Normally I don’t take pictures of my bike while I’m riding. I don’t take pictures much at all: I prefer to ride, not stop, extract my phone from my pocket and its protective plastic baggie wrapper, take a picture, put away my phone in the wrapper and then my pocket, and resume riding.

I do realize that, in the grand scheme of photography, this may be the easiest era ever to take pictures. I don’t care–it’s still more than I want to do when I’m out riding. Really it’s because I prefer to avoid stopping as much as possible, and unless a view really stuns me, I tend to just appreciate it on the fly.

During the pandemic, my attitude has shifted a bit. I still prefer to avoid stopping, and in fact I stop less than ever before. Two Saturdays ago, I rode 85 miles with no official food, water, or bathroom stops, thanks to the closure of nearly all our regular stopping places. At this point I expect to ride 40 or 50 miles without stopping for anything.

As I was starting to say before I sidetracked myself, I’ve started making an exception for stopping to take pictures of my bike in pretty spots along the ride. This is a kind of strange thing some cyclists do, I guess by way of a selfie without your actual self in it. For me, during this time when we’ve otherwise spent all our time in one building, I think these pictures prove to me that the world outside remains, and I’m still part of it. To an extent, it also captures the strange or surreal emptiness of some roads, which stretch behind my bike in long, empty asphalt ribbons.

So here are some of the “bike selfie” pictures I’ve taken since all this started almost exactly two months ago, at the beginning of March.