Of every mildly interesting fact about me, the one that gets the strongest reaction from people I meet here isn’t the demand-planning job, or the reading log with a pages-per-night column, or the shelf of board games slowly taking over the second bedroom. It’s that I’ve lived in Fort Collins for six years and don’t own a bike. People look at me like I’ve confessed to something.

This is, I’m told, a bike town. I believe it. I see the evidence of it every single day, on the trail, on the streets downtown, in the number of coworkers who show up to work slightly windburned looking pleased with themselves about it. I moved here for the forecasting internship that turned into my actual career, and somewhere in those first busy months of learning a new job I just never got around to it, and then enough time passed that not having a bike started to feel like a personality trait instead of an oversight.

I’ve had people offer to teach me like it’s a skill I never picked up, and I have to explain, no, I know how, I rode constantly as a kid, I’ve just never reacquired the actual object once I moved somewhere that apparently expects it of me. Every time I get close to buying one, something else feels more urgent, a book I want to actually finish, a game night I don’t want to leave early to make it to a bike shop before closing. It keeps losing the comparison to things I’d rather be doing, which I recognize is not a great argument, since presumably a bike would just be one more thing I’d rather be doing, if I had it.

What I’ve settled into instead is walking, mostly, the trail near my apartment that I take almost every evening regardless of weather, which around here means regardless of a forty-degree swing showing up with no warning. It’s slower than a bike would be. I’ve made my peace with slower. Most of what I actually like doing, the long books, the campaign games that eat a full evening, rewards patience over speed anyway, so maybe the lack of a bike isn’t really an oversight so much as consistent with everything else about how I spend time.

Dana keeps threatening to buy me one for my birthday just to force the issue. I’ve told her if she does, it’s going in the garage next to the boxes of expansion modules I haven’t gotten to yet, which is possibly the most honest threat I’ve ever made about my own follow-through. She hasn’t done it yet. I suspect she knows exactly how that would go.