With a completely blank social calendar I celebrated the day of the dead in a fashion more proper for the kind of ghouls I’d seen others dressed up as then I’m entirely comfortable with. A busy week of work at the moving company forced me to shun the beautiful day outside to get cracking cutting tubes and forming up chain-stays for BBW #25 and relegated the riding I was jonesing for to the night. I was a little scared of what I would encounter in the woods after dark on Halloween , my first near collision with a naked runner in the park was pretty frightening and I wasn’t prepared for encountering some pagan bacchanal on the trail but the fears were unfounded and Benny and I had the Fells to ourselves with our high powered LEDs and the moonlight guiding the way.
I got my second reminder of the week of how technical some of the trails right outside of the city are taking shadow blinded rock drop offs into leaf strewn, rooty, off camber turns. The first was taking my younger brother visiting from NJ with BBW #17 out and seeing him get completely frustrated with the relentlessly varying terrain, “These aren’t trails” he’d complained, “I can ride trails. This is just forest and rocks.”
Trails or not they were perfect for Halloween with wind ripping through the branches off of the reservoir and the trees creaking under the strain. Stopping for a breather BBW team rider Ben looked at his full suspension bike and lithium battery LED light set up and marveled aloud at the technology that allows him to have such an experience, looking at my own handbuilt full rigid rig I countered that our experience in the woods at night is what a human would experience in the absence of any technology and our thrill at feeling like we are simultaneously chasing and being chased with menace lurking just beyond the spread of our beams is more akin to what prehistoric hunter gatherers experienced by torchlight than the removed comfort that all our technology affords us on a daily basis. Being forced to make decisions of immediate dire physical consequence at a moments notice can be a pretty far fetched notion for someone driving an air conditioned car and ordering take-out or discussing a TV show on a cell phone. Ben concurred but as a bike mechanic and a gear nut he couldn’t help but equate part of the experience to the latest upgrade to his ride and offered up a quote that sent me inexplicably reeling with laughter, “I’m psyched on this bike right now, I’m really digging how these grips dial my stance.”
Whatever dials your stance I guess, but it was a bit of a comedown to return so quickly to everyday modern existence upon exiting the woods once the batteries ran down. Not having a party to attend was a bit of a bummer as well given that I was living the perfect costume as a completely consumed bike junkie outcast.
