The Tree on F/U hill

Sunday 6AM

F/U Hill isn’t very long-probably only a few thousand feet at most-what it has going for it is location—location—location. You come screaming down a hill at about 40 mph do some very fast banks and you see the hill—and you always think that your built-up speed will ricochet you over the top. Once you hit a certain point of the hill gravity puts a lock on you and you need to really work.

This isn’t a big—huge deal. Bainbridge has lots of hills. There are long hills and some really hard hills. The fact of the matter going over this hill only one time isn’t such a big deal. When things get interesting is when you start looping around the Island more then one time. This is when some of my companions have dubbed this special hill F/U Hill.

One Sunday morning—I was supposed to meet a group of cyclists for an early morning ride. The weather was sketchy. OK it was raining and it wasn’t sketchy and all the riders made the decision to stay in bed. It was their loss. Being that it was a Sunday morning—and raining there was nobody at all on the road. It was very exceptionally beautiful. The rain wasn’t bad—nothing crazy-nuts or anything—just heavy, heavy mist.

There is something very spiritual riding through mist and rain when it is quiet. Everything has an amazing smell. I wasn’t too disappointed riding alone.

I wasn’t too concerned about going downhill in the rain. The fact of the matter was you had no brakes—so you simply knew not to hit the brakes—you would skid. The bigger issue was retaining traction going up the bigger hills. You couldn’t climb out of the seat as this caused you to loose traction on the rear wheel. You just had to stay seated—and dig in.

This was my state when I flew down –and approached F/U hill. I was digging in and grinding my way up. All of the sudden without any warning—and without any sound what so ever a large tree flopped down across the entire road in front of me. The tree was about 500 yards in front of me—so there was no immediate danger. I slowed down and got off the bike. And really wanted to say to somebody: Did you see that?!  It was just completely crazy. Apparently all the rain from the preceding few days weakened the trees roots—and it was simply too much for this tree—and it was time to come down.

There was nothing to do but ride up to the tree climb over and carry the bike over the tree to get to the other side of the road. It occurred to me that cars would be flying down that same hill towards the fallen tree—so I waited at the top of the hill stopping traffic and turning them around. One driver had some flares and we put them down. We contacted the fire department—and somebody came with a chain saw to start fixing the situation.

You couldn’t help but wonder the what- if’s. The one that went around my mind the most was what if the whole group of riders actually had shown up? Always going up a hill—especially a steep hill—there is always a stretched out group of riders. Who knows what might have happened. Crazy-lucky.