Location: East Bay Bike Path, Bristol, RI

I decided to take the East Bay Bike Path out of town to Bristol to see if I could test the limits of this city. I needed a break from College Hill, I needed some quality foliage time. Back when Robert Frost was king of New England, this would’ve been the way out to the woods, a straight-shot from civilization which stretched one sinuous, pavement limb into the vast forest. Could I find any remnants of that? Maybe islands of natural solace still dot the coast of Narragansett Bay.
After having some trouble finding the start, I cross the river on Rt. 195 and I’m on my way. The path follows the old railroad tracks that used to hug this rocky coast. I switch between staring down at my wheel spinning away the pavement and craning my neck to watch the sky. It’s a grey autumn day and the silence is echoed by the rustling of leaves. My thoughts hang crisp in the air.
I find my first break from the city at a point where the path forms a lagoon, with water on both sides. Off in the distance I can see the skyscrapers of downtown but I already feel hundreds of miles away. The oranges and reds of the maples across the lagoon loom much larger than the distant buildings. Fingers of granite jut out into the bay. I leave my bike by the side of the path, hop a fence, and climb up one of the ridges. It’s covered in juniper, pitch pine and lichen. I climb to the very end of the spit and sit.
I’m shocked at how much I needed this, at how much more complete I feel without the noise of Thayer St. drowning out my thoughts. I bask in the fresh salt air. Across the bay I see some sort of industrial park but it seems not even to exist in the same reality. My little slice of nature is inviolate. I have temporarily escaped (although never completely) the reach of the city.
It’s interesting, now that I live in an urban environment I find I relish every natural moment more and more. I crave unadulterated forest. Maybe, as the world gets increasingly urbanized, every piece of shrinking natural land will become more and more precious to us. Is this our curse, to have our appreciation for something increase just as the amount of it decreases? It’s classic don’t-know-what-you-got-till-it’s-gone syndrome and our species has it bad.
The human tragedy is one of missed opportunities and repentant hindsight. The classic, Greek heroes of tragedy always realized their fatal flaw, their hamartia, just at the very end of the play but never soon enough to save themselves. And so with our people as a whole. Perhaps it is our fate to finally fall in love with the forest just in time to see the final acre slashed and burned. For what could be more human than to destroy what you love? And so the tragedy will end, in a beautiful, ironic apocalypse of contradictions, us holding tighter and tighter to the last vestiges of wilderness as they are slowly crushed under the weight of our uncontrollable progress.
I walk back to my bike as the wind picks up. I look out and see a single swan floating on the lagoon, neck curved, pure white. And I envy it, free of the blessings and curses of mankind. It could float on this lagoon forever, benign, unshakeable. Men and swans are different. Maybe we were always too passionate to have lasted long anyway.