When I was a child, my family did a lot of riding. My grandfather led us on extended rides through the Vermont countryside, I rode weekly with one or both of my parents, and we did several multi-day trips. In the wake of my parent’s divorce when I was 12, our riding lives spun in separate directions. Grampa continued to log 3000 mile summers, Mom eventually soloed across the U.S, while cycling faded in and out of my life.
By January of 1999 we had not ridden together in more than 15 years. Grandpa, now 83, was still riding across the Vermont hills, but Mom had settled on the coast of Maryland where the riding was so flat and boring that she had taken up roller blading. My wife and I were about to celebrate our eighth anniversary. She was not (yet) a rider. I was about to turn 31, our second daughter was 6 months old, and our first had just turned six. Getting the whole family together was a special event reserved for the holidays, but Mom had the idea to push for something more. She learned that the legendary Blue Ridge Parkway was only a few hours drive from her house. She hatched a plan to do a three-day ride with me and Grampa. I suggested that we include Ariel, my oldest daughter. The idea was not as abusive as it sounds.
After a hiatus of several years, riding was returning to my life. As my wife and I worked out the rhythms of parenthood I staked out the early morning as my selfish time. If I could sneak out of the house without waking anyone up, I was free to go. As happens to many riders, I soon learned the other benefits of those early mornings: almost no traffic, cool temperatures, and no sun screen needed. On the days when I got out, I arrived at the office with my skin tingling and a head so full of beauty and bird song that it was hard to see the beige fabric of my cubicle.
Private indulgence, however, can only live on the margins of a combined enterprise like marriage. If I wanted to ride more, I had to find a way to include, at least, our oldest daughter. I settled on a trail-a-bike as the best option but still had a number of issues to work through:
Absurd parental anxiety: My child falls asleep and falls into traffic.
Reasonable concern: She does something to throw off my balance and we would both end up in traffic. “No wiggling!” was a frequent command, and sometimes “Steady” as we went down a hill. I learned to grab the top tube between my knees when I took my butt off the seat for descents.
Most likely outcome: She gets bored and hates cycling for the rest of her life. Ariel was a relatively quiet child but 5-year-olds are pretty chatty by nature. We babbled on about whatever came to mind, and stopped regularly to look at ducks, flowers, or strange tree trunks. My time on the back of Dad’s tandem meant that I understood the need to let her know about turns and potholes.
By the time Mom proposed the trip, Ariel and I had worked out a reasonable partnership. I talked more than I was used to and stopped more frequently, but I had confidence in her balance and sometimes even felt her contribution to the power equation. “Go little leggies,” was another regular command. I would get a small power bump and a whole lot of wiggling. I wasn’t certain that the young Ariel was ready to spend all day on a bicycle, but I didn’t have any evidence to the contrary either. The plan was for three days of riding in the style of our old family trips––we would cycle light and take turns shuttling the car. This approach gave us a back up plan in case she burned out, and I sometimes had on our family adventures.
Cyclists know that the “scenic” label on a highway carries a price paid in elevation. The 50+ miles we planned to cover on the first day included getting up on to the ridge so we assumed, correctly, that there would be a lot of climbing, but we had planned the miles as an all-day project. Of the four of us, Grampa was, predictably, the best prepared. He had been out on those Vermont roads every dry day he could find. While Mom was active, there was no climb of any note within 100 miles of her, and I was in a phase of life where I measured movement time in minutes not days.
Our first big surprise was the abundance and variety of the butterflies. They gathered in scintillating clouds, and in places they littered the road, killed or injured by cars. We used Ariel’s plastic colored pencil box to store the most interesting specimens in my bike bag and stopped anytime we saw something new. This was much appreciated entertainment for the 6 year-old child spinning away behind me. Unfortunately, she missed the black bear cubs and mom that crossed the road some 300 feet in front of us. I was happy to stop and give mamma bear some time to move deeper into the woods.
Our second surprise was to find expansive views in such dense forests. It was only the combination of wide shoulders and elevation that let us look out over the rolling hardwood forests. The trade off was constant exposure to the sun. Fortunately, Mom had the good sense to get us on the road before the summer heat arrived and we knew to keep our sunscreen refreshed.
The “scenic” designation was appropriate foreshadowing. The climbs were unrelenting grinds but rarely steep. Grampa was often beside us as we crawled forward. “How are you doing back there young lady?” he boomed at Ariel.
“Great!” her voice, high and thin, was full of the boundless enthusiasm that only a child can capture. I knew that same energy could also collapse inward if boredom or fatigue penetrated too deeply. I tried to hold the little leggies in reserve.
In the distance, above us, we would see one of the fire towers. “Look at that Tad. You don’t suppose we’re going up there do you?” Grampa was only slightly less enthusiastic than the child behind me.
Inevitably, it was exactly where we were going. We’d get there, coast down a dip in the ridge and head on towards the next one.
Sometimes the road became steep enough for me to declare a No Talking Zone. It was part of the protocol I had worked out with, or rather imposed on, Ariel. It is the nature of a six-year-old to expect instant response from a parent and it is the right of a parent to seek refuge in silence when each breath is a full body experience and said parent is convinced that the constant stream of chatter behind him is clear evidence that the little shit isn’t pedaling hard enough. I had learned that it was best to announce a moratorium on voices.
Grandpa, however, was not intimidated by my repressive policies. He was especially fond of monitoring his beloved odometer and calling out our speed on the climbs. “Six miles an hour,” he’d announce triumphantly as I gasped “Go little leggies!”. A few minutes later “Four miles per hour,” and then “Five,” as the grade eased up a touch. There was a mischievous sparkle in his voice as he broadcast each indicator of how hard we were struggling. The announcements were usually enough for Mom to chime in “Really Daddy. Not helpful.” He would have laughed if we weren’t already sucking wind.
And on we went through the day. Slow and steady, we progressed through profound beauty and deep peace. All pleasant bike memories seem to come bundled with the sensation of having the roads to ourselves, though I know this couldn’t have been the case. The three adults were all experienced enough to know what the day was going to be. While neither Mom nor I were in the ideal condition for this kind of ride, we had enough strength and enough mental discipline that neither pain nor frustration clouded the day. For Ariel’s part, if she got bored, she kept it to herself. Somehow the little leggies continued to make their contribution. Somewhere around mile 25, Mom turned back to get the car. Grampa, Ariel and I continued on.
The tunnel caught us towards the beginning of yet another climb. It was short enough for me to see through but still long enough to put us in twilight. Almost a decade earlier I had spent a summer in Grand Junction and regularly rode through the tunnel on the road into The National Monument. I had been shocked by how the darkness threw me off balance. It took me weeks to adjust. As we approached the tunnel, those lessons from The Monument flooded into my limbic system. I steadied my breathing, kept my eyes on the far end, accelerated my cadence and called back, “Steady hijita”. We made it through with only a wobble. “Woo Hoo!” I thought.
Behind me, I heard Grampa call out as he fell. I dropped the bike at the edge of the road. “Wait here”, I shouted at Ariel, and ran back into the tunnel. At 6’ 4”, Grampa had a long way to go down. He managed to break the momentum of the fall by catching part of the tunnel wall. He escaped with only a scrape on his elbow. I got his bike out of the road and helped him to get up. On the other side of the tunnel we regrouped. As is the wont of every recovering cyclist, he insisted that he was okay. The evidence suggested he was right, but he was also spooked and the fatigue of the day came down hard.
I don’t remember the details of where Mom met us with the car but it was somewhere close to this point. With roughly 35 miles behind us, most of it up, we decided it was best to let Grampa and Ariel call it a day. They drove ahead to meet us at the lodge. Mom and I had another 15-20 miles to grind out, but with just the two of us we were able to pick up the pace a little bit.
Only in writing this have I come to realize that this was the first time I had ridden with her in almost 20 years. The last time I had been the child, and now I was, a parent trying to do a reasonable impression of an adult. That I needed to work through five drafts before remembering speaks to the magic of riding. Between us we had racked up a couple of marriages, assorted flavors of recovery, 15 relocations, and a couple of careers. On the bikes, that was all just background––some other color beyond the dappled light through trees and deeper music behind the exuberant birds and rustling leaves. If we talked at all, and I am not sure that we did, it was about hills, gears, sore hands, aching asses, Grampa, Ariel, and butterflies.
This section of the road was deeper. The shoulders were smaller and the trees closer. The woods on those ridges were just a touch denser and even more lush than our Vermont forests. The trees were a bit bigger, more mature, and just a little more imposing. Perhaps it was just a trick of the lengthening afternoon light. Still the dense, deciduous abundance was familiar and comforting. The last time we had ridden together it had almost certainly been on this kind of sinuous, shady road.
We limped into the lodge spent but not to the point of complete exhaustion. We both knew that tomorrow would be a painful start.
The showers were hot, sheets clean, beds firm, and the food would have been unremarkable if not for the spice of that unique, post-ride hunger. As our meal wound to a close, Grampa got quieter. He curled forward, head down, right elbow on the table, and hand on the top of his head. Mom was the first to react, “What is it Daddy?” He didn’t look up. With a surprisingly quiet voice he told us that he was giving up cycling. His shoulders shook. His grief embraced us all. We struggled to find a few words of comfort but mostly we sat in silence. Witnesses – each wrapped in our own profound loss. Ariel felt the gravity of the moment and cried along with us.
His fear ran deeper than the spook of the day. He had been feeling unsteady on the bike for quite some time. I had noticed that for each of our many breaks during the day, he chose his stopping places carefully and spent time setting up the angle of this bike to get started, but the observation had remained an odd detail I hadn’t bothered to ask about. The lack of balance, not strength, pushed him to quite
I heard little else that night over the recriminations raging in my head. All I had to do was stop! – get off the bike and walk all of us through. Grampa had never cycled through a tunnel before. He had no idea how disorienting the darkness could be. Without any other experience for comparison he attributed the fall entirely to his own balance and old age. Had I just stopped him there, he may well have ridden for another year or two. Of my short list of regrets in life this one sits awfully close to the top.
In part, our silence that hard night was driven by the hope that his fear was a passing shadow. I looked forward to hearing that he had decided to try one more time – that the lure of Route 2 into Middlesex would prove to be more than he could resist. It was not to be. He donated his bike to the Montpelier share-a-bike program –– a gesture consistent with his faith in community and desire to inspire others. Only now it occurs to me that he did this precisely because the roads continued to call. Better to make a clean break. Better to remove any shred of decision or trace of will. Better not to confront the pain of the loss every time he walked into the garage. Though all the community bikes were painted the same shade of mauve, the massive 42” frame was distinctive. We saw it around town for a couple of years before it finally disappeared.
Since the first instant I committed to this memoir project I have dreaded writing about this trip. At the same time, that ride is among my most treasured memories. Four generations together on a glorious early summer day, not out for some loop around the neighborhood, but logging serious miles on the Blue Ridge Highway. What greater promise could I possibly imagine?
For those who might be wondering about this towering man, or those who might wish for easy narratives, know that this was far from the end. A few years later, our small family would settle in Montpelier. It was one of the rites of Spring that Grampa and I would borrow my Dad’s manure trailer and make a run to the dairy farm of a friend to get manure for our gardens. Every year, his already large garden miraculously grew by just a few more inches. (“Don’t tell your grandmother. It’s just one more row”). In the depths of winter Ariel, then 14 years-old would emerge from high school to find her great grandparents slipping on their cross country skis for a loop around the track maintained for the ski team.
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