The only concession to middle age, I suppose, is the light clamped to the handlebars. It makes me feel old, but I'd feel older if I endo'd into the creek. The trail between the restaurant and my apartment is lit up intermittently, these pale yellow discs you kind of float through, but there are plenty of long, dark tree-tunnels over those two and a half miles. Those tunnels are fun to shoot in the dark, don't get me wrong, but the dark isn't the thing to worry about.
The whole year, there'd been a battle going on in the opinion pages of the newspaper. Motorists were bullying bikers, bikers were kicking dents into fenders and doors. Nobody'd been hurt too bad yet, but it was coming. One of us was going to get nudged a bit too hard by a bumper, nudged hard enough to get pulled under the car, and the motorist was going to walk for it like they always do, and then cyclists were going to be riding side by side from one ditch to the other, stopping traffic for miles.
It had happened before, and it was happening again. Even up in the mountains. Apparently—this just going from what I read, as I stick to asphalt and concrete—the hikers had been sabotaging the trail against mountain bikers. Deadfalls, rocks, the occasional spike. Helmets or no, riders were getting hurt.
And now it had come to town.
For five nights in a row, there'd been driftwood from the creek dragged up onto the trail.
It was then I'd relented, finally started running a headlight. And the headlight was how I saw them. The bodies.
Two guys, young, floating in the shallows where the creek turns west.
On the shore was the large piece of driftwood they'd been trying to dislodge, to drag up across the trail. It was too much for two people. But they were the only ones there.
One of them was floating facedown in the water. The other was on his back.
His throat was gone.
No blood was seeping from it.