On Thursday the lads at Reincarnation had a look at Sue Baroo the Fearsome Furster and told me she required no heroic lifesaving measures at this time. It’s a red-letter day when a geezer on a fixed income with an equally ancient rice grinder can escape a mechanic’s clutches for under a hundy.

Plus I managed 30 cycling miles — 15 after dropping the old gal off downtown and then cycling back home, and another 15 picking her back up. Though the mileage is identical in both directions, the first leg feels the longest, with 1,150 feet of vertical gain. There’s less than 200 feet of vertical on the return trip, most of it in the first mile.

There are still a few hurdles to clear, though. The people whose “home” is the weedy industrial area alongside the North Diversion Channel Trail huddle together in what shade they can find come the heat of the afternoon, usually on the west side of the bicycle path’s underpasses, south of I-25/Pan American.

Many wear dark clothing and are hard to spot in the shade, if you’re new around here and don’t expect to roll up on a small crowd sprawled in a blind corner. Here’s a guy who looks like the Feral Kid from “Road Warrior,” with a dog instead of a boomerang. There’s a pensive young woman who seems to be revisiting her life choices as the temperature creeps into the mid-90s.

We were all on the same path, but not really. I was riding a bicycle that’s worth more than the car I was going to pick up. I was wearing sunscreen and about half a G’s worth of cycling kit, with an iPhone in one jersey pocket, wallet full of cash, credit cards, and health insurance in another. I knew where I was going to sleep that night, even if the Subie didn’t start (I was riding a bicycle, remember). The place has food, drink, beds, toilets, showers, doors and windows that lock, climate control, and a lid on all of it.

Cycling past the street people I always feel like a tourist gawping at the wildlife in some squalid national park. Possibly because I am one, and always have been, never more so than when I was pretending to be a hippie, hitchhiking, panhandling, and taking all those gosh-darned drugs that were so much fun.

Maybe the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come showed me around one dark night, way back when. Or maybe I just wised up to all that unearned middle-class-white-boy privilege I was wearing like a Superman costume under my hippie garb. Because I never had the balls or the bad luck to take anything that might leave me sprawled under a bridge on a searing August afternoon, as some bastard on a bicycle breezes by.