a bike ride

I ride my bike along the Rhine to work everyday. The route is like the sea wall except instead of an ocean there is a big, fast flowing river snaking along beside you. The path is leafy green and flat. The river boats fight the current upstream with bellies lying low to the water and heavy with commodity. The Rhine is a thoroughfare for boats and bikers, who can both enjoy about 650km of navigation in and along its watery path from Switzerland to Rotterdam's maze at the mouth of the Rhine and the edge of the North Sea.

I bike against the current in the morning, feeling that endless and massive flow of water working against me, trying to turn me around and take me with it. All that water, every second, every curl and eddy, is constantly leaving that river. Nothing that defines the river is ever contained in it for very long. Every answer a river whispers to you is a question contained in narrow parentheses, scarring the landscape with meandering meanings that slack and slick and disappear. This is different than living on the edge of the Pacific, which will out outlive us all by countless millennia, perched between our knowing and the unreachable horizon, pooling energy into a wordless om.

In the evening I flow with the river, handsfree on my bike and something really good on my ipod. Rain or shine the joggers jog, the river rolls us all along back into downtown Bonn and tips me out near the bridge, back into the limits of blocks and buildings and grocery stores already packing in their wares for the evening. I weave through town on streets seemingly too narrow to hold the traffic they contain. At the central station I duck under train tracks that rattle with the expresses and regionals clanking progress towards tightly timed stops. When I emerge from the underpass the path is a long expanse of green hemmed in with apartment blocks elegantly attired in chiseled garlands and stony cherubs. This is the Poppelsdorfer: a line of green grass stretching from the university to the east all the way to the buttery yellow western palace. Halfway along this long narrow park Baumschulallee cuts through with a sudden expanse of tired pavement. Just off this corner is my apartment building. I can see the entry way where I imagine I will shortly park my bike and climb the flights of stairs to my house. But I have been stuck between the fleeting freedom of this new river and my desire for the heavy permanence of the Pacific all day and I'm having a hard time figuring out where home is. So I keep riding around, letting my bike ride stretch further and further into the evening until I am back beside the Rhine watching it slide past me in dark slicks of curled water.