Thoughts on a dark road

Biking home at night, I'm constantly reminded of how young a city Vancouver is, like many cities on the west coast, and how its frontier beginnings are still close at hand. My bike ride home takes me down the southwest side of Vancouver's Lower Mainland -- the fingertips on a mitten-shaped peninsula pointed left on a map -- and cuts through mostly undeveloped park land for the better part of four miles. (I realize I've left one mitten for another.)


On both sides of the road stand tall skinny pines packed so densely the view into them only goes only a few rows back. In daylight signs of civilization appear in plain view, and it's easy to regard the conifers objectively. "Those trees are twice as high as that light pole, and there's the trail head now, so I must be ten minutes away from campus." But at night signs of civilization disappear into darkness, and under the right conditions, the mind plays tricks.

It's amazing how a road you take everyday without a second thought can turn treacherous on a cold, rainy night. Your fingers begin to go numb, the muscles in your legs begin to stiffen, and -- the worst part of all -- your vision starts to fail. The rain quickly coats eyeglasses -- so simple and essential to modern living -- in a hundred little droplets. The world goes from Stieglitz to Picasso as shapes become blobs and the beams from oncoming cars get passed through dozens of little prisms. Soon you're steering just to stay between the cars passing to your left and the drop-off to your right -- the lights to port and the void to starboard. Trucks kick up road grime and Pacific sand, and each one that passes makes you turn your head and spit. It's like eating unwashed spinach that hasn't had the soil washed out.

Every once in a while, I'll encounter passersby on the shoulder of the road, pedestrians walking in the complete darkness. My headlight illuminates a disc ten feet ahead, but it's useless farther out. Ten feet gets covered in no time when you're going downhill, and sometimes I'll only know I've passed one of these journeymen by the change in the way the wind sounds. Two nights ago something leered at me from three feet off the road. I knew it only by its eyes and teeth. The wolf danced around me as I passed.

In the dark of a sliver moon when only the treetops are visible, I feel like I'm pedaling through a dream. The tall pines stand like elders in a temple, and I'm a neophyte scratching the ground in front of them. I realize how Miller saw the forests in The Crucible, how Myrick and Sanchez did in Blair Witch, and keep pedaling, pedaling, pedaling, until I get home and wake up.