fear and the licking valley century!

welcome to A Teetering Vulture! a newsletter about various science stuff as well as the life happenings of its author, Taylor

My father, an avid sixty-eight year old bicyclist, convinced me to volunteer to help out with an organized 100-mile bike ride in Kentucky last weekend. It was put on by a cycle club in Cincinnati that he’s involved in, and once I'd agreed, I was told I was to lead a team of other volunteers at one of the rest stops, one of the little stations that cyclists could stop at along the route to get a snack, an electrolyte-infused drink, a bathroom.

I am not a bike rider in the athletic way that the people in this ride were, are, bike riders. I’ve never been part of a race or a ride like this, have only ridden recreationally here and there, never more than twenty or so miles. I agreed because my dad and his club were lacking volunteers, and because he had asked me. And also, a little bit, because strange things I would never think to participate in intrigue me, when I'm presented with the chance to be involved in them. My curiosity perks up, and I wonder what could possibly, potentially, come of them.

It took place in the Licking Valley in Kentucky, the course meandering along ridges and one lane roads in the vicinity of the modest Licking River. The rest stop where I was assigned was in a town a stone’s throw from the river, an old, pale blue truss bridge the landmark riders would pass just before the turn off to the stop.

I underestimated, when officially signing up, the degree of rural-ness I would be experiencing and its effect on me. I, an internet lesbian, was taken aback by the town I discovered I was to spend a full day in. Desolate, ramshackle, miniature—with a quiet, florally wallpapered town hall employing a total of three women, and a coffee shop where I brushed shoulders with a cassocked priest my first time through its doors. Every time I looked down at my phone my eyes went to the upper right hand corner. SOS. There was a general store where my Dad and I stored Italian Ice provisions in the basement the day before the ride—a basement where cattle were slaughtered, apparently, and where I entertained the idea that if this were a horror movie, the employee who showed us the walk-in freezer would lock us in there, and we’d never be seen again.

I fantasized concernedly about the guns I imagined were in the passenger seats of occasional trucks that rumbled through the town’s streets. I wondered what secrets the local cats held, the cats I kept seeing disappear around the corners of abandoned-looking homes, or homes with porches crowded with unfathomable junk. I felt vulnerable and on edge the day preceding the ride, when we were there simply to set things up. I joked with my girlfriend over text that I wouldn’t be able to let her know if I’d survived the following day alive until probably three or four pm, when I would have phone service again.

“At least this town has a real mayor,” one of the town hall women quipped to us. “Over in Rabbithash, a dog is the mayor.”

I ended up freaking out a little, that night. I felt idiotic for agreeing to put myself in a potentially unsafe situation. My twin instructed me not to wear anything rainbow, as if I would have considered it in the first place. I worried about the hour-long drive I would have to make at five the following morning in order to make it to the stop by six, the scheduled start time of the ride. I worried about the volunteers I would be leading, each of whom I expected to be at least three decades older than me and with demeanors and opinions I couldn’t possibly predict. I worried about being isolated, cut-off, alone.

In the end, that night I ended up burying myself in a fanfiction until one a.m. It was ridiculously soothing to read a self-insert fic about someone’s trans OC and to forget, for awhile, about my imminent descent into the land of conservatives, homophobia, and guns.

The moon was still high in the sky when I pulled out of my driveway the following morning. It was full on the night of the solstice: June’s full moon is known to some as the strawberry moon, so I at least had the comfort of this big, strawberry solstice satellite in the sky as I drove. The roads were mostly empty—it was a Saturday, and forecasted to be immensely hot, humid, and sunny. There was a railroad crossing I got stuck at for ten, fifteen minutes as a train clanked past, and so I ended up being slightly late.

Fortunately, only one of the volunteers had arrived before me. A man about my Dad’s age who I would learn later that day hailed from a town north of the arctic circle in Sweden. To my relief, he was familiar with this ride and with the processes inherent to rest stops. As soon as I unlocked the one-room community center where we would be preparing our stop, he got to work immediately setting up roadside signs and assembling bike racks in the drive.

Meanwhile, I decided to chop fruit. I had written down a list of tasks to be tackled throughout the day, among them setting out both fresh fruit and salty dry goods like pretzels, nuts, and potato chips. Someone would also have to assemble—and, once riders began arriving, keep replenished—jugs of beverages. We were instructed to pick up four hundred pastries from the coffee shop where I’d run into the priest, and a hose needed to be made accessible for riders to cool themselves off with. There was additional minutiae, but that was the gist of what we were responsible for.

The two other volunteers ended up being a married couple from—to my astonishment—Rabbithash, Kentucky. The place with the dog mayor! Tragically, I never did get that story from them, though I wish I had.  

I’ve heard people I admire and respect say that fear is the opposite of curiosity. Though, maybe what they meant was that fear is often accompanied by uncreative ways of thinking, or narrow-minded ways of thinking. Perhaps fear often leads to rationalization and the construction of mental phantasms designed so that a person can ignore or reject what they fear. Or maybe they simply meant that sometimes fear drives you into a corner, and all you do is think about what you fear, which doesn’t lead to anything except retention of the fear. Thinking about fear certainly doesn’t always lead to facing a fear, to overcoming it.

But surely the presence of fear intrinsically presents a person with an interesting choice. How will you grapple with this? What will you do with it? Sometimes, I think fear can impel a person towards curiosity: this thing scares me—I acknowledge that. Why does it scare me? Is the fear rational? What is going on, here? Is this a challenge—an obstacle that I will be better for if I surmount it?

Personally, fear is my buddy. She is always here beside me, and always has been. She was there holding my hand down whenever I thought I had a right answer in math class in fifth grade—she was the one whispering in my ear that it was not worth it to risk raising my hand and saying a wrong answer, which would surely mean being perceived by my classmates as irredeemably stupid. And she was there sitting on a lab bench my first day teaching genetics to a classroom of undergraduates, kicking her feet while I politely ignored her. She’s hampered me, sure, but I’ve learned to live alongside her—to see what she’s doing and then make decisions based on what I observe.

I was scared of this town in Kentucky, of its potentially hazardous people and its general remoteness. But I didn’t for a moment shut myself off from engaging with it because of that, nor did I resolve myself to the idea that my fear could never be upturned. The fear was caution, awareness—a fear that I believe was guided by as well as tempered by intelligence and logic.

What happened on the day of the ride was that I fell into an amicable routine with three really cool, kind older folks. What happened was I smiled and laughed at the delightful enthusiasm with which bicycle riders chose between a chocolate chip cookie or a jam-filled scone. It put my mind at peace to hear sweaty queer riders giggling over the pile of pastries as well, throughout the day. I enjoyed handing out bottles of sunscreen to people who were having fun moving their bodies through a world that seemed as sweltering and vigorous as they were, watching them slather themselves in protective white and take off down the road once more. I loved seeing all of the endlessly, wonderfully variegated human bodies that were clothed in snug lycra and spandex. At the end of the day, when I discovered a nail had punctured one of my car’s tires and deflated it, my team of volunteers did not even ask me before suddenly, without complaint, they were exchanging the flat for the spare.  

It’s too easy to forget, or refuse to acknowledge, how lovely it can be to meet someone unlike yourself. It’s frighteningly easy to get wrapped up in hatred and vitriol and weird opinions—not just online. It should be easy to keep fear as a friend but not let it pull you in unkind, uninteresting directions. To be honest, I highly recommend volunteering for a century ride, or perhaps any sort of intense sporting event. And I recommend volunteering for something you suspect may involve people with very different views than you. Humans are crazy, and spectacularly diverse, and damn are they cool because of it. This is on display at an event like this—it can transform a town, transform a small group of strangers into people who are connected by an experience. It can make us better.