I’m waiting for the smile. The laugh. They don’t come.
Instead, the man scowls, standing next to an inverted plastic bucket where a minute earlier he had been hunched over a hole in the ice. He points a finger at John and me, then at a line of trees to the east.
“You aren’t supposed to have your bikes on the ice,” he says, as cold as the breeze to our backs.
We reply with blank stares.
“You aren’t allowed out here,” he says, as if we didn’t hear him. “It’s against the rules.”
John breaks our silence by simply replying, “Is that so?”
“You’re supposed to be on the bike trail,” the ice fisherman begins anew, pointing back to the woods. “And a number of us don’t like that, either.”
We ask him why.
“You went through the best mushroom patches,” he said, as if John and I designed the trail ourselves. “And you’re causing erosion over by the bank.”
Yup, that’s us. Renegade mountain bikers. Breaking the rules by riding our bikes on the ice, because, you know, 180 acres of frozen lake isn’t big enough for five ice fisherman and two guys on mountain bikes.
Then there’s those darned trail builders, maliciously plotting the course to go through all the best mushroom patches. Every single one.
Heck, truth be told, it was us hiding on that grassy knoll in Dallas, popping off shots at President Kennedy. And the cover-up behind that whole Roswell gig? Yup, us too. Stinkin’mountain bikers.
The one-sided conversation with this delusional guy on the middle of Westwood Lake is almost enough to ruin a perfectly good ride.
Almost, but not quite.
After all, how often do you get the chance to ride a bike on a lake?
John takes the correct approach to the whole situation with the fisherman. “Someone like that, it’s best just to laugh at them and keep on going,” he tells me.
That’s pretty much what we do, moving on down the ice, from nearly one end of that frozen body of water to the other, touching the Floating Bridge with our front tires the way a cross-country cyclist dips a wheel into the ocean at the end of a journey.
We stand there and talk for a while, admiring the beauty of Westwood’s finest winter coat. We snap a few photos to help us remember this bright day, then mount our bikes and follow our tracks back across the ice. The hole previously occupied by the bitter fisherman is now abandoned. We see him to the west, an ice auger in his hands. He must not have been catching anything at the previous location.
Undoubtedly, you know who he blames.
Mountain bike: 3.05 miles — on a frozen Westwood Lake
