Daylight

When the clouds break forth into sunlight, I'm going to hop on that bike, place a tarp in my hiking pack and head out for a few days. I am a creature of light. I am happiest when I am outside. I rode back from Orangeburg, South Carolina, some sixty miles from home, where I ended my travail by bike. I keep going back to this time in my life because I received the amount of sunlight in those three weeks that it would take a year of normal living to get. I feel there is something left to be had in those wide plains. I feel there is something that I missed by not completing those last miles by bicycle. Riding back in the afternoon,-- urging along at twelve miles an hour passing many a sun-glazed field, grain elevators, pastures, hay -- was just as warm a memory to me as my time in the mountains. I even remember a point where I got off to walk, thirty-pound pack and all, up one of the last relatively-steep hills I'd encounter, and seeing to my right a lower plain, extending for miles. I saw multitudes of trees and a runt plateau off in the distance, and an opening where a plot of farm ground defined the sheer distance of the horizon. I just want to bicycle northeasterly until I pass the Orangeburg gap, hitting hills. Hill after hill will unroll before me and I will marvel for the space of an hour in silence, what enormity God has rendered.