Riding Through the Woods

One of my earliest memories is my dad strapping blocks of wood onto the pedals of a tricycle so that my feet could reach and me pedaling up and down the sidewalk in front of our house.

Flash forward.

My 3-year-old  grandson Jack on his Strider balance bike pushing his way through the woods—5 miles!

When I first got him the balance bike in the spring he was flush with excitement, but then the glow wore off. I realized he was tired of just going on our street; he needed to branch out. We rode around the “block”—he on his bike and me on mine. Next we rode to Playmakers, where I work, then through Indian Hills the residential track next to ours along the Red Cedar River. Then . . .

I loaded his bike onto the trailer and we rode across busy Grand River Road and at a trailhead through the woods I’d stop and get Jack out and his bike and we’d ride. The path was recently paved as an extension of the Lansing River Trail. The trail winds up and down some sloughs and drainage ponds and through a wood now bursting with fall colors. We ride breathing in the crisp air and talk back and forth about what we’re seeing. Sometimes a deer will cross in front of us. He begs me to go to the woods. Wasn’t it Thoreau who said:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

It seems Jack and I are sucking the marrow out of life. On our bikes.