Finding My People The Ceaseless Search for Good Ride Buddies
Words by Jen See | Photos by Victor Brousseaud
My first riding buddy was a woman named Tina. We had shit bikes and boundless enthusiasm. In fact, that was pretty much all we had. We didn’t know how to ride mountain bikes, not really.
Over and over, we pedaled straight up to the edge of disaster and somehow saved ourselves just in time. I guess I’d call it beginners’ luck. It certainly wasn’t skill. Tina took a fearless approach to every descent and laughed off the inevitable bloody knees. I wasn’t any more calculating than she was, and I still have the scars to prove it.
Back then, we had a lot of wild, adventurous friends, but none of them took to bikes the way we did. They had their own ways of earning their scars. They threw backpacks over their shoulders and disappeared into the backcountry, climbed vertiginous rock faces, or rode half-tamed horses way too fast. Tina and I figured there must be other girls out there somewhere, but it was rare for us to cross paths with anyone like us on the trail. Mostly, it felt like we were alone in our weird passion.
We did see plenty of men and they were never hostile, necessarily. They usually just looked confused. After one look at us ripping around a corner while we laughed like maniacs, you’d understand why the average guy out pedaling his mountain bike might have wondered what exactly he’d run into. There and gone, we’d wave and disappear down the trail—dust and our creaking bikes the only signs of our passage.
We never made friends with any of the men we saw out there, which in retrospect seems strange to me. I guess I worried that they would tell me that I was doing it wrong. I didn’t care about the right way to do it so long as I made it home mostly in one piece. It didn’t matter to me that my bike was decrepit or that my helmet was crooked, but I feared that it might matter to the men I saw. So, I smiled and kept riding. Our community numbered two and it was enough.
Then I moved away to graduate school. Tina and I went our separate ways. I didn’t know anyone in my new town or where I might fi nd trails to ride. I stared up at the steep coastal mountains in Santa Barbara with their Cubist arrangement of boulders and canyons and imagined trails winding through it all. The mountains beckoned with the promise of adventure and bad decisions. I couldn’t wait to explore it all.
Looking around during my first few weeks of class, I didn’t see anyone who looked like they rode mountain bikes. No scabby knees. No sock lines. These were nice people, but they weren’t my people. Perhaps this was the first sign among many that I did not belong there. Eventually, I figured that out, but it took a few years. Or eight. But at the start, it was all fresh and new. I even mostly loved going to class. I’m not sure how to explain that part. One day, a few weeks after I moved into a shabby apartment where I parked my bike in the kitchen, a student activities fair was held on campus. Members of the various clubs set up folding tables around the quad so new students could shop around. It all felt straight out of a college catalog, and while I wasn’t a first-year undergraduate—the typical customer of this kind of event—I was a new student. I wondered if there might be a mountain bike club as I perused the booths. Then, careening around the tables, I found it.
“I’ve been looking for you!” I shrieked.
My exclamation was loud enough for everyone in the surrounding area to hear and it evoked the same confused reaction from the boys behind the table I’d come to expect. I was surprised to discover that there weren’t any other women. Until then, I hadn’t understood how rare it was that my first friend in mountain biking had been a girl like me. The boys in the club weren’t sure what to make of me, but they didn’t seem to mind if I came along. And so I did.
After that, Saturday morning was for mountain bikes. No matter how many pages of reading I hadn’t done or how many papers I still needed to write, I would be in the parking lot bright and early with my pack and my bike. Together, we groveled up climbs and whooped down singletrack. I crashed into more manzanita bushes than I’d like to admit. After each ride, we gathered for overstuffed burritos and pointless stories. Saturday night meant cheap kegs from the kind of brands found only in college towns.
Each ride introduced me to a different trail in the mountains that filled my dreams. Before long, I learned that the colors of the soil changed as I climbed and how to decode the rock-strewn anarchy. I added to my collection of scars and my bike creaked more ferociously with every passing week. Soon I used a portion of my student loans to buy a new bike. It was cute and blue and, on one of our first rides, I scraped the length of the chainstay across a sandstone boulder. Then it was mine, for sure.
By the time I realized that I wasn’t meant to sit inside and read books all day, I’d raced that blue bike with the scraped chainstay all over the place. Racing allowed me to ride with women even if it was only for a couple hours at a time. I looked at them and wondered what it would be like if there were more of us. What if we could ride together all the time? Since then, I’ve met so many crazy, beautiful women who love bikes as much as I do. It’s hard to believe that it worked out this way.
I looked at them and wondered what it would be like if there were more of us. What if we could ride together all the time? Since then, I’ve met so many crazy, beautiful women who love bikes as much as I do.
It feels like a gift. If I wasn’t going to be a professor, I had to figure out what else I could be. So, I started writing about bikes. It’d be too much to say that mountain biking solved every problem I ever encountered. It didn’t. But the escape that bikes offered somehow made life easier to sort out. After a good ride and a cheap burrito, things have a way of snapping into perspective. I still ride those same trails where the soil changes colors, and the rocks shift and roll with reckless abandon. I still like a good burrito. And I married one of those boys.
Thanks to mountain biking, I found my people. The bike has served as the magic link that led me from one person to the next and from one person to a whole, wide community of riders who share a lot of the same jokes, own too many shock pumps, and who know why crashing into manzanita is a very uncomfortable thing to do. All it took was one friend—and a bike.
