Ride # 22: Rare Roadkill

March 15, about 3 in the afternoon, 49 degrees

This ride almost didn't happen. All morning it was sunny, bright, blue sky, warm. I ran errands. Took care of business. Delayed riding. And when I did start to get ready I knew I had plenty of daylight ahead of me so I opted for some stretching first. I don't normally stretch before riding but I've been bothered all week by a nagging pain in my right hip point muscle where the connective band runs across from the lower back to the front of the quad.

When I stepped out onto the porch where the Crux Elite waited I received quite a surprise. To the west (where I was heading), the sky had turned ominously black. A huge swath of heavy cloud was moving in and the temperature was dropping as the wind picked up. Fuck! Then the rain started. Tentative at first and then full bore. Thwarted! I put the bike away and resigned myself to not riding. I considered retreating to the bathtub for a long soak.

Instead, I waited. I checked the weather radar on the internet and saw that what seemed to be an incoming storm was just a band of harshness moving through. So I waited it out. And when the coast cleared, I headed back out.

But where earlier it had been spring-like, sunny, welcoming, now it was windy, intermittently overcast, increasingly unforgiving. It was as if winter had bitch-slapped spring and was now ready to bitch-slap me. Except I flipped winter the bird just as the Virginian would have.

A Sholan Loop, the Princeton Hills. Road gutter rivulets from the melting. Frost heaves and tarmac breakdown. The harsh spew of sand. Roadsides still banked with begrimed snow. Farms. Giant winter marshmallows. The sprawl of machinery in the farmyard. Forests of skeletal trees. Landscapes of pure resignation. Shad in the midst of it all.

Running Rivulets

Farm Sprawl Style

Shad Aware of the Marshmallows

Shortly after I took the above photograph on Upper North Rd, in Sterling, I came upon some very esoteric road kill. It was a species known to appear in this area only rarely. At first, I rode by it but, realizing what I'd just seen, I turned around and pulled up alongside the corpse. There was no mistaking it. There, at my wheel, was the now empty and despondent can of Heady Topper.

Rarely Seen in These Parts

There was no mistaking it. All the identifying marks were evident. How this particular Topper came to this ignominious fate is impossible to say. I left it where I found it (echoes of Jerry Garcia singing "All I leave behind me is only what I found").

Unmistakable, if Seldom Seen

The good thing is that my hip seemed to loosen up as the ride went on. I purposefully changed positions a lot, tried to stretch it periodically, tried to notice when I was making undue demands of it and back off. I stood up more than usual when climbing, that seemed to allow it maximum unfolding and elongation. It seemed silly to stress it by staying in the saddle on moderate climbs; why not stand up and work the tall-in-the-saddle style?

As I climbed and descended, as I dodged broken tarmac and potholes, as I rough-coasted over frost heaved straightaways, I thought of Dominica. I realized that that's what riding in the Princeton Hills at the tail end of an exceedingly harsh winter is like. Dominica, that youthful, volcanic, rainforest'd ragamuffin island in the Caribbean where The Virginian and I rode in 2006, an island with mashed up roads and daunting climbs. That's what it's like here, now, in March, except colder, and with snow.

Shot from the saddle

A Shard of the Lemon Star

Ride Stats: 20.90 miles (33k), 12.5 mph, an hour and thirty-nine minutes.

Road Kill: 1 Heady Topper, a species seldom seen in Lemonstar or anywhere in Massachusetts. Indigenous to Waterbury, Vermont and areas of northern Vermont. Limited numbers, difficult to find. A Life List spotting for sure.