The hub of trails in our town is called Centennial, and is a half-flat, half-single-track tour around our drinking water reservoir. In a parallel universe, this would be a lake where we swim. For now, we’re drinking it. Two years in a row a lucky group of kids got taken on a tour of the water treatment plan—I hadn’t realised my friend who teaches sixth grade had the same idea as me the year before. I stood on a rickety bridge over the water tank next to a kid we called a “hydromaniac” because of how water followed him around, always a puddle from an exploded bottle or fountain, wondering what everyone else was learning as I was worrying.
Last year they paved over part of the walking path. It’s the part that reaches through the tunnel and up a smelly little hill past the treatment plant. They paved it with glowing pavement, so it shines at night! I have yet to experience the phenomenon: I’m not in the post-dinner walk phase of my life as I was in my senior citizen era, living in my early twenties at my parents’ house next to the West Vancouver seawall. I’ve used Centennial instead as a starter run, the run I do every time I started running again. I’ve run Centennial a lot. The end of the reservoir is beautiful. Others noticed too and put a couple picnic benches and some housing. The road there leads to Red Mountain, which you can also reach along Blue Elephant, my favourite trail to bike or run.
My first bike ride was along Drifter, the single-track flowy trail next to the wide, flatter one. I was testing out the mountain bike I’d buy from my friend Shannon and she stopped me to warn me about an upcoming dip in the trail. Unsure about anything mountain-biking-related, having seven years avoided it, I delivered the news to other friends passing by on their way to the top of the mountain. I was joking, but did they know it? The dip was fine; I was fine. A mountain bike is very confident. It rides over everything. I who had only ridden a cruiser through cities and slid out on gravel had not been able to imagine this new horse.
Looping back up Moe’s toward the highest point of the trail, I once saw a girl I was teaching learn to ride a bike. I was so impressed because she didn’t try anything at school yet here she was, on the edge of a dropoff into our drinking water. The couple in my story “Wedding Band” are facing the shaky foundations of their relationship as they prepare to divorce. There was a bout of food poisoning at their wedding, so they spent their wedding night expelling rather than taking each other in. They tell their children about this for the first time after a Father’s Day picnic turned sour. The picnic’s on a little island they take a bridge to reach; if this reservoir was land and I was swimming around it, that’s where they’d be.
I like running Centennial this way because when I reach the top of Moe’s it’s a straight shot downhill home. I fly over the roots and through the trees, in the tunnel and past the gate. I’ve been trying to make a Rossland album to share with Tristan, but it’s hard to sum up nine years in a place and do it not just for myself, but for ourselves. Tristan and I sometimes check in about our memories—this show was really good, this movie funny, this restaurant not great. We’re confirming a shared past. I don’t want the photos to fuck it up. We have the same memories of Toronto but we tell the story of being there differently. I want the story of here to be the same. I want that, yet I run alone.
