just riding along
Where we head out for a bicycle ride in the woods.
When I began writing this newsletter last fall, I told myself I’d allow it to be about whatever it is I’m wanting to write about. It was no accident that the first post was about my dog. If it’s about anything, Random Orbit is about writing, and while I’ve written a lot about drawing, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about another aspect of my life that brings me nearly as much satisfaction as drawing and writing does. This month marks twenty years that I’ve been riding bikes. Of course, I learned to ride a bike when I was six. But there’s riding bikes and then there’s riding bikes. Here’s what might be part one of two about a bike ride, or it might just stand alone, since the journey to the ride is often as important as the ride itself.
The Subaru’s engine is idling, and you’re sitting in the driver’s seat going over a mental checklist: helmet, shoes, gloves, snacks, tools, tire pump, inner tubes. You’ve got all that. Rain jacket, towel, extra socks. The weather looks iffy this weekend, and you’re prepared for the worst. Breakfast and coffee in ball jars, and a four-pack of beer in the cooler. Both will probably be available at the event, but it’s never a bad idea to have your own. Okay, that’s the important stuff. You’ve been here before, it’s not your first rodeo. Anything else can be figured out, or else, you probably didn’t really need it anyway. You a look up through the moon-roof and see your bike on the rack. “Can we go now?” it asks. You take a deep breath, centering yourself for the four-hour drive.
“Yes. We can go now.”
Ten minutes later, after just a few miles of interstate driving, you’ve technically left the city limits of Philadelphia. But it really takes a full hour, one-quarter of the drive, before you see the long low hills that define the Pocono Mountains in front of you, and the tunnel through one of them that very literally signifies the leaving of Philadelphia and the getting to somewhere else.
“Somewhere else” in this case is Wellsboro, Pennsylvania. Wellsboro is a small city, population 3400, that, like many small cities in Pennsylvania, used to be a hive of manufacturing and transportation, but is now either being slowly abandoned or has discovered tourism of some kind. Wellsboro has the great fortune to be situated near the Pine Creek Gorge, a fifty-mile gorge cut into the Allegheny Plateau, that is advertised on billboards and pamphlets throughout the state as “The Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania,” so tourism it is.
In Wellsboro, you can stay at the quaint old hotel in the middle of town, take the family to the diner across the street for pancakes, then drive the fourteen miles up to Colton Point and see the views down into the gorge. Or you can go for an afternoon hike on the rail-trail and get some ice cream after dinner. You might rent a cabin along the creek and hire a guide to take you canoeing and fishing. In your case, and in the case of about 130 other like-minded people, coming from places such as Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Lancaster, and Buffalo, you’re driving four hours to Wellsboro for a bicycle ride.
Today is Friday, May 3, and you’re making your way to Wellsboro for an event called Mammoth Endurance Gravel. Essentially, an event like this is nothing but a route that has been mapped, usually by someone who knows the area well, and supported by volunteers running aid stations and making lunch, in order to provide a challenging and rewarding day for people like you. While you’re riding the event with dozens, sometimes hundreds of other riders, it’s not a race. You might get some satisfaction passing someone, let’s say someone thirty years younger than you, on some steep hill1, but the competition is really only against your own anxieties and insecurities. Your mind and your body are asking, “can we really do this?” And your bike is saying “yeah, let’s go.”2
The full Mammoth ride is 135 miles long with a significant amount of climbing on roads and paths and trails through the farmland and hills and forests around Wellsboro. The route is divided into a morning loop of about 73 miles and an afternoon loop of 52 miles, with lunch provided in the middle. When you signed up, three months earlier, you considered your current physical fitness and mental bandwidth for training for a ride like this. 135 miles is longer than anything you’ve ever done, and you checked the 73-mile box. But, you also left the door open for more, confirming with the organizer that you could change your mind if you felt “spicy.” And now, as you drive toward Wellsboro, and you see the gentle roll of the Poconos give way to the steeper, more defined angles and pointier tops of these mountains, you know that while you’re feeling a lot of things, “spicy” isn’t one of them.
The date of this ride, May 4, is important. It was exactly twenty years ago, May 4, 2004, that you went on your first mountain bike ride, ever, and opened the door that eventually led you here. You like to think about that day, that Tuesday evening after work, when your friend Jon took you out into the Wissahickon Valley on a bike that was a size too small, and tried to show you, fruitlessly, how to ride up this hill without wanting to throw up, and how to ride down that hill without flipping the bike over. At the time, those hills seemed impossibly long and steep and rocky, and while you succeeded at not vomiting, you did end the ride, all three miles of it, with two bloody knees. You also ended it with a stupid grin on your face, and neither you nor Jon had any idea what sleeping giant had been awakened that late afternoon. Over the next month, you’d crash a dozen more times. You’d have bruises up and down the right side of your ribcage and your shoulders. Over the year, you’d show up on Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings and ride bikes in the woods with people you’d otherwise have never met, and you’d soon figure out how to manage those hills, both up and down, without worrying about throwing up and sometimes without crashing. You’d buy your first bike, actually just a frame, and wheels, and cranks and handlebars and you’d learn to build and assemble a bicycle from scratch. You’d just gone through a divorce and you were raising two little kids, and this sort of self-reliance was suddenly important. Another thing that became important was the camaraderie of the group of people you rode bikes with. These guys, mostly guys, were truck drivers and engineers and contractors and people you’d never have crossed paths with in “real life” but were here seeing you at your best and worst, encouraging you to climb that hill, and helping you up when you crashed, again, on the way down that other one.
A typical ride back then was maybe ten miles long, which is a far cry from Mammoth and the kinds of rides you look forward to now. It was a decade later, in 2014, when you started riding longer distances, exploring places you’d never been, on different kinds of bikes. You rode your first century that August. The idea of going out and riding a bicycle 100 miles had seemed inconceivable just a few months earlier. You signed up for these events, these big rides outside of Philadelphia with hundreds of others looking for the same things you were. Over the next ten years, this bicycle journey took you places like Vermont, and Utah, and Scotland and Iceland, where you signed up for bigger and longer rides and races. You took your bike on summer vacations to the Jersey Shore, to the Catskills, the Berkshires, and while your wife and travel partners were researching AirBnB’s and restaurants in the area, you were mapping potential routes and looking for hidden roads and trails.
In June 2021, you took a day out of a family vacation in Maine, and you rode north, from York, all the way to Cape Elizabeth, near Portland, and back. This was 129.5 miles, the farthest you’d ever ridden on a bike, the twelfth time you’d ridden at least 100 miles, and you did it alone. You’d started riding alone a lot during the pandemic, and as friends’ lives were changing and the kids were getting older, you’d started enjoying these long, solo, socially-distanced days on a bicycle.
Now, driving to Wellsboro, and looking ahead to tomorrow’s ride, you aren’t riding alone, not with 130 other people signed up for the same event. But you aren’t riding with anyone either. The idea of getting to live inside your own head for a day, with no distractions, thinking about your own things and handling whatever this ride threw at you was something you are looking forward to. As you pass through those mountains between Williamsport and Wellsboro, and you think about the weather forecast and whatever the next day will bring, you’re pretty sure that you don’t have 135 miles in you. But a mere 73 doesn’t seem right either. You’d looked at the map and studied the route, and you’d found a point where, if you took that afternoon loop the first twenty miles, you could turn right instead of left, roll back into Wellsboro, and you’d have 103 miles under your belt, which seemed like a more worthy goal. By the time you get into town and find the hotel that Friday evening, you’ve decided that this was the adventure ahead. You’d get your century out there in those hills and ridges above the Pine Creek Gorge, and you’d be fine with that.
This is what you are thinking about after dinner, as you ready your gear in your hotel room, and prepare your bike, and lie in bed thinking about your first ride, twenty years ago, and your longest ride, three years ago, and you hear the rain begin to fall, and you sleep in fits and starts, awaking the next morning at 5:00am full of anxiety and anticipation, and the rain is still falling, and you hear you bike ask, once again, “can we go now?”
And, so, you go.
I draw a lot of bikes, as well as write about them and take pictures of them. In fact, I should probably just give my drawings of bikes and illustrations for bike events their own section on my website. Here are a few I’ve made this last year. Some of these are available as stickers and prints at my shop.
Ask me how I know…
Yes, my bike taunts me. Doesn’t yours?
Yo B. Biggs…there IS that special feeling of “Fahrvergnügen” (borrowing the old VW marketing slogan) that a good & reliable bike provides. And like good engineering that serves function and user satisfaction, good design also provides a similiar vibe for me. it’s as if my brain was saying “Wow…that was Soooo nicely done” and generates some Joy each time you look at it . your finished art work, wood working, collage, and writings have it. i appreciate your sharing…& its always so much fun! keep up the good work :)
You are welcome! Pop :)