Riding Fool Tries Hard to be Miserable

It is a biking phenomenon how many of my fellow riders look like they really are not having all that good of a time. There they are, spinning down the mountain at 28 miles per hour, sun in their face, wind in their hair, and they look positively dour. Not only that, but many of them seem affronted by my perpetual grin and cheery hellos. It is a mystery that confounds me. Are they perhaps doing their taxes while riding? Hashing over old breakups?

On today’s ride, I thought I would carry out an experiment to see if I could be miserable while out for a spin. I tried thinking about my taxes, how bad the damage might be this year, but it didn’t stick. I worried about a fragile patient for a while. But the air smelled so damn good after the rain, Mt. Tam was crisp and inviting on the skyline, and then I rounded a corner on Azalea Hill and ran into my friend Ken. We gave each other grief for a bit (“I’m really out of condition.” “Happens at your age.” “Can you actually remember being my age?”) Then, fortified by the mutual derision, we went on our merry ways.

I grinned at a few more glowering riders, and they glowered back. When I got to the Alpine Dam, the spillway was so full and lush it was like a mini Victoria Falls. I tried dwelling on old breakups. No good. So I thought about a patient visit that took up most of my Friday afternoon. This was what I like to term a BFF visit: bodily fluids and firemen. 

The fire department of every city provides a service called non-emergency lift assist. You access it by calling 911 and asking for the fire department. And although non-emergency might make it sound like they take their good old time getting there, in my experience, they generally arrive really fast. These guys arrived in less than ten minutes to pick my patient up off her bathroom floor, and they were the usual stellar representatives of the human race. 

Any time I have had to call the fire department or paramedics for patients, I have been struck by how kind, thoughtful, gentle, and yes uniformly handsome they are. And it’s not just the dark blue outfits. These guys are just the kind of folk you want around you in a crisis. Calm in a shitstorm. And did I mention handsome?

But part of my job as a hospice nurse is to be completely professional and fail to notice when paramedics are drop-dead gorgeous. In fact, I practice a certain nonchalance around them so they will know how very professionally professional I am. This time, I kept my demeanor by focussing on texts from my supervisor. Are the firemen still there? After they left, my patient and I discussed which one was the most visually pleasing. It was the first time she’d smiled all day.

On my way back up Pine Mountain from the dam, I put my Lookie Here playlist on shuffle. It helps to have music on that long slow uphill, even though I have stopped wishing I was on downhills when I’m climbing because I love the climbs almost as much. Okay, now I am getting pretty annoying.

The thing about my bike’s phone holder is that the plastic cover is quite thick, so it’s difficult to get the phone to respond to my finger. Plus trying to work the phone while riding, well, I get a bit wobbly and it freaks the drivers out. So I just have to put up with whatever song comes on. You could say Sara, why don’t you make a special playlist of upbeat songs just for riding, but you may have seen in a previous post how that works out for me. So I can safely say I was the only person on the mountain today riding to O Children by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Yes, that’s the song Harry and Hermione danced to in the tent in Harry Potter VII at the nadir of their hugely unlucky young lives. If lugubrious is motivating to you, you’d have been in business.

As for me, I was so busy having an excellent time, I didn’t really care what shuffle threw at me. Mezzanine by Massive Attack? Bring it on. It would be a good song to dig a grave to, but also to ride up a mountain to on a day like today. If you are me. Which you can feel free to be thankful you are not. Except that when I got home, with the endorphins coursing, I sat down to a meal of...food, doesn’t really matter what it was, it all tastes fantastic after a ride. The sun was streaming into my living room, and the fire was teasing the chill out of my bones, and even though I have to do some tedious work this afternoon, and I could also start my taxes, and I’ve had breakups in my life almost too numerous to count, I was grinning to myself as I thought about that ride and I just couldn’t pull off miserable. Not even close.