Fire in the sky

Yesterday afternoon I decided to take advantage of the nice weather and go for a long bike ride. Well, relatively long.

Most real bike enthusiasts would frown on anything less than a 30-mile ride. But then again, most real bike enthusiasts are on road bikes that cost hundreds to thousands of dollars and take well-paved roads with little to no traffic on them. Makes for a ride that's perfectly safe, sanitized, and respectable. Like a Zingerman's sandwich.

But I prefer my rides a little more "real-world" -- dodging car and foot traffic, cutting on sidewalks and street shoulders, through the occasional gravelly construction site. Whatever gets me from A to B. I'm on the mountain bike I was gifted last summer, a non-branded thing that's too big for me, but I've put hundreds of miles on it by now and know it like an outgrowth. I trust it more than I do most people these days.

Yesterday afternoon I took the bike to Ypsilanti, spent a couple hours out there, and then decided to head back around 7. I knew sunset was coming around 7:30 p.m. and were I playing it safe, I would have headed back earlier. But I admit -- I like the risks that come with biking in near-twilight to darkness. Did I mention I keep forgetting to buy head and tail lights for the bike?

I was coming around the bend on East Huron River Drive that splits Washtenaw Community College from St. Joseph Mercy Hospital, still outside Ann Arbor city limits, when I noticed two things. First, how dark the sky was getting. And second, how hungry and tired I was. I'd stopped by Taco Boy on Golfside to get chicken tacos for dinner, and the styrofoam container was swinging from the handlebars, suspended in a plastic take-out bag. Car lights came up from behind me and to my left, and I thought about the five or so miles I had left to go to get home. I felt the familiar twinge of strain in the middle of my front quads that comes when I pick a destination too far.

In the middle of the bend I looked back over my right shoulder, from the direction of the disappearing twilight to the glim of the St. Joe parking lot. I'm still not sure what I saw next. A fireball? A meteor? Clearly one larger object with a long fiery tail and a second, smaller object off to the first's side. No noise, just fire in the sky. Just for a second. And then gone, like it extinguished when it reached the tree line, maybe fifty feet up. Did anyone else see that? I stopped pedaling. A UM Public Safety car came around the bend but kept going.

At the risk of sounding cliche, I know what I saw. I turned the bike around and headed into the St. Joe parking lot. I was looking left and right, to the landscaped trees within the campus as well as to the unmaintained trees beyond. I was looking at the ground, hoping to see something glowing. Meteor finds are rare, but I knew there was one out there somewhere, fresh.

I looked for about ten minutes, trying to rouse myself out of the stupor the cold, dark, and hunger were beginning to set upon me, but found nothing. By now only a thin streak of blue illumed the horizon to the west, and I turned toward it and made my way home. By 8:30, 8:45, in complete darkness, I made it home. So tired, I stripped down to next to nothing and collapsed on the floor. The chicken tacos were still sitting on the kitchen counter.