: Ups and downs

By: g | No Comments » |

Even by current standards it was a bad day. Damned computers. Some days things just refuse to work. Odd things happen: things crash, things won’t talk to each other – and hell, the whole job is pretty pointless anyway. I’d had enough. I was seriously wound up and everyone else in the office knew it. The mouse had already been hurled across the desk, the muttering under my breath had increased to an audible growl and the growl had turned into outbursts of swearing. A frustration with the job in general, combined with the acute annoyance with the PC, was a potent combination. I managed to prevent myself punching the laptop keyboard, knowing it would probably take out the hard disk with all my files on it, so instead I packed the machine into its bag, like an abused ventriloquist stuffing his belligerent dummy away at the end of a gig.

I stormed out of the office, got in the car, slammed the door and sped off out of the car park. My commute is 40 miles of motorway, most of which was spent rather too close to the car in front, fuming at the fact that I couldn’t just put my foot flat on the floor. If anyone’s car so much as twitched near me I had half a mind to crash into them. The stereo was blasting out Senser at a volume which was abusing the speakers as much as my right foot was abusing the car’s engine. I was not a safe driver that day. I wasn’t even sure I was myself at all.

I made it home in one piece, probably more due to luck than judgement and within five minutes I had changed into shorts, grabbed the camera and a bike and I was off into the evening sun, determined to forget everything about the day so far.

—

Telegraph Woods isn’t much of a biking destination, but it’s a small oasis in the city – tucked between the motorway and the suburban residential sprawl, it’s a small hillside covered with vivid green foliage. It’s a quiet place with simple paths through the ferns, where the evening light picks its way through the branches and leaves and settles on the rich, auburn ground and the silvery-golds of the birch trunks. Every town has its own Telegraph Woods, a place where the houses and the cars seem a hundred times further away than they actually are.

There was only a simple crunch of twigs under my tyres as I rolled through the wood. No sliding of tyres, no jumping and landing, no rush of air past my ears, no adrenaline-fuelled hollering as I carved the turns: I was simply riding along, drifting gently through the undergrowth. I wasn’t being a hero, I was just being there.

The smoothness of the fat tyres rolling on soft woodland trails was perfect: a graceful motion, no bouncing off rocks or flying off roots, just rolling. The ‘whirr’ of the wheel revolving brought a smile to my face. Even pedalling itself was beautifully minimalist: I’d picked up the singlespeed, just turn and go, just ride. I had no helmet, no gloves, no Lycra, no Camelbak, no glasses, no tools, no pump; it was just me and a bike. Like it was when I was a kid: before jobs and mortgages and motorways.

It was the sheer simplicity of all this that opened up everything else. The scene around me, of the light falling through the trees, of the mottled blues, whites and golds of an English summer evening’s sky. The same sky as it ever was and always will be, unaffected by jobs and mortgages and motorways. My mind had been swamped earlier in the day, now it was wide open and fresh because the important and beautiful things were clear: the job and the mortgage and the motorway didn’t matter, they were things I could put up with just for an hour or two of sitting in the dappled woodland light and rolling around on two wheels.

And that’s the beauty of riding bikes. You don’t have to be the fastest, you don’t have to launch off every drop, nail every descent, conquer every climb. You don’t have to ride hard all the time. It’s ok to sit under a tree for a bit. You can relax and take in everything around you, let your troubles out, take your time and find the good stuff.

I returned home a while later with a smile on my face. One of the worst days I’d had in ages had turned into one of the best. Bikes do that. Bikes are great.

Stewart Pratt (words and images) – UK

Stewart, or Bez as he is sometimes known, is a lanky English bloke who has roughly equal experience in biking and drinking. Unusually for a Briton, he likes nothing better than being in France, spending a sunny morning cycling up into the Pyrenees, resting before a long technical descent and then returning in time for plenty of wine and cheese. A devoted fan of Kona bicycles, he seems to have about 67 of them at any given time, but suspects it’s rather less than that.

 

Tags:bikes,Singletrack


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