THINK LOCALLY, ACT YOKELLY

FROM WIKIPEDIA: Yokel is a derogatory term referring to the stereotype of unsophisticated country people. In the United States, it is used to describe someone from the rural South or Midwest. It may also be a slur for people from a Third World country. Synonyms for yokel include bumpkin and hick. In England, yokels are traditionally depicted as wearing the old West Country farmhand's dress of straw hat and white smock, chewing or sucking a piece of straw and carrying a pitchfork or rake, listening to Scrumpy and Western music. Yokels are portrayed as living in rural areas of Britain such as the Yorkshire Dales, the West Country, Wales, St Helens or East Anglia. English yokels speak a country dialect from some part of England. Yokels are depicted as straightforward and simple, but they aren't easily deceived as they easily see through false pretenses. Yokels are also depicted as talking about bucolic topics like cows, sheep, goats, wheat, alfalfa, fields, crops, tractors, and buxom wenches to the exclusion of all else and don't seem to be aware of or at least show interest in the world outside of their own surroundings.

Merry Land IV

So, through divine intervention I managed to halt the Nicolai before sailing off to certain disfiguring injury or death. I backtracked and bushwacked around what was until then the nastiest rock drop I had ever seen only to discover that rest of the "trail" was more of the same. I have ridden in a lot of places, but nothing as gnar as what I saw in the "other side" of the Frederick Watershed. Delmer cruised this track like he was coming back from Starbuck's on the sidewalk with a cappuccino in one hand. LLF was breathing hard and had big eyes, but was surviving it with a dab here and there. I had to walk/crawl half the trail. When I finally got down near the bottom and could see that the line held no more extreme ugliness, I let the Nicolai run. I was hauling a ton of ass and about six feet off the ground when it became startlingly obvious that the little jump I had just cleaned was a hip. The trail disappeared somewhere off to the left. I had plenty of time to think. I spit the bike and curled into the fetal position and waited for gravity to do it's job. Eventually I touched down in a pile of rocks roughly the size of Hewlett Packard Officejet 6210 All-in-One printers. The first impact points were my right hip bone and the right side of my head. I have no memory of it, but the various cuts and brusies underneath my right shinguard suggest that I bounced into the air and smacked my right leg onto some more rocks and finally plopped down on the opposite side of the pile. My right hip bone was hurting so intensely I failed to notice that I could not see out of my right eye. Delmer and LLF eventually climbed back up to the crash site. They didn't bother to ask if I was O.K. When someone you have been riding with but have not seen in ten minutes is found face down in a pile of rocks, you already know the answer. After a frightening while, vision slowly came back to my right eye. I rode out the rest of the trail, except for an 80 foot long tree that had fallen across a stream and then had been chain-sawed flat on the top. I might have been able to ride that, but the ten foot section that was about 8 inches under water and therefore completely invisible spooked me a bit. Later that afternoon, LLF and Delmer took me to look at the really technical stuff and I have to say, it was nothing that I would have recognized as a bike trail. The boys at the Frederick Watershed are not faacking around.

Merry Land III

So, this guy Delmer can get away with being Johnny Match because he rides like the faacking wind, and, as I found out later, gets all of his shit free from Yeti. (Just like going to the gym, where, if you wear one of those wide leather "kidney belts", you'd I better be able to lift a faacking house, if you show up at the trailhead and all your shit matches like faacking pyjamas, you will either go exceptionally large, or get buggered deep in the bushes far from the trailhead.) Neither LLF, nor Delmer mention any name for this run, but after about four or five times down it, satisfied that I am not a complete dweeb, Delmer opines that we should go the the "other side". The "other side" consists of about five or six trails where the locals take people who either can ride, or who they want to humiliate for their own obscure and twisted reasons. Delmer and LLF mention the names of the various trails in the process of deciding which one to ride first, and conclude to descend what the quick consensus called "the easiest one". The trails all have joke names like "Panty Line", although for reasons soon to surface, I do not remember any of them. After hearing all the cute names for the trails on this side of the hill, I asked LLF the name of the first trail we had ridden and he said something like: "the Girly Run". We suit up and take off down the "easy" trail. It starts out like the Girly Run, but soon enough turns into something disturbingly different. The woodsy single track morphs into a dirty line snaking across massive rock slabs and boulders. Before I knew it, going about fifteen miles an hour and already out of control, I popped up onto the top of a rock the size of conversion van. The little dirty line I had been following abruptly stopped and then re-appeared fourteen feet below in a pile of rocks the size of microwave ovens.