A Girl and Her Bike by Noemi LoPinto

I went mountain biking in the Laurentians yesterday. You should see my legs. I look like I was attacked by a pack of wild rocks, which in a way I was. Silly me, I thought because I bike up the mountain almost every other day, because I bike back and forth to school, because I drag my daughter up hills and valleys, through tunnels and underpasses, bike paths and highways, that I was ready for it.That and the guy who signed me up was really cute. Sigh.

The event is organised by the bikeshop/retail outfit called Yeti on Fairmount and St-Laurent. I wandered in there to buy my daughter the small Winnebago that I have now attached to the back of my bicycle, in which she can read, nap, snack, look out the window and basically do everything but check her e-mail. Somewhere between wandering in there just to look, and spending 300$ on a nylon suite-on-wheels, I signed up for Yeti Mountain Wednesdays.

When I arrived, there were already a small pack of beautiful men with rock-hard butts standing around the storefront in multi-colored, skin-tight spandex outfits. For the most part, they were all were wearing nylon backpacks with plastic tubes sticking out of them, water-delivery-apparati that reminded me of a portable hookah. In between sentences, their owners sucked reflectively on the spout hanging lightly over one shoulder.

I was wearing shorts and a baggy grey t-shirt, and I had forgotten to bring a backpack so I was carrying my water bottle in my purse, which I intended to wear all the way up Mt.Difficult, or wherever it was we were going. There was only one other girl, and because she looked muscled and at ease, I avoided her.

I got a ride with two boys in their late twenties, brothers named Naim and Chris. They were both going for the first time, and they were bilingual, highly energetic types, with big smiles. Naim was the elder brother, and he liked to quiz. For example: how much liquid does the human body sweat out in an hour of exercise? Answer: 1 litre. How many litres of blood do we have in our entire body? Answer: five to six.How many minutes can the heart do without oxygen before there is irreparable muscle damage? Answer: about five minutes. Naim, a computer programmer, is one of those people who believe in logic, in empiricism. When I asked him how old he thought I was, he looked straight at the road ahead and said: "Well, logically, you are either over thirty or under. If you are under thirty, you are either under 25 or over. Which means I have a 50/50 chance of getting it right." He guessed wrong.

We drove at 140km/h down the 15 to a town called Prevost, which as far as I could see, consisted of farmland, two frites restaurants, a bar called "le bar village", a gas station, and a giant mountain. The boys from the store were already there, milling about on their bikes like a school of slogan-covered fish. There were comparing vehicles, and the merits of the new prototype, the "Da Vinci" versus the Quasar, Huffy, Mongoose, and Razor's of the world. The bikes had these two pushy-thingies, prongs or forks with shocks in them to absorb, say, falling, rocks, roots, gravity, and the weight of an entire human being. Of course me and my bike, ( nickname: the "nobrakey") a shitty, rusty, beaten, no-name green bike, fit right in.

So without further ado, no warmup, no excuses, an Ottawa native named Grant takes us to a gravity-defying dirt path and says he wants to watch us ride up, to see our technique. Grant's cycling partner, Alex, had a butt like two eggs wrapped in cellophane- not that I was looking. My technique consisted, like many others, of riding halfway up the path and then falling sideways on a rock. And from then on, it was all fun and games. Lots of riding, huffing, and then comes that moment between stasis and movement and you fall over. Naim fell twice, Chris once. We were all being eaten alive by mosquitoes. Sometimes we were all carrying our bikes in one hand, and hopping from rock to rock. Mountain biking is all about flexibility. There are obstacles: rocks, roots, mud, holes, leaves, people lying dead in the path, trapped under bikes with the wheels still spinning...Once, we approached a mud bog and Naim decided to go through it. "Logically," he said, "I should be able to get though this." He almost didn't, and his face as he struggled was really funny. Concentrated hope locked arms with stubborn insistence as the bike sank into the mud and threatened to topple him over. Mud sloshed around his ankles, his eyes bugged out, he pedalled like mad, and he got through.

It got to be dark, and we three were without $800 flashlights on our bikes. Actually, riding downhill on a mountain path filled with giant rocks, trees, roots and mud is kind of relaxing. You have to go down, you can't see a thing, you might as well use the Force and get on with it. Once, I looked back and saw all the light beams swinging through the darkened forest. A tree would suddenly glow, and then fall into obscurity again, but because there were so many lights swinging all at once, it made for a kind of silent ballet.

Because we were in the newbies group, we did only a small route, finishing ahead of everyone else. We went to one of the frites places to wait for the others, and heard that someone had been in an accident. One of the bikers, a rail-thin man with teeny ankles named Mathieu, had hit a rock and slammed into a metal pole planted incongruently and unexpectedly in the middle of the forest. His right shoulder was dislocated. He appeared with a tenser bandage supporting his arm, shaking from the pain. The ambulance took 40 minutes to arrive, and in that time I told him every story I knew, about pain, about love. I told him about being pregnant, giving birth. I told him about the time I broke my arm, and when my plumbing exploded. I told him about pain, about how it is just like heat, and how you can't get angry at heat or you will hurt yourself. I told him not to waste energy, but to squeeze my hand and think of how his body was coursing with adrenaline, it was repairing itself, taking care of him. That he was healing already, and he could handle this. I told him about how you have to melt into pain, not take it personally, not fight. I massaged his temples, and held his hand and talked and talked and talked. By the end we were united, like lovers. His head was on my shoulder, I was holding his hand and he was calm. Then the ambulance came and tore us apart. I had to tell him my name twice.

Then I went home with Alex of the egg-like butt. I stood out on the sidewalk, and felt my hip. It was taut with new muscle.

N

---

Readers have left 1 comments

Leave a comment

name
email (if you want to be notified)
<-- Please retype the word you see here:
Notify me when someone replies to this post?

---