Recently a friend and I gave in to the urge to walk to a place with pictographs. Even with the directions to Picture Canyon Natural and Cultural Preserve in hand, it felt strange to skirt a mall and water treatment plant to get to a waterfall, but we found the parking, leashed her dog and happily headed out on a trail new to us. We strolled and peered at sunlight, chatted and only passed two other hikers on a weekday morning. She liked the pictographs on rock faces; I liked standing on a wooden bridge over the Rio de Flag and spotting empty crawdad shells in the gravel and sand.
I choose walking companions for their ease with silence. I like company that can talk or not talk, consider the day aloud or let the rhythm of pine sound weaving into trickling water become tender brooding. Walking stews my thinking, stirring together ideas from the day before into a week-ago insight, causing me to re-see choice moments, rethink intriguing thoughts, reconsider positions I’ve held with passion or disgust. Outdoors I’m rarely thinking of the names of plants or considering geology or keeping a life list of birds. In fact, the sight of a leaf-sized bird on a branch might nudge me to imagine a leaf turning into a bird, how maybe leaves are just another form of bird, birds reincarnated as bits of trees maybe.
Anyway, we walked with easy breathing and, where the loop of trail took us to the other side of the waterfall, we found a view of green vines against a cliff face. Blue sky hovered above pine tree tops and a rusty bicycle hung against red and brown bark. I liked seeing that rust color, like brush strokes from an outdoor palette. Had it been fished out of the water after being stolen? Maybe it was a bicycle that escaped without a rider from the library parking lot and jumped into the Rio de Flag, propelled itself past the back door of Macy’s and headed south and east, and by the time it was out past the Purina plant it was tired and collapsed on a sandbar, got to dreaming and the water from an afternoon blast of monsoon covered it, and it was a season or two before someone discovered it and fished it out. That boy we passed on the trail clutching a sleeping bag to his chest, maybe he’d spent the night near the bicycle, tugged it out of the sand and lifted it to a tree branch to dry out and become a bicycle sculpture.
Two women and a dog continue their stroll south and back around a deep water pond and one gal is lost to thoughts of a bicycle that looked like an empty cicada shell, a life form now devoid of essence. Could a bicycle’s soul be dreaming in between incarnations, absorbing and reordering the wisdoms of its many lives? I imagined once it had been a fat wheeled powder blue girl’s bike in a Phoenix backyard where a tomboy took her first stab at upright wheeled forward motion and nearly got it right except for the part of walloping her head on the low branch of a grapefruit tree. In another life that bike was a shiny green Astra ten speed from France with white handlebar tape and a light that flipped down onto the front wheel to whir with brightness, a much classier bike than her older brother’s Schwinn Continental. And if a bike can have many lives, why wouldn’t it change continents too? Yes, I decided that bike was once a simple three-speed ferrying a Cambridge student from town to university. It dozed with hundreds of bicycles until lectures ended and the swarm of students bursts through doors to pedal between stately buildings or maybe whir happily along the River Cam to Grantchester for tea. Did it ever have a life racing in the Tour de France? Maybe this bike once had a basketful of baguettes to sell on a Paris avenue. Maybe it was born again through the gifts of a collector with a garage full of old bikes, parts put together with imagination and clever tinkering.
I know, I’m meant to be considering the dates of petroglyphs, but instead I’m captured by a bicycle in a tree aspiring to be a bird nest or a Christmas decoration or an art installation. I do feel the sun against my cheek and admire the lean of tall green reeds where birds tarry, but I’m enlivened with imagining how a bicycle was born again as a bargain in a yard sale on Birch Street. A student rode it for three semesters before graduating and leaving the bicycle locked outside Ardrey Auditorium. Security finally cut it free and it went for a song to someone who thought they’d like college but decided to serve lattes instead. In a hurry to open one morning, a barista leaves the bicycle unlocked while snow falls on Beaver Street. Did the person who took it just want to save it from the cold? It gets ridden out Route 66 and is left leaning against the Museum Club until a regular at a bus stop notices it there for weeks and takes it for a ride out to the woods. Frustrated with the worn brakes, he tosses it into a dry gulch where it lies bent in the sun until rising waters swallow it.
Like aired-up tires going round and round, our many lives go whirring forward with lively motion before resting, before charging full speed ahead, before dozing with gentle dreaming pause.
