This Town

So, today I went on my first proper mountain biking ride. As tradition would have it in this family, the person who is more experienced in this kind of intense physical activity and agility is at least twenty years my senior - this time, my father. A similar pattern has emerged with ping-pong and hiking (my grandfather) and running (my uncle).

So, today, my father and I hopped on the bicycles here in Santa Cruz. We zipped down West Cliff Drive, the winding road that follows the coast through most of Santa Cruz. On our way, we saw every single bit of Santa Cruz culture. Surfers clambering down the rocks to the beach, skateboarders as nonchalant as humanly possible (one on his cell phone with a bag of bagels in the other hand, another who took his t-shirt off while cruising down a slight hill on the bike path), scarily driven parents who are jogging with a fancy athletic stroller containing their small children, dogs of all shapes and sizes accompanying people of all shapes and sizes, frizzy-haired peaceable folks meditating in the scrub near the ocean, and a general beach attitude down by the Boardwalk, the small amusement park/beach downtown. Keep in mind that while the East Coast is in the middle of the so-called Arctic Vortex (soon, our news people will run out of ways to make things sensationalist. We'll  just be too jaded. Vortex. Good grief.) and here it's mid 70s. Kind of hard to reconcile in my brain that both can happen at the same time.

After the Boardwalk, the bike path started meandering out of town and into the woods where it lead to the most exciting and challenging bike trips I've ever taken. The route is through a forest called Pogonip and brilliantly, the trail was designed as a bike path - not as a hiking path that then some bikes decided to use - but actually as a bike path. That means the twists and turns, the curves and the dips all make sense on a bike. Now, they're not easy, but they're manageable. I have not, in a long time, ever had a time when I so frequently thought, "No, there's no way." Whether it was a root that I would have to get up speed to ramp over, a curve with dust that spun underneath my tires but I had to get around and keep moving, or just a very steep hill when my lungs and legs refused to comply -- several times I thought, "I can't!" -- don't get me wrong. Once or twice, I was right. I was triumphed by roots and rocks a few times and had to stop, and then the fun part was getting enough speed going to actually have the bike moving again. Kind of tricky while going uphill. But even though sometimes the 'can't' was right, it wasn't all the time. And that's cool.

I asked my dad as we were meandering through the very beginnings of the path and seeing other bikers come whizzing towards us. "Is there a difference in the trail?" I asked, "Which way you go on this trail, I mean?" "Oh, yes!" he replied. "The other way is all downhill. The way we're going is all uphill."

And so it was. We ended up on the UC Santa Cruz campus, which was far more gorgeous than I ever knew, even though with the drought here much that ought to have been green was brown. Then, of course, we got to ride back down all the hill that we had gone up - though a different route. It was a great loop and a great ride and at the very top of the hill, we had a view of the ocean over some of the rooftops and trees of the town. It felt too beautiful to be allowed, or to be real.