It isn’t found on our local bike club calendar. There is no food or water at the rest stops and the route isn’t marked on anything but the maps handed out at the ride start. No patch for participating but someone did make up stickers this year. The attitude is pretty much keep an eye out for others and take care of yourself.
The ride is called the Dynamo, named after a similar ride in England, and our version starts out on pavement but pretty quickly moves onto dirt and continues to go back and forth, with quite a bit of dirt, for the rest of the 130 or so miles. A fair bit of the route is through land as desolate as can be while still having some road through it, and it has a major dirt climb at about mile 105, along with regular rolling terrain. Everyone needs to bring anything and everything they may need for the ride but thanks to our generous friend Basil we did have a support vehicle to carry all the tools, clothes, spares, pretzels, Sparks, Clif bars and everything else we brought.
The kicker, of course, is that the ride starts at 10:00 on Saturday night. PM. Here we are at the start:
This ride is problematic in a number of ways: 130 miles is a long hard weekend for me, not one ride. The ride left at 10, got back to town about 9:30AM, had eight planned rest stops plus breakdowns, peeing, etc which ate up at least two hours of the elapsed time, so these guys were hauling acre through the night, which is not my specialty. And most of all, I like to sleep at night.When I was the age of a lot of these guys I would have shown up and tried to do the whole ride, suffered mightily, maybe even cracked and took the sag the rest of the way but I would have gone for it. Why not? Back then I lived in drafty apartments with nobody depending on me in the morning and nobody making the bed all cozy. But now I’m closer to 65 than 21 and I have needy little morning people and a cozy bedmate so why bother? Haven’t I grown up and come to my senses?
Apparently not.
As I tried to noodle through the question of why I was there I kept coming back to a story that my father told me many times. He would have been maybe 16, which means it took place in 1934. On summer evenings, as often as possible, he and his two best friends would oil up and adjust their bikes and cruise all over town. These are my personal pep boys, Marty, Milt and Jack. Dad talked about going through Durand Eastman park and how wonderful and fragrant that was, and maybe they’d stop and sit at the beach for a while. Back then, Rochester was a beautiful and prosperous city with Lake Ontario beaches
and plenty of glacial rises to sprint up and glide down. He and his buddies would ride all over town,
checking out girls, laughing and racing each other when the moment seemed right. And they would always end up at his uncle Henry’s sandwich shop. Henry and his wife and daughter lived behind the shop and he would let the boys have anything they wanted – homemade ice cream, cookies, candy, corned beef sandwiches, whatever. And then, full and happy, the boys would cruise home a little more slowly because it was dark now, and get ready for bed dreaming about when they would be able to do this again.So maybe I’m hoping to get a little bit of that warm, ‘riding with the guys’ feeling as I lined up with Kyle, who is a joy to watch ride a bike and boy can he ride, and Blake who rode the whole thing on an old cheap bike converted to a single speed, and Kurt who generated the electricity for his lights (instead of using those wussy battery lights like everyone else) and Mike who brought a small consignment store’s worth of clothing from multiple decades and sports, and Jonathan who rode the team issue race bike right down to his name and country flag on the top tube and who was so grateful when Mike dug into his duffel bag and pulled out a down jacket for him at one particularly cold time of the night, and Marshall who is definitely old enough to know better but doesn’t act or ride like it, and Johnny who rode his 29er mountain bike with disk brakes, shock fork and smooth tires and it didn’t slow him down a bit, and all the rest who, when it got really cold in the dead of night would turn towards the sag car when it showed up like zombies in a horror movie and shuffle over with blank eyes and drape themselves over the hood or press hands, feet or cheeks to the lights or hug the wheels to get at whatever warmth could be had. And when the ride was finished, tired, happy, starved, they went to the Little Grill for breakfast.
Nothing like riding with your friends and then grabbing a bite afterwards.I never rode a bicycle with my dad, but once, when I was in high school, I found a matching his-and-hers pair of old balloon tire bikes in the trash, which I took home and completely went over, polished and tuned them and gave them to my parents as gifts. When I unveiled them on our driveway, my mom looked at hers like she was wondering what in the world she would ever do with this. Dad, however, got on his and rode down the driveway, turned left and went to the stop sign, kept going and rode out of sight, eventually coming back to the stop sign from a different direction and glided back to our driveway with a smile of pure delight. It had probably been 30 years since he was last on a bike and I don’t think he ever rode one again. Maybe that’s why I ride, too.
Milt - May 18, 1918 --- January 3, 2005
