Night rider

 

I'm borrowing half of this lyric from a conversation with the Bluesky account Occasional Transpo (and the other half from Dean Martin), but:

When you bike in the night and your eye hits the light, that's a sore ray

(but) when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore!

Daylight Saving Time ended last weekend. That means all of a sudden the sun was going down at 5:45 or so, but now it goes down at 4:45. So when I leave the office at about 5pm, it's twilight, and it's full dark by halfway home. 

This isn't a thing I look forward to each fall. That first night when I watch the sun going down from the office windows can be a bit rough. It's not like I don't ride at night all the year round, but this time of year is when I start riding in the dark at rush hour. 

Nights are weirdly dark on the roads in Ottawa. It's hard to make out curbs and corners and edges. On some of the pathways, the headlights of oncoming cars can wash everything else out: it's hard even to see other pathway users through the glare, especially walkers in dark clothes or people without lights. And some of the people on the paths are running powerful headlights that also blind you. And coming towards an intersection, even with lights on my bike, it's hard to be confident that the drivers see me. So there's a little extra tension. Rush hour feels different from late night, when there are fewer cars and things are quieter and it's easier to see by the light of my headlamp.

However, I at least got to start out this dark season at the peak of the Beaver Moon. So the last few trips home have been pretty. The first night I left the office after sundown, the moon was hanging up in the sky above the parking lot, wreathed in clouds, and I thought, "okay, this won't be so bad."

Last night, on the way home, I crossed the Hartwell Locks bridge, and came across the Bike Ottawa Lights On Bikes giveaway: a portable tent and a bunch of cheerful volunteers bedecked with red and white lights giving away little turtle lights to anyone who wanted one. I stopped to chat with a couple of people, got a free light, sang the praises of both studded tires and battery-powered twinkly lights wrapped around the bike frame, and then went on my way. 

Across Carleton Campus, I hit the Rideau River pathway, and then was suddenly struck by the sight of a gigantic rising full moon over the river. I stopped to get the shot at the top of this post a little further on. Standing there in the dark pulling my phone out to get a picture, I thought, yeah, this is okay: I might even take the long, less-steep, fewer-cars route home through the hospital grounds, even if it's dark, even if it feels like I'm darting from the office to my apartment through the long dark of winter.