To Roll Softly and Carry a Big Camera

Easter weekend here is stretched into a nearly weeklong holiday of endless sunshine and gleeful business closures. It is quiet. Not in a hushed churchy way. But more in the lazy, sunbaked way of a backwater beach town in the waning days of August. The morning is so bright it could be mid-day. The sun does not set till nearly 9:00 in the evening. Friday gives way to Saturday, then Sunday, with a viscous seamlessness. This weather and this silence are disorienting, making me feel drowsy at random times of the day.

At an hour that could be early morning or could, just as easily, be high noon, I get on my bike and go. I have a route to follow, designed weeks prior in the unlikely event of just such a long lazy day of calm weather. And now I'm glad of it, because my brain is mush from the unexpected solar caresses. And my legs are mush from the too-fast ride done with a friend the day before. For the first time this year I have exposed my ankles and I feel giddy.

Along the main road processions of caravans and trailers flow unhurriedly. Some head toward the seaside caravan park. Others toward the Gliding Club. Their parade is peppered with the occasional car, stuffed with children being driven to football games and egg hunts.

Cycling alongside them gingerly, I am accompanied by honks followed by enthusiastic hand waves from people I know (how did I manage to know so many people here?!), as the sun beats down on us all. And then I turn off the main road, and all signs of life disappear.

On the narrow mountain lanes there are no church bells and no beach goers. No caravans and no carpools. There are no village shops, flaunting traditional Easter closures to capitalise on ice-cream sales. There is no weekday and no weekend. There is no sound, aside from the occasional hum of a distant tractor. There is only an eerie stillness, more noticeable now in the absence of wind.

The rapeseed fields, having blossomed all at once in the week prior, look now like a spillover of sun from the sky. The earth underneath them is scorched and cracked, showing no signs of the water that flooded it only weeks earlier.

Half way up a hill I pass a cricket field, the first sign of activity for miles. As men in white move about a whim bush-framed playing field, Binevenagh Mountain looms in background with an almost ludicrous picturesqueness. I do not know the game, but from the vantage point of my bike I can see it involves at least 2 bat-like objects in use at once. I remind myself to look this up.

Just then a ball flies out of the field and lands on the road beside my wheel, and so I stop and pick it up. The man who hops over the fence to retrieve it pauses to thank me, then quizzes me about my comings and goings in the uniquely local manner that feels simultaneously like friendliness and meticulous intelligence-gathering. In the end he squeezes my shoulder and gives me his good wishes, warning me to be careful over the next, sharply winding, downhill stretch of road. I photograph the cricket game and get ready to take off. "Ride softly and carry a big camera, eh?" I hear a laughing voice behind me as I pedal away.

Along roads like these you can ride with no end and no beginning, because they seem to have none. You can ride tired, drowsy, wobbly legged, half asleep. You can ride all day and not feel the bike or yourself as distinct from what is around you. The road rolls and you can roll along with it. You can roll fast. Or, you can roll softly and carry a big camera. And as you snap that photo you will feel that the still, sundrenched landscape will be here, rolling, with or without you in it.