A Few Brief Moments
by
Scott Yule

I wrote this after coming home from one of our clubs weekly race nights.

About a kilometer into lap three. It's the kind of single track we love. Fairly tight, hard packed. The kind that tempts you to pour on the speed then smirks at you as you grit your teeth going into corners, hoping the shoulder knobs on your tires hold up their end of the bargain.

It's about 7:40 PM. The sun is low and coming through the cedars like a strobe light at a 70's disco. The smell of the river wafts into my head and reminds me not to be surprised again. This stretch of trail is about to spit me out onto the bank six feet above the river on what feels like a balance beam. Crumbling edges and roots, with evil intentions lay in wait for the less than fully focused rider.

Back into the flashing semidarkness of the forest and I hear it. Sound carries strangely in here. A grunt, that dull 'clink' as chain meets chainstay,the snap of a chain catching a new cog. He's behind me. Speed and trees, rocks and roots. The second it would take to glance over my shoulder would be more than enough time to bury myself among the trilliums.

It's a guess, but I'm saying a guy riding that close isn't content with my pace. He's looking for a twenty six inch hole to shoot twenty six pounds of bike through, leaving me to become the phantom sounds behind him.

The universe becomes the moment. Six inches wide and four heart beats long. The distance from here to where the thin brown ribbon disappears around the next bend. As hard as I ride, as hard as I can, the sound of him never seems to fade as much as I'd like it to. I catch myself spending too much time listening and try to block it out. Ahead is a straightaway sixty feet long that rises sharply into a knoll the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. Beyond it lies a nasty little rock garden that single-handedly justifies the money spent on full suspension. It saps your speed like riding into a lake.

Coming to the roof of the Volkswagen I see it. A golden beam of light, a message from heaven, the perfect line. No more than two inches wide it's actually straight enough that you can thread a bike through this needle making the necessary changes in trajectory by tipping your head from this side to that. From the hood of the beetle the bike and I become weightless just long enough to subtlety shift the bike under me. I stop breathing for that shard of time it takes to skim along that golden beam and evade the treacherous collection of skulls.
My sly grin is quickly replaced with a squinting grimace by what I hear as I lean into the next corner. There behind me, the sickening thud of a human body bouncing off the hard packed dirt. The crazy clatter of a bike, unweighted, cart wheeling through the weeds. The profane words seething from between angry, gritted teeth, then silence.