Not Riding

Today's not ride was hard to get motivated for, 20 F and a north wind and gray and spitting snow, which was all fine once I didn't get out in it. I didn't set out with no spares or tools. The terrain did not include gravel and paved roads, ploughed fields (in my mind the most difficult terrain I don't ride on), hay fields, snowmobile trails, white and black ice, most of which didn't break, class four roads and a quarry.

I didn't get a cup of coffee and a couple of garlic sausages at a tourist shop and consume the meal sitting on the porch of a friend's antique shop.

I didn't follow a flock of turkeys who didn't run, not too fast, in front of me for a quarter mile or so until one by one they didn't cut off into the brush along the trail. I didn't pass a shed full of beagles with rabbit feet nailed to the outside wall in a farmyard and I didn't pass a pile of dead rabbits a little further along the road.

One of the lesser roads didn't devolve from suburban style houses to small simple houses to trailers and shacks and wolf cross-dogs who barked, not too enthusiastically, and yards full of junk and trash. At the top, there weren't concrete barriers across the road. I didn't stop to talk to a fellow running a chain saw, who didn't say hi, hello, sure you can ride, have fun, and shortly thereafter I didn't find a whole network of marked trails with signs saying have a good time, no motors please.

I didn't ride about twenty-five miles in all, and didn't start cramping in the final mile or so and didn't snarf down a bunch of gatorade and food when I got back home.

It's good I didn't ride.

Killer Trees and Hope

Riding in the woods gives me yet another chance to ogle trees. I spend as much time observing trees as most do watching television.

After you have watched the same community of trees for thirty years or so, you start to notice things like the fact that maples are vicious. They set into a lime ledge and wedge with their roots until they rive off boulders the size of a Holstein calf just to make themselves a little room. They insinuate themselves up alongside a white pine, stealing the light and gaining steadily until the pine gives up and falls over. The wrap themselves around the base of other species and strangle them.

A forest over time can take out anything we can build. I have been watching a twelve foot steel wire fence around a defunct local reservoir as it gets laid on its side by various falling boles, then covered by leaves and sticks. If you dig into the organic cover after as little as a decade, the wire's rusted and brittle, snapped easily between fingertips. In fifty years it won't be there in any casually recognizable form.

These and other observations give me hope that, when we have completed our poisoning of our own nest, there is some hope, there is in fact certainty of recovery in some satisfying form.

A Not Riding Yet Day

I have - I don't know - maybe 40 acres of ledgy wooded land across the stream from my house that I have been wanting to put some trail on for years. I have a few exploratory threads started, but they tend to peter out in too wet, too steep, blowdown pickup sticks, whatever.

Late last fall I thought that I had worked out a good start at a perimeter loop, but there's a really disorienting patch of blowdown from an ice storm some years back and I have never managed to put together the same line twice running.

I spent a half a day in there Sunday wandering around and watching and listening and still no satori; eventually it's going to come together and a trail will emerge, but apparently not soon.

In the meantime, mosses and ferns are greening up even as the half thawed ground still crunches underfoot.