If your Depressed, do Something about it.

You may have wondered how a mill worker during the day and firefighter at night became a biker too…

Not too long after my divorce with my first wife, an acquaintance came over to my house and invited me to go mountain biking with his group of friends. I turned down his offer, but they threatened to kidnap me and take me anyway—and they meant it! I tried to resist, “But I don’t own a bicycle I whined.” He said, "We brought one for you."  I implored, "I don’t have any biking clothes.” He said, "What you’re wearing will do just fine." "But...but, but.." They concluded with, "It’s your choice: come willingly or we’ll take you tied up, but you are coming with us today." Begrudgingly, with my head hung low and pouting, I submitted and went with them. I hadn’t ridden a bicycle in years. I wasn’t even sure I still knew how to ride one of those two wheeled contraptions. They dragged me off into the mountains to a beautiful mountain lake where they inform me that we were all going to ride around this lake. I ask hesitantly how far that would be. They pop off with, "Ohhh… it’s only… humm, about 19 miles I guess, but we’ll have a picnic lunch for you when we get done."

Now mountain bike riding is not like riding on the edge of some paved street in town, noooo. Mountain bike riding happens.... in the mountains! The trails they ride on are narrow, loose dirt paths with brush growing along the sides that sometimes tries to rip you off your bike. The trails include switch backs (meaning very, very tight corners on a steep slope) and then there are those neat drop-offs, (aka, cliffs!)

So in the custody of my kidnappers, I wobbly pushed off and pedaled down a slot through the brush corridor that looked sort of like a narrow trail. Even though the scenery was beautiful, I couldn’t really enjoy it because I was concentrating so hard on not going over one of the aforementioned CLIFFS on this cow-path of a trail. It did feel good to feel the breeze on my face, feel my muscles working, and smell the forest as it whizzed by me. Along the way one of the kidnappers got a flat tire so I rode ahead, knowing they would easily catch up to me when the problem was resolved. Another comforting thought was that if I crashed over an embankment ahead of them, hopefully, they would hear my moans for help and come and recover my broken body. For me a defining moment in my life was when partway around the lake I heard and felt the wing filled flap of air over my shoulder. Looking toward the sound, I saw that I had startled a bald eagle who had been sitting on a branch overlooking the trail. When he took to flight, he flew right over my shoulder and I felt the air he had moved when he lifted himself into the air.

On his huge wings he flew out over the edge of the lake and then, majestically, he turned and flew along side me for several more seconds before he peeled off to go find a quieter spot to perch. Feeling his wake as he flew over me, it felt to me as though he was encouraging me onward with the slow steady beat of his wings. It was one of the most profound moments I have ever experienced.

I finally made it the rest of the way around Applegate Lake. I afterwards was barely able to sit down because my butt ached so badly from the narrow bike seat. I did get the promised lunch though. My leg muscles, my lower back and my arms hurt too, but for just a moment, I noticed that my divorced heart didn’t hurt at all. It was the most alive I had felt in many, many months since my divorce. I asked whose bike I had ridden that day; they said it was one of their spare bikes. "Would you be interested in selling it?" I asked. "For $1800.00." they said. I bought that bike that same afternoon after finagling on the price a bit and haven’t really stopped riding since then.

After partially recovering from my first big biking adventure around the lake, I figured that if riding cured my broken heart once, maybe more riding would do it again. I started out with twenty or thirty mile bike rides along some of our country roads after work, but they just didn’t have the same effect on me that riding in the mountains had. It became a challenge for me to find harder and harder rides that would make my whole body feel the effort. If my body pained me terribly after a ride, the better it was on my mending heart. I remember on one of my bad days (depressed) riding to the Page Mountain Snow Park.

It was snowing pretty hard that day, the wind was blowing and as I gained elevation up the Happy Camp Road the snow got deeper and deeper on the roadway. As I plodded along uphill, my pedals started leaving curved marks in the deepening snow, but I forced myself upward. The higher on the mountain I pedaled, the stronger the wind howled and the deeper the accumulating snow got. When I later saw the movie Forest Gump, I had to laugh during that scene when the army vet who'd lost both his legs in the war was up in the crow’s nest of Forest's fishing boat during a terrible storm, screaming at God, “Is that the best you’ve got?" Because I too, can remember pumping my fist in the air, screaming into the wind at God that day on the mountain, “Is that the best you fricking got?” when I finally reached my destination, the deserted parking lot at the snow park. Riding back down the mountain was actually much harder then pedaling up because my bike kept slipping out from under me in the slick snow pack. Descending the mountain that afternoon, I fell so many times that I lost count and my mind began to go blank as hypothermia began to sink in. If it hadn't been for a Forest Service worker I knew, who came along that afternoon and told me to throw my bike in the back of his Forest Service pickup, I most likely wouldn't have been found until after the spring thaw. After being dropped off at my house and crawling inside, I climbed into a hot shower. Standing there letting the hot water rain over my numb head I noticed my heart didn’t hurt at all— although every other part of me did from all the falls I had taken that day. It had become a very good day for me after all.