Peregrination

Let's say you're out for a nice bike ride on a gorgeous Sunday evening in Methodistville, and the wind is a mild sou'wester. MacKenzie's First Law says that you would start out going southwest, against the wind, to get the tailwind on your way back. It's an ideal late-summer time to unwind, in the immortal words of Chuck Berry, with no particular place to go.

If you go west on Walnut and hang a left at the cemetery, then head down Knox and cut through the service department past the skateboard park, you get to Alum Creek bike trail and go south, under Schrock Road and I-270, past a row of condos to a little unofficial eroded pedestrian trail up the bank to Cooper Road.

Here it gets tricky for a minute, as you ride uphill a short distance north, looking out for traffic on the curving two-lane road, before turning left on Corporate Exchange, a wide connector through an sort of office park campus that wends its way up to Cleveland Ave. and comes out, lo and behold, at the Home Depot. This was my objective: to find a route to that corner. Success!

There's no bike rack at O'Charley's, which is not a surprise, only a mild disappointment, since I was secretly hoping to bicycle there to meet my posse later this week. However, at the back of the parking lot I notice an inconspicuous, heretofore unnotice driveway, like a call to adventure leading around a bend and over a small rise to the Xenos campus, which looks busy, well-organized, and wholesomely friendly, like a cross between the Hallmark Channel and the Sci-Fi Channel. Just past the well-marked Cafe in the rear of the the back building I spot a gap in the fence, squeeze through a narrow gate at the back corner, an almost hidden portal onto an out-of-the-way dead-end street that leads to the mainstream normalcy of Sharon Woods Blvd.

I love to discover these obscure connections between the public geography that's printed on the map and the places that the locals know only because they happen to live there. Sharon Woods winds south from Schrock about a mile through a suburban residential neighborhood not unlike my own, past Underfunded Public High School, and comes out on state highway 161, one of the ubiquitous commercial strips from hell so common in central Swingstate.

Crossing 161, the neighborhood changes, as they say, and for an old white guy it doesn't feel so familiar anymore. Since I'm macho in my backward Buckeye cap and cruising along in high gear on le Trek, I have no fear, but through the roundabout of Tamarack Circle I know I'm not in Kansas anymore. I get as far south as Morse Road and things get really strange.

I haven't been to what's left of Northland lately, and apparently no one else has either, because it's deserted save for the surrealistic movie fascade of a building labeled State of Ohio Department of Taxation. This is either some extreme irony or people actually work here, but it's Sunday so I can't really tell, and the sun is going down, and I don't want to turn into a pumpkin, so I definitely need to head back from whence I came.

With no buildings blocking the view it's easy to find my way through the uninhabited expanse of pavement to Karl Road and head north past familiar landmarks like Woodward Park Rec Center, Epworth Methodist Church, the Northside YMCA, and the Karl Road branch of Columbus Public Library, all of which are, in my insular world, bastions of civilization.

Karl turns residential again north of highway 161 revisited, and it would be a stretch to say that I'm on my own with no connection home like a complete unknown, though I was enjoying the indirect route I was riding not quite like a rolling stone. After turning right on Schrock, I happened to notice a gate left open at the very back corner of Sharon Woods Metropark where it ends at I-270, so I doubled back and snuck through the gate into the park and found the unexpected treat of a perfect curving path through protected woods and picnic tables back toward Methodistville.

Directly across from the park entrance is St. Ann's Hospital, which reveals itself as a kind of campus, too, as I coast downhill through a succession of parking lots leading back to Cooper Road, which takes me back to Alum Creek trail and up the hill to Otterbein, which really is a campus, back to Walnut Street and Om Shanty, where there is a cold Great Lakes Eliot Ness Amber Lager waiting for me. Pointless but satisfying nonetheless.