In A Mist

Went for a drive.

In a mist.

100% humidity.

Swampy.

All the summer smells of decay and growth, in suspended animation during the recent dry spell, have emerged; co-mingled essences, heady stuff, cloying, bringing me back, back to a crazy bike ride, on my 30th birthday.

80 miles, almost straight north, leaving downtown at 10 p.m., picking up highway 65 in Northeast Minneapolis... a straight shot to Mora, Minnesota, and then five miles north of that to a log cabin on an old homestead. We had been renting it for the summer; the Weaver and me and baby makes three. I had been stuck in town all week working but this was Friday. A storm had preceded me- a big light show in the northern sky, but I wouldn't catch up to it.

Around Ham Lake the air became calm, a miasma from the swamps was seeping onto the road, like Dracula entering a window in an old horror movie.

It felt good.

In Cambridge I stopped at a road house, the drunken band was plodding its way through a Creedence medley, I drank a Coke and headed back out on the road. It was midnight. I was feeling a bit chafed, I had a long-tailed shirt on, so I thought I'd stow the shorts for a while. The old leather Brooks saddle had molded itself to my anatomy years ago but this was a closer type of intimacy.

About ten miles of this “commando cycling” dropped my core temperature enough so that it seemed prudent to regroup, as it were. Redonning the shorts, I pedaled alone, not even a bar-closer drove by. I finally pulled into the cabin about 3 a.m., wiped myself down and crawled into bed. It was dead still, and silent, save for the gentle sounds of the sleeping Weaver and, in the crib, the baby.

Outside, the dew covered the grass and all was still.