This winter, I made a New Year’s Resolution to maintain some familiarity with hill riding in our Upper Left Hand Corner. On January 16th, we explored ghostly rural roads between Massbach Ridge Winery and Hanover. On Sunday, the 24th, we revisited “Twenty Something,” a route we blogged last May.
Twenty Something begins and ends at the Salem UCC church just up the hill from the Slurp n Burp in Loran. We named it Twenty Something, because there is something close to a twenty percent assault twenty something miles into the ride.
This January, we were in forty degree wool piercing nearly dreary “sun please appear” weather. A southwest blow squelched the tinnitus in my ears as I rode into the stately Val de Loran towards Mount Carroll.
In Carroll County, I happened to look over my left shoulder to see an ominous looking earthen dam holding back Lake Carroll. I turned back to the road ahead and instinctively quickened the tempo.
Then, a deep baritone growl invaded my conscious. Glancing down through the handle bars, I was horrified to see water gushing over my tires. The peddles now turned in great earnest as I struggled to keep my rims above the rising water. This was now a race to get out the valley before being swallowed by the deluge.
Then, miraculously, the water vanished, and I remembered the possible side effects from the Analox antibiotic I was taking for a pesky sinus infection—“hear voices, see things, or sense things that are not there (hallucinations).”
Relieved, I ascended the west wall of the valley and pressed through the wind to the corner at Meyer’s Road. Now, the blow barely hissed in my left ear as I rolled through the hills and valleys of one of the loveliest roads in the Upper Left.
Meyers Road is unique, because it doesn’t follow through or cross perpendicular to the valleys. Like the path of a great mogul skier, it takes an oblique path sliding over the dales. And so, you receive a different perspective of the surrounding hills and woods.
I confess to being cheeky about a certain training camp in last May’s blog. Only recently did I learn that Blackwater’s facility trains law enforcement people in special weapons and tactics with an emphasis on tactics.
Mark Marti opened my eyes to how critical this kind of training is to preserving our freedom from fear and intimidation. Mark is recently retired from Freeport’s Police Department, and he shared his experiences as a volunteer officer for the United Nations security force in Kosovo.
There he received several letters of commendation for bringing down some truly bad guys without so much as shot fired. While producers of movies and television sell heavy armor and gunplay, real law enforcement strives to shield innocent folks like you and me from becoming innocent casualties of desperate gunplay.
Mark’s experiences echoed stories I had heard from a former Captain of the New Mexico State Police Narcotics Division. While the Cohen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men may be gripping in its entertainment, it would be refreshing to see a factual treatment of the hours of training spent by those who keep us from harm’s way?
Always grateful for a tail wind, I pressed up the 20 (something) percent grade on East Loran Road. A sweet looking lady in a shiny new Chevrolet Traverse rounded the corner as I crested the hill. She gave me the look like, “wherever did you come from?” I don’t believe she was an Avalox induced hallucination.
Finally, it was all down hill to Loran past the Slurp n Burp tavern to the little church and the heated seats in my trusty slightly rusty Blazer, Ruby.
