OK Commuter

The Submarine is docked about 9 miles from campus, where, at a minimum, I have to go every Thursday for lunch (except this past Thursday, due to Yom Kippur) and usually several times a week on one errand or another. If we exclude helicopters and hot-air balloons, there are three ways to travel from here to there. The first is to take the bus, an option I haven't yet tried but probably will once the weather worsens (apparently I get to ride the bus for free with my college ID). The second is to drive down Route 9. This takes about 20 minutes and is by far the most efficient option, if also the most depressing. Route 9 is the only part of the area that looks like NW Oklahoma City, where I grew up: big box stores, gas stations, and fast-food joints. It's home to the area's only Wal-Mart, Target, Applebees, Chilis, and - soon - Home Depot. Just to remind you of where you are, Route 9 also has a few things we didn't have back home: a couple of farm stands, a drive-thru organic coffee hut, a Trader Joe's, and a Whole Foods. Traffic on Route 9 is correspondingly heavy, the drive often tedious and aggravating.

The third option is by far my favorite, and it's what I want to talk about today. This is the bike path, or the Norwottuck Rail Trail, which runs along a disused railroad track dating from the 1880s. Thankfully, they've taken the track out, although there are several jarring patches along the path that certainly make it feel like you're biking over railroad ties. The trail roughly parallels Route 9, but, apart from a brief stretch that passes behind Wal-Mart and Target and the movie theater, to travel down the trail is to enter a different world entirely. Starting from NoHo, you first cross the Connecticut River via a charming old steel bridge, from which, to the south, you can see and hear cars whizzing down the highway.

Then you come upon farmland. Red barns, cornfields, pumpkin patches. It is ridiculously, even stupidly, quaint.

Moving on, you go through moderately dense forests, veer south under the highway, check out a bit of the fall foliage, and pedal on through the trees.

Then you get to the boring part - the part behind the box stores, where the path unaccountably gets really rough for a time, but even this can present some surprises.

(I don't even know)

And then it's back to the country - a charming vista of Mt. Tom to the south, a dense grove of trees, a small herd of cows (whose smell invariably alerts you to their approach), up a hill, and into town.

I love the bike path for several reasons, only one of which has to do with the scenery along the way. It is relatively flat, which makes the 9 or so miles go by fairly painlessly; it is usually uncrowded; it appears to be utilized principally by the elderly, who are easy to dodge and unlikely to go zooming past me at perilous speeds; and it is usual to smile, nod, or even verbally greet the people whom one meets along the path. All of these things make biking the Norwottuck much more pleasurable than, say, the Minute Man Trail north of Boston, where traffic jams are common, "serious" bikers speeding by in their fluorescent spandex jumpsuits present a serious and unending hazard, and people are anything but friendly (I once even biked through an Arlington High schoolyard brawl on the Minute Man, for chrissakes). My one concern about the Norwottuck Trail is the chipmunks. Many, many chipmunks scamper back and forth over the trail all the time - they're fast little buggers and you don't have to worry too much about running one over, but here lately, perhaps because of the colder temperatures, they've become increasingly lethargic. The other day, after nearly running over several of them myself, I was horrified to see one instance of actual chipmunk roadkill on the path. I can only imagine what the poor guy thought as some gigantic whizzing contraption came barrelling down the path, breaking the peace of a crisp autumn day, and crushed the life out of him. I have, consequently, moderated my own speed on the path to avoid doing anything similar. (Squirrels, I should note, are also an area of concern and for the same reasons, but in my hierarchy of cute animals they fall well below the chipmunk, and so are less deserving of serious precautions. Besides, most of them are big enough to look after themselves.)