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skinny dipping

We both saw the lake at exactly the same time. We were just riding along, and suddenly there it was, winking at us through the trees.

It had been a long day. We’d gotten lost on the way to the bike shop — because every ride starts at the bike shop — and we took a wrong turn on the way to the trailhead. We’d spent too much time messing with the bikes. We always spend too much time messing with the bikes.

Also, it was hot. The summer’s heat tasted like dust and smelled like fire. There were trees, but none where we needed them. Why are there never trees on the climbs? This is one of the bike’s great mysteries.

The best rides have an easy cadence to them. You ride, you eat, you banter. You ride some more. When the group separates, you always find each another again. You ride to the big tree, flop in the shade, and swap stories. Remember that one time? Of course you do.

This was not one of those rides. We stopped all the time, but there was no story-telling, just arguing. Which trail to take? We could never decide. Everyone wanted something different. The group split up more times than a ’80’s hair band. We could never find everyone. Tempers frayed.

ghost in the machine

They drove into the woods in a van with suspect wiring, the night black among the trees, the passing landscape a blind country. At their last stop, the van hadn’t started. They’d sat, dumbfounded, until suddenly, it had roared to life. They really had no idea what was wrong with it or why, as if on a whim, it had chosen to turn on again. Their minds had already been far ahead down the road, chasing the vanishing horizon.

They’d left California earlier that same day, but it seemed like they’d traveled several times around the sun in the course of that single long day of gas, food, and yet one more coffee stop. Coffee fueled their progress and their laughter down the arrow straight interstate, “the 5,” in the peculiar parlance of Californians, whose intimate relationship with their freeways is both unique and necessary.

The 5 runs north-south the length of California, passing through Oregon and Washington, and until it eventually reaches British Colombia, mountain biking’s promised land. Traveling north, the freeway follows the gentle upward tilt of the Central Valley. It feels intuitively right that we should travel uphill when heading north up the map and the Central Valley obliges. The climb is imperceptible, though, and out the window of the van, it’s all flat farmland as far as the eye can see.

Then the terrain changes. Suddenly they were into the southern Cascades under the panopticon gaze of Shasta’s hollowed out peak. The van wallowed through the curves like a ship in heavy seas and soon enough, they discovered that the brakes didn’t do a hell of a lot. They shimmied between big rigs and campervans, swapping non-stop stories the way mountain bike people do. There was that one time — the cadence of anticipation echoed through the stories as they hurtled northward up the highway.