I ride my bike all the time, but the most consistent riding I do is my commute. I ride the same way, day after day, for years. In New Orleans I rode between the Garden District and the Tremé so many times I knew the asphalt, intimately. I have spent years riding the Maryland Ave. cycletrack, right on Monument, left on Paca, right on Lombard. And then they moved the shuttle stops, and everything changed.

Ok, that’s a little dramatic, but because I spend several hours a week on this commute, it was a big change. Instead of catching the UMBC shuttle by the UMD medical center on the east side of MLK, I catch it from the Lion Brothers building over west at Poppleton and Holllins, and that means a brand new commute that skips downtown entirely. It also means more zig zagging possibilities, so sometimes I’m on Carrollton, or Schroeder, or even all the way over to Carey Street. It has been pretty exciting, and there are so few cars in those West Baltimore neighborhoods that I am much less stressed out. The commute is a bit longer now, and that’s usually a good thing.

I was exhausted on my ride home yesterday. I had one of those work days where from the second you put down your bag, you are talking with people, teaching, putting on a show, for the next seven hours. It takes a lot of energy to be as “on” as I usually am, and I was wishing I didn’t have to ride back up the hill on a windy day–until I was doing it. I can’t believe how good it feels still to just pedal, pedal, pedal. The exhaustion remained, but at least my mind was getting right!

I got off my bike for a minute during the north-on-Fremont part of the ride to snap a picture of the crows gathering in the sky. They were flying in bunches, and there were other bunches of tiny birds swirling in their wake. I love watching the murmurations of birds, though only starlings technically murmurate, according to my very quick research on this issue. They fly together and swoop across the sky, and that’s murmurate enough for me. Ok, I digress.

It’s not really possible to get a good shot of things in the sky with my cell phone, so I didn’t get the picture I wanted. I paused, looked around, and instead took a picture of this decaying building covered by plants. This part of the city has so many decaying building covered by plants, with full grown trees coming out of windows, walls held up by wooden braces, you can see the sky through the windows because the roof is missing. Who used to live here? Who lives here still, and what is it like to live amidst this graveyard? How did this happen, and how can it change?

Riding my bike means I get to think about these questions and say my how-you-doin’s to people as I do my thinking. Riding a bike means I know, viscerally, that things are wrong, life goes on, and West Baltimore isn’t The Wire. I’m grateful for this new-ish commute for the chance to think more, and for being great streets to explore.

And then I got back on my bike, zigged and zagged, up over the North Avenue bike lane–a topic for another post–and up the cycletrack and home again. Fall is the best time of year for riding a bike around. Get out there if you can!