My Church

The woods are lovely, dark and deep..... yeah, yeah, but can I ride there?

Each Sunday morning I can be found preparing to enter, like an aged and awkward Alice, that small opening in the picture astride what has become a trusty old friend during the last year, my 1989 KDX200.  On most occasions I am alone, and while this is more dangerous than being accompanied, I generally prefer it.   My arrival occurs just past dawn in order to beat the others and the Virginia summer heat.

The thoroughfare to this undisclosed plot of wild, overgrown heaven sandwiched in between toll booths and big box stores leads me by a still sleeping church, parking lot empty, not yet ready for the day's worship.  But I am.  I have come to give a two-wheeled obeisance to the well worn single-tracks, trees, mud, roots and small creeks that comprise my cathedral of green.

I could wax poetic about the inherent, quiet, enveloping beauty of this place or point out the irony of its existence amid the asphalt and concrete temples of consumerism, but I won't.  Instead I will mention the moments, the ones where the engine is silenced briefly, when there is a pause in jumping over logs and skidding around corners with the raspy cacophony of a richly jetted two-stroke engine howling behind, everything becomes still enough and silent enough that you can feel truly alone.  Sharing this with some other grinning dipshit on a motocross bike would be sacrilegious.

I don't know if god can be found in this dense chunk of land between the tracks and the highway on a Sunday forenoon, but so long as the bulldozers are kept at bay, I will be there looking.