The birch stands out. Unique. Defiant.
A stone’s throw from Lights Out Bridge, beside the snow-covered single track, it spreads arms still laden with leaves, months ago turned the color of brown sugar. Stop and you’ll hear them rustle in the wind, a dry chatter, muffled, like hens cooped up for the night. But no one stops. No one listens. On a brief stretch of trail between a steep climb and a sharp left turn onto an unforgiving bridge, riders who pass that birch see only the path before them.
I’m trying to be different, to look deep into Westwood, seeing contours of a thousand angles defined by recent snows on ravines and logs. Under less-than-ideal conditions, I’m tracing deer runs and looking into fox holes, but casting only quick glances as I pass, seeing things in snapshots. My eyes act as shutters, framing the landscape in factions of a second.
Everything about the sport of mountain biking suggests I roll on, mastering snowy turns and frozen ruts, pushing myself, concentrating only on the trail.
Everything about who I am screams to do otherwise.
Only when I stop on a hilltop and close my eyes do I begin to see the park, the flowing of treetops not unlike a slow-moving stream. I open my eyes to flashing light, the lake mirroring its survival. From a different hill, it’s the staccato conversation of a thousand Canada geese that draws me to close my eyes again, and from a point of land not half a mile away, I open them wide to observe the shuffling, bobbing, standing of that crowd, with one goose too nonchalant or tied or sick to be part of the waddling wave that slides off the ice and into the safety of freezing water. It lies motionless, neither time nor a raised voice bringing movement. Only as I mount the bike again, leaving the goose for dead, does it stir, as if to ask me, “Why all the fuss?”
I ride on, reminded by geese and birch trees alike that this is a sanctuary. Here, it has never been about the bike.
10 miles — Westwood Park
POSTSCRIPT… A tradition is born. This marks the second straight time I’ve started the new year with a ride at Westwood Park. A special thanks to John Rogers for the photo to the right.
