Moonbound And Simulated Mars

"I will show you a technique for exploring your nerves – the underside of them."

There, in the calm shadowed chamber, she taught him how to meditate.

Moonbound by Robin Sloan


What do you do with a midweek holiday?

I don't know what I would have done previously. Nothing, maybe. Stayed home and lollygagged if I were at the camp, or back in the Wausau days I may have made grand plans and not followed through. (That was certainly my pattern.) Now -- I escape. Staying home and lazing requires me to navigate downtown parking and that holds no appeal; that simple fact makes it much easier to find and pursue plans.

So this last week, with my midweek holiday and my birthday gift to myself, I aimed for one of my favorite spots in my geographic neighborhood.

The Badlands.

For all my exploring there by car and on foot, I'd never really considered riding a bike on those roads. By and large this is because I've struggled to be comfortable on a bike with cars zooming by or confident enough to cover the mileage that's required (and not in the shape for such an excursion). But this year -- given my fortieth birthday and the industry discounts available to me -- I got myself an ebike.

And it has opened up options my doughy form would never have considered otherwise.

Wednesday morning I got up as usual, got ready as mostly usual, and then started the fun part. It was shockingly cold for June, 37 degrees when I got up and only 45 as I left town, but that only meant I would be more comfortable when I rode.

And I started an audiobook.

Oh boy.

Some notes.

1. ​If you have your pick of days to spend in the Badlands, find one when the temperature is going to max out in the 60s. It is, simply put, perfect. And hey, the rattlesnakes are less likely to hang out in the open.

2. As with many places, the Badlands are enchanting by bike. Something about being that close to the landscape makes it even more like exploring a foreign planet.

[And something about taking photos from a bike makes you fully aware of your sense of proprioception.]

3. Speaking of foreign planets, may I recommend Shokz headphones and an audiobook set in the the year 13777? Robin Sloan's Maximum Happy Imagination world of Moonbound was just about the perfect soundtrack for a ride through pseudo-Mars.

[Yes, I also had the hardcover with me. The map was necessary when I stopped for lunch.]

The weather, the bike, and especially the book, allowed me to forget to be exhausted or self-conscious. It let me sink into the terrain and take it all in, let me not be so worried when I approached a hill poorly and still had to walk my bike up the last bit, let my brain rove with Ariel de la Sauvage instead of wondering where I was or exactly how far I'd gone already.

Moonbound was, to use a phrase from a different Robin Sloan book, the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.

So it was that my midweek holiday was what I needed it to be and perhaps a bit more: an escape, a reminder of the best parts of SoDak, and a chance to charge my social battery before a weekend that was Full Of People. I also got to absorb the newest book by one of my favorite authors and bask in weather that just doesn't normally happen in June.

Fabulous.