Well, if you want to know the truth, I left the darned helmet at home yesterday. Living dangerously(?) except that I'd slapped on some sun block.

Nor did I mind the snakes along the way. They startle us because they're inert and snap into life so quickly--and to worsen things they wait until the last second to move. Saw two basking in the sun: a thin black one that did a quick reverse and slipped off into the sycamores, and later a grey-green lazy bones that stayed still as a discarded inner tube a few inches from my wheels.

I'm on a paved path someone was kind of enough to create; it wanders in and out of housing developments and golf courses, mini parks, random religious establishments, under two tollways and at both ends "nature." Here on the north end, all the big loud motorcycles and their big loud friends outside Cook's Corner seem not in the least menacing as I pedal slowly onto the street. The pathway ends here where the foothills climb into national forest land. I go about half a mile along Santiago Canyon, unconcerned that this is where cats eat people on bikes, and I'm a person on a bike.

A few of those machines roar by, both directions, their crackling engines echoing against Whiting Ranch Wilderness Area on one side, O'Neill Regional Park on the other. These men and their women wrapped around their backs seem so Californian to me--in fact historic--that they seem wild, too, part of the landscape that puts the words "ranch" and "wilderness" together and expects us to believe it.

I also see rabbits, squirrels, an old black raven with a beak like a rail spike. At one point a dark flying bug smacks into my eyelid (still hurts), somehow managing to go right over my glasses, but not into my eye... Anyway, I turn around finally, take it easy and coast most of the way home, kinda sorta watching out for killer bees.