The Seat of Scoffers

Posted by Eric (August 22, 2006 at 9:14 pm)

Blessed is he who sits not in the seat of scoffers.—Psalm 1:1

In my last post I said I was going off on a 30 mile road ride. I decided instead to go mountainbiking at Saw Wee Kee park, a woods grown over an old strip mine, filled with miles of tight, hilly, rocky, sandy and very challenging singletrack.

This was my first mountainbike ride in almost a month—it isn’t only the blog I’ve been neglecting under the demands of this exceptionally busy summer—and it was a real challenge. I’m at the point where I can knock out a thirty- or even forty-mile road ride and then carry on with a busy day, but Saw Wee Kee really took it out of me.

There are some among my associates who delight to scoff at the notion that there is any serious mountainbiking in the Chicago area, and never miss an opportunity to sniff when I mention a grueling climb or wicked descent, or employ the word “hill.”

“There are no hills around here,” they tell me. “If you want a hill, you’ve got to go to [insert home state here].”

They snigger especially at the term mountainbike—”What mountain? I don’t see any mountains.”

It’s no good trying to explain that the term derives from the name of the first company to produce bikes for off-road use, Mountain Bikes, a name which stuck long after that company was history, and long after the machines they manufactured had been ridden far beyond the rough mountain fireroads where the concept of a specifically off-road bicycle was born.

Like the so-called “clipless” pedals into which one clips—but cycling lore is of little interest to the scoffers. So instead I invite them to ride with me sometime and see if there aren’t some serious climbs and severe drops around here. That usually claps a stopper over their nonsense.

However, in truth, I would not seriously entertain riding with these fellows, for despite their scoffing attitude they are dear to me and I would not have them risk life and limb undertaking an endeavor to which they are physically unequal—no, not even to prove a point; not even to hear the dying words, “You were right all along, Eric—can you ever forgive me?”

By the way, I had considered cleverly entitling this post “The Saddle of Scoffers,” adding a bikey element to the Psalm, but of course it is not the scoffers who are in the saddle; if they were they would scoff not. They are very much “in the seat” —and a disturbingly expanding seat at that.

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