As a young person, August loomed as only decline can. The beginning of the end of summer. These were the days as a grade schooler I stayed out as possible, dreading the call of my mother: Paaaa-triiiiick.
When my love of cycling effervesced and seeped into every corner of my life, August was what happened after the Tour de France ended. a month-long fifth of July. The best part of summer extinct as a dinosaur for the next 11 months.
To a Southerner, August carries all the grace and wonder of an affliction. If an entire month could be avoided, this would be not just the nominee, but the presumptive winner. January can be battled with an extra layer of clothes, but there’s no peeling away of the epidermis to reduce the agony of the shorthand Southern meteorologists employ for the worst August days: “90s and 90s.”
But it places not so forsaken as to feature in Faulkner novels, August is a time of ripening, a season of berries. In her great poem, “Blackberrying,” Sylvia Plath writes of her fingers stained “with blue-red juices.” What she doesn’t betray in her poem is that this tattoo of picking is the mark of finding perfectly ripe berries, that the ones most ready to eat often pop at the slightest touch, that the sweetest aren’t the ones dropping from the vine, but the ones that offer the faintest resistance to being picked, the ones that rupture in the picking. Those stained fingers are a kind of victory.
Nothing interrupts a ride with such voluntary joy as ripe berries. I have loops worked out in which I know I’ll pass blackberries, road rides that don’t require a gravel bike, but I’ll ride the gravel bike so that I can step on low vines to reach berries that more diminutive pickers can’t reach.
And of the many experiences I’ve shared with dogs, I’ve never felt more united with their species than when sharing the delight of a ripe blackberry. Life can be that simple.
Cycling has always been a sport of place, an activity that changed with locale. When I left the south I never guessed it would deliver me to the most sublime experiences of fruit of my life, experiences I can repeat each day. I never thought I’d relish an experience that made time seem to stand still in August.