Like him or not, the power of music to transport your soul down the pathway of memory is strong. Chances are that if you're in your 30's or 40's, DMB was playing somewhere along the way, at least in the background, in a time and place that ended up being pretty important to you.
Watching this, I am reminded of one of the last times I rode bikes with Iron Mike Walling.
Mike was right behind me, and we both hopped over an old log in the trail - a log that had been a tree that had fallen on that same trail about 8 years before we were riding it that day. We'd ridden that trail probably 500 times since the tree had fallen, loops upon loops over time, watching that tree slowly break down and decay. The last time we rode it, the log was basically just a pile of red dirt, almost completely decayed, and Mike said something like, "Tell me that riding over that log doesn't make you feel old."
It did not, at the time, make me feel old.
But an old log doesn't grow a grey beard, and it can't sing like Dave Matthews.
I was riding with Shaine, Kirk, some of our crew out in the mountains above Boulder, CO. This was probably like 2004 or so. Mountain biking in Boulder county has long been a subject of contentiousness - so much of it isn't actually allowed. But in 2004 we had this huge ride that we used to do - we called it "Busta' Ned" - and we had it dialed. Basically, you caught the N Bus at 9 AM from Boulder up to Nederland, got off at the High School at about 9:40 AM, and you rode singletrack back into Boulder. The ride, like most summer rides in Colorado, took all day. It was probably a 40 mile descent, losing 5,000 feet of elevation along the way, and I guess it was about 80% singletrack. I haven't done the ride in 10 years, I guess. Some of it, I'm told, is long gone. At the time, much of it wasn't 100% legal. Semi-legal, hidden trails in Boulder County - this stuff was like gold back then. And like any claim that you stumbled upon in the mountains, the conventional wisdom was that you kept it a secret.
So we were riding back down from Nederland one afternoon, huge beautiful blue Colorado sky against green Colorado pines. Magic dirt, just the kind of ride you'd want to do if you were a visitor - and we came upon two people who were just that: Visitors. Newbs to town. A husband and wife, I don't recall their names, but they were from the midwest somewhere and they'd heard about this Nederland-to-Boulder singletrack, and they were about 1/2 way down the route trying to figure it out, and they were stuck. The next trail was anything but obvious. We came up to them, and everything was polite and fine, but when they asked us about how to get down, we lied. We straight up lied to this wonderful couple, a part of our tribe, these two great people just like us, that maybe we would have been friends with if we'd just showed them the next trail...we told them that we didn't know the way down. They rode down Magnolia rd back towards Boulder, a steep gravel slog that kind of sucks, and we took the secret hidden stash of singletrack down behind their backs, to the south, back onto the West side of Flagstaff mountain and on into Boulder.
I felt absolutely empty.
Afterwards, Shaine and I debated what we had done for days. Years even. I think we still talk about it some. In Shaine's view, the trails that we were riding were not legal, and more importantly, they weren't ours. We had no right to share them with complete strangers.
That may be true, but I 100% and wholeheartedly disagreed, and I still do. They weren't ours, I insisted. We had no right to hide them either.
On a flight back from Sacramento recently, the guy next to me tapped my leg and pointed out the window. There, much to my surprise, was a HUGE double rainbow - one of the biggest, prettiest rainbows that I have ever seen. In your life, if you maintain a list of the top 10 rainbows that you've ever seen, which you should...this one would have been a top 5, for sure. Anyway, here's the point - if he hadn't pointed it out, I would have missed it.
Sharing the beauty of nature with other people, even complete strangers, is a fundamental part of what it means to be a human being. Humans have the unique capacity to observe and share natural beauty in ways that animals do not. At the very least, it's the cornerstone of most environmental conservation in the modern world - the deeply rooted reflex of, "Wow. Hey. Holy shit. You have to see this..."
I do everything I can to not cut the logs now, to allow and enjoy Dave Matthews as he grows old, and if I find a secret trail I share it. While we're all still here.
This world, it is not mine.
Up, up, up.
