Beginnings at the Point of the Mountain

(Rockhopper photos courtesy of http://zeusmeatball.blogspot.com/.  Everyone should check out Zeus’ site.  This bike is just one of many he has resuscitated.  Even more impressive, though, is the work he has done in making himself an inspiring advocate of bicycling fitness and health.  Really worth taking a look!) 


My renewed vigor in bike riding appeared with my father’s purchase of a Specialized Rockhopper Comp 6 speed mountain bike with Biopace (oval-style chain ring), at a price of six hundred 1988 dollars.  As with most of my father’s sports equipment purchases, he bought it ostensibly for the whole family to use but with a specific member in mind so his son could save money and not have to buy it himself.    

Constrained to a paper hanger’s apprenticeship with my father and living in his basement after I had graduated high school, I learned the hard way that maintaining my weight lifting regime while hanging commercial vinyl at piece rate was impossible.  For two weeks I struggled to work out for an hour or two after a long day of intensive labor.  If I pushed myself to keep moving and not sit down to relax when I got home, I could lift like I wanted to, but my body would make me pay for such exertion come morning.  Waking up was, of course, like shaking rigor mortis out of my body, and that wasn’t the worst effect.  If I had hung one hundred yards of vinyl wall covering the previous day, working out after that meant that I would be mentally and physically sluggish the next day and be capable of hanging only eight yards.  Although I felt like the more I lifted weights the less proportionately I would be able to hang, working out would not eventually prevent me from hanging wall covering at all; I would just be limited to sixty to seventy five percent of my capacity.  Since work and money are deathly serious, and I had to earn a living so I could pay bills in order to be alive, after struggling to sustain my weight lifting routine for two weeks I gave in.  My father and older brother had told me it couldn’t be done—they’d tried and failed, too. 

The nature of commercial wall covering piece work demands you devote all energies to work.  Paint contractor after painter would later confess to me that they sub-contracted the wall covering sections of their jobs to professional hangers because the work was so demanding and strenuous.  Sure, many of those painters could hang wall covering if they needed to, but the job had to be completed on schedule and they could not afford the time or money to hang one hotel room a day while a professional paper hanger hung five or more.

I found the low-impact exercise I needed in mountain bike riding.  My father’s Nishiki twelve speed road bike provided a smooth ride from a well-built bike, but it was so lightweight and its tires so narrow, I didn’t dare take this expensive bike off-road; I didn’t even like pedaling it through patches of gravel on the road shoulder.  With a mountain bike, though, a cyclist could go virtually anywhere.  After work I could push off from the front porch and embark on a two hour adventure in the foot hills, cranking along the fire roads and deer trails.

Some time ago, after being dropped off at a trail head and my acquaintance had caught up to me on the crest of the first steep climb, and he expressed his enthusiasm for riding off-road by scoffing at road cyclists as “nothing but a bunch of line chasers.”  Although this was my one and only ride with him, I had no difficulty categorizing him as an exclusively downhill mountain bike rider.  Having ridden along the canals of Western Europe, I can say with all possible gusto that I could chase those lines all day long for days on end.  With few states accommodating cycling enthusiasts, finding a long stretch of road you didn’t have to share with traffic often required a long drive first.  Even when living in the middle of urban and suburban valleys, though, I preferred to pedal the necessary miles to the foothills and climb up to the trailhead where most people unloaded their bikes to start their rides.  The climb was usually more adventurous and exhilarating than the sprint downhill.  Living in the Rocky Mountains provided easy access for mountain biking and the off-road terrain eliminated the monotony of the limited pavement trails at the same time it shielded the cyclist from riding in what feels like a wind tunnel (aka, the Highland/Alpine Highway).

Hopping on a mountain bike and pedaling into the foothills to see what I find is always reason enough to go for a ride.  Through each grove, up every climb the stress and burden of work is pumped out of your system.  While filling your blood with air, instead of running in place on a treadmill inside, you’re looking at and responding to constantly changing scenery and trail conditions.  It requires concentration and effort yet it provides you with relaxation and freedom.  Pedaling through the foothills and mountains of Alpine, Highland, and Draper I rarely passed another person.  Not until I ended the ride back in town did the images of other people begin to remind me of a culture with no individuals, of groups needing to believe everyone is the same and my experience is no different from everyone else’s.  I was the one pedaling, there was no one else out there, and it was my adventure.  For two hours I could escape into wilderness.

The Rockhopper comp saw me through four years of pedaling uphill to college, making the frenzied rush from class on one side of campus to the next on the other a pleasure that always put me in class on time.  While there I upgraded the bike to a 7 speed (the rear axle only wide enough to add one rear cog/gear), replaced the Biopace with round chain rings, converted the shifting system to a RapidFire-like style, and bought set of slick road tires for long rides out through the marshland farms.

Moving from this rural college setting to a downtown apartment in the state’s metropolis, I found that some mornings I couldn’t open my apartment door into the corridor because transients had passed out, blocked me in, and crowded the stale air with the fragrance of sour-mash vomit.  I didn’t need the failure of security bars and gate codes to impress upon me the necessity of locking everything I owned and preventing easy opportunities for thieves.      Nevertheless, I tried not to wake the bums, the “sacred cattle” asleep on top of the coin-op washers while I unlocked the storage closet to get my bike.  After six months of living in that roach motel, I moved to a place of better hygiene bordering the city park.

The new apartment, the basement unit of a tri-plex, shared its only entrance into the building with the upstairs unit’s back door.  Descending a brief stairway to the communal door landing at street level, the upstairs tenant could continue down a full-length stairway to his utility room at the bottom the same way I might enter the basement apartment or facilitate my utility room.  Although the upstairs tenants had a front porch and door with easy access to their apartment, I learned that they often found their back door more convenient to use.  After unloading all my belongings on moving day, I climbed the stairs to drive to the grocery store, ensuring the street level door was locked before I left.  Sorting groceries and boxes in the basement upon my return, I stepped out of my apartment to the landing and opened my utility room door to a feeling that something was amiss.  Later that afternoon when I went for my bike to go for a ride, I realized the whore of reality had rolled me.  I stormed up the flight and a half of stairs to my new neighbor’s back door and pounded.  A doughy, bovine couple crowded the doorway.  “Bike?” they said, as if they’d never heard of such a thing.  “You didn’t leave the back door unlocked did you?” I pleaded with them.

     “Well,” said the man, laggard and unaffected, “we always keep that unlocked ‘cause we forget our keys to the front.”  My bike had probably been converted into a dime bag by now.  Stifling my anger and asking the neighbors to keep the door locked from now on was going to be as helpful as going to the shooting range and unloading a dozen rounds into a soggy, giant wheel of cheese.  The police wouldn’t care enough to file a report.  I didn’t have apartment insurance and I wasn’t scurrilous enough to try to get my auto insurance to replace my bike.  In that moment I longed for the smell of roach poison, of vomit and cheap liquor and body odor; I longed for the garbled sounds of foul language at my previous apartment complex.  The transients there seemed to have more integrity and more than a dozen IQ points--regardless how many of them were drenched in chemicals—than my new neighbors.

Grateful the Installment Plan was not dead, I drove downtown to set up payments for a new mountain bike.  I brought home a Trek 8700 carbon fiber Composite mountain bike with full XT components for 1,200.00 1995 dollars.  Only part of this new light weight but rugged 8 speed I didn’t love was the Rock Shox front shocks, which had elastomeric cylinders with only about an inch of travel.  I eventually upgraded to a Manitou suspension shock with a good four inches of travel.   

    

Perhaps inspired by a new bike in the family, my father saw all the off-road fun and exercise I was having (even on snow-covered trails) and purchased two new family mountain bikes.  Of course the stepmother and half-brother never rode them, but it meant that the next time I stopped by with my mountain bike, the old man was going for a ride with me.