Riding the Green Pastures of Home
by Patrick Clark
(Reprinted from the Patrick-edited Kokopelli Notes, a magazine of “Walking and Biking for a Greener Planet”…sadly now gone: A nonprofit org with money trouble. Any editors/rescuers willing to help reorganize it – contact them through OYB.)
After a hard day at work last fall, I was lamenting the lack of mountain-biking trails near my home. I looked out my window at the distant ridges, across the cow pastures, the tobacco fields and grain silos. There’s got to be some mountain biking trails out there, I thought, but where? That day last fall I headed out with a craving for real trails. Several miles up the valley I pedaled, turning off the smooth pavement onto a gravelled road.
The gravel road forked onto an even rougher road with a sign which said “Bee Branch.” This road led across what looked like a 100-year-old wooden bridge with gaps between the boards five inches wide. About a mile from where I had turned, I found myself in a mysterious and hidden bowl-shaped cove. All around were pastures worn bare by the overgrazing of cows. The mountains, which from the distance looked like soft and rounded ghosts, were now towering over me like giants.
Cows have paths, I thought, why can’t mountain bikes? I turned up a lonely looking tractor road that went through a small tobacco patch to a gate. I stood on the first rung of the four foot metal gate, carefully lifted the bike over my head, and eased it down over the other side.
The path, worn bare by the daily migrations of cows between field and watering hole, was perfect for my knobby tires. The zig-zag approach turned out to be the solution. I just pedaled uphill along one side of the pasture at a gentle angle, until I felt like turning toward the other side. The climbing could be as difficult or as easy as I chose, because I was creating my own trail. Soon I reached that sunny patch and took off my sweat soaked gloves and helmet to gaze at the expanse of Appalachian countryside.
It was then that l noticed a farmer on a tractor, methodically moving big, round bales of hay which were scattered around a field. In my deep meditation, I hadn’t seen the tractor going back and forth.
If the farmer didn’t like me in his pasture, it was too late. I had climbed the slope and was ready for the funnest part. Obviously, there was no way to go straight down for very long, like an arrow out of control. Down would have to mean contoured angles and switchback turns, the way I came up. The bike headed down like a beast with its own power and will – down at a blinding speed, a rush of wind, a blur of sky and mountain. Too scary! I gently eased the bike to point on a more horizontal angle and let it come to a gliding halt on the slope.
On this first exploration of mountain pasture riding, I timidly nudged around until becoming acquainted with the personality and peculiarity of the new discovery. Within a month I would be doing loop the loops, rocking down drop-off banks, curving in and out of small bowls, and bouncing air-borne over humps. But the whole valley was now covered in darkening shade, so I left with my appetite only teased.
I pedaled further up the cove to talk the man on the tractor. He was at the far end of the field away from the road. I waited there near a barn where he was stacking the hay. The tractor, with big forks in front scooped up another six-foot ball of hay and came hurriedly back, like a bee gathering nectar. As the farmer approached, he turned off the tractor. “I hope you don’t mind me riding on your land,” I said loudly so he could hear me twenty feet away.
“Oh, it don’t bother me. I’ve never seen a boy going straight up a mountain on a bike. How many gears does that thing have?”
When I told him it had twenty one gears, I realized what a spectacle it must be – an creature half bike and half human, appearing out of the blue and crawling up the pasture like an insect with tentacles. The old man was sitting on the tractor leaning over as if glad for a rest. “They don’t make bicycles the way they used too,” he said.
I asked him if he knew anything about the abandoned house which was a bit further up the road.
“Boy, I know everyone who’s ever lived in this valley. I’ve seen people come and go before you was even born.” The man talked about two families who had long ago occupied the house and told me nobody had lived there since the sixties. “Ever since they put electricity in the lower part of the valley,” he said. “There was a real good fiddler lived there a couple years, way back.”
I looked at the abandoned house and tried to imagine what it would have been like. “Did they have barn dances and get-togethers?” I asked.
“Back then people were too busy to play-party much,” the man said, still leaning forward against the tractor’s steering wheel. “We had lots of work to do, back before we had tractors and electricity. I was sixteen or seventeen years old when my family signed up for electricity. We did all our work with horses and mules. But you wanted to know if we ever got together to celebrate. Sometimes we did. We met at the old Sandmush School – you know, right down before you turned up Willow Creek?
“My school teacher used to pick me up in her horse and buggy and take me to that school. I never had to walk like a lot of the kids. We used the same building for a church – Big Sandy United Methodist – where I’ve gone all my life.”
I must have been asking too many questions of a total stranger with whom I hadn’t developed trust. As if suddenly realizing he was telling me more than he should, the man said, “I tell you I’m not good with history. I don’t know dates worth a hoot. By the way, my name is Charlie Wells. What did you say your name was? And what are you doing way out here anyways?”
I told Mr. Wells my name, and tried to think how to explain my uprooted and spread-out life to this man who had been firmly planted in this tucked-away place valley for over 60 years. How do I describe the complicated moves I had made, the cities I had seen, the career decisions I had faced which had flipped me around the continent like a pancake? Would he really believe that I would decide to move out here in the country where life is hard and economic opportunities terrible, just because I like the mountains? Why did I move a thousand miles away from my family? I decided to sum it all up in a nutshell. Putting my helmet back on my head, I told Mr. Wells, “I moved out here because it is a great place to bike.”
There was a silence as we both looked up at the sky. One star was already visible and the chilly dew was soaking us. Charlie turned on the tractor and shouted that he was glad to meet me and I could ride my bicycle in his pasture anytime. I thanked him and we waved as he turned the tractor toward the barn.
