Well-traveled

Mountain Biking

Relaxing at the Parautane Lodge

The night before we planned to go mountain biking, we checked into a luxurious hilltop bed and breakfast outside Nelson. Candace, one of the owners, let it slip that she was a physiotherapist. She probably regretted this admission a moment later when I complained about my bunk shoulder, the result of stress, I thought, combined with slaving over a cramped laptop.

She examined me in the morning and discovered that the muscles around a couple of my ribs weren’t moving properly. The ribs were stuck in place, pinching nerves and shooting off pain. Candace explained that she was going to dislodge the ribs from their stuck position by crunching me in her arms. “There will be a pop,” she said.

I sat up, breathed out as instructed, and rolled back down while she squeezed my rib cage. She stopped—no result.

“As soon as I press down, all of your muscles tighten up protectively,” she said, sounding surprised. She tried the same thing with the other rib, and once again I seized up like a harassed sea anemone.

I wasn’t surprised in the least. That’s me: uncontrollably over-controlled, particularly with regard to imminent pain.

Which brings me to the top of another hill, on the other side of Nelson. We had pedaled some 10 miles from town, much of it up a dirt logging road that meandered through thick forest. Once again we were enveloped in that long white cloud. I gulped fresh, misty air while we rode up, up, up. Unfortunately we also had to go down.

The view from the Parautane Lodge, a hilltop bed and breakfast outside Nelson

Near the very top, we turned off the road and walked our bikes up an ultra-steep section of slope, until finally we couldn’t go any higher. We had emerged from the thick forest into an area covered with tall grass and scrubby trees, probably post-logging re-growth. Kristin offered to take over our single CamelBak, which contained water, a pear, two granola bars, all our money and spare layers, plus the car keys and a map.

A small wooden sign pointed to the ride we had come for, but the narrow, steep stretch of dirt didn’t look very rideable to me.

“It’s fine. It’s pretty meek,” Kristin said.

I didn’t believe her. Mountain biking was the trip activity in which I most feared actual physical danger. I wasn’t just being paranoid. As the result of mountain biking accidents, Kristin had dislocated one shoulder, shattered the other, and acquired a six-inch piece of titanium in her right ankle.

Before taking off, she gave me a word of advice: “Slowing down is not the best way to take on a hard part. Trust me on this. You’ll find it easier if you go a little faster.” In theory, I understood. You can’t balance on a stationary bicycle; a little speed makes you less likely to fall. People have given me similar advice at the top of ski slopes. Ruthless physical self-control will just leave you stranded on the hillside.

What my well-meaning advisers don’t get is that for me, letting go of control is no more controllable than my reaction to Candace’s rib crunch. The animal brain is in charge, and it says no.

Kristin took off, rolling down the visible part of the path and then disappearing amid tall grass, bushes, and low piney trees. After much hesitation, I followed, plunging over rock and mud toward the spot where the track turned. I didn’t fall off! But a nasty surprise awaited. The path was skinny, and the bushes that hugged it were thick, spiky, and soaking wet. I was suddenly hurtling through a cold, sharp carwash. Within a minute, my clothes and shoes were drenched. Stopping in front of an insurmountable pile of rock and dirt—insurmountable to me, anyway—I became aware of a burning itch on my exposed calves and looked down. They were completely covered in angry red bumps. So that’s mountain biking, I thought: Just when you think you’re going to fall on your head, you’re attacked by wet nettles.

Kristin was somewhere below me on the slope. Every now and then I heard the whine of her brakes on one of the switchbacks, or she would call up to see where I was. Our voices sounded close, but the enveloping fog was so thick that I couldn’t see more than 15 feet down the hill.

“Are you walking?” she called up.

“On and off,” I said, not sure if I was more annoyed with myself for my repeated dismounts or with her for asking.

The truth was that I was finding the route barely passable. It was a mess of knotty roots, rocky outcroppings, and slippery wooden “features” installed by human hands. I caught up with Kristin where the trail crossed a logging road, but she quickly dropped away again into the cloud.

“I think I need to keep moving, it’s cold,” she called from somewhere down below. And then there was silence.

I continued my downward struggle, my morale dropping much faster than I was. I was reduced to reminding myself that I had skills, too, that I could do things in the world, that whole communities, if not civilizations, existed in which mountain-biking ability was not a barometer of worth. Between these bouts of self-pity, I cursed the inventors of mountain biking and dismissed its practitioners as fools. Obviously, you had to be lobotomized to enjoy this.

Suddenly, the re-growth ended, and I arrived at the entrance to a real forest. It was made up of ancient-looking conifers, and even though I come from a land of conifer forests (British Columbia), this one was darker and denser than anything I had ever seen.

The trees tangled with one another along the sides of the path and came together above it, forming a long cavern that barely admitted the light of day. It was a Grimm’s fairy tale forest, the kind where bright-eyed wolves and talking bears would not be amiss. (There are no human-eating beasts in New Zealand, I reminded myself.) Despite being soaked, itchy, and tired, I was awed.

The trail now became wider and flatter. I stayed on the bike for longer stretches, sometimes actually picking up speed. I seemed to be riding along the side of a deep ravine that was sloping gently downward. I decided that mountain biking wasn’t entirely idiotic. For fleeting moments, I had fun.

Eventually, I popped onto the logging road we had used to get up the mountain, only to find no sign of Kristin. I looked up and down the road, shivering now that I had stopped moving. I called out loudly, cupping my mouth toward the woods.

“Kristin!”

Nothing.

“Hello!”

Silence.

I became acutely conscious that I had no food, water, or warmer clothing and thought about how dumb that was. I rode down the hill for a mile or so, stopping at places where paths seemed to drop from the road into the woods. Then I rode back up. I turned up an unfamiliar spur, then rode back down to the intersection.

She must have stayed on the single track. I tried to remember the map. Wouldn’t it have to come out of the woods eventually? Why didn’t she stop to wait? Bitch. But what if, in fact, she was lying at the bottom of a gully with a broken leg?

Damn.

I tried to guess what she would do, and what she would think I would do. Assuming she was uninjured, I decided, she would wait, then ride down. After riding up and down the logging road for some time—I had no watch—I rode all the way down to the grassy park where the dirt road met the paved road and a large map stand marked the entrance to the mountain’s roads and trails. There was no sign of Kristin.

No sign of anyone, in fact, except for a skinhead emerging from the trees.

“Nice ride?” he asked.

“Yeah, except I lost my friend up on the mountain,” I said, marveling at my new level of dumbness.

He was white, bald, hard-featured, and missing a few teeth.

“I’m just …” he said, and gestured. He was proceeding toward an outhouse hidden among the trees. As he passed, I saw that the back of his head was covered with black tattoos. All of my prejudices about tattooed, snaggle-toothed skinheads began to emerge as I sat down to wring out a shoe.

No dangerous animals, the Kiwis always tell you. Just nettles, bad weather, and park lurkers. I considered what to do. Wait here at Kristin’s only obvious exit point? Ride all the way to Nelson? Launch a search party? With no cash, car, or phone?

The lurker was in the outhouse for what seemed like a full 30 minutes. Cutting up a body, no doubt. As he headed back my way, I decided it would be a good time to ride into Nelson. I put on my helmet and took one last look up the logging road—and saw Kristin barreling toward me.

She had searched, then waited, laying her bike across the road and curling herself up on a rock. Then she had come down. Our pear was exactly half-eaten.