I do love a good bicycle ride

I heard if one could walk a full hour every day, a person could knock a pretty good hole in that danged ol’ condition some folks call “The Sugar,” more widely known as diabetes, which I have.

I’ve been concentrating so much on my walking I was neglecting my bicycle riding.

And I like my bicycle riding: The relative quiet, the breeze in my ears.

I would’ve written “wind in my hair,” but I don’t have much of that.

So I went riding through Clovis around noon on a Sunday.

Soon I found myself on L. Casillas Boulevard.

My ride took me by Bethlehem Baptist Church where folks were getting out of church.

I wondered what was going to be happening for their Sunday dinners.

Would there be macaroni and cheese?

L. Casillas Boulevard has homes on one side and park-like grassy land with shade trees on the other.

On the other side of the trees is the BNSF railyard.

I wondered what it would be like to live right next to the tracks with the trains passing close by.

I mean, it’s not much different where I live now with the railyard just two blocks away.

If you lived by the tracks would there be hobos tapping on your door after getting off a train, asking for some food or spare change?

My mom grew up in a house not far from a rail line in northern Ohio.

I used to like to visit my grandfather’s house. He had a big ol’ ramblin’ place, his big farming field next to him and across the field, tracks for a long-gone rail line, The Nickel Plate Road.

I liked to sit on his front porch and watch those trains roll on by.

My bicycle ride by the railyard reminded me of one of the earliest things I wanted to be when I grew up, a railroad engineer.

I don’t know why my momma brought it up, Mom didn’t tell me many stories of her youth, but she told me how hobos would drop in on her old homeplace.

“My mother would give them a little something to eat, mostly leftovers, but if she didn’t have any she’d make them a sandwich or something,” Mom said.

She told me hobos had their own little signs they’d carve into a home’s fenceposts.

“The sign might tell other hobos the people at a house were nice, mean, a preacher, a doctor who didn’t charge, people who would let you sleep in the barn, there’s a mean dog at this house, they had symbols for all kinds of things,” Mom said.

But something tells me what hobos there are here in the future may be a bit different than those of the 1920s and ’30s.

For instance, when I lived in Arizona along the Mexican border, I chatted up with old-timers who spoke of how things used to be different along the border back when.

“You could leave your house unlocked when you went to town. When you came back you could tell someone, probably a border-crosser, had been in your home and had some food,” a guy told me once.

He said in the 1970s things changed.

“You’d come home, your place ransacked, stuff stolen, you had to lock your place up when you went away,” he said.

Well, it was a nice bicycle ride that Sunday afternoon.

I’ll do it again this Sunday.

Grant McGee writes for The Eastern New Mexico News. Contact him:

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