I mark the autumn by falling off my bike more. There is a cruelty to the season, as the heat of summer finally relents and makes all that pedaling easier, but suddenly leaves obscure the way forward. Suddenly, I’m consumed with trying desperately to keep control of both of my tires as they cut loose from a trail surface I know intimately most other times of year.
It is currently peak leaf season, which most people take to mean the colors are their most full and vibrant. What I mean is that the trails are all as deep as they’ll ever be in dead organic matter. We will eventually get it all tamped down, literally ground to dust, but right now traction is a random event, roots and rocks hide beneath the surface, and the sphincters of the careful riders remain semi-puckered.
My friend said she thought it was “fun.” Initially, she’d been reticent. A few unseen obstacles had pushed her this way and that, but then at some point both wheels cut loose and instead of going full yard sale, she’d slid neatly down the trail and into a soft corner, where she’d regained traction and rolled away like some sort of Hong Kong stuntwoman.
My “fun” tends to look more like sliding tire-loose out of a switchback and rolling into the bracken or failing to be able to scrub enough speed in a descent and baseball sliding, with my bike, into whatever bunch of branches and rocks have collected at the bottom.
It’s ok. It’s all ok. A little scrape. A couple bruises. A leaf jammed in the top your helmet.
I recognize that the math is different this time of year, multivariate, algebraic, concepts Ms. Shanklin and Mr. Casey struggled to get across to me. Math never really held my interest with its cold abstraction and its “right answers.” I prefer gray areas, guesses and romantic paeans.
Which is why I like to scan a section of trail and take a stab at the right line through the fallen leaves, rather than working my way methodically through the problem. Give me the risk of language over the surety of numbers every time, the speed and thrill of it in lieu of mere completion, better to have loved and tumbled into the rock-strewn verge than never to have ridden at all.
I did, I should confess, take a moment to shush the leaves off the “mangler” a precipitous rock roll with a daunting crack running through its middle. There is romance, and there is folly. Such is leaf math.