Artcyclescotland

The other evening after riding the trails at Wolftrax, Lindsay and I were sat at the picnic table with a cup of tea talking bikes and trails while keeping a watchful eye on two of the young lassie’s that live local play that game where you have to get from one place to another without touching the ground; using planks of wood, bits of plastic … whatever is at hand. It was a beautiful warm evening, and they’re out playing, just the two of them, imagining, contemplating—this or that move—working together to help each other over who knows what imaginary abyss or hole in the earth’s crust … importantly they’re out in the world, feeling the textures of it’s fabric, learning to breath … It’s what I think we do when we ride trails: put sections, details, lines, experience together in creative ways so that in one sense we ‘don’t touch the ground’, and so that we can in another, play—and learn about our world—as we did as children.

Later, in a supermarket in Aviemore, we marvelled at the narrative possibilities of a man whose purchase on this Saturday night amounted to a bottle of cheap vodka and a tube of antiseptic cream.

one
bug-bites = sleepless nights: ah! such a tender expression: if only I could have hacked my legs off at the knees with a cleaver …

two
We saw Maybole three times; a lot for a Friday night. The road, split open by frost, hugged the coastline through the fields at Turnberry; already harvested, packed into bug-black pork pies and neatly arranged around the edges of the shorn fields: a landscape and language outwith my experience: Pinmerry, Kirkoswald, Crossraguel Abbey, Pinmore, Pinwherry, Glenhapple, Minnigaff, Kirroughtree … by the Cree.
three
Just the best pre-race evening meal ever.

four
Van + adrenalin + bug-tiredness = sleepless night
five
Meeting Aidan again after what must be 3-4 years. We paired at my first “10 Under the Ben” with the team name of ‘Cheese and Onion’! but never settled on who was what …

six
Lap One, and my turn to go first—neither LC or I had ridden here before (which was—in addition to topping-up our reservoirs of self-harm, misery, agony and a Calvinist world-view that subscribes to the authority of, “God made the back for burden”—one of the few sensible reasons for entering this event) so this was going to be fast and blind; “fast” understood in all its heaving and panting relativity.
seven
My attachment to the colour gold was revealed to me: it’s to do with corduroy, and a women’s agricultural tug-of-war. Oh! the hell and honey that is sweet singletrack!
eight
Steve—who pitched next to us and shared the easy-up—rode solo in the Sen Vets and completed 8 laps … missed top spot on the podium by 4 seconds! … nonetheless, numero uno!
nine
laps: good numbers; and our best performance to date. (See reference to self-harm, misery etc., at six: The report card reads: “… can do better”).
ten
Paul—Perth Camera’s—solo’s in the Sen’s, completes 10 laps, places 4th.

I listened to the rain falling on the roof of the van as we fell asleep, thinking of all the places where water collects and flows.

Reading from June’s copy of ‘Poetry’ Magazine at the picnic table … and a “kopi-lewak or “kofi-annan” … and the suns’ ray … guiding a father, and his sons (on holiday from Mumbai) on the trails … into a soft evening light of ’skin-so-soft’ and paddling—in the drain of the bike wash—as I wash the dirt off the hire fleet …

The Latin root of the word ‘compete: com(petere)’ means ‘to seek’, or as the radical architect William McDonough explained it; “competition means to train together … and then race”—the true purpose of “competition” in other words is to help each other become fit and strong, whatever the task.
two
The last thing I did before leaving home was “earth-up” my potatoes; pulling up more ground to cover over the green leaves pushing through the soil: slightly eccentric race preparation perhaps, but I knew I’d ride better if I got this done. You’ll hear that potatoes are good for “cleaning out the ground” which—depending on how one looks at it—is either true or near nonsense. In my experience—and it is limited to this audience of Catriona’s—it is the gardner that cleans out the soil looking after the potatoes; the crop “trains” the gardner to be attentive and ensure that in the competition between it and “weed” the crop wins out.
three
A cabinet curiosity asleep in “the hearse” (Chéz Volvo) on Friday night.

‘Anxiety Dream #4’
On the edge of a steep ravine, on a gentle slope of a path
going North-East, you have a little walk, pushing a bicycle.

six
I know how much Lindsay my riding partner loves to go fast and smooth—we’ve spent hours chasing each other down muddy trails but I have an incomplete picture of him riding the race circuit: big-ringing it along the puggy-line; cutting elegantly through the rock field in the woods … the shared experience of an action which, as each hour passes, as each lap becomes more enriched by experience, more complex, visual, unfixed and liquid in the intense heat—to help each other become fit and strong.
seven
Small kindnesses and gentle words in evening sunlight.
eight
Anxiety Dream # 5
Sitting on a rock out front of a burger van with a live one with onions and ketchup, a cold beer, and some Australian guy in a thong setting fire to stuff.
nine

The cleats of ‘Anxiety Dream #4′
ten
I spent the afternoon after the race driving the uplift at Wolftrax; a way to kick-back after the intense experience of the previous days racing—you don’t spend much time with your race partner during the ten hours of the race except to exchange a few words in the transition area: words about how the track is running, what to watch out for, words of encouragement, words charged with all the explosive energy that the body has just emptied itself of  … I imagine a new poetic of the transition area … the exchanges “adequate”, urgent … good to haul myself up a fireroad in a Landrover instead of on a bike then, and enjoy the energy of other, fresher riders—to help each other become fit and strong, whatever the task.

The young deer—three of them—were watchful; one by one through the small trees and shrub that the winter strips down to a few species—kinship connects us back to a dropped hillside like this—drawn by a leaf or other fresh shoots of the colour green mid-beauty … Left to the weather, two riders and three deer disappear, each forgetting for just a moment which brother, which sister … which way.

I remember my mother said to me: “You’ll soon get warm here by the fire”—and my six-year-old “self” huddled close in to her. Her warmth and the warmth from the fire sent me, I like to think, off to sleep in her lap, but the memory is hazy, and I am unsure of its veracity; the words may have come from my grandmother; from a piece of writing, overhead from another woman … a complex, and feminized experience then, of other possible worlds, but despite this, or perhaps because of it, I trust in the moment of remembrance because they are the very words I know my mother would have uttered had she seen me standing before her, shivering after an afternoon of burn-damming—her arms open and beckoning me to come to her.

I recalled this as I sat by the fire last Wednesday evening after returning home from a ride with LC (see post: 10 January 2009) that took us from Bankfoot to Dunkeld and Craigvinean Forest returning to Bankfoot through Glen Garr. As with the painter in their studio, or writer, at the outset of writing, it’s difficult to know how a mountain bike ride is going to evolve—and what you are going to encounter and discover: about your environment, “your self,” your companion(s)—and how it may come to live in you, returning aspects of you, to you, may years later, cajoled, by more dirt and rain and sleet, from memories store to blink awkwardly at your “present self.”

Snowdrops have broken the surface of the flower beds in front of my cottage; I can barely wait for them to open. I fell asleep that night thinking of them “out there” below the window, imagining the sound they made as they grew through the soil towards the fresh air, and the inaudible gasp of their opening.

Wednesday 7th January. Pitch black outside, and freezing. Lindsay (Carruthers / BaseCamp Bikes, Laggan Wolftrax) and I had agreed to meet in the Bridge of Tilt car park at eight thirty, ready to ride by nine, giving us a good six hours of daylight. I had a sheet of poems “from landscape and deer” in my jacket which I was going to try out (pieces by Carole Frost, Kathleen Jamie, George Oppen, Robert Robertson …) but that’s where it remained, in the soft-shell, for the following nine hours as we tackled a trail that took us from the car park east between Beinn A’Ghlo and Ben Vuirich to Daldhu, then north to Fealar Lodge, west to the Falls of Tarf and back to the car park through Glen Tilt itself—a big day out, replete with slick and freezing conditions and a cloudscape shape-shifting one abstract phenomenon into another in a landscape that appeared liquefied.

At times it was difficult to see much further than a few hundred metres ahead, low cloud, snow and a diffused, otherworldly light made it feel as if we were riding in a dream, sometimes not a very pleasant one: Lindsay said to me at one point later in the day—after he’d got the better of the demons he’d been fighting—words to the effect of: “You only see the up’s when you’re in that kind of mind, never the down’s, it’s always just up …” — When you “leave the path” you make a space for “the self” in which it may grow against other forces, a space created interdependent of mind and terrain, between the imagined and the real.

Near to the end, as we followed the river through the glen—as we were being, or so it seemed, inexorably pulled through the glowering darkness back to the start—a family of deer crossed silently in front us, coming from the river, going back into the mountains. We’d been riding for more than eight hours by now and I turned to Lindsay and said: “ We came all this way just so that we could see that.”

At Loch Moraig near to the start of our journey, and after we’d disturbed a pair of roe deer and a flock of teal, it was onto an icy trail and a sample of what was to follow. What began as slip-sliding fun ended, nine hours later—frozen to our cores—as the world tilted to one side just a few clicks from the car park: I slid out on an off-camber sheet of ice and hit the ground; this trail, this time, got to us both in different ways, and by the end of it we were as exhausted as much by concentration, as by pedalling.

The small drawing? When I was emptying the car the next morning I saw the sprig of heather stuck in the back of my pack and I remembered a daft “off” on the single-track between Fealar and Tarf—not while I was riding, but while I was describing to Lindsay what was coming up, but that’s not why I drew it: it struck me on seeing it that our day had been made up of thousands of similar jewel-like details, things of exquisite and profound beauty; moments of deeply felt experience; locked-in, focused and joyous riding, but also it’s endurance playmate, discomfort, pain and exhaustion; a shared joke or observation; the sound of ice broken by our tyres; the bodies memory of shifting its weight through the single-track; those moments when we knew we’d got away with this or that flit over a section of trail; the fresh freezing cold air …

The last day of the year: Kinnoull Hill.
Soutar wote about how falling snow makes us aware of silence—we expect sound—but also how it illustrates the paradox and fascination of “varying monotony,” a steady falling of similars which are yet so wayward in their fall: riding the one trail (again and again) can be like this—somehow like snow falling.

Saturday 20 December 2008. Wolftrax—against the forecast—in brilliant sunshine: Black, Red and, a civil-twilight kind of blast down the Blue (Orange) with the spark, before the lights went out.

I work alone, all day—across the silence of the separating air flung with darkened trees—until there’s not much light.
I work on the lower sections first—getting out the fear. The lines are silt.
My food is “plain” with cheddar, a flask of sweet tea—“sugarsole.”
There’s no “last run,” but the light eventually runs out—and know myself to grow lean and hard again with toil.