On Dusk

Ever since I started riding in the 1990s, dusk has been my favorite time to ride.

While riding certainly means wind in your face, there is such a thing as too much wind. As the sun goes down, it ceases powering the wind and calm prevails.

It’s still warm at dusk, and the setting sun has not yet robbed the world of heat and left the air reluctantly giving up its energy.

Working folks have been home for a while, and they’ve done their post-work duties; most of the chores are done. The lawns have been cut. The grills have been lit. There are campfires, and the sounds of gatherings reach out of neighborhoods to the through-roads. If you happen to be rolling through a town, you’ll see people at the sidewalk seating of coffee shops and neighborhood grilles; you’ll hear the ruckus from behind the wooden fences of pubs with volleyball nets, horseshoes, bean bags; you’ll hear bands warming up to play small outdoor stages.

If I’m out riding, chances are I am experiencing a world that is preparing to wind down, while I am still alive and active. I am a nocturnal creature, taking in the sights and smells of a world that isn’t prepared to challenge me. I’m probably a little sunburned, and the setting sun gives me some relief.

Without the sun powering the wind and evaporating moisture to higher altitudes, humidity rises. This, too, is a relief to my sunburn.

The best Dusk experience, really, is during a multi-day riding trip. I get to see the unique character of the sun as it rises in the morning in one location, and I get to see the unique character of the setting sun many hundreds of miles away in a different environment. If you’ve never experienced this without the UV-treated windshield between you and the world, you will not understand. If you’re in cage, you won’t feel the difference in the wind between morning and dusk. The difference in the the way the air feels and smells, of sound and the pressure in your ears. If it is a long trip, then dusk also means that rest is likely coming. I’ll be stopping for the night and joining the ruckus behind a wooden fence. People will ask about the patches on my vest, where I’ve come from and where I’m going, and I’ll be glad for the conversation even if I’m traveling with friends.

At night and far from home, with either a can of beer (it has to be a can) or my travel flask of bourbon, I am at my most thoughtful and melancholy. I’m outside, sitting on my bike, mentally time traveling. At a hotel or campsite folks are out at all hours of the night taking smoke breaks or reinforcing each others’ company and the details of their own adventures. They ask me questions, and I’m happy to talk, but something about my eyes tell them I’m not really into it: I’m already deep in my own head.

I love the dusk time, and on a warm summer evening when lighting bugs are visible in backyards and the smell of burning leaves drifts from one neighborhood to another it’s all I can do to keep myself from hitting the starter and taking off.