Bagel Commute

I wrote this up for the commuter forum on RBR but never got around to publishing it. Anyways those who know me can probably wade through this one...

Every Monday morning for the last month or so my commute has been filled with bagels. I’m not eating the bagels (it’s hard to find a good bagel in Reno) but I’m seeing them. They pop up every 100 yards or so. Onion bagels, raisin bagels, egg bagels, every Monday I’m surprised by the variety.

The bagels are always one at a time, lying on the shoulder of the road. Sometimes they’re under the sagebrush off the shoulder but usually their just lying in the gravel. Usually by Wednesday they start having a “nibbled” look as the local fauna works away on them. Old bagels are rock hard and cannot be eaten easily. There’s a lot of Marmots on my commute. They’ve grown big and fat off the grass from the wet winter we’ve had. The Marmots live in the rocks and rangeland around Reno. They greet me every day as I ride by on my bike. A bagel on the side of the road probably looks pretty appetizing to them. It’s too big an offering for mice and ground squirrels. They could never get them down the burrow.

I don’t know why the bagels appear. I’ve imagined a pit bull directeur sportif, ala Manolo Saiz, out driving along my daily commute. He’s yelling at his tightly grouped cycling team “Rapido! Allez!” in a mix of broken Spanish and Italian. A bagel is periodically chucked at the bone-thin riders as they drop off the back of the pack to spur them on.

There are some pretty fast cyclists living in Reno (Julich spends part of the off-season here) and in all reality, there’s no one whipping bagels at them. That’s just my overactive cycling imagination. It’s probably just some high school kid who works at a donut shop getting his kicks throwing day-old bake goods out the car window. Either way the bagels are out there every Monday.

And I’m out there pedaling by wondering why?