The terrain south of Tucson—rugged dirt roads, old mines, Elephant Head butte, thorny cactus single track, canyons and sky and dry—has filled me for 30 years. The bikes have changed but they’re a distant second to the landscape and emotions and riding with friends.
West Virginia has a long and storied tradition of East Coast mountain biking. The pitched terrain, the remoteness of woods noisy with life, mountain tops holding up humid air and sunlight.
A landmark, a place to focus a quiet fun story, a metaphor.
This inland Maine, mosquitoes and a low rippled earth, a thickness, a null-time and none-here, a forward that feels like a happy stuck.
I’m loving that it’s so dark. By which I mean the towering colossal stupid.
A line that in this part of the country doesn’t follow something natural like the Rio Grande but instead is a cartographer’s dashed euclidean creation. Maybe that’s more honest with respect to the contingency and arbitrariness, maybe it doesn’t let us off the hook by encouraging lies about the separation and the essential unalloyed luck of being born on one side or the other of it.
This ride breathes and coils. Sometimes big climbs, other times flick woodsy singletrack turns. Logan’s route inscribes dirt road motifs in a more expansive land’s humps and berms and valleys movement.
We say it matter of factly, and the facts are just bricks, our talk mortar—one could build walls or a paved path.
The identity of this place is that it is nowhere, towns that we will inertia through when we need to, but the network of agricultural tracks horizons into midmorning heat and we don’t have to intersect anything else.