Circles

Forty riders came to RAMS Fun Ride on a Saturday to ride in circles. That sentence sounds like a criticism. It isn't. Those circles are the season starting. They're the part nobody photographs — the deliberate repetition before the terrain gets serious, the recalibration of hands and weight and instinct after a winter of sitting still. You don't ride circles because you've run out of places to go. You ride them because you know exactly what you're doing and why. Forty people left home on a Saturday and chose this. That's not a small thing. The dust was there, the noise was there, and so was something harder to name — the particular energy of a group that has been waiting and is finally, quietly, moving again. The season doesn't announce itself. It just starts — in a field, in circles, with nobody watching except the people who showed up.