A Bike Ride to Beat the Pandemic Blues

It's been a little more than a year since Governor Laura Kelly issued a statewide "stay-at-home" order, which urged Kansans to refrain from all but essential excursions and exercise. Like a lot of people, Commentator Rex Buchanan looked for ways to ditch "cabin fever" during the height of the pandemic. One of the best excursions he found was taking a solo bike ride... far away from the madding crowd.

Commentator Rex Buchanan is an avid bike rider and director emeritus of the Kansas Geological Survey at the University of Kansas. He lives in Lawrence.

Production assistance for this commentary was provided by KPR News Intern Isabel Ashley, a Baker University student from Silver Lake, Kansas. 
 

(TRANSCRIPT)

Like a lot of people, I’ve spent time outdoors during the pandemic. Over the past summer and fall, I rode my bike on a number of the state’s trails, including most of the public rail trails.

One of the best rides was last spring. I rode the Flint Hills Nature Trail, peddling from Ottawa to the little town of Rantoul, about 12 miles southeast of Ottawa, and back. The Flint Hills Trail is an old railroad grade that’s been turned into a path for hikers and bikers and horseback riders. It’s called the Flint Hills Nature Trail because it runs from Osawatomie in Miami County all the way west to Council Grove. And while it’s in the Flint Hills for the western part of that route, the name doesn’t really fit the eastern leg, which is in the Osage Cuestas physiographic region.

The stretch from Ottawa to Rantoul runs near and mostly parallel to the Marais des Cygnes River, over flat bottom-ground that doesn’t encounter any hills, which is perfect for a casual bike rider like me. The trail crosses little tributaries that flow into the Marais des Cygnes, including Middle Creek, near Rantoul, where the trail goes over a spectacular old metal truss bridge.

Rantoul, at least in my world, is known for the nearby oil field. From the trail, you can see three or four small pump-jacks, up on platforms, maybe six or eight feet above the ground, because they’re in the Marais Des Cygnes floodplain. These are little pump-jacks, small-scale version of the big nodding horse-head pump-jacks out in central and western Kansas. The ones here are smaller because they produce oil from only a few hundred feet below ground, compared to thousands of feet out west. When I rode the Trail last spring, a couple of oil-field hands were busy working on one of the pumps.

Ride the trail a little ways southeast of Rantoul and you’ll go past acres of old airplanes and jets, being dismantled for parts. Wings, a fuselage, cockpits. It’s an airplane graveyard, about the last thing you’d expect.

Spring was kicking into gear along the trail that day. Lots of redbuds and a few dogwoods were blooming. The most obvious flowering plant was blue phlox, a low-growing delicate light blue to lavender flower that dotted the wooded areas.

I didn’t see many other people during that afternoon. Another biker near Rantoul, a couple of kids playing under the bridge over Middle Creek. By the time I got back to Ottawa, foot traffic on the trail near town had picked up.  

Like most of you, I imagine, I spent lots of the last year oscillating between deep dives into virus news, and the worries and sadness that comes with it, to looking for other things to do, other things to think about, ways to get exercise safely. Bike trails, like the one out of Ottawa, are perfect for that. For a few hours, you can listen to the bird calls and frogs. Check out the big sycamores along the Marais des Cygnes. It’s good to be in a place, even for a little while, where the biggest worry is a flat tire.

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