After adding a category for “biking” I figured for sure I’d never bike again, but I managed to get out Saturday morning anyhow. This time, I wimped out: I consulted a map. I took the cell phone. I (sort of) stuck to the planned route.
I don’t remember if I’ve given a street name for our house, but let’s call it Broken Road. We live on the paved portion of Broken Road. Across the state route from us is the unpaved portion of Broken Road. If I go the other direction, it reaches The Creepy Zone, where according to the map, it ends.
Half a mile later, Broken Road resumes and connects back to a major road. I decided to take Broken Road out into The Creepy Zone as far as I could, hoping to connect it back to the other part of Broken Road, and then make a circuit back home again on the main roads.
The rain finally stopped on Friday afternoon, so Saturday morning I suited up (I wear my red Vegeta shirt for biking) and took off into The Creepy.
Revelation: the creepy zone is not, in fact, very creepy at all when you zoom through it. I didn’t even realize I’d passed through The Creepy until I was at The X-Files Fields. At that point, I passed into ~Here Be Dragons~ territory.
Instead, I learned that here be sea dragons. More specifically, tadpoles.
The road is practically gone in The Creepy Zone. Past that, it’s been removed but not barricaded. The dirt is puddled. When I came to one three times the size of my kitchen table, I dismounted and walked around.
Tiny spheroids darted away from my tires: I gasped and looked into this four-inch-deep pond across the road and discovered tadpoles with the tiniest of feet. Hundreds of them. I beamed: I’d never have seen them otherwise. No one would have. I was the only one around. Well, angels were around. I kept thinking of them looking out on the road with me.
The road narrows to only four feet across, but it does continue. The woods are thick, and at times I had to duck beneath branches, but I could bike the whole way until I burst out into the open, over gravel, and found myself at some railroad tracks. I walked across those at peril of losing my tires. After that, it was back on the bike, back past more gated fields, past a DPW station, and then all of a sudden–a house. After at least a mile, I’d found someone’s home.
The other part of Broken Road is not paved either, for the record.
From there I shot back onto the main road, took a road parallel to the big state route, went around a barricade put in place to prevent cars from doing what I did, and then pedaled back home (with one more pass around the Angelborough Loop because it felt so good.)
I make fun of Angelborough, but it really is such a pretty place. Such pretty homes, such deep woods, such a clear sky and open roads.
Heaven has to have bicycles. There have got to be millions of tiny explores to do there, and I’d like to take a shot at them.
Tadpoles, like catepillars, are symbolic to me in a very spiritual way.
Do frogs remember when they were tadpoles? Do butterflies remember being a chrysalis? Do they dream during their time in the cocoon of their time as catepillars?
Is each stage a form of death for them?
When we die, will we remember our time here? Or…during our time here, do any of us remember the Time before Here?
But I digress. I hope as you there are bikes and bike trails in Heaven.
I wonder that too. I think we do remember some of our time here once we reach Heaven, if only because I believe the saints in Heaven pray for those left behind on Earth.
(Actually, we *see* the saints in Heaven in revelation being quite aware of what’s going on Earthside, and the martyrs cry out to God to bring justice on those who killed them. So therefore, we have to assume there’s some memory that gets carried across.)
Tadpoles are these awkward half-way states. We’re halfway states ourselves (halfway between pure spirit and pure animal). Caterpillars have that chrysalis state where we can’t see their awkward halfwayness.