Riding Fool Snacks on Bugs

Like any life-threatening activity, when you road bike fast downhill you pay really really close attention to what you are doing. Wednesday I was riding home from the Alpine Dam, a ride that I know like the back of my hand. The last stretch from the top of Azalea Hill to my door is a non-stop fast-paced downhill stretch that takes half an hour to ascend and nine minutes to come down. If you don’t attend to every millisecond of the descent, you could be toast. I love toast, but I don’t much want to resemble it.

A downhill when you are familiar with the road involves knowing exactly how much you need to brake at the start of each curve in order to safely make it through the bend without losing control and without crossing the median on a blind corner. On most bends, if I brake for one to two seconds, I have curbed my speed enough to ride freely into the curve and feel I can come out of it alive. Sometimes I let it go a little, see if I can take the curve with no braking. Yeah. No. Braking is generally a good thing. Coming out of it alive is never a given.

Wednesday was a warm Spring night, the first of the merry month of May and when I set out, I was trying to ride away from a tough week. This generally works, which is why we fools put on the spandex and clip in with the silly shoes and pedal up vertical slopes. But as I rode up the mountain I felt slower than usual. The mountain was also a lot longer and steeper than usual. This is typically a sign that I am going to have to ride harder to leave my day behind. Either that or CalTrans has actually employed some guys to make our local hill higher and more steeply graded. This happens. I have seen them out there, with their traffic cones.

Just past the Deer Valley golf course, I saw a mama deer with her little bambi snacking on the lush grass and forget-me-nots in the ditch. Baby bambi looked to be just a few days old, he was still tottering a bit. Maybe I was the first bicyclist he had ever seen. I called out to him not to be afraid of us, we mean him no harm. It’s those morons in the King Cabs you need to worry about, bambino. He gave me a quick nod. I hoped my lesson had sunk in.

On the downhill past where the road has caved in because nobody’s paying attention to national infrastructure, I started to feel seriously good. The ride high was kicking in. I knew this because I started swallowing bugs. When I am on a ride, I generally have a silly grin on my face and this freely allows small insects to fly into my mouth. Believe me, this is worse for them than for me. They were probably planning on dinner with the family, with the intention of having dinner, not being dinner. Me, I get a tiny nugget of protein. With wings! And legs!

When I got to the dam, I was feeling that old I did it feeling that really floats my boat. The sun was about to set over the mountain and a duck was doing a spectacularly low fly-by over the lake, so streamlined and graceful I couldn’t understand how he wasn’t skidding into the water. Then he sort of sank into it with choreographed grace and I wondered if the maneuver released endorphins in his brain like my ride did for me or if it was all just ho-hum for him, another day skimming over a lake in paradise.

I parked my bike by the metal sluice gates and I noticed once again how they inexplicably have large KEEP OUT signs carved into them. I mean, who really wants to enter a dam’s sluice gate area? Or is it a general statement about the lake and its gloriously pristine environment? About America? Am I reading too much news?? I took a selfie beside the sign, and a picture of Mathilda casually leaning up against the gates. No, I don’t think we will keep out, I hoped my selfie expression said. I think we will keep riding right across your dam with its unfriendly signs and I think we will keep soaking up the free natural beauty of this mountain lake.

But the sign also got me thinking about the southern US border, because despite having ridden all the way there after work I wasn’t quite unplugged enough. I thought about being an immigrant myself, a blow-in from Ireland with a lottery visa in 1991. It was relatively easy for me. I was white, educated, and Bush Sr. was president. I literally won my green card in the lottery instigated by Senator Brian J. Donnelly in an attempt to legalize the tens of thousands of highly educated yet illegal Irish workers who flooded in from the “sick man of Europe” in the 1980s and boosted the California economy in Silicon Valley.

I did not have to walk across a desert with little food or water. I paid money, a lot for me at the time, but coyotes were not involved. My point of entry was Boston’s Logan airport. An immigration official looked at my paperwork, and although my heart hammered as hard as any immigrant hopeful, he waved me through. 

Twenty-eight years later, I am reminded every day how lucky I am. I work with caregivers from Haiti who yearn to return to their home country; with nurses who were physicians back in the Philippines; with refugees from El Salvador, Guatemala, and the Chiapas. I left terrible economic insecurity in Ireland, with an undergraduate degree not worth the paper it was printed on in terms of available jobs, but it was nothing to what these people fled.

So I got back on my bike on the dam and I headed up the mountain to that nine-minute downhill . There is a bend in the road right near the summit where you can look back down over the snaking uphill road you have toiled along, all the way to the distant puzzle piece of lake far below. It never ceases to amaze me that I have ridden that far uphill. I’d like to capture that feeling in a little bottle and take it with me to work every day so I could open it now and then and get a burst of it.

Failing that, I put the bike in its highest gear for the descent and I let loose with my carefully timed braking schedule. One second, curve, two seconds, curve, long free downhill, one second, curve...Dramatic descents usually provoke some quietly manic laughter in this riding fool, so I definitely got a little bug protein action. Hors d’oeuvres! And on my way down, I passed a CalTrans guy putting the cones back in his truck after a long day making hills steeper.