The Edge

I went for a pretty big ride on Sunday afternoon, out through the fringe of the northside of Charlottesville.  The trails I ride up here are all nooks and crannies, private land I do or sort of don't have permission to ride.  Some of them run down gaslines and across neighborhood HOA's.  Some traverse the river down the edge of unmanaged county land.  Some are old, deeded right of ways that don't actually give anyone a right or a way.  But I ride them anyway.  It's a lawless, wonderful place, the edge, where no one is really supposed to be. 

Along the Rivanna - somewhere above the reservoir - I came upon a guy diving and spear fishing in a deep hole at a bend in the river.  He was a madman.  I talked to him for a while.  He had canoed in there with his dog, a brown and white mutt that kept watch from the bank while he dove.  He had beached the boat on a sandbar there and spent the better part of the afternoon.  Two small speakers played reggae from the seat of his canoe, on top of a cooler of beer cans, mostly empties.  He was in and out of the water a lot, back and forth to the canoe, no oxygen tank or real equipment, just a set of goggles and big lungs and a spear.  It's illegal to spearfish in freshwater in the state of Virginia, but he wasn't worried.  He was Caucasian.  His skin was deep bronze, thick and loose like a mature hog late in the summer, the kind of permanent tan you only achieve after a thousand sunburns.  He didn't worry about sunscreen.   He didn't worry much about anything, I gathered.  His shoulders were huge, the kind of mass you'd never develop in the gym, only through a lifetime of paddling and rich food.   He was distracted at times, the way that high people can be, but also laser-focused -  diving underwater for two minutes at a time, searching for the big catfish that tend to push upstream from the reservoir this time of year to spawn.  He had seen some big ones.  He tried to sell me weed, but I declined.  So he tried to sell me acid, which I thought was a strong upsell for someone who didn't want to purchase weed, but I declined that too.  We talked for a while, but eventually he went back to spear fishing.  Intermittently, he would waive a bowie knife around above his head, swatting at mosquitos, or maybe just hallucinating.  He shot a huge bass.  

Then it got weird.  

A beautiful woman rides by on a horse.  She is by herself, young and very fit.   She wears her blond hair pulled back tightly in a ponytail, and she pulls hard on the horse's reigns to control it as she carefully picks her way down the trail next to the river.  She stops the horse, tall and proud above the river like a statue, and she looks down into the depths of the hole.  Spearfish guy is literally chest deep in the water, speargun in his hand, scuba goggles on, with a huge dead fish, and he yells up from the river and tries to get her phone number.  I've never seen anything quite like it.  There is very little dialog.  She's like 50 yards above him, and the current is pretty fast around that bend, so he has to yell to be heard.  He sees something he likes and he bellows out to it like a bull moose.  She declines and rides off.  

But 20 minutes later she comes back and gives him her number.  

She doesn't make a show of it or anything.  She reads out her phone number in an even monotone, loud enough but also measured, like how she might call out the numbers at the local community center for bingo on senior night.  Spearfish guy scrambles to his canoe to get his phone, speargun dragging behind him in the water, still attached to his belt by some kind of lanyard, still loaded.  

Afterward, she departs upstream, and he leaves downstream.  It's a date, I guess.  I fish for a while, but the river is calm and empty.  

On my ride home, it's sunset and I laugh some.  They will make quite a pair.  She left, knowing better, but she came back 20 minutes later and gave him her number.  I have no idea what her story is, but I imagine her brain for those 20 minutes, the time between when she left and she came back.  She's riding her horse in the forest.  It's silent.  In between the green sycamores and the huge riverbank poplars, a transition of some kind must have occurred   She knows it's a bad idea, or...at least it used to be.  But this is the edge.  Things are changing fast.  

Everyone I know is somewhere in those 20 minutes right now.  

We're going somewhere, aren't we.  

But where?  

Up, up, up.