Be here now. What a bunch of hippie bullsh$!, am I right? Here and now is 65 degrees and raining. Here and now is a winter that never really happened. Meanwhile, I have one buddy skiing waist deep powder in Japan and another headed to British Columbia where they’re counting their powder in feet, not inches. And this is happening at the same time that Breckenwolf has shut down mid-week. Because it’s 65 degrees and raining. And apparently, you can’t make snow when it’s 65 degrees and raining. It’s really hard to be here now, when Instagram is telling me that it’s so much better somewhere else. When here and now is too warm to ski and too wet to mountain bike. A guy can get downright jaded. F#$k here. F#$k now.
And yet, during a break in the gloom yesterday, I experienced one of those hippie bulls$@t “here, now” moments. It was still too warm to ski, but the clouds split and the rain stopped and the sun came out, so I dusted the road bike off and headed for a lunch time ride with a buddy. Because when global warming and Donald Trump take your winter away, you ride your f#$ing bike.
Neither of us are in road biking shape right now, so we took it slow. I strapped a speaker to my handlebars and we listened to Beck’s Guero as we slogged up a five-mile climb to the Blue Ridge Parkway. We talked about fancy wheel sets, soaked up the sun and didn’t care that we were logging our slowest Strava time in years. And there was a moment, when the climb gave way to a flat stretch and I hit a sweeping turn through a farm with the sun in my face and wind at my back, there was a moment when I wasn’t pissed that it was 65 degrees in the middle of February. There was a moment when I didn’t care that I wasn’t skiing Breckenwolf, and that my friends were getting waist deep powder turns in far-off lands.
There was a moment when I realized I’m riding my bike and it’s beautiful. I’m here, now. I’ll be angry about this lack of winter again. I’ll bitch about Global Warming and Trump and a lack of powder at sometime in the near future. But maybe here and now ain’t so bad.
