Big Bikes

Leave it to Beavers

The plan for today's ride was to connect some trails I "discovered" along Springs St. in Bedford to Burlington Landlocked Forest, and hopefully to connect the trails behind school to the whole chimichanga. I invited some others out, but due to the fact that it was a weekday at a weird time and that I am an entirely disagreeable person to ride with, I had only one taker. It's probably a good thing she had scheduling conflicts and couldn't make the ride. The way the ride ended up going the Fox News teaser might have gone:

"Internationally beloved Cyclocross star dies on a mountain bike death march in a swamp. Police are holding a reclusive, local, hunch-backed, mountain bike weirdo for questioning."

So ya, the trails didn't link up like I'd imagined they might. I did find that the Bay Circuit trail backs right up to the school parking lot, which is cool. But the trail system that branches off of that basically runs in circles and into people's yards, and some of those people have dogs who aren't super-nice. After figuring that out I checked out the next section of trail. Although that section was pretty cool (most of the photos are from that bit) it also ran in circles, only taking me out to the V.A. Medical Center parking lot, not all the way over to route 62 like I'd hallucinated during a peyote-fueled map-viewing session the night before.


As I did before, I skipped over to the next section on the road, cutting into Spring Brook behind the V.A. While I was riding around in there I started thinking about the fact that so much of what appears to be green space on the map(don't over-analyze this one), at least in the metro-Boston area, often turns out to be swamp...er, excuse me "wetlands." Well I think it was mighty white of the folks who developed and continue to develop Boston's suburbs to build their houses around all those fragile, ecologically valuable wetlands...instead of in them like they really wanted, It was just their deep-seated love of ducks and snakes and mosquitoes that prevented them from doing it too.

I mean they totally screwed over the dryland creatures for the sake of preserving the wetlands. "Hey you little dryland fuckers, you can have this...lets' see — parking lot! And what else? This, uh — highway!" Now dryland creatures like coyotes come back down from the wild, wild north country and eat a Pekingese and they're like: "We can't have these aggressive, invasive predators coming around attacking indigenous species!" Those dryland dudes get screwed if you ask me. Who did those wetland critters pay off to get the sweet deal they did?

There's just one thing that troubles me...these folks who were so concerned about the newts and the water rats, they don't care for the beavers. In fact they wrap chicken wire around trees the beavers are trying to fell. Now what's up with that? The beavers just want to drop those trees over areas of running water so they can create more...fragile, ecologically valuable wetlands that these suburban people obviously love so much. The beavers are just trying to further your cause, why you gotta mess with their program huh?

Long story not quite so long, I wound up dead-ending my ride into a swamp. I made a, um...judgment error that lead to my feet getting soaking wet. F-in' beavers, kill 'em all.