October 26, 2001

 mfinley.com   
"In the Como Woods"

by Michael Finley
(c) 2001 by Michael Finley

I have spent a bit of every day the past month walking with Beau in a few little wooded areas in and around Saint Paul. I use the time to unwind and get my thoughts together. But lately, even the woods seem troubled.

For one thing, I'm not finding pools of smashed beer bottles the way I used to. It is always dismaying to realize that some group thinks so little of a place you revere that they use it to get drunk and then make as big a mess as possible, setting fire to picnic tables, breaking glass, spray-painting  secret symbols on the surroundings.

But now I don’t see any of that, and I wonder if the current crisis has had a discouraging effect on young men being bad. Once you think of it that way, you start rooting for the bottle smashers. It's their walkabout, their ritual way of expressing incipient adulthood. Yes, it is disrespectful and obnoxious, but it seems to serve some necessary developmental purpose -- to beat their chests and howl, swig from a bottle and shout out, "I'm a man."

Does this mean they have suspended development -- which could be very bad, boys for the duration -- or have they found a non-vandalizing way to supersede it?

There's another problem. Ten days ago, in the early morning, I was in the Como Woods and came upon a tent and campsite. It was a nice clean nylon tent -- no patches or rips. Beau wanted to go up and give it a snoof, but I called him back. I imagined the people sleeping inside were middle class people who suddenly didn’t have a place indoors to spend the night. This situation couldn’t last, I knew, and sure enough, the tent was gone the next day, chased away by cops is my guess.

Three days later the two of us almost stumbled on a man in a sleeping bag lying right on the path. It freaked me out. It freaked him out; he sucked in air when he looked up from his slumber to see Beau's smiling, pointy teeth. It didn’t seem to do Beau any good, either. Once again, we skedaddled. Not out of fear, but from respect. Suddenly finding ourselves in this man's bedroom, we withdrew.

Then one evening this week, Rachel and I were walking along the railroad tracks down by West Seventh Avenue, and came upon two young women, wearing several sweaters and coats, camping out over a buried pipeline that burns natural gas all year round to keep the rail bridge nearby from icing over in winter. The two women seemed excited about their adventure. I'm guessing it was their first night out. The deep chill doesn’t set in until two or three in the morning, and while the gas vent warms one side of you, the other side gets awful cold

But one thing in the woods has not changed, and it gives me hope. For years the woods have been a battleground between hikers and bikers. The hikers, like me, go there to draw air and take their dogs off-leash. They are there to escape. The bicyclists are dirt bikers and stunt bikers -- they are there to have vigorous, sometimes extreme fun. They don’t care if their bike paths interfere with rain runoff and cause erosion and etch a scar on Mother Nature's careworn cheek -- they just want to rough-ride and have a good time.

The dynamic is that bikers are forever trying to clear paths for their vehicles, dragging away fallen trees and filling in holes, while virtuous but spiteful hikers like me drag fallen branches back onto the paths, and place other obstacles in the way of the bikes.

We seldom actually see one another, and when we do, we are invariably polite. But as soon as the biker passes, we shake an imaginary fist at him, and drag something huge over the path, like a sycamore. Bear in mind that this exchange often occurs at floodplain sites like Crosby Farm where water runoff is too hideous to worry about. Nevertheless, hikers occupy the high moral ground here. Take it from me.

Then there are the jumpers. These fellows are the woodland equivalent of skateboarders. Young and frisky, they build elaborate ramps and traps for their bikes to leap over, Evel Knievel style. It's like motocross, without the motor. 

I have never actually seen a jumper, but their stunt courses are remarkable -- deep pits, 15-foot runways, steeply banked curves. They don’t care if you place a tree in front of them -- that only encourages them. They like obstacles. God bless them, I don't think they mind losing teeth.

Yesterday, I came upon a jumper course in Como Woods that took my breath away. It was over a hundred feet long. It consisted of a hole about ten feet across, that the bike had to jump over, followed by a mound, then another hole, then a bale of hay, then a hole, then a giant log, another hole, then a ramp of mud that rose about two and a half feet above sea level, culminating in a cliff that plunged down a dizzying 30 feet and ended in a kind of briar patch with giant thorny pricks. I was unnerved just standing alongside it.

But it got me thinking, there is no stopping these people. They come out here, without neither cars nor power tools, no shovels, no axes, and they construct these Byzantine race courses on public land. No one rewards them for doing it. No money changes hands. No assurance exists that the work won’t be undone by the next disgruntled hiker like myself.

And yet these sacrificial sites rise up at significant cost to them in labor and time, all for the joy of lifting off and gaining a few instants of freedom from the strictures of gravity.

And I think of that work, and the spirit that goes into it, and I think we might win this war.

mfinley.com 
_{COPYRIGHT (c) 2001
by MICHAEL FINLEY}

Mike is available to write for your publication or organization right now. Call him at 651-644-4540. Or e-mail him.

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