Slush & Kilometers
By: Matthew St. Amand
Tags: Cycling, Memoir, Mental Health, Self Improvement, Outdoors

Photo credit: Matthew St. Amand

Epoch: Riding.

Time: 2005–2006.

During the Winter of Riding, my life was ruled by paradoxes.

An avowed indoorsman, I rode my father-in-law’s bicycle each day during the most forbidding season of the year.

As well, after years of suffocating in the coffin-like confines of office cubicles, I couldn’t wait to find another. Applying to online job postings was a pillar of my morning, providing the illusion of productivity.

Ghostwriting the biography of a local industrialist, mapping out a life already lived, the evolution of his decades-old business, a fortune earned, adventures — African safaris, hunting expeditions in the Arctic Circle, a two-month hunt in the jungles of South America—brought to mind a phrase spoken to me often by the adults in my life when I was in my early twenties: “You have your whole life ahead of you!”

The phrase had the same benign ring as the age-old Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.”

The people around me meant well, of course, but the truism resonated more as an omen than a wistful cliché.

And the greatest paradox of all: the more aches and pains I experienced, the more I wanted to ride the battered mountain bike. Long out of shape and well into my thirties, my body was a symphony of gripes. Thumbscrew twinges ran up and down my legs and back, causing me to walk like a poorly programmed robot.

As an avowed indoorsman, I never had any use for weather reports, other than the necessity of resenting the meteorologist’s unworried existence. Now, I cared.

Certainly, I still envied the weatherman, begrudging his airy, carefree nature in the face of a cruel world, disdainful of his gameshow-host crispness when — doing the math — I realized, the poor bastard probably rose around three o’clock in the morning to make it to the TV studio and review his “data” before going on air to mislead us all.

No matter his forecast, I went out riding.

Each day’s ride was Groundhog Day, it was Finnegans Wake, it was the snake swallowing its tail — my route was an unending loop around LaSalle and environs, along swerve of street and bend of lane. Clad in layers of track pants and sweatshirts, against the wind, the occasional pelting sleet, ever present cold, I chugged along Malden, Matchette and Front Roads — and the web of streets, avenues and paths linking them — my clunky boots pounding the pedals for all they were worth.

As my body suckled its ration of endorphins, my mind entered the liminal space of memory, where it wandered like a blind man through an archive. As someone already given to daydreaming, there was something about the bicycle, about mechanistic distraction of my body fully engaged in the physical act of riding, that my daily trek achieved escape velocity, allowing me to journey outside of the present.

Revisiting a sleety, foreboding February morning in the late 1980s, when my dad drove my brother and I to school. As we passed over the Campbell Avenue train tracks, between Rooney Street and College Avenue, we caught sight of a figure on the tracks, approaching from the west. It was a man: the new parish priest, Father Willy, a tall, young, lean guy in his early thirties. That morning, he was in shorts and a thin long-sleeved shirt, jogging on the train tracks. It was a humanizing detail circulated among the parish that Father Willy ran marathons. He was a decent, kindly guy, who needed no softening biographical flourish, but it at least explained what appeared to be a mania.

Seeing him in that moment, from the car, he looked like a lone, forlorn figure damned to some storybook punishment, trudging outside on that dire winter’s day dressed as though he was ready to mow a lawn or wash a car. He looked at us, wide-eyed, behind his large-framed eyeglasses, his expression unreadable. No pain, no recognition, no acknowledgement. A pair of lantern eyes on a murky morning.

“Crazy,” my dad said, as we thump-thumped over the train tracks. “I hate to say it about a priest, but I think he’s nuts.”

It was hard to dispute, at the time, yet nearly two decades later, there I was rolling along the slushy edge of Malden Road with surly traffic whizzing by me. Dad went for walks and played racquetball and never experienced “the zone”, where the mind dropped through pin-prick worm-holes during a run, or as I now learned, during a bike ride. I was “there, not there”. Quite a pleasant experience, really, the mind sitting in a dime roller coaster car cascading through memory:

In the bathroom during dinnertime, when I was six or seven years old, changing the toilet paper roll. Curious how the the metal, spring-loaded tube worked, I pulled the ends apart and found the spring inside. For no particular reason, I put one of the metal tubes on my index finger and slid it down past my knuckle. When I tried removing it a second later, it wouldn’t budge.

My mind exploded with panic.

After a few frantic moments, trying to get the tube off my finger, I returned to the dinner table, in tears, terrified and repentant.

“It won’t come off!” I wailed, holding up my hand with the metal tube protruding from my index finger. I had disfigured myself for life.

My parents looked at me, bewildered. My younger brother laughed.

When my dad had no success removing the tube after soaping up my hand, he loaded me and my brother into the car and drove to the local fire station. All the firemen came out from their supper to see what I had done. One of them located a tool that appeared designed precisely for removing metal toilet paper dispenser tubes from fingers. The fireman cut it off my finger, and the clouds parted. My relief was immeasurable. That weekend, Dad had to install a new toilet paper holder in the downstairs bathroom.

I emerged from my fugue long enough to monitor traffic and road conditions, before submerging again. Watched the reef of slush at the side of the road splash apart under my front wheel.

What do they call that? I wondered. It’s a word used to describe ketchup — neither solid, nor liquid… or both at the same time.

Came to me after a moment — my mind a magnet for meaningless trivia: Yield stress fluid… Didn’t scientists for one ketchup maker calculate the optimal flow of ketchup as being approximately 0.028 miles per hour…?

My hips ached. I stood on the pedals and my quads cried out.

In those early days of riding, there were a few practical details I neglected. Such as wearing a helmet. My wife soon rectified that. Also, the height of the seat should have been raised. I just rode the bicycle as I found it. Only later did I learn the seat was too low for me.

Another dinner in my childhood, somewhere in 1977, around the time we brought home our first and only pet: a mixed breed pup whom my brother and I had named “Tara Sal”. As Dad cut a corner of meat loaf with his fork, he declared without preamble: “If we are ever in an emergency, we’ll have to eat the dog.”

We all looked at him.

Eat the dog?

“The puppy?” my brother said. He was four years old.

“Yes,” Dad said, “but only in an emergency.”

“Like if the house is on fire?” I said.

“Well, not if the house is on fire,” Dad said, “more like if there is nuclear war… if we were starving…” he trailed off.

Or, the late afternoon he called me and my brother in from the backyard. It was mid-April, the Thursday before Easter. An ice storm the night before toppled a neighbour’s tree, two doors down, across two backyards, and the tangled topmost section of the tree ended up in our yard. To kids who enjoyed climbing, it was a gift from the gods. After school, our friends came over and climbed through it with us.

Around dinner time, Dad called us into the house. Mom had gone out earlier, and I had a passing thought we’d be having a “Dad dinner” that evening: liverwurst on crackers with Tang on TV tables, watching Hogan’s Heroes. There was no sign of dinner as Dad led us into the living room. There, he sat with us on the floor. He never sat on the floor. My brother and I leaned back against the couch. Dad looked very serious.

“J.T.’s had an accident,” he said.

An instant thrill of excitement went through me. Aunt June had invited us over for an Easter egg hunt that weekend with her son, J.T. He was eighteen months older than I was. He was a genius of fun, and the leader of our games. The previous autumn, he fell out of a tree and broke his right leg. His friends brought him home in a wheel barrow. The full-length plaster cast, which ran from his toes to his hip, didn’t slow him down. On a visit to Ojibway Park, he glided along on his crutches. Later that day, at the riverfront, he gingerly pulled himself into a tree I was climbing, and sat on a low hanging bough. Still part of the action. His mother snapped a picture of us.

So, J.T.’s had another accident, I thought, wondering if he’d have a cast on his arm, time time, or a black eye.

He spent a day at our house that winter when there was a day off school and his mother had to work. As J.T. sat on our living room couch, drawing in a sketch book he had brought, I sat on the floor, examining his cast and all of the inscriptions his friends’ drew on it—scrawled in black marker, green, blue and red ink. Some drew faces. I noticed how the pant leg of J.T.’s jeans had been cut from the cuff to mid-shin to accommodate the cast. I wondered if Aunt June had cut all of his pants, or only certain ones…

“J.T.’s gone to Jesus,” Dad said.

Locked out of the house after school that day, J.T. tried climbing in through a back window. The window slid down on him as he got his head through. He was four and a half feet tall. The window was five feet above the ground. J.T. was the boy who could climb anything. There was just no way this was how he died. Yet, it was.

Riding past Sandwich Secondary school. Riding past the LaSalle Public Library. It wasn’t long before I made the trek without winding and wounding myself.

After J.T.’s death, I remember being in my bedroom, pushing up my window and bringing it down on my hand, to… I don’t really know what I was looking for.

My arse hurt and my nose was running. The world is too much with us.

The sun was out. I hated the sun on snowy days, where the world turned into endless series of blinding surfaces. It had snowed the night before, but the temperature was pleasant.

From Malden Road, I turned left onto Sprucewood Avenue. As part of my ongoing exploration the area, my idea was to cross the small bridge spanning Turkey Creek and cut through Vince Marcotte Park.

Entering the park required a 180° turn onto the narrow path that led into the Vince Marcotte Park.

Didn’t quite make it.

Got about 178° when my front tire made contact with the post of fence at the corner of someone’s property, stopping me dead.

Like somebody in a John Candy movie, I proceeded, headfirst, over the handlebars, over the fence. My body and mind slammed back together. I returned to the present like a man falling out of bed.

The moment I knew I was airborne, I tucked my chin in and went into a forward roll. Felt like it happened in slow motion. The snow drift I landed on was perfectly contoured for my body. I landed on my back on the pillow-soft snow. Hands-down the most pleasant and enjoyable accident of my life. Twenty-five years before, my friends and I would have spent the rest of the day recreating the trick.

Looking around, wondering if my pratfall had been observed, I saw no one. I lay back in the drift, closed my eyes and laughed.

The black tire mark is still visible on that white fence post. Showed it to my sons earlier this year while driving by.