Lake Mattawa and the Hills of Orange, Wendell, and New Salem

The Virginian and I have been eyeing this weekend for a month or so, I figured it might be one of the last opportunities to get out for a massive ride. I'd hoped for an end-of-the-year century but that proved to be beyond our scope, mostly for time reasons (no matter how finely conditioned we are, 100 miles would still take a good eight hours of cycling to accomplish and with the weather now cold and the length of daylight abbreviated, a century at this point in the year is out of our reach).

Moosehorn Road, New Salem

Instead of a road century, we opted for dirt roads and forest paths in the hills of Orange, New Salem, Wendell, Shutesbury, Montague. Instead of the graphite arrow (my road bike), I turned to the Crust (first time since the D2R2 in August). These choices proved propitious and while we ended up covering 'only' 47.70 miles (76 km), they were rugged, exhilarating, challenging miles on roads largely bereft of traffic and through forests on what I imagined to be old colonial cart paths. I half expected to come across an old rickety dray loaded down with cider apples, a stubborn mule paused in the ruts.

The Virginian (aka Benzoid or the Benster from Ventoux Calls) is a decades-long riding partner. We started out on mountain bikes back in the early 1990s but then were swept up in the tsunami of Lance and switched to road riding around 1999. I've been a pavement devotee ever since. And yet now the Crust, with its more rugged frame and slightly beefier tires, opens up a new variety of riding. Not exactly mountain biking (i.e., no single track, no crazy technical rock/root/downhill/uphill madness) but not just road-riding, the Crust is the perfect bike for the kind of byways and opportunities one finds in the lesser populated regions of central and central-west Massachusetts. Plus, with autumn conditions making the roadways a little more perilous (blowing wet leaves, roadside debris), the Crust offers the comfort of rugged dependability.

The Virginian

So the Virginian and I met at Lake Mattawa in Orange. The temperature stood around 40 degrees (4 c) and the sky was steely gray and overcast when we set out. It's all hills and woods and small scruffy roads through this swath of the state, even the pavement roads are back country and rough and little traveled. And there's plenty of climbing. Back in our mountain biking days, I'd written "Ride to Climb" on my helmet, I was relatively light back then, not much more than 150 lbs, and I was, indeed, a fine climber and a decent bike handler; I could stay upright while climbing a single track path all rooty and bouldery. Being small was good.

Since those days, I aged and puffed up, taking an office job and gaining 10, 15, 20 pounds. I almost got old. Finally, earlier this year at a Zen meditation retreat it occurred to me that something had to change, that I had to shed the poundage that I'd accumulated in the previous two decades, that I had to re-orient the glutton within and become literally less than I was. So, from April 1st I've been consciously tracking my calorie consumption and actively trying to carve away the bloated excess that'd gradually formed on my once-sinewy frame. I was like a farm-raised salmon at the beginning of the year, an embarrassment to the sleek, silvery, aquatic arrow of a shad that might still exist beneath my suet rolls.

Shad Rides

Blessedly, I was right. The shad lives. Since that April 1st reckoning when I tipped the scale at 169 lbs (76 kg), I have melted it all away so that now, November, nine months later, pedaling aside the Virginian up the first steep hill of the day, I'm lighter than I was back in our mountain biking heyday, back in my early 30s. This morning I tipped the scale at 145.5 lbs (65 km), a quicksilver dart of a shad, a shad with a second life, an anadromous sliver of scale and fin returning to familiar spawning grounds.

Once again, I can climb. Perhaps not race speed climb, but climb doggedly, surely, inexorably. Without stiff log legs or the gasp-breath lung burn. Once again, climbing is a focused, Zen-informed practice of pedal-turning. In fact, the front wheel of my road bike is a Mavic and on the hub is a yellow Mavic sticker. When out of the saddle on a lengthy climb, I focus on the Mavic sticker turning turning turning (if it were a songbird it would be the "revolving yellow mavic") and forget all else but the turning of the pedals and the consistent revolution of the yellow hub. Trance-like.

Up Chestnut Hill Rd, passed the steep fields where the annual garlic and arts festival takes place, the pavement ends and we're on packed dirt, more climbing, more Chestnut Hill Rd. (there are "Chestnut Hill" roads in every town out here suggesting how extensive the chestnut trees were 100 or 200 years ago; there are few left today).

Then it's off the packed dirt and onto Mt. Mineral Rd and right onto New Boston Rd, a road that, by its name, might suggest some importance but which is, actually, a nearly abandoned track through deep woods. It's kept clear by, perhaps, cross country skiers and snowmobilers, perhaps hunters or mountain bikers. The trees are close overhead, great numbers of hemlocks spread out up the slopes on either side, the road for a while follows a stream so it's fairly flat for a ways following along the water way, and interspersed with the hemlocks and white pines are great old hardwoods, maples and oaks, remnants, perhaps, from colonial days.

New Boston Rd Heading South

New Boston Rd Looking Back North

For long stretches at a time we ride single file, the Virginian usually leading the way. I pay close attention to my pedaling, to the road and its pitfalls and obstacles; but I also drift off in fantasy. November in New England conjures images of Bruegel the Elder and his fantastic Dutch landscapes and peasant imagery from the 1500s - somber, smokey fields, dun hillsides, gnarled tree trunks, huddled villages, burghers wrapped in woolen cloaks, pottery jugs, clay pipes, swaths of browns, ochres, russets, burnished oranges, carts and casks. I delight my imagination by disappearing into the past. I escape the wrath of Phillip II's soldiers, I'm a rebel peasant under the sway of William of Orange, we will rout the occupiers and regain the Low Countries and celebrate with overflowing milk pails, with jugged hare, with salted herring and potatoes roasted in fire embers.

A Forest Road

It goes on like this for hours. We stop to consult the map periodically. It's been years since we've ridden these roads. We emerge onto pavement and then launch off again onto dirt. Eventually we climb out of North Amherst and head up East Chestnut Hill Rd. in Montague and stop for a visit at Hotar's abode, Hotar like the character from a Norse Epic; bearded, burly, welcoming, once-upon-a-time a very committed cyclist but these days now more of a farmer philosopher and loyal companion. We warm up in his kitchen, even imbibe a tipple of cognac, eat an energy bar, and then re-mount the steads for the last hour.

We've breached the arcing pivot of the loop and we begin the return, much of which is downhill. I'm chilled now after sitting, my inner layers damp. To stave off the incipient cold of the return journey, I stuff a folded paper grocery bag inside my wool jersey (Hotar didn't happen to have any old copies of L'equipe or I would have used that). It works! The thick paper bag traps the warmth from my torso inside my layers and at the same time blocks the wind buffeting my chest. And I'm warm again.

The light grows wan. We zoom down long slopes from the center of Wendell, back toward the cars parked beside Lake Mattawa, back to the 21st century.

Ride Stats: Ride #85, 47.70 miles (76 km), 12.5 mph (20 kph), 3 hours 47 minutes in the saddle. Saturday, November 9th, 11:30 am to 4:00 pm all told.