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Oct. 2nd, 2018 11:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dariaphoebeI quickly confirmed our destination as we got in the car, and then set off. As we moved up the river valley, I pointed out the bike trail alongside the freeway, gesturing at landmarks I so often passed on two wheels: The old mill. The fish ladder. The park.
Before long, we reached a decision point. The road we were on trailed off into a stub aimed vaguely toward its intent of connecting to the next state capital west, leaving me with options north and south. I took the former, shortly dropping onto a surface road to find my way to our first stop.
Our day had begun with a 3 hour walk to and through a park in the southern reaches of the city, a journey which included neighborhoods I hadn't yet visited, stumbling into a tree climbing championship and gawking at waterfowl blithely fussing in the lakes a few feet from our plodding. It made up for not being on a bicycle, I thought, as I turned onto a road I'd traversed a couple weekends earlier with foot power, in the opposite direction.
We turned off the main road and up a narrower country lane before being waved into the grass. I turned off the car and we walked a couple hundred meters, lining up at the end of a row of folks whose attention was focused on the tent ahead of them and the amazing smells wafting from it. Minutes later, our prize collected, I paused to enjoy one still-warm fried ring of dough before reversing my path to the main route.
Our path through the afternoon was just as the morning was, one where each turn either created or duplicated a piece of my own known world. Cartography was not always printed: sometimes, as it did in this moment, it lived only in my mind, a mesh defined by the shape of the physical, organized by the places and people of my own experiences.
Most of the trip to our next stop duplicated one or the other of two recent cycling expeditions. We were still surrounded by familiar landmarks: the road across the street that I'd ridden after visiting its namesake orchard. The hot dog stand in front of us. We got our tickets for the corn maze, though, and soon disembarked from the hayride to start tracing a path between the stalks. We each held a map we'd been assured was not quite accurate: what would be the fun in that, after all?
Before long, we reached a decision point. The road we were on trailed off into a stub aimed vaguely toward its intent of connecting to the next state capital west, leaving me with options north and south. I took the former, shortly dropping onto a surface road to find my way to our first stop.
Our day had begun with a 3 hour walk to and through a park in the southern reaches of the city, a journey which included neighborhoods I hadn't yet visited, stumbling into a tree climbing championship and gawking at waterfowl blithely fussing in the lakes a few feet from our plodding. It made up for not being on a bicycle, I thought, as I turned onto a road I'd traversed a couple weekends earlier with foot power, in the opposite direction.
We turned off the main road and up a narrower country lane before being waved into the grass. I turned off the car and we walked a couple hundred meters, lining up at the end of a row of folks whose attention was focused on the tent ahead of them and the amazing smells wafting from it. Minutes later, our prize collected, I paused to enjoy one still-warm fried ring of dough before reversing my path to the main route.
Our path through the afternoon was just as the morning was, one where each turn either created or duplicated a piece of my own known world. Cartography was not always printed: sometimes, as it did in this moment, it lived only in my mind, a mesh defined by the shape of the physical, organized by the places and people of my own experiences.
Most of the trip to our next stop duplicated one or the other of two recent cycling expeditions. We were still surrounded by familiar landmarks: the road across the street that I'd ridden after visiting its namesake orchard. The hot dog stand in front of us. We got our tickets for the corn maze, though, and soon disembarked from the hayride to start tracing a path between the stalks. We each held a map we'd been assured was not quite accurate: what would be the fun in that, after all?
