Cycling Musings
Category: Local...
Posted Wednesday, August 27, 2003 at 01:57 PM [GMT-6]

Interesting bike ride this morning. Thought I'd share some of it with you while I'm waiting for a @#$(*@ connection to a (#*&(Q#* Windoze webserver so I can upload a new website for a client. (Can anyone explain to me why FTP connections to these webservers inevitably slow to a crawl? I've been trying for more than 2 hours to upload a set of files that generally takes less than 10 minutes to upload via FTP to a Linux server running Apache.) Anyway, I digress.

I noticed a cloudbank to the south as I headed out, but it seemed to be moving away, so I thought nothing more of it. In fact, by the time I was a mile or so outside the city limits, the sky overhead was clear and the sun was shining brightly. And it was raining on me. Well.

It didn't rain hard nor long, and it was actually kinda neat. My folks always said that rain during sunshine was a sign that the devil was beating his wife (the raindrops being tears, I suppose). I was young enough to let it lay without prodding; that was a picture that I didn't want to see too clearly. But I always had nagging questions. If the devil lived down there, and, presumably, so did his wife, then how come the tears were falling from the sky? Did he catch her up there where she wasn't supposed to be ("Woman, get back down to Hell's Kitchen and whup me up some demon grits!")? And how did the devil find a wife, anyway? Who'd want to marry him? (Not to mention the difficulty in finding a preache...um, never mind. I suppose he had plenty of those to choose from. ;-)

Of course, later I realized that there was a sequel. When you heard thunder in broad daylight, that was the devil's wife going into the closet, pulling out a sawed-off 12 gauge, and blowing his sorry butt back back to hell.

By the way, you probably won't hear much of this in Sunday School.

But, I digress...again.

The rest of the ride was fairly uneventful, allowing me to ponder such issues as "if Colorado was flattened out, would it be bigger than Texas?" and "what if all the bloggers agreed that on 9/11/03, we'd post just one thing -- in memory of -- and then let the blogosphere go silent for a few hours?"

As I got to roughly the same point where it rained on me on the way out, I saw something wriggling across the road. It was obviously a little snake, but what kind? I pulled up next to it and realized immediately that it was a rattler...a little teenie one, probably less than a foot in length, although I didn't stretch it out and measure. He (she? That's another thing I didn't inspect for. We'll go with "he," just for discussion purposes.) had one little button on his tail, kinda cute in a viperous sort of way.

Snake sightings aren't exactly rare out here, but it is pretty unusual to spot a rattlesnake up close and personal. I rolled my bike around so that the front wheel blocked his path, and he coiled up in that clichéd menacing pose, his little button tail whirring silently (what's another word for "whirring" that doesn't imply sound?). But he didn't strike, deciding instead to check out the strange intruder.

Rattlesnakes, as you all know, are pit vipers, meaning that they use heat-sensors in their head to detect and recognize prey. I'm guessing that the friction of rubber against road had heated my front tire sufficiently to make it worth his investigation, but he flicked his tiny little forked tongue against the wheel and quickly decided that nothing else supported an eat-or-be-eaten reaction. "Gee," I'm sure he was thinking, "I'd love to tell my brothers and sisters about this strange encounter...too bad mama ate 'em all." (That's an occupational hazard of being of the snakely persuasion.) And then, "Gee, that cloud came up in a hurry..." as my cleated cycling shoe came down on his head, sending him to join his devil brother in a demon grit feast.

Gotcha! I would never do that. Snakes are good for keeping the rat and other varmint population under control. I've never been repulsed or frightened by them, and killing them is something I just can't get behind (spiders are another story entirely, however). So I watched him wriggle slowly into the bar ditch, in search of more interesting prey than a bicycle tire.

So, to recap. To the disinterested observer, this was just another routine ride through the semi-arid West Texas landscape...but the details paint a much, much richer picture. Some say the devil in the details (he's in this post a lot, isn't he?), but I say it's God revealing His hand, if we'll just pay attention.