But as of now, the my stultified mind has succumbed to the wiles of the a-ccursed Internet, the bane of all humans and even slightly sentient beings. If frogs were useful for something other than shoe sole lubricant, they would also enjoy using computers. But right now, my mind rebels with every keystroke as it imagines several wonderful scenarios in which I am not being vaporized by the light emitted from a computer screen, such as...
Going for a Bike Ride : The Story
Biking is supremely supreme- supremerific, if you will. As a sport and as a method of transportation, it holds so much more promise than such foolhardy pursuits such as this "walking" people keep telling me about. In my heyday, I would glide through the streets and backroads of Bayonne, hair fluttering from under an only slightly ill fitting helmet and my eyes watering from the intense 12 mph's of velocitative movement the bicycle was sustaining... so like, fastish.
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| Height*Speed=Total Velocity, I think? |
When I was a kid (summer 2011) and in Poland, I found myself in a similar situation. Luckily, the family hosting me lived in the mountains. No, really, you had to switch gears on the bike and all to get up to their house, perched precariously there like a tree jutting out of the side of a mountain. Why do trees do that? Anyway, I might've sustained several heart-attacks biking up to their house, and several more on the way back down. But this one morning, I was feelin' lucky. My friend, Piotr, told me about gorgeous hills and an active sawmill directly above a dam-caused lake not far from his house... who was I to resist this invitation? Wheeling a bike out and riding the few kilometers (that's right, Europe, baby) there, my front wheel finally began enjoying its true offroad environment by sinking several feet down into a swamp that was four inches wide and thirty feet deep (official estimates vary). As I looked up, my spine was thrashed by more than a chill- an icy freight train ran through it, rattling each vertebrae while stopping for fuel around my T4, then continuing on its hellish way. Before me stood not a hill- nay!; that description doesn't do it justice. Imagine a rocky, jagged precipice that giants jokingly chopped off the top of a mountain and plopped unceremoniously on a random hillside. Welcome to Poland.
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| The name of the town I was in. Why is it in English? Shutup. |
In a fit of daring, imagine attempting to climb a skyscraper using thumb tacks as picks and toilet plungers as foot suction cups. Transpose this ridiculous scenario to Poland 2011, Wisla, and you would alight on a scene of me billowing full speed, wheel bouncing in and out of cavernous puddles, heading straight for a rock-studded wall. Okay, rock-studded hill. At a 89 degree angle. After the bike decided it wasn't feeling going vertical and started sliding down the rocky, muddy hill (I didn't mention it rained, did I? Because it rained the night before. Alot.), disembarking seemed the wisest course of action. At the top of the hill, the hill had another hill on top of it. This hill was barely on a 45-degree angle; might as well have been downhill for all I cared, and this hill was covered with tall grass and fallen tree branches, which was confusing because there was tall grass and no trees; yet there were tree branches. Poland. After 30 minutes of switching between riding my bike three feet and then getting it either stalled in water or stuck in mud, I just biked across the hill, because screw it, there was a third hill on top of the hill on top of the hill, and screw everyone, the bike was now sporting a brown coat of mud. Later, I would find out that the "trails" I thought I was using were actually just where the rain had worn ruts into the hill... but how did they wear ruts running horizontally across the hill?... Eh. Poland.
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| When I looked behind me on the road to the hill, casually passing by... |
There I was. Actually, that statement is definitively false, because I had no idea where I was in a geographic sense, but more of a local intuition. I was at the top of Suicide Hill. At a sporting 40 degree descent, this hill features a 8-inch gash running through the middle of the road until the bottom, where it crosses the left side of the division, forming a moat filled halfway up with rocks. The top half was empty space. After staring at this road for the span of 12 prayers to God to give me a sign whether I would survive the descent, I decided that signs are for wussies. But I waited an extra minute just in case, cause, y'know. DOWN I SPED, gripping the handlebars tighter than a fat kid defending a pastry. The wheels shook and grumbled, moaning for a sudden and violent release from their bicycle-frame prison, but the unruly rocks shattered them back into place with each new bump. Traveling at an estimated ten bagillion MPH (once again, official estimates vary, though consensus pegs it between 8 and 12 bagillion), I realized that the gash in the road had turned into a smirking mouth which was anticipating a delicious meal in the form of my entire front tire. In the most single daring moment of my life, I loosened my grip on the handlebars and hopped the voracious rock filled moat of doom only to land in a rocky road (not the ice cream, although that would've been nice) with the front tire swerving more erratically than a Batmobile with an entire birthday party inside. Forty feet later, the bike ground to a halt.
At this point, I decided to do something safer for the rest of the hour, like navigating through an active sawmill with logs rolling to and fro. And hour later, I went down suicide hill again, offering another baker's dozen of perfunctory prayers. After coming back to my host family's house and talking to Piotr Blazowski, who introduced me to that area, he told me he only goes down it with a helmet... when it doesn't rain.
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