Gullyrunning

The foot presses down on the pedal to rotate at the fulcrum, an interface between animate life and inanimate machine. The teeth of the sprocket hold fast to gaps in the chain and the chain strains to turn the wheel on another gear. The incline increases, requiring exponential gravity for the process. Muscles strain to match the energy, the heart pumps to wish the muscles strength and lungs heave to feed the internal combustion. One revolution turns into another and progress is made. The brain struggles to retain optimism, labouring through distance and time. Distance stretches, time expands. Energy depletes. Hope diminishes, failure is imminent.

Jeez. My child voice. Are we there yet?

Seth and I bike along the gray asphalt travail up a slow grade of the Niagara River Parkway, rising from the leafy hollow of Queenston, up the escarpment towards Niagara Falls. Weekend tourist traffic passes us cautiously while we weave along the shoulder, though Seth is especially erratic in his weaving, to the point where vehicles have to slow down to let oncoming traffic pass before they can give him a wide berth. He earns angry glares from drivers and passengers alike, of which he is blissfully unaware or boorishly ignorant. He turns back to me often, shouting things I never hear through the sound of traffic, the wind in my ears and general disinterest in anything he has to say. As he does this, his bicycle lurches even further over the yellow shoulder line to cause even more dissonance and frantic confusion. 

I’ve flipped my ten speed to the tenth speed, succeeding only in making the revolutions more concise, to the effect of spinning rather than pedaling. I’m a big guy, bloated soft with sedentary tendencies. Under normal circumstances, I can look in turns like a fat overstimulated country bumpkin or a big plodding ogre, but in this instant I look like a comedy skit on weight loss, huffing, puffing and getting nowhere fast. Seth, by contrast, is gangly and unencumbered, seeming to exert nothing to the effort of pumping up the hill, shouting back god knows what to me the whole time, fueled by madness and a stalwart denial of the senses. 

“Hayo, Apeface!” he seems to say, I think. I’m not sure.

This is Seth on a high.

I should explain. Seth’s moods often take on peaks and valleys that are neither explicable nor predictable. When he is on a high like now, he sails to such cold Icaresque heights that one could swear he is snorting cocaine or something. Addiction would also explain why his falls always plummet directly into the dark pits of hell, where gravity will always send you, the molten center of the Earth. I don’t know. I don’t have the range of experience to know. During these lows, I do know outings like this would not even happen. In that context, he would seal himself in his room, telling the world to fuck off through the door, disappearing for days sometimes. When I am meeting him, I need to study his face and gauge which personality I am going to have to deal with. It’s always either/or. Everything is absolute with him. If ever he appears normal, it’s only a transient point on a spectrum between nadir or zenith. 

We two are nerd kindreds from high school, knowledgeable in all things save functioning in society. We blend over sci-fi novels, Frank Frazetta comics and astronomy documentaries, harbouring our geekdom with our backs turned to the slings and arrows of teenage socialization, sooner found in the library or AV room than the gym playing b-ball or whatever the neanderthals do on their lunch period. We don’t care about those things. We’ve connected through mutual interests and shared trauma, though I can’t say I ‘like’ Seth. I don’t. The best I can say is I ‘relate’ to him, and given the aberrant parts of his personality, that’s stretching it.

We are mounting the plateau atop the Niagara Escarpment. The river is bluegreen and capped white with the rapids churning a hundred feet below, apparent through the precariously rooted trees at the precipice. On the northern horizon beyond the valley that is Niagara-on-the-Lake, visible only to those who know it is there, is the blue strip of Lake Ontario; a reminder that this Niagara River is only a conduit in a larger system, a watershed of the continent, a mechanism of the Earth. I am sure if my idol Buzz Aldrin were looking down on the Niagara Region from Apollo 11 all those years ago in the midst of his global epiphany of one planet, one home, he would have seen how all the lakes and rivers of the interior are dispatched down the slope of the continental divide, pooling into those inland seas, the Great Lakes. From there, he’d have seen all that water, every litre, funneled through this one river, the Niagara. He would have seen that bluegreen flow entering its mouth at Lake Erie to rage over cataracts, carving a deep gorge seven miles long, gouged with surging rapids, guided by gravity into Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence Basin and out into the Atlantic. He would have thought that, looking down from that portal hundreds of miles above our heads. I’m sure of it.

Arriving at the parking lot of Niagara Glen Park, Seth maintains his reckless speed, nearly blindsiding clutches of hand-holding tourist families, drawing ever more ire from the visiting public. At the trailhead, he dismounts and dashes for the trail without looking back, his bike crashing down the embankment to nestle in some bushes. I lean my bike against a post and take a few beats to collect myself before heading down the gorge trail to catch up, hoping no one will steal my ride home.

We call this ‘gullyrunning’, which entails running as fast as one can down two kilometers of rotted wooden steps, steep ravines and jagged terrain. Sailing headlong downward, Seth is agile and barely touches the ground as he leaps down the descent, scaring evermore tourists as he flashes by. I tamp down the earth with each stomp, leaving impressions in the mud and humus that I’m sure archaeologists will find thousand years from now. Neil Armstrong’s footprint is still on the moon from 1969, so I like to think I have that kind of longevity. On the lunar gravity 1/3 of Earth’s, Neil was able to skip along like a carefree toddler through the Mare Tranquillatis dust, yet it takes all my effort just to stay upright, devoting my full concentration to not tripping. Dodging slowpokes hindering our descent, we both race noisily and with much imposition. Nearing the bottom and the end of the trail, I sense the sound once again. That primordial sound that has not ceased once in millennia. The hiss of eternal hydraulic abrasion upon the limestone gorge, the wind and complaints of seagulls. Emerging from the trail terminus, the sound envelops me, contained within the mile-wide bowl of the canyon carved out of an ancient elbow in the river’s trajectory. Our feet finally slow onto the rocky beachhead laid out like a crescent moon where the grade has eased.

I am exhausted, breathing hard, my body wanting to fall to the ground. I throw off the backpack and let it fall to the rocks, feeling the coolness of my sweat that had accumulated underneath it. I roll my body onto a rock to sit on, but Seth is not content with stopping now. He picks up the backpack and swings it back at me.

“Not time to quit yet, Apeface! Allons-y!”

He resumes his sprint to the rocks and boulders along the side of the gorge. Though my lungs are burning and my heart is going to bust through my ribcage, I take up the burden and jog after him towards the great limestone detritus that had dislodged from the side of the gorge. Keeping with his headlong levity, Seth leaps from rock to rock with only a fraction of the effort that I have to exert in pursuit. There is a precocious bravado in rockhopping, crossing the gaps between them while the river twists and rages beneath us. I’m fine with this. This is all within my lugubrious capabilities. It’s good fun. I carry on with full commitment until Seth takes a detour towards the gorge face where a sheer cliff towers above us. He takes a handhold of a projecting stratus, making it clear that he is going to climb the rock face. I stop and study the rationality of this idea while he lofts himself into the endeavour. I don’t see any ledges to grip onto or to place a foot, yet all the same, he is scaling the cliff, barely holding on to anything for any length of time. Seeing my hesitation, Seth urges me to follow, but my computations see no positive outcome for doing so. Seth jumps down and I am amazed to see he can disengage from that height and land on both feet when there is nothing but loose rocks to meet him.

“Quit being such a labia,” he says, wheezing from his exertion. “If I can do it, so can you.”

“I don’t think I can do that,” I say.

Usually, in situations like this, I’ve had to exert common sense against his pressuring but, depending on the height of his high, this can be incendiary. As it is proving now.

“Why do you always do this? Why do you pull back like that?”

He pushes me, and I absorb the energy with a shrug, trying to let it roll off me. I’ve done this before and not only with him. It’s alright. This time however, his eyes are wild and full of hatred and pain. My refusal seems to hurt his feelings. He’s not letting up, so I have to push back because I’m getting dangerously near the water. He coerces me onto the last rock that stands above the water but he’s not stopping. I let him push me though his shoves are evolving into punches that will surely leave bruises on my lilly-white skin.  Now I have to choose whether I will let him push me into the water or fight back. I grab his wrist when it lunges towards me and use his momentum to pull him past me. A maneuver I’d seen in a kung fu movie.  He falls into the river gracelessly with an awkward splash. I turn and watch him thrash in the current, hoping he hasn’t hurt himself on the submerged rocks. The current tows him from the brink and he drifts a short way until he struggles back to the rocks where he grabs on and begins to climb out.

Assured that he is uninjured and safe, I turn back towards the mouth of the trail, my heart struggling and my muscles quivering with unresolved adrenaline from the conflict I’d just stopped short. I suplex the backpack hard onto the rubble for him and start my ascent back up to the bikes, hoping my own bike is still there.

Photo by Siddharth Patel on Unsplash.