Keep It Between the Ditches

It turns out that I am a religious mountain biker. All I can do when I hit a rocky spot is hold onto my handlebars and pray to god I make it home alive.

Tara and I went biking today. We weren't really sure of where we were going, but let's be honest, we are in the middle of nowhere. It is an exceptionally beautiful chunk of nowhere, but there isn't really anywhere to go. We passed a sign for Rainy Bridge. That sounded good. There were little pictures of camping people and boats, so we headed off down the dirt road. After a while, we came to a fork in the road with a sign that said "Public Access Area." I have no idea what that meant, but we were the public and we were trying to access an area, so it seemed like a good idea to turn. We biked along, Tara captivated by the various species of birds and me just racing for the hell of it.

I work with a woman who is marrying a professional bike racer. He has to train by going 30 MPH for 6 hours straight, up the Rocky Mountains and back down. I have a speedometer on my bike and I tried to get up to 30 MPH- at all, going downhill. I made it to 31 MPH, maintainted it for about one minute and then gave up and went back to my normal 20 MPH to help Tara watch the birds.

We kept biking along and a motorcyclist passed us that I had seen earlier on the road going the opposite way. He turned after another sign that said "Public Access Area", so we followed him. Chances were high that he had a better idea where he was going than we did. After another mile or so of me holding my handle bars and praying, we came to a river with camp sites and boat trailers. It appeared that we had found Rainy Bridge (although there was no bridge. The motorcyclist had parked his bike up against the marker signs that described the river and the surrounding area. We went up to read the signs and he asked us where we were from.

"Salt Lake," we replied.

"I used to be from LA, but I moved out here in 1980, no, I guess it was '79. I did my senior year out here."

"Wow, that must have been a culture shock."

"Yeah, I introduced the people out here to the Sex Pistols."

"So, you did them a service."

"Ha! Yeah. And I actually made the finishing touchdown that was the big finale of the football season. (Insert story about running, tackling, scoring and crowds cheering that neither I nor Tara understood.)"

"Oh, wow," we said. Oh wow, I thought. I have just met Uncle Ricky from Napoleon Dynamite. I really am in Idaho.

We stopped and chatted with our motorcyclist neighbor for a while, had him take our picture with the river in the background, wished him well, and picked up our bikes.

"Keep it between the ditches," he said.

"Yeah, you too," I said and laughed.

As we pulled away Tara whispered, "What does that mean?"

"It means don't fall off the road, I think." Doesn't it?

On the way back, past the river, the birds, the cattle, the gigantic clouds, the green fields, within constant view of the rocky Tetons, our motorcyclist friend passed us. First going in our direction, then going in the other direction- towards us, then away from us, then he reappeared out of a sideroad coming towards us again.

"Um, Tara, do you get the feeling that we are being circled by a shark?"

He passed us again and then turned down another dirt road that led to an old, yellow school house. He was done riding. Phew.

We weren't though. We still had another five miles of listening to frogs croaking in roadside streams, watching rain clouds roll in over the green hills on our right and staring at meadows on the distant, glacial peaks in front of us. Five miles of gorgeous, soul-expanding, sweat-inducing nowhere.