Friday Follies ~~ Trees

I love trees.  As a kid, if I could climb a tree, I was in heaven.  I built tree houses all over the place.  I’d climb anything.

As a gardener I don’t do well with decorative flora, but I get along well with trees and vegetables.  I like trees and they seem to like me.

Then there is my relationship with trees while on a bicycle.  On the road, this doesn’t seem to come into play much, but let me get off road..!  Wow!

I really enjoy being able to ride in the woods.  I’ve done some mountain biking out west.  It can be amazing.  Dryland single track is unique, and some of the technical stuff is truly astonishing.  But I always feel a bit strange.  The long sightlines distract me, and I feel too exposed.

My woodland biking style is…  Well, I’ve heard the word “rough” used, and I think the user was trying to be kind.  I’m not the most technically adept rider out there.  I tend to just sort of go for it, and motor along, hoping for the best.  I figure that, if I don’t fall off, or crash a few times, then the trip is wasted.

Back some years ago, I was introducing my daughter to the joys of riding a bicycle off road.  We had fun, but it was not without stress.  You see, she had seen me ride on the road.  In packs.  Around squirrely riders.  She’d seen me, literally ride right over a rider who fell in front of me.  She knew I would do that, rather than crash with them.  She had an entirely rational concern.  She didn’t want me to ride over her.  And she was uncertain of her skill.  So if I was behind her, she felt pressured to ride faster than she wanted to, or run the risk of being crunched.

But if I rode ahead of her, she got upset too.  You see, I tend to get moving, and to go barreling along.  We’d hit a technical section that I liked, a long climb, or a tricky set of stutter bumps, and I’d drop her.  It wasn’t intentional, and I always waited, as soon as I realized it had happened.  But she really did not like the feeling of being left alone.  In the woods.  Where she didn’t know where she was.  With Dad disappearing ahead.  And would the big idiot ever realize that he’d left her!?  So she tended to yell at me a lot, and she rode hard to keep up.

So that brought us to another tension inducing moment.  We were riding in a new place.  It was heavily wooded.  Sometimes the trail went between trees that were awfully close together.  She was hanging onto my wheel, and the trail was mostly level, so I was cooking right along.  There was a spot where the trail went between two trees.  These particular trees were closer together than the width of a handlebar.  But one of them was slightly ahead of the other.  I saw the tricky part coming.

I rocked the bike quickly one way, and then the other, and cleared the gate without slowing.  The Kid didn’t.  She hit both trees with her handlebars and came to an abrupt and inglorious stop.

I heard about that for a while.  We had a tension-stress situation.  I wasn’t supposed to ride behind her.  I wasn’t supposed to slow down.  I wasn’t supposed to run away and leave her.  This all led to more than a few high level discussions.

Then, one glorious fall day, we were out in the woods together.  The Kid was behind me.  I got into the rhythm of the trail and started motoring.  I noticed that I hadn’t heard from the Daughter.  Not in a while.  I looked back and my stomach knotted.  She wasn’t there.  I turned around and started to ride back.  She came chugging up the trail smiling.  Hmm.

That scenario repeated itself several times.  “This is interesting,”  I thought.  “I am leaving her, and getting out of contact, but I’m not catching the dickens for it.  Something had changed.”

I resolved to ask the Kid about it.  I did.

“Dad, it’s not a problem,”  she responded.  “I figured it out.  If I look up, above the undergrowth, I can see the trees.  You sort of go bouncing from one to the next, and I just look for the trees that are shaking, and I know where you are.”