Cycling in the South Bay

Everybody has that thing that they were gonna do.

That place they were gonna go.

That person they were gonna see.

That adventure they were gonna embark on, lead where it may.

We were gonna ride our bikes out to Limestone and then lash them to a tree and then hike up Brush Creek to the giant natural slides and the waterfall.

We were so gonna do that.

We were gonna do it a whole bunch of times but each time we got ready to do it life got us ready to do something else instead, so we never did it.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. The road to Brush Creek is paved with good intentions. We’d be 24 miles in and beat to snot and it would be the perfect day to do what we’d been saying we were gonna do, but we never did. This is people, never doing what they were so gonna do.

Then she showed up on Friday night after an unforgiving drive and a beatdown of a work week, and on Saturday morning, with the dawn sky breaking, she said, “Are we gonna do it today?”

And I said, “Yes, we are.”

We saddled up and she found the eleven, me hanging on for dear life and doing my damnedest to pull through and the heat smashing down and the headwind plowing into our faces and the 15-mile climb sapping the fuck out of my legs and what normally takes me over two hours took us one-and-a-half and when we got there I was spent and she was looking fresher than a lie on Instagram.

We hiked up the trail a ways, locked the bikes, and continued on up the creek past pools and tall pines, hidden swimming holes and green-lined banks, over rocky outcroppings and giant boulder scrambles, ascending a hot dirt path strewn with rocks until there were no more footprints but ours.

Down the last giant stones we heard the rush of water and were greeted by the clearest pool, the most translucent stream, the slickest chute of rocks plunging off into a blue depth of the chillest mountain water, fed by secret springs or melting snows a hundred miles deep in the Sierra hence.

I clambered over the boulders, time-smooth, and slid off the ledge into the icy pool. The dirt and sweat and exhaustion of triple digits vanished and was banished.

We hiked back down the long trail and blazed home.

That thing we were gonna do? We did it.

You should, too.

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