Constellations
“Hey Nick, you remember the storm that caught us on the way into Stowe?” Grampa’s single glass of chardonnay was more than enough lubricant for the holiday dinner conversation to take this familiar turn. My dad grabbed his own glass and leaned back with a smile, “I sure do.” The storm had come down on them more than 30 years ago, and they had ridden through just as they had on so many other days. Rain, heat, wind, hills, bad drivers, worse pavement, grating gears, and rubbing brakes were the stuff of those days. They were the grit and grind that lingered in the background of so much green and fathomless blues, infinite skies and endless miles that trivialized all the most common sorts of sense, that made flesh forget humility, that urged forward, further –– always further. I had been with them on more than a few of those hard, brilliant days. That Dad had been Grampa’s ex-son-in-law for more than 25 years was a minor detail when measured against these memories. Dad’s third wife, her sister’s family, my younger brothers, and assorted family friends were all happy to jump into the conversation. This was an unlikely menagerie with complicated histories but we all cherished the simplicity of pushing two wheels through Vermont hills.
Despite twelve years of marriage, my wife had not fully appreciated how completely my childhood was tangled in spokes and chains. Even I, at 35 years old, was rediscovering how deeply the bike spoke to me. We had moved to Montpelier less than a year before, and the dirt roads welcomed our young family into adventures just as I had predicted, but I was surprised by how the pavement called to me.
When Leslie, Dad’s wife, spoke across the table to tell Grampa that they were planning to do the Onion River century ride, she glanced my way. My last hundred mile day had been with Dad, more than 20 years ago. We had ridden from our house in Connecticut to Grammy and Grampa’s house in Montpelier. We had pulled more than 100 miles on each of the first two days. I was 11. After that glance, the roads, the hours, the wheels rose inside me and I made no effort to separate the buzz of quiet excitement from the wine’s gentle warmth. The conversation wandered on to other places.
***
My second glass of port tottered over the indecorous remains of apple pie and a flourless chocolate cake even denser than my own muddy thoughts. Kids had scattered. Dishes and adults remained. The conversation ploughed, raucous, through books, movies, and neighborhood gossip. We sparkled in the joy of our ever increasing cleverness. The candles dripped and guttered. Each of us, just a little more liquid, pooled across the table.
“Are you going to do it?” The words cut through the debate about which were the best Westerns of all time. Leslie looked at me. In any other circumstance, or from any other mouth, that line would have been a nonsequitur, but I knew exactly what she was talking about, and she knew that I would know. I looked at my wife who was already sitting outside the conversation’s main current, “Les is suggesting I join them for the Onion River Century ride this summer.”
“You want to?” That she phrased her words as a sincere question surprised me enough to take some edge off of the port. I felt myself worthy of at least a little snark or subtle condescension. Was she really surprised by this?
“Yeah,” was all I could manage. In fact, this was one of those unadmitted desires that had secretly crawled around the back of my head for a couple of months. I had nursed it with the same relish, and only slightly less shame, than the great romantic crushes of adolescence. Leslie already knew this was the dirty little Playboy hidden in my emotional bath room. My wife was kind enough to play along with my charade of innocence.
“We can talk about it,” she said, but the tender look of bemused endearment already told me everything I needed to know.
***
At the end of April, I opened the map kept at my desk and put Montpelier in the center of the space. Craftsbury, Glover, Elmore, Lake Willoughby, Craftsbury Commons: these were the legends of holiday dinner conversations. The names passed among the plates and splashed out of wine glasses, trafficked as the Vikings must have traded tales about Freya, Floki and Odin –– awash in laughter, a shade of debauchery and ample respect. With a moment’s concentration I found each name on the map, but I found no memories of these places rattling around my own skull. At first this bothered me. How had I betrayed these family memories? I stared at the map and thought a bit more. As a child all I had to do was follow the wheel in front of me. I never looked at the maps. Geography was defined by heat, the grade, the quality of the pavement, width of the shoulder and miles to the next creemee stand. Names were only brief flashes of white on green beside the road or phrases flowing among the adults around me. I smiled. What had first looked like betrayal was revealed as opportunity.
I took stock of these known points and considered their relationships to each other. In my mind's eye, I laid concentric rings over the map with rough estimates 40 mi, 50 mi, 60 mi, 80+. The main arteries were obvious enough that I could toss each name into a loose mental file organized according to my training plan. I worked backward from the target date, figuring I needed two 80+ mile rides prior to the event and I wanted to put two 60-70 mile rides under my belt prior to those. These would each consume the better part of a Saturday or Sunday. Prior to that, I’d work up to 50-mile weekend rides in addition to my regular 25-mile loop four days a week. Given weekend complications or some extra time, I could fit a few 50 milers into the long summer evenings during the week. I look up and out the window. A rough plan coalesced in the back of my brain.
When I returned to the map it took a moment for my eyes to refocus. It had changed. There were so many names I did not know: Northfield, Williamstown, Albany, Woodbury, Roxbury. Every time I blinked I saw more. The main arteries that connected them were thick dark lines. I leaned in closer to some of these strangers and traced my fingers across fainter grey veins. The concentric circles faded as I leaned into this more subtle web. Loops, eights, zigs and zags appeared and then melted back into the paper when I shifted concentration to the next dot.
I spent a lot of time looking at the map over the course of that summer. I found many patterns to fill the spaces between those dots. Was this what the Greeks saw in the night sky? I traced each line into miles, burned it in hours, and etched it in sweat. Each one filtered into memory. Some were edited into story, and a few repeated until elevated into my personal pantheon. This is where that storm caught me. Here I saw the bear. To look at the map was now as much about recounting as planning. As the folds in the paper got thinner I could run my fingers across the warmth of the known world right alongside the tingle of lines as yet unknown to my legs.
I also started to use MapQuest on my computer. Between meetings I could fall into route planning the way some people described getting lost on eBay. A left here would add another 3 miles and 500 ft of elevation, while turning right would take me over to that lake I haven’t seen in a while, but going straight could be fun too. Most routes were not saved, but they still filled the maps with many layers of someday. The few selected for today came out of the printer with clearer turn-by-turn instructions than the paper maps ever gave me. Each sheet was folded into a handy zip-lock and tucked into my jersey.
I was surprised by how often the crisp printouts of new routes led me into places soaked with a sense of the familiar. Riding into Hardwick put me on the southern edge of the Northeast Kingdom. It was the first town I hit heading north on Route 14 out of Montpelier. As such, it would have been the gateway for most of my childhood journeys into The Kingdom. I have no memory of any one of those family rides and yet on a random day of exploration I found myself spinning on 10-year-old legs at the bottom of the hill that led into the town. A sharp turn to the left threw me into a short, steep incline around a corner to the right where the hill leveled out at the edge of town. Some 20 miles from Montpelier, this was now a chance to get my butt out of the saddle for a few strokes instead of the punishing grind that haunted my childhood. Just past the crest, on the right, there was a hillside cemetery that sloped down a steep grassy bank to the sidewalk –– a perfect rest spot. The memory of placing my sore, young cheeks on that grass between my parents was crystalline, but there was no way I could thread this image into any specific ride. On future rides, I made it a point to plant myself here, more to sit among the memories than for want of a rest stop.
Such moments of searing clarity were rare. More often I found only the misty texture of deja vu. I had no idea which impressions were synthetic creations of the moment, and which had some basis in experience. A few seemed to touch something even more fundamental than simple memory. Sure, I had seen the sun cut those exact shadows across a field, but was it this field? I took this precise angle around just such a corner. Was it this corner? The pitch of a climb, the bank of the road, tap of the rain, weight of heat, bite of cold, or clarity of air were familiar companions even if the place itself was unknown. The more I rode the more it seemed that the experience of riding was uncoupling from specific places and times. The supposed fidelity of a moment to a memory became somewhat slippery and slightly lascivious. The sensation of Lake Elmore burned though the hill outside Glover. The squint into Route 15 sun wrinkled my eyes in the instant I turned off of North Street. The dark bank of clouds that found me two weeks ago in Cabot was just now rolling into Moretown.
The longer a ride the more familiar it became. Fatigue, doubt, lactic burn, stiffness across the shoulders, thirst could all transcend the ephemeral coordinates of space and time. I found these things tucked away in hidden corners of my body –– deeper than memory. One day the trigger was the smell of fresh cut hay. Then it was the rays of light through a distant storm. A particular vibration through the handlebars. The clattering grind of a missed shift. A lupine’s last flower. Unbidden, the sensations flowed into each ride. Through. Between. Among.
On one especially hot day, I added Elmore to the itinerary as a way to make a bigger loop out of my trip to Hardwick. I was not completely naive. I had memories of climbing up to Lake Elmore with my Dad on his inaugural tandem ride some 12 years earlier, but I underestimated both the heat and the miles that lay between Hardwick and Elmore. I came into the heart of that climb running on empty. Thinking about the 15 miles and big climbs that loomed beyond Elmore pulled me into that familiar death spiral –– I am already this tired, I’ll never be able to: make that climb, go that distance, deal with the headwind. There was always a long line of applicants waiting to jump into the doom loop. I needed to focus. Crawl into that mental space where pain is so pervasive that it slips into the background. I took inventory of water and snacks. Death was unlikely. Therefore, this was doable. I retreated into my body. Only enough awareness remained to track road conditions and traffic. Let the legs do what the legs gotta do.
It was this exact instant –– cresting the hardest part of the Elmore climb –– that crashed into my brain 20 years later in the mountains west of Toluca, Mexico. The squiggly blue line on my phone suggested a long gradual coast off of the high pass but instead delivered an endless series of steep plunges into high-altitude gullies and equally sharp climbs out. I was, once again, in full survival mode with even worse pavement than Route 12, and with just as little shade as on my journey through the Sierra Nevada in ’84. Different geographies. Different decades. Same place.
On the Vermont roads, a ride with the kids mingled with the last time my Dad and I came through, sat atop a training ride, a hot day, that big rainstorm, Daysi beside me; Fall, Summer, and Spring, back and forth, up and down; child, teen, adult, husband, father; in different bodies I repeated these same simple movements. Over and over and over again. So many hours. So many miles. Deposited through so many years. Isn’t this how the dinosaurs died: crushed under the collective weight of eons? Suffocated. Buried alive. Have I been riding so long as to squeeze all novelty from the world?
Where I might have expected calcification, stultification, rigidity, obsession or boredom, I, instead, found liberation. There was no settling of the weight. Nothing congealed. In this great accumulation I found a gentle unravelling. I am written across the landscape. Past, present and future selves exchange that faint cyclist greeting on these narrow shoulders – the slightest raise off a hand is all that we require. Every new mile is an eclectic reunion of trusted companions. Each mile retraced is a nod towards those yet ridden.
buy me a coffee
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