I moved to California last summer. There is a steep hill near my house, an open preserve where I regularly go for hikes. There are features of the trail that appear to have been added to make the course more interesting for mountain bikers: huge jumps and banked curves that flow nicely together. On my hikes, I often pause to mind-surf these features. I enjoyed mountain biking 30 years ago, but I don’t recall anyone being so enterprising as to cut such features into the landscape back then.
When our local, fairly porous version of the Covid lockdown began, suddenly there were more hikers on the trails — there are few other places to go. I also see knots of two or three teenage boys out on the trail with their bikes and shovels, adding new jumps and whatnot. But now the city has declared the trails off-limits to mountain bikers, saying this is somehow made necessary by the virus. The reason offered is that “group rides increase your risk of exposure”. But groups of hikers are benign, apparently.
In the larger sweep of the pandemic’s disruptions, this is surely a minor inconvenience. But the asymmetry in the city’s response can’t but make some residents suspicious, and such suspicion is clearly a wider phenomenon at this moment. In episodes of government by crisis, some interests find themselves more aligned with officialdom than others.
To take my local case, there has long been a pattern of hikers using the levers of local government against mountain bikers, and the virus would seem to provide a fresh pretext for this. There is an aesthetic objection to all things mechanized intruding on “nature” (even on a trail system that must be maintained by chain saws and gas-powered weed whackers), and this purity is more prized by some demographics than by others. But it doesn’t present itself as an aesthetic preference; instead it gets moralised as a concern for safety, or as environmental responsibility. To invoke these concerns is to don a bullet-proof halo of public-spiritedness.
Yet the costs of maximal deference to such concerns fall more heavily on some than on others. This makes virtue a little too easy. I haven’t yet seen hikers out there with shovels maintaining their own trails, as the mountain bikers do, or clearing fallen trees that bock the path. The English philosopher John Locke said that it is by mixing one’s labour with the land that one gains a just title to use it.
Because of the virus, the teenage mountain bikers find themselves expelled from the supervised social setting of school. To judge from the conversations I have overheard as they stop to survey a jump from the top of a ridiculously steep incline, and their exultations at the bottom, they have formed what the Dutch historian Johann Huizinga called a “play community.” Such a community sets its own challenges and adopts its own rules, internal to a group of players who set themselves apart from the larger community. At once rivals and friends, their typical talk consists of boasts and playful insults as they goad one another on to new levels of risk and skill, from which emerge new expressions of creativity. Huizinga found in such scenes the wellsprings of civilization.
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