My daughter’s first “real bike” was a mountain bike. That’s pretty common these days. It’s difficult to find a road bike for a kid.
I must report that I did the same thing I see a lot of folks do. I wasn’t too sure just how the kid would take to cycling, so I purchased a really cheap hunk of junk, “just to see if she was going to get into it.”
Now here’s a surprise. I’m a dedicated cyclist. So of course, I was going to encourage (read cajole and/or threaten on occasion) my kid to ride. She rode. She liked it. It wasn’t always fun, but it was mostly, and it was together time for the both of us.
The junk bike became a problem. (That’s another shock, I know.)
I replaced the junk bike with a pretty decent one. It was still a mountain bike, but it was quality. So naturally, we went looking for mountain biking adventures. We had a quite a few of them. I’ve chronicled some of them elsewhere in this blog.
Over time, my daughter became an accomplished off road rider. Along the way she also got to be downright devastating on the road.
Together, we tried out lots of trails. We rode at Tsali, and around the Asheville area. We did a lot of local stuff, the horse park, the Camp Thunder trails, McIntosh Reserve, the old Quarters Road trails, and some that are not, and were never on the map. We laughed a lot. We cracked up on occasion. There were times we came out of the woods soaked, covered in mud, near hypothermia.
I remember one shining moment. This was near the time when the kid would be leaving home for college. I think it was the last fall before she left.
The weather had done what it has here recently. It had turned unseasonably cool, and dry. Then it warmed a bit. The leaves were starting to turn. We had a day, a weekday no less, to go and play.
We prepped the bikes the night before, so as not to lose time in the morning. It was cool, and dry when we left the house in the early dawn light. We drove my old beater of a truck to the trail head, chattering all the way. We were up for it. We knew, from previous experience, that riding this particular trail in the middle of the week would be great. There would be no one else out there, no crowding, no one to dodge.
Of course, our planned early start didn’t happen. There were chores to do, and things that got in the way. What with ten things and another, we didn’t make it out the door until late morning.
We got to the trail, and saw no one else around. We had the place to ourselves. We mounted and rode through the rough parking area to the trailhead. We stopped at the verge of the trail for a moment. We could tell by the cover of leaves that no one had been out here for several days. This was not unusual. Mostly these trails were ridden on the weekends.
After we worked through the rock garden we were both soon laughing. We kept breaking through spider webs, and I managed to ingest a bug in one. Good fun! Many laughs. Lots of spider webs. No one had run through here, no rain had fallen, and the spiders had been busy.
Then we were in thick woods. We were both warmed up, and the day had grown temperate. One or the other of us would occasionally shout some kind of statement about the profusion of spider webs. But then the competitive urge struck us, and we went barreling into it.
After a couple of hours, we reached the summit of a ridge, staring into the late morning sunlight. We stopped and looked at each other. Every leading surface on each of us, and on our bikes, was covered in spider silk. It glistened silver in the sunlight. Yes it was sticky, but it was also glorious.
By the time we were leaving the trails, toward the evening of the day, the late sunlight was painting us in gold and orange, draped in our new coats of gossamer webbing.
It took us hours to clean the bikes and ourselves. I did not have a camera, but I can see those moments, clearly as if they are eternally etched before me. Light and glistening spider strands, grinning and laughing. Thank you for this.
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