A Good Ride and a Bad Picture

Monday morning came, already warm and sweaty, to the city by the river, and as always I dragged myself out the door into the soft uptown humidity. I was feeling more lazy than tired, and I noticed immediately that my legs felt suspiciously good. It could mean only one thing. I'd obviously squandered last weekend by spending too much time sucking wheels. Water under the bridge, I guess. Speaking of which, the Mighty Mississippi has not dropped a single millimeter since last Friday. The cleared area of the batture, immediately adjacent to the levee with its concrete apron is mostly underwater, and there are some sections where the current there, between the willow trees and the levee, looks to be quite strong.

So today it was just David and me and, since it was a Monday and everyone knows that Mondays are recovery days even if there has been nothing of significance from which to recover, we rode the entire twenty-whatever miles side-by-side philosophizing about weighty matters and occasionally indulging in nostalgic stories of bike races long past. It was, in a word, uneventful.

Then, just as we were coming up to the Jefferson Playground on the way back, something caught my eye. An alligator was casually gliding along right at the foot of the levee. I stopped rather abruptly, spun the bike around and reached for my camera, but alas the gator had already spotted me and made a minor course correction to put even more distance between us. So that thing you see above that looks like a paint-by-numbers Monet is actually a blurry and heavily enhanced photo of said gator amid reflected trees and glare, taken in a hurry from way too far away. Like those photos you see of the Loch Ness Monster, this is all I got, so if you want to claim it's just an old log or something, feel free. At any rate, I'd strongly suggest that if you happen to take a spill while riding your bike on the levee you might want to make sure you stop sliding well before hitting the water.