Hell on two wheels

There's a certain balanced beauty to riding your bike through the streets of Santa Fe. On one hand - at least if you're coming from the St. John's campus - pretty much anywhere you want to go is going to be in the same direction: down. Start on the road in front of the upper dorms, pedal a couple times, and just glide.

On the other hand, it's almost too easy. It's something like two miles from campus to the plaza area, which convienantly (for me, anyway) holds a combination of a bank, overpriced Indian/southwestern trinkets, the public library, and any number of places to get a tasty and overpriced treat. The more astute members of my audience may note that one of those does not entirely fit with the others - it's the library, which is in fact free. No, actually it's the overpriced trinkets, which I generally pay little heed to, for several reasons. One, that would just make me feel like a tourist, which I am not. Santa Fe has three and a half types of people: Natives, who are all crazy in a sort of mellow, retired-and-wealthy hippy way; Tourists, who are all crazy in a sort of touristy "ooh look mellow retired hippies!" way; and students A (CSF students, who are all...art majors or something), and students B (Johnnies, who are more or less reviled.) Anyway, I'm not a tourist, so I can't be seen browsing the Indian market. Nor do I have the financial means to buy anything there, so it's really a moot point regardless. To go back to the actual topic of this paragraph: It's almost too easy to ride that far. You can easily maintain a brisk enough pace that you will inevitably run a stop-sign, causing a couple bearded Hispanic guys in a white diesel pickup to honk at you.

On the other other hand, going off campus on a bike means that - at least for those of us un-car-having souls - you get a reprieve from your fellow Johnnies. I love this school and therefore, the students, however, there are a mere four hundred some of us and when you've spent the past week literally being kept awake at night trying to figure out either what the hell the book of Job is all about, or what on earth Kepler was talking about with his oar analogy, it's nice to escape a bit.

On the other x3 hand, every other driver in Santa Fe is drunk. Race does not factor into this, simply mere presence on Santa Fe roads. Either that, or they're blind. Regardless, recklessly crazy swervy driving is apparently the city pasttime.

I very rarely ride back from the plaza, though. Those two miles aren't anywhere near as much fun when you're going uphill. I pretend I'm justified by saying that it'll irritate my knees - which is true - but really I'm just kind of lazy, and I'd rather sacrifice a buck to take the bus back up.

It would be kind of cool if you could shift gravity to pull you uphill, though. I think I should figure that one out, right after I decode the bible.