Road kill

Riding along the Pacific coast of the United States of America is scary. You follow highway 101 or highway 1 for most of the way. Sometimes the highway becomes a Freeway. Which means you end up riding a bicycle on the shoulder of a two or three lane road where cars are driving along at 70 miles an hour. That is 112 km/h for the rest of the world that is not still thinking imperial things should be kept.

Anyways, it's scary to ride along the coast. A lot of the way the shoulder just disappears. Of course this never happens on a nice straight flat road, but on windy section going uphill where you are already slow and looking back to see if it is safe to go onto the road becomes a challenge. You could remedy that with a mirror. Like many a traveling cyclist has told me. But I'm stubborn and sort of fail to see that a mirror makes this better. There is no way you can correctly estimate if you can savely switch lanes without actually looking over your shoulder when the differences in speed are this big. So I stick to no mirror and looking back now and then.

You sort of get used to the fast moving cars from behind though. And after a while it becomes normal and it is mostly fine. Also 99.5% of the drivers are nice, slow down and take enough distance overtaking you. The other 0.5% wants you dead. They seem to speed up and like to overtake you as close as they can. Hopefully blasting you with a good cloud of black smoke. What is worse is their 5.7 liter v12 engine they have in their wannabee truck is so loud you feel your ear drums almost tear everytime one of these rednecks tries to kill you. Your heart stops beating for a moment and then pounds a few times extra to compensate. Then you loose your balance from the side wind that hits you. You get dizzy from the fumes and the shock and for the life of me all you can do is peddle on and hope your body remembers what to do.

Somehow people think it is a good idea to push the debry from a crash onto the shoulder. It's away from the road. Problem solved! So riding on the shoulde becomes a game of dodging old pieces of car body, big and smaller pieces of glass and other things that cars are made of. Then there is of course the innumerable amounts of garbage being thrown out of the windows. My paper Starbucks cup has no coffee anymore? No problem I'll just toss it on the side of the road. No worries! My plastic Ice Tea cup as well for that matter. Oh and this old piece of I don't know what is also just fine there on the side of the road.

Then, while dodging all the nasty things of human kind, a waft of decay hits you. It is overpowering so it must be a big animal. Sure enough a deer pops up a moment later. Fur and bones and ant food is all that is left. The amount of dead animals along the roads is stagering. Deer, skunk, possums, mice, rats, racoons, rabbits, vultures, quails, all kinds of not identifiable anymore birds. But the thing that is mostly killed on the road is insects. Incountable amounts of bees, wasps, dragonflies, insects of all kinds and butterflies have been smashed on the roads. You see wasps or bees wondering around in circles on the shoulder, hit but not dead yet.

The scariest thing to me though is not the amount of road kill that is actually there. It is the amount of road kill, and here I mean mainly insects, that is not there. The amount of miles we biked along fields of some sort of agriculture with row after row after row of food where there was no insect around, no bees, no flies, no nothing is more than scary. Those fields should have been filled with life. A heaven of zooming noices. Annoying swarms around your sweaty sunscreened face trying to get a piece of you. But especially around those agricultural fields the insects where absent. Steril agriculture. It scares the shit out of me.