I Wear My Sunglasses At Night

I like riding at off hours, when normal people are doing whatever it is normal people do when they aren't cluttering up my bike path. At night, after the sunsets, or in the morning before dawn, no one is around. No pedestrians, or cars, or other bikes. Once or twice I've glimpsed other People of Darkness, but we do the only civilized thing, and ignore each other. 

There's something edgy and uncertain about riding at night, the way the streetlights make the night sky seem even darker, the isolated feeling of moving between cones of yellow light from the few lampposts along the path. If you follow the path to the far side of the lake it becomes even darker, more remote. 

It seems illicit; the lake makes the lights of the village seem far away, and the thin line of trees along the path obscure the houses just a few yards away. The remote, woodsy vibe is an illusion, but if a murder were going to be going to be committed in our cozy little neighborhood, I could see it happening here: away from traffic, hidden by trees, a sizable lake literally thirty feet away. The alligators would be an added bonus. 

The new construction in these parts has been relentless for the last few years, particularly after Covid, when all the new building began roaring back into action. There's money to be made here Western reaches of Port St. Lucie, lots of it, and the developers have wasted no time. 

On any given day or night, and depending on which way the wind is blowing (this is not a metaphor, I mean it literally) I will often follow one of these new roads to where the asphalt ends. It used to be that I could find myself abruptly in wilderness, where the concrete and asphalt abruptly ended. There were fields. Trees. Swamps and stuff.

But not anymore. The roads are getting longer now, faster than I can pedal. The trees are getting fewer, and the pigs and bobcats and other critters are disappearing. We've still got our sandhill cranes. 

I'm glad for that.