Today, the first Sunday after 17 May, was the first ride. Actually, it was a Sunday with many rides going on, past even heading out alone for a spin: the Lake Pepin Three Speed Tour, a friend's Michele Bachman Dump Ride, a memorial ride a thousand miles away I could nearly have done with a red-eye drive and a more than understanding wife. Several old team mates and fellow mechanics were up for a metric century that we had kicked around in January, when the Spring seemed too long away and our schedules very open.
But, no. Today was the first ride, and needed to be more, and less. Colin and I had always been bound and separated by bicycles, linked and parallel. Despite both of us working as cycling mechanics, riding for USCF sanctioned teams, prizing Italian frames and components above all others, and having cut our cycling teeth in the valleys and on the mountain roads of Montana, we never rode together that I remember after we were in middle school and junior high. I got serious, very serious, about racing in my sophomore spring, shedding 50 pounds from my defensive lineman's frame and learning to pace and to hammer. Colin, much more a natural athlete than I, was still more interested in transforming the many butter-fly barred and banana-seated bikes around into jumping and stunt machines. He looked askance at my first toe-clips and straps, and probably thought I was nuts riding to Battle Ridge and back twice in a day. But I wonder...so many views and dreams we shared but never spoke about, so many things I started and left behind that he picked up and took further, I wonder if that strange passion for unattainably wonderful Italian frames and jerseys and peletons (never in 1982 Bozeman) that obsessed me and drove me to my bike for hours upon hours didn't lodge with him, then, to burst into full blossom and recurrent blooms later.
There is another thing about bicycles and brothers: in our darkest days, I know cycling saved our lives, figuratively and literally, for a time. Mine first in high school, when it gave structure and appreciation and in many ways a spiritual voice to life in a bleak time. Again, after leaving my beloved undergraduate college without a degree but with a brutal brain injury, I turned to riding and wrenching to sustain myself and regain balance and worth. Working at Freewheel Bicycle, riding not too well for Flanders Brothers, while Colin worked at the Chalet, for the first time we both learned how immersed we were in cycling, and felt the bikes coursing within us. I was never great, rarely good, often battered, but always lifted by it...as was he. For Colin, cycling waited and welcomed him when the snows of his first love, skiing, receded. It sustained him and saved him when the hard seas of life broke on him. It immersed him in the bright, the possible, the lovely, and gave him hope far longer than anything else. It almost, I believe, almost saved him from hi daemons in the end, even after the broken collarbone that took him low for a year.
Bicycles bound us, still bind us. Through him, I ordered my first Bianchi frame, a frame I raced for 10 years and which I still ride often...nearly every week, at least. But today, the first year without Colin, needed to be marked with a ride of a different sort. While the Delphine team took to the roads and hills where Colin and I learned to love cycling, I rode alone, wherever, en route to nowhere...I simply rode, following the whim and the wind, and remembered riding as kids, riding the neighborhood and across town, to Joe's Parkway for gum and soda and baseball games, and out Third and back Eleventh from the foothills with our family on golden-soft, perfect evenings. Today the roads were a thousand miles away from those roads, and decades away in time, but I rode in memory and with memories and without remembering where I rode. A ride that was simply that: riding.
Next year, end each after, there will be other rides, other memories to come alongs. But this year was simple, and sad, and fine. I left my Bianchi at home, left the daily driver LHT at home, left the dad-bike Ute and the old, proud Raleigh from high school that is now a fixed gear fun bike at home. I rode the only bike that fit the day, for the only time I will ride it every year: Colin's Marco Pantani commemorative Bianchi. One bike, two men, gone the same way. Two held close and held up by so many, two who should still be here. I rode neither as effortlessly as Marco, nor as smoothly as I imagine Colin riding, but I rode...a simple thing, a needed thing, a beautiful thing.
Whatever the route, the first Sunday after the day Colin left will always be at least me and his Pantani Bianchi on a ride, some ride, the ride.
I miss you, my brother. Ride with me?