Clinching dirty white handlebar tape. Hot magnolia breeze in my teeth. Peddling the yellow ten-speed, pumping, swerving, up a hill. Freewheeling down the other-side—the buzzing click-click-click—everything left behind for a while.
Do they even make ten-speeds now? I should have a little black transistor radio gray-taped to the handlebars with “Three Dog Night,” singing “Shambala” serenading the curious cows with their long eyelashes blinking over soft eyes, asking, “What is this life?”
The silver ripples in the distance. The undulating road swells, stretching in the summer fumes. I race toward the mirage, popping tar, but I can never catch it. What is this silver blur? Is this Shangrila?
I stop where the mirage was at the same distance it is now up ahead. For no reason I swerve right—right off the rocky berm. The fast whip of tall weeds cut into my bare ankles. Too much speed—a header. The flash of a creek. The yellow Schwinn lies on its side, yawning, getting off its rubber dogs for a minute.
The stench of slick gray mud sucks at my ragged Dockers. I step, unbeknownst, through a spider web—frantic swipes—it’s in my hair! Then I see under the bridge.
Christopher J Ananias (Photos also by CJA)
Saragun Springs 
CJA
The under art we are surrounded by (minus the stupid tagging) is true to the Sound of Silence line about the words of the poets.
True stuff all the way.
Thank you!
Leila
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Very cool. Terrific photos too! Brings to mind my own adventures atop my beloved icy-blue Schwinn Typhoon 10-speed, back around 400 years ago. Peddling through the darkened streets at midnight and later, while high. It lasted until an ugly green Plymouth backed unexpectedly into the street in front of me. The impact was such that it bent the frame of my bike, leaving me with a black spaghetti of chains, derailleurs and shredded rubber. Left me with a permanent limp too, as well as a bad attitude (the driver of the car sped heedlessly away). Barring that incident, I might have become a world-class something or other. Ha-ha. Good read. Thanks for the positive thought fleeting memories.
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