a rough and timorous piece that helped me figure out another one

December 6, 2009 riding rabbit blog

This is going to be less of an essay than the sort of wordy self-indulgence that makes diaries and blogs so enjoyable. I’m starting out with hardly any thesis, expecting to ramble for a few hundred words, then with a flash of insight, make a rhetorical leap worthy of Spider-Man, and wrap the whole thing into a neat bundle. It’ll probably peter out after a few depressing paragraphs, draw no conclusions, and I’ll go back to playing solitaire.

I’ve always been of the solitary sort, sometimes due to circumstance, sometimes social ineptitude masked as choice. The seeming ease with which other people interact looks like a magic trick, or a fantastic lie. One reason I gravitated to bicycling, besides the fact that it got me out of the house when I was too young to drive, was the fact that I could do it without anyone else’s cooperation. Now, with nearly thirty years of semi-serious riding under my wheels, most of my miles have been solo.

Apparently this isn’t true for everyone. Once, after a particularly bad shellacking in a criterium, I purchased a paperback book entitled Beginning Bicycle Racing. In the chapter on handling, the author suggested a drill in which you would gather five or six of your riding buddies, and scorch around the local little-league diamond bumping wheels. At the time, I didn’t have five or six acquaintances, much less buddies. Moreover, I was the only person I knew who rode a bicycle. Later, he suggested borrowing equipment from other riders in your club. Even today, it still seems to me that if I belonged to a racing club, I wouldn’t have needed to buy a book called Beginning Bicycle Racing.

For all this time, I’ve been virtually the only cyclist I knew, by far the most serious one, and every book or magazine article I read appeared to have been written on some velo-centric planet, a place where Andy Singer has his picture on billboards like Chairman Mao. They suggested haunting the flea markets in search of a titanium Bontrager with the custom-geometry fork, riding secret stashes of trail, and of nighttime rides that ended in trailhead keggers. All of this was as distant and unlikely as the planet Vulcan. That is, until today.

Three or four years ago, I was chatting with a guy at the Yellow River trailhead, and he mentioned an illegal trail he’d been riding, with a ladder bridge, a wall ride, and a lot of sinuous singletrack, all hidden on a patch of undeveloped land in an industrial park. He gave me very explicit directions and recommended that I check it out. I followed his directions on the way home, and couldn’t find the entrance. Came back the next day and had no better luck. Got hurt and couldn’t ride, got caught up in school and couldn’t ride, got sent out of town and couldn’t ride. Never found the place.

Then, this morning, I was back in town for the weekend, and needed a mental-health ride really bad. The Ti Bon was on the roof of the truck, it wasn’t yet eight o’clock…and I just couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for Yellow. So I figured I’d make one more search for the elusive trail. On a whim, I reversed the directions I’d been given—right off the interstate, then second right--- and sure enough, there was a little sliver of singletrack running back into the woods. I parked the truck, clipped in, and followed it.

Okay, it’s not great riding. There’s virtually no elevation gain, and the trails are zigzagged so tightly that they occasionally grow together. The woods are just calf- to thigh- diameter trees, clearly new growth on land that was cleared but never developed. It’s too tight for my full-speed-ahead Bon, and I was constantly running wide on the corners. But it does have a ladder bridge, of erratic width and haphazard slope, a wall ride without enough run-in, and a plank bridge that dumps you down the spine of a rain gully. But the best part wasn’t the riding, but the ambiance. The outside sweeps of the curves are marked with lines of old softball trophies. There are bridges made from a refrigerator door and an old sliding board. Race banners, weathered into illegibility, hang in tatters from the trees, along with an Irish flag. And best of all, like Ralph Steadman hallucination, you come around a twisty and meet up with a giant fiberglass chili pepper, pilfered from the top of a Chili’s restaurant.

I rode the whole loop, twice, savoring the ambiance, the feeling of being one of the in-crowd. I noted each incongruous element: the pair of hiking boots, the little silver trophy cups, the way the trail was purposely built right at the edge of the ditch. After an hour and a half, I wasn’t tired or even winded, since there was never any space to build speed or hills more than head high to climb. I pulled the trash I’d picked up on my ride out of my coat pocked, stuffed it into the garbage back hanging from a nail at the trailhead, and rode away, feeling like I’d finally become part of a larger fraternity.