The Printculture Committee on Experimental Vehicular Transport is sending a probe vehicle out on the roads of Connecticut and Massachusetts, equipped with two tires, a water bottle, and a flashing red light (just in case). According to the latest reports, sunshine is predicted and suburban gardens will continue to flower with dogwood, azalea, and rhododendron. We'll file updates, commentary and pictures as news occurs.

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(May 29) Success: the green bike with baggage racks, rechristened for the purpose the Mass. Rover, has been from New Haven to Northampton and back in a two-day jaunt. The Rover's sensors were mainly tuned to assessing the likelihood of making this trip entirely on a dedicated bike trail-- within any of our lifetimes, that is. More about this prospect below: first, some olfactory impressions.

The trip turned out to be a drug run. Late May is the time when Connecticut and Massachusetts farmers cut their first round of hay, and the fields, strewn with thick green stems, give off a dense perfume that makes me want to park the bike and go rolling around in the fresh-cut forage. Compared to new-cut hay, the grass eaten straight off the turf must have a slightly acidulous, shallow taste. Watching the humans go to great lengths to harvest, prepare and store hay, the cattle, I imagine, if they can put together the narrative, must think we are awfully convenient and thoughtful servants as they anticipate the crisp, slightly fermented taste of the forthcoming hay. Good for them too if they're not putting too many narrative steps together. Riding past their deadpan gaze and suppressing the urge to speak to them in my human-accented Cow, I appreciate the seasonal change from the mainly manure-scented late winter and early spring to the flowers and hay of late spring.

But I am getting off my track, which is precisely the track. In the 1820s, a canal was dug between New Haven and Northampton, Massachusetts. I had always heard the purpose of the canal was to bring Yale men and Smith girls together, in a Saint-Simonian scheme like the Suez project, but the chronology's off. (Smith was founded in 1871.) The canal wasn't a success, even in terms of trade and communications, but the right-of-way served as the basis for a railroad that ran for a hundred years or so, then fell to bankruptcy, takeover, and scrap. After a few growth years for the brambles and mosquitoes, somebody had the idea to reopen the corridor as a connected series of walking and cycling trails. And that is what the Mass. Rover set out to investigate.

You can't google it. Or at least you can't google all of it. Clubs and associations display parts of the trail as maps, but there are missing parts and not every map is up to date. So I thought I would answer this question empirically: is it possible to ride from New Haven to Northampton on a cycle trail? Or to ride how much of the way on a dedicated cycle trail? Route 10 runs parallel to the path, so I knew I would have a fallback.

So, departure from Lulu's, the New Haven gathering spot where nobody thinks you look funny in your helmet and dancing shoes. A few blocks up and around Whitney Avenue, some going around in circles in Hamden, and then a hook onto the lower part of the trail in a typical once-industrial, now-commercial zone (the back sides of supermarkets and shopping malls; former gunpowder plants where it's not a good idea to put the soil in your mouth; rows of abandoned brick factories). A sign boasting of a company's skills in “Rebuilding and Deconstruction” reminds me that I am only five miles from New Haven. Before long the lawns get bigger and the trees are taller; then come parks, playgrounds and finally the first fields of hay. Cheshire, another suburban town, where three-car garages and would-be Federal houses loom threateningly over cow pastures, and the trail drops you onto a road. Ten or twenty miles on the highway shoulder (strip malls, auto parts, pizzerias, package stores), some highway overpasses, through Southington and Plainville (darting off to the west every now and then to see if there might be an entry to the trail; once in a while, a stretch of paved trail, but many times only the ditch). Then the tall trees and long lawns of Farmington,

with a diagonal approach through parkland to the Avon segment of the trail. This continues up through agricultural land (old tobacco barns, now surrounded by polyurethane greenhouses and various cash crops) in Bradley Airport country. In the Salmon Brook corner of East Granby, one surprise for the rider who, like me, wasn't up on the latest trail news:

requiring a U-turn and short trip back to the highway: return to Route 10, which is the route of choice (there being no rival choices) through to the Massachusetts border and on for the other 25 miles or so to Northampton.

The shoulder was generally hospitable. Not too much broken glass or sand; usually a decent margin for cars and me to coexist. A few cranky drivers, but generally, civility prevailed. The downtowns have a worn look but the older houses with wide porches are extraordinarily handsome-looking in the late evenings of early summer, with a lawnmower or two droning in the distance and only a few translucent insects punctuating the fragrant air.

82 miles, give or take a few, and plenty of local color. Houses and gardens pointed toward the social and economic history of the Connecticut Valley. Civic architecture: the nineteenth-century town halls that would make the Florentine Podesta envious; the slapped-together pseudo-international “municipal service centers” of the mid-20th century; more recent attempts at civic pride that, to my eye, backfire.

Church architecture told a parallel story (the Congregationalists, always at the center of town, with white-painted, steeple-crowned wooden meeting houses; the Episcopalians, not far behind, with their reproductions of English parish churches awaiting an American Thomas Gray to lurk in their nonexistent churchyards; the Catholics, going Gothic, Romanesque, Sienese or classical, but always putting on the style; the Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans and Presbyterians, following with their variants of stout Englishy Gothic; then the resale of the aforesaid churches to pneumatic sects, coffee shops, stripper clubs, etc.; and now and again a brand-new megachurch with a non-denominational sign out front and a big parking lot).

I saw used bookstores. A big hawk waiting for a slow sparrow. Plenty of chipmunks and groundhogs. I jumped illegally into the Farmington River for a short, cold bath.

Thanks to the sons and daughters of Italy who in the 1800s supplemented the mechanical-minded early Nutmeg Staters, I was able to bite into freshly-prepared, non-chain-store pizza at the crucial moments. An experiment with a Power Bar proved once again that I am not the power biker to rank with E Hayot (at least not where my innards are concerned). And in Northampton at the end of the day, I very much enjoyed soaking in a hot tub, amused by the love cries piercing the thin walls.

The trip back the next morning was just as nice. At Simsbury, a conversation with a pair of riders on a fine-looking tandem brought me into contact with Steven Mitchell, president of the local rails-to-trails association and host of a local-access show called “Trail Rated.” Steve is on the cusp of two economies, running the Dodge dealership in town and hopping on his bike to harangue officials about the need to invest more in bike trails. Simsbury is lucky to have him as sage, promoter and gadfly. Here's to more miles with Steve.

More from the road:

I somehow feel that “explicit” runs in the opposite direction from “airbrushed,” but maybe this means my sensibility is pre-digital.

What metaphysician could pass up the opportunity to live in a state rife with feral Cheshire cats?

Post-industrial life is going to be worth the living, as witness the transformations of the Canal Route through the last hundred and eighty years of boom and bust. Same for life post-peak-oil. Let's just remember to save enough petroleum to make bike tires with.