Saturday Madness
SATURDAY MADNESS
UP FRONT
Allan Girdler
Suburban bikers have an extra dimension. In common with our city and country kin, we get to hit the open road, commute to work, go for day trips to the woods, etc. All these things are good. But there are days, usually the Saturday when you promised to do all the things around the house you didn’t do last Saturday because you’d gone riding in the woods instead, when you’ve just got to take a little ride, have a pocket adventure. When that time comes nothing matches living in a small town that’s one of many small towns not too near to the big city.
This particular adventure began with a sending unit for the garage door opener. Broken switch. The company has a parts and repair department two towns up the line from my house. The sending unit is a little box, small enough to pack in my iool bag so I reckoned to ride the XL.
And I’d ride the railroad. No, not the tracks, the right of way.
Environments are funny. I live in a small town, formerly ranch and farm country isolated by topography but not distance. The oldest level of country, so to speak, is the earliest one, the paths and trails carved by streams, men on foot, powboys and farmers. Then came the Railroad, which carved another set of ways between here and there, using steam and mule and dynamite. Atop that, the daily level, is the modern world; no mountain is too high to be shoved into a valley so we can have a bland highway leading from the bland housing tracts into the bland shopping center and inlustrial park.
Which is just what I wanted to avoid. So I rode up the old highway until it stopped, then jumped down the little embankment, steered between the weeds and small trees and there I was, next to the tracks. Interesting place. Not mainlined, as the highway warning signs say, so you have to keep an eye out for rocks, iron pipes, ditches, cables and the like, all the while getting a different view of the country you see every day.
Or a view of the country that’s been lost. A couple miles up the line the tracks went up on a bridge, too narrow for anything except the rails. I ducked under the beams and there was a creek.
One of my favorite creeks, and one I thought had been lost. It’s wild where it runs out of the mountains and where it empties into the sea, but when the developers paved the farms here they also paved the creek. No kidding. They bulldozed it straight, then lined the banks with concrete. All gone, I thought, but here in the railroad’s domain it’s still full of weeds and rocks and water just like the old days. I rode down the bank, missed the rocks and churned up the other side.
And there was another surprise. Time was this area contained a little town, a way station and social center for the farms. Then came a locked-gate retirement community, a giant shopping center, housing tracts, fast food and muffler repair shops. The old school and church sat forlorn by the side of the road, then one day they were gone. Turned out the developers dragged them away and put them in a park. Lovely place. But not where they were in real life, not where they were when this was a little town and I rode through trying out my XL all those years ago.
I rode up the creek bank, around and across a truck maintenance yard and look! A cluster of frame houses, the old general store. The Master Development Plan hasn’t been beaten but the original inhabitants are holding it at bay.
Some of the surprises aren’t so nice. Cruising along on the right-of-way again, I glanced up to check the sign on the bridge, so I know where I am, and there on the bridge are two kids.
They gawk and point and wave. See, I told myself, kids today aren’t so bad. They still admire adventure, still notice heros.
Yeah, maybe, but in this case what they were pointing at wasn’t me. It was the train that came thundering up from behind and passed me with inches to spare. When it comes to blocking ears, nothing beats a swollen head.
Chastened if not reformed, I rode through the weeds, into a parking lot and then the stream of shoppers jostling for position. Zip, and they’re gone.
Ever try to buy a part at the appliance store? If so, you don’t need my horror story. If not, you wouldn’t believe it. But I managed to get a rebuilt circuit board, easily modified if your son knows electronics.
For the return trip I went down the other side of the tracks to the creek, then more abandoned road, a new road and a power line trail. Back before the open lands were closed, I used to ride the power lines cross country and I used to visit a place that probably existed only in my mind.
It was a valley, with a spring and a stream. Where the valley opened into the canyon where the railroad goes to town, there was a cattle chute and a sign, Gavilán. A rancher, I figured, and a dream that didn’t quite catch hold. Last time I came through the March of the Plastic Houses had reached the ridgeline to the west, so I wanted to see the valley before it was too late.
It was too late. The trail was paved, the spring had been buried. Probably violated the zoning laws or something. So I rode on past the present . . . and found the past again.
Several weeks before this there was a grass fire here. Set by an arsonist, the sheriff said. No harm done in the sense of houses or lives lost, nor will the land be hurt. It burns in the fall and gets rain in the winter and every spring the grass comes back.
In this case, a benefit. The weeds were gone and I found an old wagon trace, next to the creek and cut (or so I fondly imagine) when Mr. Gavilan took the family to town. So I followed the trace until the creek, paved here, met the hills.
Running diagonally up the hill was a cow path. I mean a real one, built by cows two generations ago.
Had I thought about it, I wouldn’t have tried it. But up we went, in second gear and on the pipe. I didn’t put a wheel wrong. The ISDE people would have awarded me a gold medal. Malcolm Smith would have asked for advice. It may have been my finest ride. (Like all such moments of greatness, of course, there were no witnesses. Not like when you stall in the parking lot.) Then I rode down the other side of the hill and home, where we fixed the garage door opener in short order.
About a year ago, I made a bet. I predicted that because dual-purpose bikes were so good, they’d sell better in the 1982 model year.
They didn’t. Never mind the economy, etc., they didn’t sell, so I’m out the $20, well, I will be when the winner finds me.
I don’t much care. The buying public has spoken and I don’t much care about that, either. What bothers me is how anybody can get through a suburban Saturday without a bike like mine. EB
