Bike Ride Views on a Kansas Summer Morning

Tags

beauty, bike ride, farm roads, Kansas, open fields, sky

I decided to do a different type of “street photography” today, and celebrate what I came across just west of where we live, on the west side of Wichita.  What I love about our house is that it backs up to a little horse corral, owned by some lovely Hispanic gentleman, and so we don’t look out our west window at breakfast-time or sunset-time at someone else’s house; we look out over cedar trees and beautiful horses milling about.  Another neighborhood or two over, continuing west/southwest, and there begin to be large agricultural fields, open roads, that lead to Cheney or to Goddard.  You really feel like you’re out in the country after only a fraction of an hour pedaling away from home.

This view would not be particularly exciting to those of us who live around these parts and are used to the openness, but I have learned from my travels that there are those who long for these spaces…. these seemingly limitless roads that point skyward at times.

The “No Vehicles” sign drew my attention because it was placed there to keep cars away from the baseball field where my son, Ethan, played as a youngster.  Upon further thought, it occurred to me that looking skyward and changing my vantage point changed the potential interpretation of the sign:

In other words, free rides to heaven, angels use their wings not cars, Back to the Future- “Where we’re going we don’t need roads..”  Things like that.

Dirt was flying like mist all around that tractor.  It was moving so fast I had to pedal hard to get past him, and hop off my bike quickly in order to grab this shot so it would include that patch of flowers.  I love the vastness of the dirt and the potential it represents.

Bird on a wire.  He kept flying away and coyly coming back. I’m pretty sure he posed for me a couple of times.  How tiny he looks all the way up there juxtaposed against that big field and sky. I wonder if he feels tiny and insignificant the same way we do when we look up at the stars.

Life mixed with death…  I just like the way these persistent little flowers grow in the middle of dry, dead things all along the roads. It makes me feel hopeful.

Dilapidated fence posts always hold a fascination for me.  Who built that?  How long has it been like that?  What is the barbed wire keeping out?  Whose property does it protect? Why this is beautiful to me is hard to say. It just is.