Race Riot
by Jenn
Hopkins
I'm a bit of a placid person,
me. Calm, laidback, don't like upsetting people too much; can often be found
twiddling my thumbs at the back of an argument, wondering if the rest of the
pub is having any more fun than me. Not this time, though: now I'm well and
truly wound up. Proper, shouting, foot-stamping angry: ready to dust off the
soap-box and rant.
Simon and I are standing beside one of our favourite trails, Porn, named for
its ceaseless, hip-wriggly curves and the mysterious clippings of Playboy's
finest that appear nailed to trees every now and again. It cuts through the
top corner of our local woods, a skinny ribbon of dirt hiding playful stumps
beneath its green edges, a pencil scribble through fallen leaves and winter's
black cathedral trees. Well, that's how it's been for the years I've known it:
now, like 90% of the singletrack in this little paradise, it's a 5' wide motorway
of ruts and gloop, each and every corner dug out and pitted, the last of the
undergrowth scratched out in mud and tyre tracks.
As we stand there, bikes in hand and depression setting in with a vengeance,
we're both seething with betrayal. The saddest part of the sorry tale is that
this carnage is the result of one mountain bike race. Not kids on motorbikes,
horse riders or walkers but the equivalent of two or three winter's worth of
two-wheeled traffic inflicted on fragile, hiddenâ trails on a single wet autumn
Sunday.
Now, I don't have anything against racing in general. True, the appeal of spending
a perfectly useful weekend behaving like an amphetamine-fuelled
myopic hamster on a particularly large and wiggly wheel has always been a bit
of a mystery to me, but if that's your brand of joy, feel free. But before you
start packing the car for next weekend's race, in fact before you head off to
ride anywhere that's not your own local patch, pause for a moment and think
about those trails that are dearer to you than any others. The familiar friends
that welcome you back with a knowing, double-edged smile when tyres leave tarmac
at the gate. They might be the trails that taught you to ride, where you collected
your first stitches or broken bone; the trail that changed your life or the
trail that led to the end of the world. I'll bet you've got them, filed neatly
in that place reserved for Very Important Things.
Now, imagine 600 pairs
of eager wheels brutalising that fragile face in conditions that would have
common sense shouting down temptation and see you tucked up on the sofa with
tea, toast and the stereo remote. Not a pretty thought, is it?
Try and justify your presence on a trail that's tripled in width overnight to
the dog walker launching into a rant about the mess "you cyclists" cause. Spend
sad, lonely hours redefining lines from memory, filling in ruts and mud holes,
reinstating the corners erased where trees have been lopped to make a faster
racing line. Know that every repair you attempt is futile because once a trail
goes onto a racecourse, no amount of sticks laid down and polite requests will
restore its hiddenâ status and you might as well erect a large, neon billboard
at its discreet hedge-gap entrance. Squander those hard-earned trail skills
on singletrack dumbed down for riders who can't (or won't) ride roots, slide
themselves neatly between bar-grabbing trees or carve a perfect corner with
tender precision and care.
Depressed yet? Anxious? Feeling just the tiniest smidgen of guilt? You damn
well should be. If you'd not inflict that on your own little patch of heaven,
why are you happily heading off to do it to somebody else's? In an ideal world,
trails would be both weatherproof and beautiful, cutting corners would be the
hard way out and bikers would be welcomed wherever their wheels led them. Mind
you, in an ideal world it'd never rain on Sundays, nice bikes would come free
with cornflakes and your own local trails would be so mind-blowingly good that
it would be madness to waste valuable riding time driving to someone else's.
But fire roads are boring, wars happen and anyone with an ounce of mud in their
blood can't resist the golden singletrack carrot when it dangles in front of
their muddy noses. If the trails on offer can't cope with the battering inflicted
by too many wheels on fragile dirt and local relations, no race is a promotion
for this fluffy biking thing we do. When the weekend's over and all that's left
is a sad, trashed trail network and a few bits of marker tape blowing in the
wind, those who'd see bikes banished to tarmac won't discriminate between those
that came, rode and went home again and the riders getting their hands dirty
picking up the pieces of the trails that are dear to them.
These precious places grab their foothold on the planet in a timescale where
the life of a two-wheeled transient doesn't feature as the tiniest blip. You're
a hiccup in the turning of seasons, a glitch in the growth and renewal of seconds,
hours, years. Engage that rusty responsibility chip and let it ride tandem with
the grinning idiots adrenaline and fun; accept the challenges nature slips beneath
your wheels, leave the tools in the shed where they belong and learn to ride
your bike. Celebrate those slippery roots and learn to avoid those little stumps
with a hop and a cheery hello as others did in the years before this trail knew
you. Make your presence momentary, harmless, as beautiful and magical as the
trail itself: a flash of mechanical rainbow, so brief that you may or may not
have ever been there at all.
© Jenn Hopkins
Outcast,
issue 8