2008_1123_pdxcross0251 The Rat: My Power Animal

heidi-1-small Off to battle!

The pumpkins at Kruger’s Farm are rotting.  Slow decay.  Fuzzy green beards where children might have carved geometric faces.  These are Halloween’s rejects.  Piled gourd-corpses littering the fields and lumped next to abandoned red wagons.

It’s colder than a well-digger’s elbow and the cornfields are blanketed in low fog.  Beyond the fog is a bright winter sun that will come slashing through later in the day.

It’s crisp.  Late fall.  Everywhere are the signs of an encroaching winter.

This is my favorite part of the cyclocross season.  The main racing series is over so the short-timers have all stayed home, leaving field sizes that are actually enjoyable.  Breathing room. Normalcy that almost borders on calm.

Kruger’s Farm is straight out of cliché hotel oil-painting.  Fields, farm roads, out-buildings, bon-fires, happy children laughing, dogs on leashes smiling, and families buying apples and locally made honey from the market. A bon fire, hot cider.   You get the point.

I’m so caught up in the Rockwellian stupor I nearly forget that I came here to race my bike.  I put a cowbell into my mother’s hand and show her where the carnage will be best: here, where they’ve piled rotten pumpkins in a heap across the course and here, where there’s a little downhill into a barrier in the middle of a swamp-like mudpuddle.

This is her first time at a cyclocross race.  She can’t wipe the grin off her face.

We stand together for a few moments watching the early men’s categories make their way through, over, around, and sometimes straight into, the Pumpkin Corpse Crossing.  A few racers manage to find a good line through the slimy gourds and begin to clear a path for those behind them.

Unlucky  bastards who miss the line are going down left and right.  Cyclocross tires were not designed to tread through squash guts.

Ten minutes before my race I run into my friend Richard.

“Have you seen the course?” he asks.

“Nope. I walked most of it but not that section.”  I point south.

“You missed the best part.” I don’t like the look on his face.

“Fuck.  More cowshit?” I ask, recalling the previous week’s Corral of Crap.

“Worse.”

I give him my best “stop shitting me asshole” look and wait for him to deliver the punchline.

“Dead rat.”

“What!? You’re lying.”

“No I’m not ““ stay far to the left when you make that turn over there and you’ll squish right through the middle of it.  It’s awesome.”

Only in cyclocross would I be receiving advice on how to get the best squish out vermin corpse.

“Thanks for the tip, dude.”   I make a mental note to stay to the right through that section and begin to question my decision to forgo a pre-ride in order to keep my bike clean, but it’s too late now ““ I have a date with the start line and also, apparently, a dead rat.

Out of the gate at the horn and I finally get a good start.  I’m in my pedals from the first stroke and mashing away.  I shoot off the front and lead into the first corner.

“I’m winning!” I think to myself as I laugh at the absurdity inherent in that exclamation. “I’m beating all these suckers!”

I revel in what I know will be short-lived glory.  I have seen the field of women who are sitting on my wheel.

The first rider to come around is in blue, followed by a few others.  I accelerate out of the next turn and try to stay with them as long as I can. Coming around a right-hand turn I take an outside line to pass two riders on my left.  The first hits the loose gravel too hot and lays the bike down hard. Rider number two has nowhere to go and teeters over the front of her bike, coming down over the handlebars.  Pile up.

I punch it and accelerate just in time to put myself out of reach of potential carnage.

The course is an amusement park ride.  Tacky mud, flat power sections, loose turns, three-and-a-half sets of barriers and an off-camber jaunt next to a barn leading into a short run-up.  Lots of time getting on and off the bike. And dead rats. And rotten vegetables.

Sweet.

The only problem is by the time I come into The Rat Zone my heart is beating so fast  I can no longer comprehend who I am, why I’m here, or what in the hell I am supposed to remember about this part of the course.

In my delirium, I take the left line.

There it is!

SQUISH!

It’s a happy mistake.  Richard was right.  It is awesome.

Emboldened by the feel of animal intestine under my tires, I accelerate down the straight-away with visions of my enemy-decapitating Viking ancestors swimming in my head.

Heavy swords swinging.  BLOOD!  DESTRUCTION!  VICTORY!

Mouth open.  Gasping.  A tiny bit of rest through the off-camber section.  Descend descend descend!  The race has become a battle and the pumpkins must die!

I attack them with eyes wide, smashing my Hutchinson Bulldog tire straight through the soft wall of a vulnerable gourd on the outside. I am aware of a cheering crowd and wonder for a second what they are doing on my battlefield. I gut the next pumpkin and press on.

The bike bucks beneath me but I keep it upright, clear the decaying mass, and find a rut to guide me through the muddy section that follows.

My path now leads to The Rat ““ source of power and might. My mother is off on the right-hand side of the course, calling me nicknames from my childhood and abusing the cowbell without mercy.

Up ahead I see my father.  He is massive and bearded, holding a camera with huge, calloused hands. The hands of a woodsman. The hands of a Viking.

His cry is gutteral and barbaric.

My tires are covered in blood.

pumpkins Die, pumpkins, die!