Flashes of Panic

After a morning of plowing through more application yip-yap (I’m going to have to go home sometime this evening and have a session with my printer) I met up with the Illustrator in North Leverett for a ride. (I’m winding up with some Scoplaw-esque pseudonyms here, but as usual, I’m not trying to hide identities; I’m trying to avoid being a Google result for the proper names.)

He used to be a runner, and much faster than me (a state champion when I knew him in high school, actually,) but he hasn’t run for about five years. Instead, he mountain bikes. In bike-magazine jargon, I was riding a twelve-year-old rigid frame with slicks and traditional pedals; he was riding a fully-suspended recent model with disc brakes, clip-in pedals and knobby tires. He gave me some breaks on the trail.

We rode north through the hills (in Leverett, it’s pretty much all hills) on dirt roads that eventually got too gnarly for cars. We came out at the entrance to the Wendell State Forest and spent some serious time bombing around the fire roads in there. I labored up the hills, quads burning, and lagged going down, because if I went too fast the rocks would bounce my feet right off the pedals. He would take a little rise and hop into the air; I would hope I remained attached to the bike. The first big downhill was quite dramatic; I reached the bottom pretty quickly, convinced I had, in fact, actually done some living today as I wondered what would happen if I didn’t keep the wheel straight. The second was so rough I had to pick my way down, peering for good lines through the sweat dripping on my sunglasses. Some of the roads would have been drivable; some of them were tough even for bikes. I think we stuck to the easier ones.

At some point he asked how long I wanted to ride. “Until I fall off the bike,” I said, with the mental addition, “Which might not be too much longer.” I’m not sure I could trace our route on a map, but I wasn’t ever too lost. We told some war stories, discussed what we liked and didn’t like about the Valley, and “shopped for houses.” (“I think that one’s what the realtors call a handyman’s dream.”) He may also be going to see Josh Ritter on Thursday, so if I pick one, that will probably be it; I won’t need to go alone. We wound up riding for about two hours, but it definitely did not feel that long. Well, maybe when I was working up some of those hills. He was pretty pleased that we got that much good riding time in December.

Afterward, being in the neighborhood, I dropped by the Montague Bookmill (motto: “Books you don’t need in a place you can’t find”) thinking I might get a hot drink at the Lady Killigrew. Instead I warmed up browsing the overheated fiction room. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on perspective—I’m trying to prune my book collection) I didn’t leave with anything.