Last night I downed pints of plain on a celebratory bar crawl with the woman who designed my new website and set me up with this blog. As is not uncommon these days, she is much younger and in much better shape than I... so under the table was I drunk. When I awoke this morning, feeling like an omelette (note: I did not say “feeling like eating an omelette”— there is a distinction), I washed down a banana and ibuprofen with black coffee then got on my bike for a 30-mile ride.
There are two reasons I reached for the bike: one, physical; the other, moral. The first is fairly obvious. Just as you can pray your way through a hurricane, you can pedal your way out of a hangover. The second is more complex. When you are feeling omelettesque, you have to find a way to feel better about yourself. As one who can never really suppress his Eurosnot tendencies, I believe the greatest advantage to living in Rhode Island, perhaps even the entire USA (with the exception of lean freak shows like Boulder and the like), is that no matter how overweight you are, there is always someone around the next corner who is… how should I put this?… more portly than you. So you can be a volcano of pudge and still feel fit and trim, even attractive to the opposite sex. It’s quite salutary. Packing a 40-pound paunch, buddy? You’re still a Providence Adonis. Got a booty the size of the Hindenburg? You’re a Newport Aphrodite.
Unfortunately, the lowering clouds and the chill threat of rain had left the bike path devoid of my fellow Rhode Islanders. I was the only sorry human around, and the fauna had come out of the closet. Now, I am no naturalist (see an earlier post: “Of Beeps and Cheeps”), but I enjoyed seeing the seabirds, robins, sparrows, pterodactyls, whatever… I even passed two bunnies. At about the ten-mile mark, I came across a gathering of exuberantly incontinent geese and goslings (The French, incidentally, say caca d’oie [geese poop] for yellowish-green). More remarkable still, out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed a coyote, seated in a position of repose. I knew coyotes dined on suburban cats in this state, but didn’t know they breakfasted on geese.
As I haven’t even the courage to watch wildlife snuff documentaries on television, I sped up. And there, not twenty yards directly in front of me, stood a deer.
I should say at this point that my bike, sweatshirt, sweatpants, helmet and hair are grey. And my face is red. So the initial impression the deer might have had was of a vertical ashtray containing one burning cigarette butt hurtling toward it. It appeared hopelessly confused. I, fearing a homicidal coyote nipping at my heels, accelerated. At the last possible moment, the deer reacted, and boing-boing-boing, off went its rear end down the path. The problem was that this stretch of the path is bordered by a single line of trees and then back yards: the deer thus had nowhere to go to get out of my way. So we raced on, me fearing a possibly rabid canine death squad; it, fearing me. I felt bad, guilty of Bambi harassment.
Mercifully, the deer finally found a track off to one side and I made it, unscathed, to the end of the path at Bristol, Rhode Island. The sun came out. Other, bigger bikers appeared. The omelette had been put back in the shell, restored, and I was eager to return to my desk and the Middle Ages.
On the ride back, there was no deer. No bunnies. When I reached where the geese had gathered, they were gone. And there was no blood anywhere, just caca d’oie.
But the coyote was still there. In exactly the same seated position.
I slowed. It wasn’t a coyote.
It was a wolf.
And it wasn’t even a real wolf – it was a life-sized photograph of a wolf, stuck onto a carboard backing and placed on a lawn to scare the geese from doing their thing on the green perfection.
Beep. Cheep.
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