Trail
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Somewhere in the thousand-plus acres of Van Cortlandt Park, up past the Star Wars–flavored bridge over the Harlem River at the northern end of New York City, a tangle of paved and shaded trail unfurls into a straightaway heading north. If you follow it, you’ll eventually realize the city is now behind you: The park is a portal to somewhere cooler and greener yet, which turns out to be Westchester County. Locking knuckle to handlebar to fend off the perilous jarring of the odd tree root that juts a rough seam in the asphalt, you keep going past runners and roller-bladers through a world that opens like Narnia off the back of the wardrobe, close enough to the city to reach from it in a few self-powered minutes and yet clearly something of a different kind, a rebellion or at least a hypothesis against the dominion of the car.
Money built this right-of-way and then abandoned it, for railroads and trucking respectively. The land, the views, the engineering: They’re lavish in a way cyclists and pedestrians learn not to expect from our infrastructure, like a postcard from an alternate universe where someone in the right place at the right time decided several tons of steel were not the way to move a single human body. (Legislation that gave rise to many rail trails did so as a means of banking that infrastructure for rail’s implausible return, which is one reason so much enviable land is still in public reach.) The two histories, ours and that one, intertwine for a while—like when you leave the path to puncture a half-dozen parking lots for a latte and a gallon of water at the Stop & Shop in a car-heavy commuter redoubt called Baldwin Place. But then you get farther from Metropolis, and the land opens up and the cars retreat to an inaudible, invisible distance. The trail is a groove now, struck into the rock and overtopped with bridges, and then it’s a tree-shaded glen, and then it’s a causeway over one lake conceded to lily pads and another kept yachting blue.
I was on this trail, the Hudson Valley Greenway, last Saturday for three reasons: (1) to get to James, who’d finally gone upstate after being glued to my side for most of this catastrophic spring; (2) to ride for six-plus hours in accordance with my Ironman plan; (3) to pass the place where I crashed in March, to surpass it and bury it—and thank it. Somewhere in the last few weeks, looking at my painful, swollen, scarred, restricted wrist, I decided I wouldn’t turn back time if I could. This injury is part of me, its lessons not something I can think to discard.
Growing up in Utah, I spent a good chunk of my childhood in natural places whose splendor I have yet to see exceeded, and in most of them people were scarce. So it’s not surprising to see the same scarcity in a hundred-plus miles of leafy athlete’s idyll extending straight out from the heart of New York City. Humans are wired to look for threats, to detect them where they aren’t and brace for assaults that don’t come (even as shock and loss sniff out the unguarded avenues). I wonder what it would be like if we were so vigilant for things that can restore us. For years I’ve driven the Saw Mill River Parkway to and from one place upstate or another; never once did I notice the bike path that follows it for miles and miles. The greenway might be a taunt—“You could be outside”—were it not so self-content. It’s an offer, not an argument.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.