Our Eyes Adjust

I wanted to title this piece “The Ebbinghaus Illusion And Other Related Size-Distance Paradoxes And How They Have Contributed To My Inability To Trust The Advice Of Others As Well As Anything I See With My Own Two Eyes”, but it seemed a bit unwieldy.

Growing up in a small town on the north island of a small country, my idea of a long way away was 100 miles. Up until the point where I got my driver’s license, I considered the limits of my physical world to have a radius of about seven miles. This was determined because that was the longest distance I had hiked at that point, and because there was a bicycle race one year from Waihi Beach into Waihi town proper, covering a whopping seven miles in distance that kicked my 14 year old ass so thoroughly that I thought I was going to die. 100 miles, meanwhile, felt like the outermost survivable limit of being squished into the backseat of an Austin Maxi watching the featureless green of the Hauraki plains float past and praying that there would at least be some decent sausage rolls at the other end of this purgatory.

Then I got my motorcycle license, and the distance between me and the farthest away place that I could imagine was determined less by absolute distance but instead by how long it would take the rain to completely penetrate a handed down waxed cotton Belstaff jacket smelling strongly of fiberglass resin and my dad’s body odor. The peephole through which I viewed the world was being pried open a teeny bit, but still, the landscape and horizons of my teenage years appeared in a way to make sense. I felt like I could understand time and distance.

Moving from the vegetation swathed corrugations of New Zealand to the expansive beige aridity of the American west totally threw that understanding out the window. The bigness of everything that I encountered in the US did my head in. The sprawl of the towns and cities, the width of the roads, the size of the cars, the willingness of people to cover massive distances in their commutes to work or just to “go for a drive”, and the completely staggering scale of the natural landscape; it was all more than I could understand and I felt dwarfed by the enormity of the world.

I got used to it. More or less. By the time I started riding mountain bikes, the massiveness of the west didn’t seem as intimidating. Until I started exploring the tiny little cracks and crevasses etched into the edges of this vast continent, that is, and then I felt completely smashed out of my perspective all over again.

Realign. Readjust. Refocus. As I started riding longer distances, getting dragged out of my limited worldview by stronger, older riders, I began to understand that my body could propel my bike and me all the way up to that mythical 100 mile boundary. I could ride right up to the edge of the world. Except every time I managed to come to terms with a new horizon, a greater distance would stretch out in front of me, and make me feel very small all over again. But along the way, I picked up tools that helped me navigate.

During my fit years, I came to count on being able to move across most landscapes at around 10 miles an hour, factoring for about 1000’ of climbing in each of those hours. If I kept the food and water coming in, I could do that for about 10 hours at a time, but generally would get pretty uncomfortable after four or five of those hours. I learned that I could ride for most of 24 hours in a row, but that I really wasn’t cut out for the no-sleep competitive boogie in that regard. The most I climbed in a day was 18,500’, and that was a pretty damn painful 10 hour race that sowed the seeds of my desire to step away from chasing that flavor of carrot. But it also helped me look at big empty maps and recognize that I probably wouldn’t die if I decided to explore tiny corners of them.

And somewhere, after so many years of driving through the deserts of Nevada and Utah, riding and exploring Colorado and Wyoming and Idaho and wherever else the wind blew me, I came to see the world through western eyes. I could look at a dirt road stretching across an empty valley and into the next mountain range, and could predict how far that dirt road stretched, how much elevation that trail zig-zagging up the face of that mountain gained, how much time that would all chew up, and whether there was enough daylight to get it done.

My eyes adjusted again, sometime not long after I began to trust how they informed me when assessing the relative time/effort expenditure of looping out of Crested Butte and over 403/401 then back to town. And instead of reading topo maps and staring at mountain ranges, my eyes spent the next decade editing Word documents and filling in Excel cells and answering emails and balancing budgets. By the time I found myself back in those grand landscapes of granite and towering conifers and thin, thin air, my trustable average speed was about half that of my younger self, and I could no longer contemplate those big rides in big terrain with any degree of confidence. The world had become vast again, and I was once more very, very small. I am once more very, very small.

Slowly, I have been reassembling my understanding of this terrain. I live in these big mountains now, just a proverbial stone’s throw across some 14,000’ peaks from those Crested Butte trails that I used to knock out in big day rides, rides that I recall thinking I could do forever. But now, I look at those rides in 20 mile chunks, and get a little bit nervous when the distances stretch beyond that. If there’s more than 4000’ of climbing in a day, I know I will be hurting the day after. At times, it feels like I am learning to ride all over again. Sometimes this is felt with awe and wonder. Others, it’s a gnawing bummer of aging and decay, flavored with the smoky reminder of my own inevitable mortality. Little by little, though, my eyes are adjusting. Along with my lungs, my legs, and my sense of scale.

There’s a lyric at the end of a Ray Wylie Hubbard song called Mother Blues. It goes; “And the days that I keep my gratitude/higher than my expectations/well, I have really good days”. Down in New Zealand last month, I was watching my friend Gaz stretch the elastic away from me on the Paparoa Trail. He’s the little blue dot in the picture at the top of this column. That ride was the biggest ride I’ve knocked out in quite a few years, and the landscape was so spectacular, and everything looked so massive, that right when I took that photo I was dying inside and wondering if I was going to make it out of there before it got dark, worried that I might buckle completely and then be stuck in the middle of all this massive uncaring nature.

About a minute later I was riding past the spot I had taken the photo of, thinking it was far closer than I had judged, and realizing that my eyes were still trying to measure these entirely reasonable distances and elevations with an inaccurate western scale. Gratitude way higher than expectations, we railed the rest of the ride. It was a very good day. A few more very good days after that I returned back to these big mountains of Colorado. My eyes are adjusting to the scale again, I'm remembering that we can all stretch a little more than we think we can, and I'm a little more ready to follow some map lines wherever they lead.