Thoughts from the crow's nest

Sometimes, in my darker moments, I realize that being a mountain biker in the midwest is much like sitting slumped in the crow's nest on the mainmast of a ship becalmed in the horse latitudes, futilely searching for wind, or a puff of cloud on the horizon, anything that might fill the sail and carry us all away from here.  But of course nothing ever comes but the flat bright glare of the unyielding sun and the static ennui of going nowhere fast as you're forced to sit there powerless, a passenger to fate adrift on the dead calm sea.

Of course it's hard to be a mountain biker in the midwest.  There are no mountains.  Duh.  But there are trails, and some great ones at that, which makes it such a pity that they're buried under snow a good third of the year.  And when the spring finally comes and the air warms, we are forced to wait yet again, since the thawing trails are still unrideable, as vulnerable to damage as a freshly-cut wound.  The only way to let them heal and bed in is to let them dry out, which makes every single day of rainfall an excruciating lesson in patience, since every inch of precipitation on the already-saturated ground equals another couple days of waiting.

And it's been raining here a lot.  Constantly.  This spring sucks.

Last week, though, I got the chance to ride the Kettle Moraine trails in Wisconsin, a couple hours drive north of Chicago.  A pretty rare treat for me, since I don't have a car and my work schedule usually conflicts with everyone else's.  My man Zach had a morning free and offered me a ride up.  So I threw my trusty steel hardtail up on his car rack and away we went, blasting Stiff Little Fingers songs pretty much the entire way to get us in the proper frame of mind.

Now my whole objective of this first dirt trip was simple: don't get hurt.  Because I know how quickly skills erode after a winter of disuse, and I understand that the surest way to kill a starving man is to offer him an endless feast.  The longer, outside-running trail was closed off due to (what else?) rain and erosion damage, but luckily we still had the quick shorter loops to amuse ourselves with.  Which worked out great for me, since I was able to re-acquaint myself with a bike I hadn't ridden in months, and the sheer repetition of the loops sped along the process.  And man! speaking of speed: the trails at Kettle are smooth, well-built, and flowy, letting you keep your speed up with bermed turns and short punchy climbs.  After a few runs I was able to anticipate upcoming obstacles, to know the subtle weight shifts to throw the bike into a turn, to rise up from the saddle and power the rear wheel up a loose climb.  The atrophied skills slowly returned, and I remembered how sweet the sound of a spinning knobby tire biting into the ground, hunting for traction and then finding it.  There were a couple of blurry fleeting moments where I recalled why I do this in the first place, and then they were gone.

And as I write this it's raining here again.