The beautiful Saturday spilled over into Sunday. We were all up early because of the time change, so AJ and I watched cartoons in bed while the sun rose.

Later I threw the bike in the back of the van and drove to the trail. I turned right instead of my usual left today just to see what would happen and found myself in one of those weird rural-meets-industrial zones that are so common in exurban areas like this one. I rode into the wind alongside the quarry. Next to me, several feet in the air, was a gravel mover, like a miniature train track, frozen in space. I passed giant clumps of grasses full of red-winged blackbirds, chirping throatily; past abandoned factory buildings and a stand of trees with a cluster of balloons, escaped from some child�s birthday, caught in the highest branch; past fields of corn, now mown down; past piles of scrap metal and then a tiny airport.

I�ve always loved abandoned machinery and factory buildings. Industrial decay looms large in my personal mythology, obsesses my dreams. I am under Chicago�s el tracks looking up. I am on Lower Wacker drive, exploring the catacombs. I am under a bridge where the highways tip over and flow into Manhattan. There are bridges upon bridges. These are almost nightly occurrences. Sometimes when I stumble on such places in waking life, it feels like I�ve always been trying to get there. Or like I�ve been there all along. Or possibly both. I�m not sure what it is about such spaces that captures my imagination. Perhaps it�s the idea of objects created for a particular use that are no longer being used in that way. There is an element of danger too, that the machinery is powerful and potentially harmful, but mostly just a danger that comes from remoteness, aloneness, disuse, and crooked, shadowy spaces. It is the potential of danger, not danger itself.

But today, it was the balloons that haunted me. They were an untold story of�what? Loss? Frivolity? Happiness? I am reminded of the film The Red Balloon that I watched over and over again in childhood, the one that instilled in me an early and lifelong francophilia. A boy finds more in common with a red balloon than in the people around him as he races through Paris. Ultimately he abandons Paris and people in favor of a cluster of red balloons that raise him high above the city just when he thought he had lost the balloon he loved forever. In the retelling, it strikes me as a pretty unsubtle retelling of the story of Christ. If, that is, Jesus were a balloon. But such allegory was lost on me. The film was always about escape from misunderstanding and mistreatment, escape from people, escape to aloneness and ergo freedom.

That�s kind of what my morning bicycle trips are about too. Solitude and silence are rare commodities in my life. I need to remember what they�re like. And I need to remember what it�s like to get places under my own power.

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