Left the house at 11 for a
modified North Bridge loop, a 32-mile ride through Arlington, Lexington, Bedford, Carlisle, and Concord. It was already 91 when I set out, and the route was chosen to include a lot of shade, starting with the Minuteman to Depot Park, Bedford.
Proceeded out Route 225 towards the Concord River. The phragmites in the wetlands of the
Carlson Conservation Area were looking as happy as phragmites can get, with their feet in the mud and their heads in the sun.
At about this point, I came under the benign influence of a cloud bank, whose shade lowered the temperature a couple of degrees: most welcome.
The heat and humidity were manageable (I went through 3 bottles of water in the course of the ride), but the ground-level ozone, a major component of the haze, was noticeably irritating my lungs. The haze was a factor throughout the ride, often visible, always present. This view up the Concord River captures a bit of that.
Rolled over the familiar hills of River Road, Carlisle, and Monument Street, Concord. At the big horse farm, noticed that all the horses were sensibly in the barn, out of the mid-day sun, unlike my dubiously sensible self...
By the time I reached Concord Center, the cloud bank had headed East, and the respite it had provided was past. Rode down Lexington Road, with its Transcendentalist relics, and turned onto Old Bedford Road, with its agricultural relics.
Followed that to Route 62, and continued back into Bedford, where I picked up the Reformatory Branch Trail. This provided plenty of shade, and the cycling equivalent of a walk in the woods. A little downy woodpecker wheeled within inches of my handlebars, before landing upside-down on a nearby tree-trunk.
This brought me back to the Minuteman. At this point, the cumulative effects of the heat and humidity put me into a slow-ride groove, and I poked contentedly along mostly just listening to the succession of sounds as I approached Route 128, crossed it, and climbed the hill into Lexington Center: the cicada chorus, sounding like the human nervous system might if you got quiet enough to hear it; the oceanic roar of auto traffic on Route 128, subtle in the distance and overwhelming as you pass over it; the monster howl of a large jet on the approach to Hanscom; the percussion of carpenters' hammers at a house construction site. Almost as striking as this aural experience (though mercifully more brief) was the fragrance of the Lexington land-fill at Tophet Swamp.
As I passed Arlington's Great Meadows, I noticed that the cattails have flowered, and are once more displaying their characteristic brown cylinders. Mostly, though, I noticed the heat: the further East I rode, the hotter it seemed to get; the self-generated breeze of the long, fast down-hill through Arlington felt like a hair-drier. By the time I had put the bike away the thermometer was showing 94, I'd finished the last bottle of water, and I was happy to have a shower and some lunch.
rod