November Ride I set out on my red mountain bike my mother gave me last Christmas. It is late fall and a while since my last real ride. I hit the golf course at full speed trying to cross before someone in a white sweater yelled at me or one of the hooded carts gave chase. The road at the end goes up. Not five minuets into the ride and I’m winded. My goal, as always, is to find “off-road” trails. Usually I find one, head down a steep dirt path which ends in a pile of debris and have to bike strait back up to the road. Sure enough before long I see the tall towers of a major power line route. Despite my general distaste for industry for some reason I have always liked these power line routes. I think it has to do with the way they accent the landscape, describing the steepness and distance of the hills. They often form vanishing points or mark tall peaks. They remind me of the work of that artist who wraps islands in plastic and such…Christo I think. First I try the trail on the left side of the road, cut across someone’s back lawn and into the brush. Not even twenty feet later I hit their junk pile. No trail. So I cross the road after letting the thirty seconds of back-hills-rush-hour-traffic pass by. The sun is low on the horizon. I had started late. I stand by the fence looking down the once-dirt-road. The path goes steeply down. I give it about a one-in-ten chance of going anywhere, but decide that that’s why I’m out here, to find out. I heave my bike over and craw through the fence. I head down fast. This is why I have a mountain bike. I few seconds later I skid up to a fresh ravine, not too deep by steep. Someone has placed a long, white, 11/2 foot in diameter, PVC pipe across, but it has fallen down on my side about five feet. Jumping down to this pipe and walking across with my bike is not an option so I scramble down and up. I wonder briefly if any super bikers, like the ones I would meet in Syracuse, could have biked or jumped this. No way. Not without spending several hours building a jump. So I don’t feel so bad hiking it. Once across, the trail really starts going, step, rocky and wild. I get my weight way back and let go of the brakes. The sandy dirt is a little wet and grabs my tire a bit. Small water ruts begin crossing the path. I slow down then suddenly hit the near bottom of the hill and a wall of briers, hedges and brambles. The two-minute decent was fun while it lasted. Unfortunate it was steep with lots of wet sand, I’m pathetically out of shape and going back the same trail to the road is never fun. Getting up is going to be a bitch. On the way up, as I stop to suck in air leaning my helmet against the handlebars, I think to myself this is good. I need this. I think that this is a reminder that there is not just one kind of suffering in life. There are two: mental and physical. I think that maybe I mountain bike as a kind of artificial reminder that there is a who world of physical suffering out there which I forget about in my city apartment. It reminds me of my work on the farm and digging postholes with Susan D, my lesbian boss who was determined to work me into the ground. She could too, but the challenge felt good. We would take turns jamming the stones with a long metal bar to secure the new post as we buried it. She called the bar a tamp and I called it a wrecking bar. It's not the first argument I have had with workers about the proper names for tools. Anyway at the end of the day she’d tuck the shovel, the wrecking bar, the posthole digger, and the extra post under her arms and everything else and carry them back to the truck. I’d carry my gloves and my shirt. She was tuff, but also just a touch more angry than I was. I got back to the ravine. This time the pipe looked really tempting. It was secured on my side and slopped down to a ledge on the other side. The only thing that worried me was sliding too fast or dropping my bike. I wasn’t really worried about falling off. I don’t know why I do these strange things. I guess it just looked fun, like a kids slide. Sliding turned out not to be the problem, in fact the opposite. In the first foot of the crossing my shorts road up and my butt cheeks gripped the PVC like a long lost friend. Moving consisted of lifting my weight with one hand, while my other secured and slid the bike, and pulling myself forward with my legs, kind of like climbing a rope but different. When I made it across and secured my footing on the ledge I just started laughing. It reminded me of the applause I had received after fetching the apple from the canal in Venice, but that’s another story. No one had witnessed this stunt and I was glad. Reservoir Trails I loaded my bike in the back of Laura’s mom’s Saab. It’s a nice car, deep blue with lots of room for stuff and lots of pick up. As I headed out onto Connecticut highway 84 east I thought to myself that in no way did this car represent my social status and wondered to my unemployed self whether it ever would. And if it ever did, whether I would drive a Saab… I was heading for a spot I thought I had hiked with Laura not too many months ago. We had found a fantastic trail not far outside Hartford and as we hit the trail feeling energized and in good spirits we had decided to run it. I love running wood trails almost as much as I love biking them. You always feel as though you’re moving much faster then you are, and there is a kind of rhythm and focused required as you place your feet between roots and stones. Cross country at its finest is just that, across the country. On this hike I noticed the signs and history of many mountain bikers: gear scraped rocks, worn logs where the gears tare a little away each time a bike goes over, skid trails on steep slopes. As I ran I imagined the moves. It looked technical and at times quite difficult. It was my kind of bike trail, challenging but not ridiculous. So I was headed for this spot and realized once again that somehow I must have gotten hikes confused. The directions in the book simply didn’t lead to the parking lot where Laura and I had hiked that day. They lead to a different parking lot just past a pull off where I had stopped this past summer because I spotted a small army of mountain bikers getting in and out of cars. It had been threatening to storm all day…