The ride itself was a pleasure, snaking through woodlands and along the utility right-of-way clearings, which had been left to become lush grasslands. At the lake...which actually looked like a lake, given recent soaking rains...we stopped to hydrate and chat.
And then we returned. I marveled at all of the life around us as the trail pushed through an area of powerline-crossed wetland. Small gulleys and streams snaked lazily through heavy growth of reeds and tall grasses, and throughout all of it, insects buzzed and hummed about their business. So many pollinators, so many living creatures!
It was all a wonder of natural beauty.
Which was precisely when a small black something crossed my plane of vision right in close and right to left, and I felt the impact of an insect right where my head and the front of my bike helmet intersected. There was a moment of fierce chitinous scrabbling, followed by what was to be the first in a succession of sharp stabbing stings.
The insect's efforts were immediately joined by my own, as I endeavored to 1) get it the rackafracking frack off of me and 2) not crash and 3) come to a stop and 4) also not crash. A second sting was followed by a third and a fourth, before finally my frantic beating at my own forehead dislodged whatever it was, and I came to an abrupt halt.
For the next few days, the flesh over my os frontale was swollen, giving me a faintly Neanderthal aesthetic. I don't doubt the wasp fared far worse.
Of all the foreheads on all the bike paths in all the world, you had to fly into mine?
Why, one might ask, did that happen? Was there a reason for it? Was it purely random, or was there a Lesson To Be Learned about the sharpness of the natural world, about how little it cares for our romantic musings and moonings?
This, I can't know. In the scheme of things, and against the backdrop of how easily we mortals are broken, that momentary unpleasantness was a very little thing.
It is a peculiarity of our times that shortly thereafter, I watched a viral video in which tiny little human forms...each, a soul, as fully human as I...fled an oncoming wall of water, rock, glacial ice, and mud in a Nepalese/Tibetan valley. Along with millions of others, I watched them consumed. I watched the moment of their deaths. One moment, they were tourists and workers enjoying the beauty of a mountainous valley. The next, they were gone.
My trivial discomfort, nothing to theirs, and infinitesimally tiny relative to the wrenching, heartbreaking loss of those who loved them. Yet still, it is nature, showing how buses can be tossed like matchsticks, how seven story concrete edifices can be shattered like glass, how even the swiftness of flight and terror can end in a tossing, tumbling oblivion.
Why, one might ask again, shaken by the viewing, did that happen? There are reasons, of course, underlying the mechanics of the event. Glacial collapses...like wildfires and droughts and megastorms...are more common now that our world is warming. But the "why" of those particular deaths is harder to parse out. Do we suppose they died because they deserved it in some way? They did not.
It is as beyond me as the reason for Job's suffering was beyond Job.
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