I’m writing from the Ouita Coal Company Mountain Bike Trail.

I pedaled over here from my house, and now I’m zipping around the ten-plus miles of zig-zagging trailways.

A few short months ago, I’d never heard of the Ouita Coal Company. I knew there was an "Ouita Island” on Lake Dardanelle. My daughter and I took the out boat there and hiked around it a couple of times. I wasn’t sure what to make of the big sinkholes we found. “They look like craters on the moon!” That’s what my daughter said, and they did. They do, even if they’re just marks men made on the earth, divots left behind by excavators.

Those same lumps and bumps are what make the mountain bike trail so great. I wonder what those miners from the late 1800s would think of men like me, dudes in spandex shorts and brightly colored plastic helmets, ramping bicycles off their left behind colliery?

I know one thing for certain: it’s a blast.

Buy Eli Cranor's books - #Commissions Earned

It’s been a couple of decades since I’ve had this much fun on a bike. When I was growing up on Muscadine Lane, I rode trails and ramped ramps on an undeveloped half-acre lot my friends and I simply called “The Woods.”

We were neighborhood kids, pining for adventure. Our bikes gave us freedom. They transported us from house to house, block to block, to the place where the pavement stopped.

They bulldozed that half-acre last year.

I noticed it one day when I was dropping my kids off at school. I scanned the downed trees and the scoured earth for the ramps we’d built. I wondered if any of those men on their bulldozers had unearthed the dirty magazines we’d buried there long before the World Wide Web put Playboy out of business.

I saw no signs of the past, no soiled magazines, no crumbling ramps, no tire treads left in the dirt. “The Woods,” as I once knew that small patch of land, had been reduced to a memory, a place and time I’m still able to summon.

It happens when I’m on my bike, whipping around switchback curves and launching myself off ramps. That’s when time pauses. Or to borrow a line from brother Bill Shakespeare: "In winged speed no motion shall I know."

It’s not just my body that’s soaring; my mind does too.

When I’m on my bike, I’m a child again, a kid with a baseball card flapping in the spokes of my neon green Huffy. I’m a boy who knows nothing of women like the ones in those magazines I buried.

When my wild ride ends, as wild rides always do, I return to the real world. I pedal back to my house, back to a wife who puts all those Playboy Bunnies to shame, to a home on the banks of Lake Dardanelle where two towheaded children roam like I once did.

And I think to myself, my younger self: “Keep pedaling, kid. The best is yet to come."

VISIT www.elicranor.com
JOIN my monthly newsletter
GET THE BOOKS!