They really are the most improbable of birds, ones that should reside in the fossil record or at the withered tip of an evolutionary tree. A bird made for easy comical characterisation, lumbering on take-off, landing like a float-plane on touch down. And yet, as I sit on a sea wall, one can but marvel at their grace in flight. A wing of pelicans are travelling the shoreline, heading out to the fishing grounds, a single long line skene. They each rise and fall in easy succession, an aerial graph of the sea’s undulating contours, as if drawing energy out of the breaking waves. Gliding, the leading bird offers a few leisurely wing beats and the subsequent followers follow suit, like a flicked pulse travelling down a skipping rope.
Yet those pelicans’ few oscillations have probably gathered more accumulated height on that short fly-past, than we have in the last six weeks cycling through the states of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and eastern Texas. The handlebar computer gives a height gain figure that can only be accounted for by totalling up the bridge climbs and adding them to the kerb clambers.
And now we meet our first true hill, a salt dome appropriately name ‘High Hill’, all 25 feet of high hill. Still, it’s a foretaste for when we eventually decide to forgo the levels of the Gulf coast and head in land to the Texas HillCountry and the groves of pecan trees.
“Ya’ll in the Texas Hill Country now…” or so I’ve been informed by our volunteer warden who’s checking us in at the next state park: “My, I hadn’t noticed”, ……” could that be why my thigh muscles are a bit taut?”. But I didn’t say it.
We’ve gone from the flatlands of the Gulf Coast, travelling inland and upward; it’s now that I’m reminded that there are two sides to a hill, that for the first time on this trip we get that interesting sensation of a freewheel. The best type of freewheeling: brake-free freewheeling.
Crest the rise… a flat stretch that gives time to inspect the cattle in the paddocks…. then a gentle falling away…. a long gentle drop down a straight line… set off… the speed picking up…. the novelty of effort-free travel…. faster still…. no I’m not going to brake…. no braking, only this could hurt… hurt a lot if it goes wrong…. hope there’s no gravel at the bottom… don’t want to brake… got to keep the momentum going, see how far up the other side I can get…. won’t brake… good, no gravel…. oh bugger, there’s an expansion joint… bang!…. reckon that made the panniers flap on their hinges…. still I didn’t brake and I got part way up the next rise. Try to remember that on the next drop. Trouble is, I seem to have a very short memory.
