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The first couple of hours of my commute are kind of lonely now, as I bicycle along a nearly deserted U.S. Highway 65. It gets more sociable as I get closer to the city, though, with more and more people biking, walking, rollerblading, riding horses. You can tell the dedicated employees, the ones who take work home; they’re the ones with the handcarts.

All in all, they seem to be handling the end of the gasoline era pretty well, although once in a while someone breaks off from the group and tries to siphon the tank of an abandoned car. Nothing ever comes of it, but we all cheer anyway.

We need things to get excited about, as the miles drag by. Some days the only highlight comes when we meet a group of 30 or 40 business people on their way to Chicago. Even though they’re traveling on those little leg-propelled scooters, not an airplane, they stay elbow to elbow in clusters of two or three, and there’s always some guy who yells at us to bring him a drink. That’s one strong force, that force of habit.

We have lots of time to kill, so sometimes someone will start a game. Twenty Questions is fun after we deal with Al from Altoona. When he says, “I’m thinking of something,” someone immediately asks, “Is it gasoline?” and then it’s on to the next player.

Nora, a brass stair railing polisher from Norwoodville, had a good one the other day. We narrowed it down to a male person living in the United States who was a politician and had sent an army into an oil-producing nation without making our energy situation any better … but then Al wasted the 20th question on “Is it gasoline?” and Nora never would tell us the answer.

Sometimes we get a little more serious and talk about how things ended up this way.

“First they sold me a pickup truck, and I said nothing because I had some stuff to haul,” Farrar Phil said the other day. “Then they sold me an SUV, and I said nothing because we like to take the kids camping once every summer. Then they sold me a Hummer, and I said nothing because … well, I just thought it would be fun to sit up real high.”

“I blame the commodities speculators,” said the guy who wraps his lunch in The Wall Street Journal. “Those guys sit in front of their computers, not working, not contributing to society, just hoping to get lucky and hit the jackpot. It’s like ‘Deal or No Deal’ without the cleavage.”

“It’s a vast petrochemical conspiracy,” said the woman who always seems to be running for political office. “You’ve got oil men in the White House, the Capitol is crawling with oil lobbyists, and the car manufacturers are determined to keep us hooked on oil.”

“If only someone could change that,” I said. I remember her getting me into a headlock and demanding a campaign contribution, then I must have blacked out.

“I guess we really should buy homes closer to our jobs,” said a woman who has the air of a real estate agent about her – no matter what you say to her, her reply is, “There may never be a better time to buy.”

She got us talking about Prairie Trail in Ankeny, which is billed as an example of “New Urbanism.”

The houses will be built close together; shopping, restaurants and “other necessities of life” will be within walking or bike-riding distance of the homes; they’ll have a city park; and they’re including lots of “green” features in the houses.

“Hey, wait a minute,” I said. “That sounds like the town where I grew up. Practically all we did was avoid using energy. We lived within walking distance of the school and the stores; we didn’t waste electricity

on frivolities like dishwashers or clothes dryers or air conditioning. But there was so much gasoline stored up that we drove up and down Main Street with 426 Hemis just to get rid of it.”

“Don’t you wish you were back there?” Phil asked, as we made our weary way across the Grand Avenue bridge. “Don’t you wish you could just forget about gas prices and collapsing housing markets and credit problems?”

“What,” I said, “and give up the American dream?”