Rites of Spring

A prudent cyclist either road-rides with a club or mountain bikes as an individual. It's my intention to mountain bike as long as I can -- into May hopefully. On one of our first 70 degree days I was mountain biking up a hilly paved road, up to the Continental Divide. Near the top a young female cyclist was resting; she wanted to know if I'd seen a friend of hers on the hill somewhere.

My goodness, it is amazing what an effect well-sculpted spandex can have on the male brain and body, even one as old as mine. I stood outside my own body and sniggered at myself. My attitude about female beauty is out of the mainstream, when compared to stereotypical nature lovers, those nice folks with the Tilley hat, wrinkled skin, binoculars, and zippered nylon khaki pants. ("Nice" was meant seriously, of course.) The subject is curiously uncomfortable around them; almost taboo actually. Where do they get such an odd and inconsistent viewpoint?

I've often been interested in explaining this: I once ran into a bicycle tourist in Baja California. He was headed back to the USA. His most precious cargo was a paperback copy of Thoreau's Walden. He was in his late twenties, and seemed to be a thoughtful, soul-searching sort of young man. When we started discussing Walden, I mentioned that I had read it several times, and couldn't remember Thoreau ever mentioning a pretty girl, which seemed odd to me since they are as much a part of Nature as pretty sunsets, butterflies, and flowers. He had no response.

Thoreau didn't mention pretty girls as part as nature because he wasn't really interested in nature Herself; rather, he was a product of decayed and frustrated Puritan New England, which was looking for a new religion. The Transcendentalist coterie finally found Salvation in Abolitionism.

Switching over to another famous Henry of New England ... a scion of the famous Adams family of Boston and Quincy, young Henry Adams was accompanying his father on a Washington DC political gig just before the Civil War. In his Education of Henry Adams, he recalls:

Life was not yet complicated. Every problem had a solution, even the negro. The boy [how Henry Adams referred to himself] went back to Boston more political than ever, and his politics were no longer so modern as the eighteenth century, but took a strong tone of the seventeenth. Slavery drove the whole Puritan community back on its Puritanism. The boy thought as dogmatically as though he were one of his own ancestors. The Slave power took the place of Stuart kings and Roman popes. Education could go no further in that course, and ran off into emotion;

The modern nature lover sees everything in nature as Perfect except homo sapiens, who alone of all the animal species has known Sin. The universe is a Dualism to them: virtually all of nature is on the side of Good; homo sapiens alone represents the principle of Evil. Thus Evil includes pretty young girls. Even dogs are Evil, not because they are canids but because they belong to a human.

Anyway, the next day I switched over to my road bike; I hadn't ridden it since early October. The road bicycle is so light and fast compared to that ol' tractor-like mountain bike. I dressed in bike shorts instead of pants. It felt so strange to expose skin, instead of cowering underneath sweaty layers. But I had to do something new. Something had to be reborn to celebrate spring.