Following the news was starting to feel like losing a shit-eating contest, so I stepped away from the Mac and treated myself to a little expedition down to the bosque.

It was something of a whim, actually. I just grabbed the Soma Pescadero and without a plan in place took the Paseo de las Montañas trail down to I-40, rolled up and over the bike-ped bridge, and then risked life and limb riding Indian School and Washington to the brief I-40 Trail at Carlisle, which leads to the North Diversion Channel Trail.

But instead of turning northward as per usual, to head back to the Mac via Osuna-Bear Canyon, I swung south. What the hell? I thought. Why not? Let someone else gnaw on that shit sandwich for a few hours.

Ridden south the NDCT has an exit onto Indian School, which becomes Odelia as it traverses I-25. It’s the sort of auto-friendly shooting gallery that bicycle advocates call a “stroad,” with a bike lane, and drops past Albuquerque High School (pay no attention to the graveyard on your right). To avoid the equally dicey Broadway at the bottom I hung a left off Odelia onto Edith, then a right onto Mountain.

This is the same route I ride to collect the Forester whenever it needs a little love from the Subaru wizards at Reincarnation. But Mountain also winds through Old Town to the Paseo del Bosque trail.

Mountain can be a little sketchy, being a narrow two-lane shared with street people and gas-guzzlers. A seemingly endless construction project that I first dodged in June added a small degree of difficulty, taking me off the street and onto a series of sidewalks from Tiguex Park to the Albuquerque Museum. After dodging a dog-walker, dropping off the sidewalk onto Mountain, and crossing to the opposite sidewalk to punch the bike-ped button at Mountain and Rio Grande, it was smooth sailing to the bosque trail, which I joined just south of I-40.

Then another whim: Check the state of the Rio Not-So-Grande. Up the Gail Ryba Memorial Bridge I rode. Yikes, etc. Back to the bosque trail.

The cottonwoods weren’t showing a lot of fall color so early in the season. Just a hint of yellow here and there. No matter; just happy to be here. I brought arm warmers but never needed them as I cruised along at a pleasant skull-flushing pace.

I shared the trail with kindred souls. E-bikes, recumbents, mountain bikes, gravel bikes, even road bikes (how quaint). One long lean type on a flared-bar, fat-tired gravel bike ahead of me was riding no hands, swaying gently to some music in his mind.

They call me the breeze / I keep blowing down the road

Was he was thinking about ways to drag hapless strangers into unmarked vans and out of the country, or into court to fight some half-baked rap, strip them of their jobs, health care, and reputations, sic’ the thugs in his cult on them, or simply shoulder his way in front of a cluster of cameras so the rest of us have to look at him and listen to his bullshit? If so, I wasn’t seeing it. Just another dude on his two-wheeler, enjoying some fresh air between shifts in the barrel.

As I turned north off the bosque onto the Paseo del Norte Trail and headed for home I thought about how the barrel is with us always. We need a broader view than the one we get through the bunghole.