Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
glimpses of dairy land. On the Elroy-Sparta trail, there are three tunnels a cyclist has to
negotiate in the dark. (A sign instructs you to walk your bike, but I unpacked my head-
lamp and got back in the saddle.) The longest of them is well over half a mile long, and
with water dripping noisily from the ceiling, sometimes onto your head, and the echoes
of your pedal strokes bouncing of the walls, traversing it is spooky, a carnival ride, en-
tertainingly eerie.
For someone who has ridden roads his whole cycling life, the concentrated trail riding
I've done lately has been a new wrinkle, mostly a joy but partly disconcerting. Being
away from traffic is simply delicious, a whole source of anxiety removed, and of course
having a road of one's own is something a cyclist relishes the way a football team relishes
its home stadium. On the other hand, as a cyclist, I'm used to finding my way in an un-
welcoming world, being the annoying little brother in the vehicular universe. I'm proud
of my ability to work around traffic to get to where I'm going. I like to think my skill in
negotiating debris-strewn highway shoulders is both earned and useful.
But on a trail, cyclists, particularly long-distance riders, are the home team. We're the
popular kids in the lunchroom, the cool clique, and that changes the enterprise. You run
into other riders fairly regularly on a trail—that's a change of pace in and of itself—but
most of them are local, out for an hour or two of easy exercise on a nice day, and I've
been surprised at how they tend to steer clear of me, nervously riding the far edge of the
path with their heads down or pointed determinedly straight ahead. I almost always say
hello; they almost always don't. For a while I interpreted this as resentment. With my
loaded-up bike I was a stranger invading their turf, like a motorcycle gang command-
eering the counter at the local diner. But what I've realized is that it's just the opposite;
they're the ones who think of themselves as invaders and that they see the turf as mine.
This first occurred to me in Minneapolis, where the complicated network of trails
around the city's lakes and through downtown is heavily used by joggers, in-line skaters,
and roller skiers as well as cyclists. On these trails bikes are the biggest vehicles, the
equivalent of lumber trucks, the things to watch out for, the bullying bad guys. Out
here in the boonies, except for maybe the teenaged boys doing tricks on their lowriders,
I still represent the dangerous traffic. The tentative riders detouring on the way home
from the store with grocery bags in the handlebar basket, the kids on their wobbling
training wheels with their parents running behind them, the elderly strollers wearing
sun hats, the racewalkers with their heel-toe stride and elbows held high—they stay out
of my way, as if the path is my natural habitat and they are trying to borrow it as unob-
trusively as possible, the way I keep to the shoulder on the highway.
Do I like this? Well, yes and no. On the long-distance trails, whether paved or un-
paved, you can feel pampered, yes, but you also feel sequestered, shut off from conven-
