I am not what you might call a great descender. Going downhill fast on a bike might seem fairly straightforward, but that is precisely the problem. Most of the time it’s not straight, it’s curvy. In the case of mountain biking, it can be bumpy too. When the rains have not come for several passages of Apollo, the bumps multiply and grow edges. In uphill navigation, the speeds are significantly less, and one has more immediate control over them, thereby lengthening decision making time. Going downhill is more like an impending wreck for the length of the grade. Any trucker will tell you that brakes are not there to stop the wreck, they are there to help you take the wreck where you think it should go. But don’t ever believe you are in control. Decisions need to happen faster, and the room for error is reduced.
So collecting information is important. Collecting good information is even better. Something about today’s light on the sides of Little Hickory Top in the Bent Creek Experimental Forest made good information hard to come by. Somehow the oblique angle of the late November sun robbed the light of any contrast. And while I have heard people talk about this “depth perception” thing, it is not something I have experienced personally. Finally, setting one’s foot down during a mountain bike ride is like an alcoholic’s first drink. Once it is done, it’s not so hard to do it again. This means I stop taking chances even when those chances are less than ones I have taken previously.
All of this translates into a slow descent to the base of Little Hickory Top. Today the lower slopes were filled with riders who I would dare say do not venture to those woods more than once or twice a year. Climbing past, I regarded them as globules of fat in the bloodstream that is the trail system. I, of course, was a superhero. This illusion lasted to somewhere near Ingles Field gap, although the father pulling his child in a trailer at the upper end was fairly humbling. As the descent began, I detected trouble which was not assuaged by the nice young man with the deer rifle. Further along, as I set down my foot yet again at a stream, the sounds behind me were surely those of the deer which that young man wanted to shoot. Looking back, I saw a fellow biker who was patiently waiting for me to proceed. His name: Lipitor. I was the blockage.