Biking Back to Work

After lunch today, I decided to bike back to work. Non-motorized bike. It was good. I’ve been around the sun well over 45 times, now, and the lure of incremental healthy (and fun) decisions has overridden any other decisions that seemed to intersect with the metabolic rate of my 20s and 30s. I’ve also been recalling in my memory some time ago hearing the phrase, “Well, every 7 years we are somebody different than we were 7 years prior.” That also links up with the understandable IRS requirement of retaining 7 years of records (kind of non-related aside). While on my ride, I was thinking about where I was 7 years ago, on the planet, and frame of mind. It indeed was different. None of which really is necessary to go into here (maybe it’s kind of secular spiritual for everyone to think of where they were 7 years ago, keeping it to themselves of their own record).

While pumping the pedals of the bike, I also enjoyed how much more audible the urban setting is from historic downtown Bismarck to the Missouri River front (audible even while my bluetooths allowed me to hear Ray Cappo discuss his spiritual journey through India in the early 1980s and such).

Photo below is from the Chief Looking Village overlook (Chief Looking Village was one of several interconnected Mandan-Hidatsa villages circa 1500s). In the photo you can see the horizontal light blue Interstate 94 bridge that spans the Missouri River at Bismarck (check out the Missouri River Heritage Mural on the visible pier at left). In the distance, with all the floating cranes, you can see the Ames contractors of BNSF, the floating cranes, as they are ramming pilings into the river to build a new rail bridge that can accommodate stacked rail cars for all those one-click Amazon orders that bring stuff from the Pacific World to Chicago, and everywhere in between. Once finished, BNSF will disassemble the 1905 bridge superstructure and the 1883 rail bridge piers (they were built with Minnesota granite). It will change the landscape viewshed of the river. Off in the distance of this photo, mid-right, you can see little dots on the horizon butte. Those little dots are the 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps reconstructions of the 1870s Fort McKeen/Fort Abraham Lincoln (today’s busiest state park in all of North Dakota). Bottom center you can also see the contour of a mountain bike trail, one of many that our Burleigh County Bicycle Cult friends maintain for everyone’s overland bicycling pleasure.