Double Hamster on The Rocks

Winter riding is like winter hiking. It isn’t the cold that will kill you. It’s the wind and your own sweat. You’ll want to find clothing that is not made out cotton, because cotton retains water and turns to ice when it gets wet. You want to wear wool or polyfill or something made out of extruded shredded recycled plastic soda bottles.

When I arrived in DC, I had three changes of polypropylene long underwear, some high tech pants, a liner jacket, a regular jacket, three shirts, four pairs of socks, a helmet liner, a face mask and some new gloves.

Dave’s fiancée stood in the door and looked at me and paused before looking back at Dave, who was stumbling around in a pair of wool dress pants and a tattered flannel shirt with a button down collar. He was looking for his wool vest. A white cotton union suit peeked out beneath his pants. Snow was blowing off the roof and curling around the eaves near the living room window. His fiancée watched impassively as Dave searched around for his scarf and gardening gloves. By the time she turned back to face me, she’d worked out a detailed backup fiasco plan along with an estimate of each major contingency as well as a detailed estimate of the number and location of the bones that he’d break before freezing to death. I’d known her for years. This is how she operated.

-Dave, honey, are you wearing enough clothing?
-Yeah, baby, sure. It’s all wool… it’s really warm
-Dave… John looks more, um, prepared.
-John doesn’t know what he’s doing. He probably spent a lot of money that he didn’t need to spend. He always does that. Where are my gloves?
-Which gloves?
-My gardening gloves.

Her even, resigned expression remained fixed until we left that afternoon.

We drove to a parking lot off a side road just north of Great Falls, MD. The day had become hazy and gray, half-twilight by the time that we put the gear on the bikes and locked the car. We agreed to bike a few miles down the trail and then set up camp. We’d begin the serious ride to Havre De Grace in the morning. “It’s late today… we’ll get up real early and start tomorrow. We can definitely make Havre De Grace in one day. It’s hardly more than sixty miles”

At it’s widest, the C&O canal trail and accommodate a full Brownie troop, mother and troop leader in tow, arm to arm. It’s the width of a schoolbus, a small house, a flattened telephone pole, a train car angled to one side. Further up, past Bethesda, MD, the trail narrows, but it can always accommodate two cyclists or three rollerbladers abreast, and knots of joggers can be seen along it’s length during the summer months, when the trail moves from dust and gravel to dirt and shade, winding up along the edge of the Potomac river, through Great Falls National Park on mile 15 and the Seneca creek aqueduct on mile 22.8.

This trail, domain of strollers and the elderly in the summer, had been reduced to a rutted single lane carved through the recent snow and ice. Every inch of slush on the trail had frozen up and the bike tires crunched and creaked and slid under us. We weren’t walking but we were forced to go slowly. We each skidded out once, planting a leg down to catch the bike, in the first five miles.

To be continued...