I can see that lone white pine slouched in resignation in the clear-cut with my eyes opened or closed. I love the burgundy underbelly of a cut, the dark damp mulch and the murder of severed roots. Twice in the 120kms, we paid visit to gnarly switchbacks through this cut. If you had the guts to shift your gaze, you looked out on a fall oil painting of leaves in every pigment of burnt orange; in hell, the sky is sapphire. The unobstructed view of the hills is the best kind of alone.
On the final lap, I spoke to Wilson, the volleyball. I whipped my head like a golden retriever spotting a squirrel when I thought I heard cars. “Cars? Cars. Cars? Cars! Cars! Cars!” Cars meant road, road meant I might be almost out of the woods, but- not out of the woods yet. My own craving, romance and protest for more single track was a backhand to the face when all I wanted to see was the sun again and get off-the-fucking- single-track!
“Get me out of here. Get me out of here. Get me out of here. Get me out of here,” I repeated aloud to no one.
For a long time on the final lap, it worked to repeat to myself “keep-rolling, keep-moving; keep-rolling, keep-moving; keep-rolling, keep-moving!” For a short time on the final lap, it worked to talk to myself the way I talk to my dog Juno: “You’re so pretty. You’re sooo strong.”
There is no finer way to spend a day.
The hours lapsed- by early evening, the morning felt like a dream. A montage of fields crossed, the hill I fell down promptly after saying in bold ink in my mind “I feel so in control,” the climb that led to a rural white church, to a climb with a climb within it, all captured in high definition.
You know when you wake up knowing you had a really cool dream, but you already forget why it was really cool but you know it was cool and you went somewhere cool- you wrinkle your forehead and don’t talk to anyone or think of your schedule so you can harvest, a quick flash of where you were in your dream? That’s the first lap of Elgin. That’s the first time you get off the charming dirt road where you were passed by a couple of polite pickup trucks and you enter the first make-shift single track that looks like a lawn mower ripped through a wall of raspberry bushes to build you a tunnel. A tunnel sweet with the smell of decomposition of recently fallen leaves; a warm trellis of trees not-yet claustrophobic.
I say it too often but I still mean it and I’ll say it in different ways forever: mountain biking cures my curiosity and simultaneously breeds more. I bet you don’t even know where Elgin is- I wasn’t perfectly sure, but now I’ve been in its bowels.
If you want to organize it, you could see 120 damn near secret kilometres in the right vehicle, but you wouldn’t remember them the way you will if you bike them.
“On a given day, a given circumstance, you think you have a limit. And you then go for this limit and you touch this limit, and you think ‘Okay, this is the limit.’ As soon as you touch this limit, something happens and you suddenly can go a bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high.”
-Ayrton Senna
Although it was hell, there is no finer way to spend a day.
Packing my backpack to go out for a ride can alone be tiring, but now, already, in a world post-Elgin120, nothing is a big deal. Rides farther and faster than my ability are fine, no cause for worry.
My optimistic memory will shrink some segments and expand others. Although the final lap started with one of the loosest climbs, and the falling rocks laughed at me, I’m counting down the months until the next one. Finishers- you’ve got grit.