Flashes of Panic

For various reasons, A. had to improvise for her run this afternoon, and we ended up driving out to Pelham with my bike in the trunk and doing some more exploring in the Quabbin reservation. If you’re following along on your official M.D.C. map, we entered at Gate 11 in Pelham and went pretty directly down to Gate 6 on the Belchertown line.

It’s always a little spooky to be on the roads in the reservation. On the one hand, it’s wilderness. Nobody has lived on the Quabbin land since the Depression, and in that time even the wood lots have been harvested more than once, some quite recently. The area is as wild as wilderness gets this close to the northeastern metroplex. Yet we were cruising along well-maintained dirt roads between stone walls which clearly marked someone’s former fields. For two hundred years (give or take a few decades) before the MDC took the land, someone was building those walls with the rocks that percolated up with the frost and stubbed the toe of their plow. Now, it’s empty.

Thanks to a few unseasonably warm days and relatively light snowfall this winter, the roads were mostly clear, if wet. There were a few snowy patches, but for most of the ride the worst traction I had was the dry leaves uphill from Gate 6, which spun out from under my tires as I tried to climb the hill.

Most of the ride. Within a mile of the car, I slowed to walking pace and tried to roll directly over a small patch of ice blocking my way; instead, the tires slipped, and I ended up dropping the bike. (I kept my own feet, but I wonder if I would have done as well if I had been clipped in.)

I wound up carrying a lot of Quabbin gravel home on the tires and frame of the bike.

Now Playing: City Rain, City Streets from Love Is Hell by Ryan Adams