Shiny spiders in the dark!
With a doctor's OK, I took the recumbent out for a night ride despite a tear in one of the cartilaginous bits of my left knee, possibly caused by doing three 22 - mile sunset rides last week after a winter on the couch with Doritos and medication. The knee feels fine while riding, but sit me in a chair for an hour and it will flare up with peculiar pain, as though some connective band of tissue has slipped from its moorings and would really like to be put back in place, thanks very much, sort of nowish would be good. Cycling isn't a problem, apparently, although I'll have to watch the knee to see if it balloons up like a clown on smack.
(No. I don't know what that means, either. Let's just move on.)
Ordinarily, I wouldn't have gone for a ride, but I have to test an alternate version of The Most Rocking Kick - Ass Light In The Entire Friggin' Universe, to see whether I like the lamp with a ten - degree beam spread or an 18 - degree beam spread. This will ensure that the light is, in fact, Perfection Itself. Bill over at Gretna Bikes responded to my e - mail fretting that I might have made a mistake in choosing the 18 - degree lamp by just sending me a ten - degree and writing, "Let us know which one works best for you, and send the other one back." Didn't even charge my card against the return of the lamp, which I was entirely prepared to do. Lupine lights are manufactured in Germany, and Gretna is the sole distributor in the US. Good choice. That's proper service, that is.
About half an hour after sunset I headed off into the twilight, stopping on dark stretches of road to swap the light heads back and forth and see whether I preferred a slightly wider bright spot or a longer throw on the beam. More testing will be required - - there's trade - offs for each, which I won't go into because the portion of my readership that gives a pickle's mustache about such minutiae is vanishingly small. (Move on.)
But both light heads illuminated the spiders equally well.
Heading downhill in the dark, I kept seeing what I thought were brilliant blue - green flecks of mica or some other reflective mineral in the road surface. Then one of them moved. I stopped, and watched a jet - black wolf - style spider scurry away in the neon blue light of my Down Low Glows. I rode on, and came to a section of the road that was covered with dozens of the little sparkles - - black spiders of all sizes, glinting like tiny motile jewels in the dark.
Some folks don't care much for spiders. I generally don't mind them. But this - - this was a real Rural Wildlife Moment. I didn't see them on fall or winter night rides last year, and their numbers suggest that it's sparkly spider spawning season. I wondered, as I rode, whether there was some insect evolution at work here - - the arachnid equivalent of Kettlewell's Peppered Moths. If you're a small black spider who frequents dark country roads, do you gain some advantage from being really shiny when illuminated by a high - intensity light source, such as the headlights of an oncoming car with giant tires of spider - crushing death? Do some drivers avoid the shiny ones, perhaps mistaking them for glass, so that some slightly greater percentage of the less - sparkly are killed before breeding?
I'm no naturalist. Maybe all the black spiders are sparkly because it's neat to be sparkly.
This is why I moved here (in addition to the fact that maniacal assholes blew up some buildings that were uncomfortably close to me). In the city, the sparkly stuff in the road is glass, and you have to have Kevlar - banded tires on your bicycle, and spend a few minutes every week digging the stuff out of the treads with a knifepoint.
Here, the sparkly stuff is fauna, and all you have to do is avoid squashing them, if you're so inclined.
Vastly preferable.
