Snowmobiles

As promised, there was snow riding on Friday night. Joel valiantly attempted to come, but the bus from Windsor wasn't running (and riding all the way from Windsor was, understandably, a little much). Will un-valiantly decamped to New York for the weekend. Brendan even more un-valiantly went incommunicado all evening. But Rich and I were in it to win it, as is our custom.

The plan was to meet at Chez Rich for a pre-ride fortifier around 9:00, then take to the streets. Owing to some complicating factors, I didn't arrive till 10:15. Complicating Factor #1: My elder son was on some stay-up-late-and-worry-about-monsters ish. Complicating Factor #2: Hartford was on some plow-the-east-west-streets-but-leave-the-north-south-streets-untouched ish. Factor 1 only slowed me down by fifteen minutes, but Factor 2 brought the ruckus. I feel like to took me about half an hour to go from Park to Farmington on Whitney. The Special Tour de France was in full effect, and I really think there's no better mix of speed, toughness, and versatility for most conditions than a 30-year-old three-speed, but I would have needed some Puglsey-type tires to keep it rolling in that cruddy mess.

Anyway, once I reached Rich's deluxe apartment in the sky, we imbibed a bit, talked of serious matters such as women and bike repair (not the combination; we just talked about both of those things), then went out to Bushnell Park. I had the idea to bomb down the hill from the Capitol parking lot toward the band shell, which was theoretically a good idea, but the snow was so very deep that even on that incline, we had to pedal constantly to keep moving. So we decided to find another, steeper hill. After brief consideration, we decided that the downward slope from Park Terrace into Pope Park might do the trick, so we headed that way.

It was nice riding across town with the roads pretty much to ourselves. Lots of people were out and about, shovelling, commenting on the absurdity of riding bikes (one guy standing in front of a bodega offered this grammatically ponderous but perfectly intelligle interjection: "On bikes?!!"), and you know, walking through snow. We passed a car dealership on Sisson where all the cars had been turned on and most of them had their headlights on. The logical explanation for this might be that the proprietor wanted to warm up all the cars to melt the snow and ice on them so they would look sharp for the next day's shoppers (because what better thing to do when your car is stuck in a snowbank than go buy a new one in Frog Hollow?). Some other explanations I like more: (1) The proprietor dropped a contact lens somewhere on the lot and turned on all the headlights to look for it; (2) We happened to witnessing a well-planned, multi-vehicle theft, á la Gone in Sixty Seconds.

Eventually, we reached Pope Park. After some surveying, we chose a spot that seemed likely to provide the steepest slope. It started with a moderate, rolling hill, crossed a path, then went down a very steep slope with some low, sparse bushes. It was fun, in the sense that the bikes actually kept moving despite the deep snow, but I couldn't stick the landing - I crashed over and over again at the bottom. Snow is good for falling down. Rich managed not to crash, but in the process couldn't keep enough momentum to maintain forward motion.

Then we set our sights on the large hill on the west side of the park, next to the highway. In hindsight, this was a bad choice, because reaching the summit involved considerable slogging, and the descent failed to satisfy. (I never noticed how flat Hartford it. It is very flat.) There were also snowmobilesmachines (thanks, Todd Palin!) in the park. That looked like fun, except for, like, the 48 weeks of the year when there's not that much snow on the ground and you have to devote some large portion of your home to storing a $5000, gas-guzzling, pony-sized item. (That's why I sold my diesel-powered pony, by the way.) Anyway, after that, we gave up and went to our respective homes, because we were tired and sweaty, and the snow was just too damned deep.

All of that said, I strongly recommend riding bikes in the snow. It is good exercise, it allows you to see beauty (because no matter how ugly a place, when you blanket it in snow, it looks nice), and while the risk of losing control of the vehicle is at least as high on two wheels as on four, the risks to self and others are appreciably lower. Also, you don't so often get stuck in a ditch.