Life Priorities

Today found me biking on the Kokosing Gap Trail. It's totally beautiful, and well worth a trip for the day. I guess I've gotten into bad habits though.

The trip from my place to Mount Vernon, Ohio, the starting point, is supposed to be a straight shot right down Route 13. Being who I am, I simply set the cruise control for the speed limit and roll. That worked just fine until Fredericktown, where we had to make a detour. Off I went to Centerville, 20 miles out of the way, down a beautful rolling road, behind a truck. He couldn't keep the speed limit. After all, we were supposed to be going 55 and he often dropped to 45!

Finally I arrived at the trailhead, pulled myself together, and took off. I often treat a trail like this a a sort of race. The trail is 13.5 miles long, and I wanted to do it all as an exercise in speed. (Kind of funny, considering the hybrid bike and my non-speedy physique. I see young muscular guys all the time who could double my speed for the whole trip.) Beautiful, fairly uneventful trip to Danville, the end of the trail. I stopped for a couple of minutes before returning. This was when a fellow trail user gave me a cheery "hello" and made a comment about the beautiful weather. He was right—it was a totally wonderful day. I thought maybe I'd found a companion for the trip back, so I stopped to chat. Then I got a look at him. The bike was a fat-tire 5-speed. He was clad in a Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts, and loafers. He had quite a gut. Obviously, speed wasn't our agenda. He kept chatting and I kept wondering how to get away from him gracefully. But that wasn't happening. We biked along at about 4 miles per hour, so slowly that I had trouble keeping my balance in places.

Then he pulled his trump card. He's a birdwatcher, and his specialty is finding eagles' nests. And he had found one just past the halfway point of the trail. Well, I had to see that! Just as we arrived at the watching-point, a bluebird pulled the old injured-bird trick to lure us away from her nest. We played along until we were a safe distance from the nest, then the bird took off. Then we stood, looking through his binoculars, trying to find the eagle's nest among the foliage. We never did see it, but we saw a lot of redwing blackbirds, and I found out that my companion comes from the same tiny town where my uncle lives. After half an hour or so, it became obvious that we weren't going to see any eagles, and we finally headed home.

I guess I finally got the point. Sunday found me hiking through Mohican State Park with two teenage boys. Jared was a gas molecule, bouncing about and always urging us to zoom ahead, but Jake and I had the sense to ignore him and look very closely at a jack-in-the-pulpit.