be Explored

"Time changes everything except something

within us that is always surprised by change."

Thomas Hardy

While I long for company, I do not long for city roads, even those that are not heavily traveled.  This, combined with a sore tendon, helps me decide to head for the gravel, something I have not done for a bit and hope to do more often in the near future.  The sun is hot.  Feel like temperatures are to soar to over 100 degrees today.  I decide not only not to do the club century, but not to do a century.  

Slowly, since getting my Surly, I am starting to familiarize myself with all the gravel roads in the area, the ones I rode past many times over the years on my road bike, wondering about but never traveling.  Some of them would be rideable on a road bike, but many are gravel for a reason.  There seem to be long, steep hills on many of them, hard enough to ride on paved roads and made more difficult by a sliding and slipping rear wheel. Today's gravel has almost a ditch across it in places where, I assume, water has forced a path in heavy rains. I don't know that I will ever feel truly competent on gravel, the way it seems to vie with you for control, always leaving me rather off center, yet I find myself strangely drawn to it.  Briefly I think of when the children were small and they, for some reason I still don't fathom, dug a ditch so that water would come into the shed.  I remember anger struggling with laughter in my husband's eyes when he discovered what they had done, and his resignation that it was just one more thing he had to tolerate until he could fix. 

I pass mobile home after mobile home early on the road, run down, almost frightening.  It is not the mobile home that frightens me:  I lived and raised my children in a mobile home until they were in middle school and we had enough to buy a house, but it is the condition of things: bushes untrimmed, yards unmowed, trash scattered, rusted cars and trucks everywhere.  Just a general feeling of neglect, as if caring would be too much of an effort.  Poverty...I learned a true fear of poverty from the stories of my mother and her childhood:  hiding from landlords, moving 12 times in a school year, never knowing if your needs would be met.  And yes, this place frightens me.  I pass a small camper with clothes lines attached.  A woman is hanging her clothing out to dry.  She yells something at me that I don't quite catch.  I don't stop, however, I move on.  I think briefly how I am surprised there are no dogs coming out and giving chase, but whether it is the heat, that there are none on this road, or they are restrained who knows.  I just know that I survive that part of the road with my calves intact.  

Later on the road, the scenery becomes beautiful.  Perhaps because the hills begin and there just is not a good place for a mobile home or camper.  While it is hot, there has been lots of rain, and the trees are green.  I come upon a young deer, walking down the road in the same direction I am going.  At first I believe it is just a large, skinny dog, but when I hail him he turns his head and I see budding antlers, black and velvety looking.  Startled, he bounds into the brush, but almost slowly as if the heat is just too hot for him to make an effort.  A tad later, a racoon saunters across the road, lithe and graceful, melting back into the forest.  

At times, I get off and walk the hill.  I have wrapped my achilles for the first time and forgot to allow accommodation for swelling feet.  It definitely is restricting the movement, but it also is not comfortable.  Still, I don't mind walking.  I find I have more of these niggling injuries now than before and that the best thing to do is to go with them rather than fighting them.  I have been lucky enough to heal from each with time.  This too, I feel certain, will pass.  

The gravel yields to paved roads and to fields of corn, tall and green.  This makes me think of my garden.  I have not gardened for a few years.  I tore down the rotted raised beds my husband had made this summer, but I did not plant or commit to planting.  I have all winter to decide and to ponder the numerous rabbits that have taken up residence in my yard since Rocky died and is not longer there to maintain order.  

But I have time to decide.  10 more days of work and I will be retired, free to do perhaps not whatever I please, but free.  As I told a friend recently, I suspect it may be like turning 18 when you think that you will be able to do whatever you want and find to your surprise that it is not that way at all.  Alas, dreams so often surpass reality.

I get home all too soon for my mental well being, but soon enough in light of the heat.  A shower will feel good.  My bed with clean, sun-dried sheets will feel good.  And I will sleep and dream of the rides that I will be free to do.  Even without retirement, time would change things, but as Hardy notes, I am always surprised by change, even when I am expecting it.