My thirteen-year-old son returned to the classroom today. This will be his final year of middle school. I’m always deeply saddened to see summer end. At least we had one last bicycle adventure on the river bottoms before he resumed that tiresome slog of quizzes and essays.

As we left the neighborhood, I cautioned him to pace himself because it would be an extended ride with a challenging hill near the end. I said this for my own benefit more than his. I had been taking it easy because of a minor back injury and felt out of shape. He didn’t pay me any heed of course, and I had to shout at him to slow down just to keep him within sight. His new Canyon full-suspension bike is several times more expensive than my Rockhopper, but that’s not why I can’t keep up with him.

An hour later we found ourselves under the 494 Bridge that spans Gun Club Lake and the Minnesota River. I propped my mountain bike up against a concrete piling and surveyed the slough that was choked along the edges with lily pads. Overhead, the sky was a bright blue and the suspended clouds reflected magically on the duckweed-speckled water. I can’t view lily pads without thinking about the tranquil paintings of Claude Monet, the famous French Impressionist. Monet died in 1926, the same year my stucco home in Minneapolis was built.

I stared into the water, lost in the stillness of the lily pads and the clouds, and took photographs with my phone as my son bunny hopped around in the shade of the bridge. Monet’s oil painting, “Reflections of Clouds on the Water Lily Pond,” is worth tens of millions of dollars and hangs behind protective glass in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Someday I will have to visit New York City and see it. But for now, nature and my pedaling legs will have to suffice.

Gun Club Lake is one of my favorite places. Despite it being rather shallow, I’ve caught some astonishingly large pike and bass from it with my flyrod. A year ago we witnessed a family of river otters swimming under the bridge. My son likes the spot too, but for the graffiti more than the wildlife. Soon enough the water will be teeming with flocks of migrating waterfowl—geese, pelicans, herons, egrets, cormorants, teal, mallards and swans. Rich men in waders used to blast ducks from the cattails with shotguns, hence the name. A great deal has changed in the decades since then. Their hunting clubhouse of quarried stone is now just a ruin. As for the birds, they don’t seem to mind the speeding cars and passing airplanes.

The long beam bridge was under repair with scaffolding, ladders, machinery and tools everywhere. It was a Sunday so the workers were all at home with their own families. I’ll never forget the I-35 Bridge collapse in 2007 that killed 13 people and injured 145. It didn’t seem a disaster like that was possible. But I guess that’s the nature of disasters. If we could predict them, they wouldn’t happen. With that memory in mind, I appreciated the workers, both for their labors and their absence. I was grateful for the relative silence as I gazed at the wonder of lily pads and clouds.

My son and I admired some fresh graffiti and we continued along on our epic journey together. It’s a completely different perspective under the bridge than from above it. I don’t think anyone racing to or from Eagan at 70 mph is contemplating the works of Claude Monet.