If you’re like me, that title would strike you as kind of odd, and until the other day I would have agreed with you. I mean, who tastes the spillway? That place is gross, nasty, and smells funny. Well the other day I learned how the spillway tastes.
Let me set this up for you a little bit. First, Emily and I started riding mountain bikes back a few weeks ago. So I had never “really” ridden a mountain bike before. Sure when I was a kid I had the bike that I rode around the neighborhood that had 12 speeds, a water bottle, and really cool yellow hand shields. All of which were absolutely necessary at the time, because we did some pretty hardcore bike riding up and down the street. Anyway, once we got our bikes we decided to take them out to Baton Rouge and do some riding, and it turned out to be really fun. We went back to BR a few more times and then up to Ruston with a couple of our friends (shout out to Damon and Scarlett). So in total, I had logged about 5 bike rides before my trip to the spillway.
So to make a short story long, I figured that after my extensive experience on 5 bike rides that I was pretty much an expert at this stuff, and the spillway didn’t scare me at all. This should be a piece of cake. WRONG!! Well the trails aren’t exactly technical. It’s kind of twisty and thanks to the rain (about time) it was a bit slick, but none of that really mattered. I’m settling in to the trails, and getting a feel for their layout. Also, the trails here are named (with cool little street signs). About 1.5-2 miles into the ride I enter the “5 minutes alone” trail. About a minute later it opens up into a pretty straight stretch, and I start to build up speed. Then I see a log laid out across the trail in front of me. Now Damon taught me how to jump tree branches and things like that that lay down on the trail, so I figured I had this. It would be the largest one that I had jumped since it was about 12-14” in diameter (I went back and checked later and it’s about that size). Approaching the log, an experienced rider would have made a couple of observations. First, SLOW DOWN because you really don’t know what you’re doing here. Second, there are no marks on this log. The first is self explanatory, but the second is something I should have learned by now. If bikes have been going over a log, the crank tends to cut into the wood as the bike passes over it. So unless everyone had been completely bunny hopping over this thing (and I don’t think all the riders out there can do that) no one has really jumped it. Well that didn’t stop me. I built up speed, got up to the log and pulled up on my front tire and …… What happened next is kinda blurry. I remember a really bright flash of light, and then I started pushing myself out of the middle of the trail. Best I can figure, my front wheel didn’t get quite high enough, so my bike stopped immediately. Since I can’t quite stop that fast I went over the handle bars. Now don’t worry, I broke the fall with my face. I flipped so fast that I didn’t even have time to get my hands off of the handle bars.
Now I’m sitting on the side of the trail gathering my thoughts and composure and trying to do a check.
- Face – still there and it hurts
- Nose – not broken (good thing I have a small nose because if not it would have been broken) but full of mud
- Hands – Check (perfectly fine because they didn’t even come close to touching the ground)
- Arms – Check
- Legs – Scraped but good
- Eyes – Must be something wrong. I saw a flash of light and now there is light and dark intermingled. Oh wait; my sunglasses are smashed crooked on my face. Eyes – Check
- Mouth – also full of mud
- Ears – Yep got mud in them too
I’ve kind of given everything a once over and made sure I’m not really bleeding. That’s when I look at my bike and realize it’s now facing the opposite way down the trail. Ok so that was what landed on me. (Bike – Check) All in good working order. So I sit on the side of the trail a little longer to gather my composure. And what’s the first thing I think? “Man nobody got to see that. That would have been awesome. I wish I had a video.” Ok not the normal thoughts for that situation but come on. Who wouldn’t want to have seen that? It would have been nice to at least have a friend there to laugh at me.
Once I felt around to make sure everything was at least close to the same place, I climbed back on the bike and went back to riding the trails (little more gingerly this time). I finished out (didn’t do the teeter totter cause I wasn’t really feeling good) the rest of the trail and headed back to my truck. Once there I looked in the mirror to make sure nothing screamed “HE JUST CRASHED HIS BIKE!!” Other than a little scratch on my nose and upper lip, along with a strange bruise on my forehead, I was in good shape. My helmet now has a cracked visor, but that really doesn’t affect much.
So to answer the original question, the spillway tastes like nothing I’ve tasted before (or ever want to again for that matter). It’s a good mix of wood and rancid dirt, with a slight hint of animal matter that builds at the end (props to the “Next Food Network Star” on that description).
