My elder son rides his bike to school. Like anybody who rides a bike he puts up with his share of crap. So this morning because it was frigid and snowy I took mercy on him and drove him there:
And yes, I realize this makes me part of the problem, but he’s pretty much the only kid riding to school even when it’s warm and sunny, so in this case I’m fairly confident I wasn’t discouraging anybody.
Generally speaking, I don’t like driving places to ride. It’s not that I have a moral objection to it or anything like that–I mean yes, I do feel smug when I ride past all the people unloading their dual-suspension bikes in the parking lot, but that’s not moral superiority, that’s just run-of-the-mill cyclist superiority, like when you pass someone on a climb. (And I pass nobody on climbs, so feeling superior to the people unloading their bikes in the parking lot is all I’ve got.)
No, the reason I don’t like driving to the ride is simple: the driving time cuts into my riding time. If I have free time to ride, I want to spend as much of it on the bike as possible. In the dark days when I lived in Brooklyn I pretty much had to drive if I wanted to get some decent trail riding in (please spare me your single bro stories about your regular 8-hour round-trip trail rides from Brooklyn, the rest of us don’t have that kind of time), but once I moved somewhere I could easily ride to trails I mostly gave it up. Twelve years later or however long it’s been since I moved up to the Bronx I still can’t believe how ideally situated I am for good road and trail riding, and so I take advantage of it as much as I can.
But if I’m already using the car that’s something else, and in this case I’d spent so much time de-icing the thing for the short trip to school it seemed silly and wasteful to just park it again. Plus, those short cold-weather trips are terrible for the car, right? You need those highway miles! And, yes, it was also Nineteen (19) Freedom Degrees outside, which is pretty cold, unless you’re one of those Minnesota Humblebrag types, in which case that’s barely even cold enough to put on pants:
[“I’m not even wearing pants now!”]
All of this is to say that throwing a bike on the hitch rack and driving to some trails was clearly an investment in the longevity of my car’s motor and electrical system, and so after I dropped my son off at school that’s exactly what I did:
I didn’t go anywhere far-flung or exotic; in fact I just headed up to a little park to which I regularly ride. However, in the frigid winter stillness I felt as though I were deep in the boreal forest:
Sure, I may have been close enough to the surrounding homes to hear their Keurig machines, but the only sounds were the chattering of the birds, the burbling of the streams…
…and of course the crunching of the crusty frozen snow beneath my fat-ass tires:
Anticipating trail conditions in the winter can be a tricky business. If the snow’s too deep you spend more time trudging through it than riding and it sucks. If the snow’s too wet the trail gets all slippery and muddy and it also sucks. But if it’s no more than two or three inches and it’s frozen, as was the case today, then it’s just right.
Besides its proximity, another reason I’d picked this location was that I figured walkers had probably further enhanced the trails’ rideability by tamping down the snow, which in fact they had. However, after a little while I ventured further afield to a remote section untrodden by all but the local fauna:
Following the tracks, I soon came upon the beast’s scat:
Tasting it, I knew it was fresh.
This was confirmed when, shortly thereafter, I came upon what I can only assume to be the fecal curator:
That’s the sort of arrogance that comes from living in a neighborhood where there’s no hunting and no natural predators.
The people act exactly the same way.
If I were snowbound for weeks or months on end in a less populous region I could see wanting some sort of a fat bike, but around these parts where the snow is generally pretty moderate, the roads are almost always clear, and the severe cold snaps are usually just a few days long, the plus-sized Jones is more than enough:
The four-wheeled gasoline-powered recumbent also comes in handy once in awhile, what can I say?