Chariots of Rust

Published by Singletrack. Available in text and audio. Photography by Peter Munnoch and Rob Jenkins

Subsequent to the sudden death of a childhood friend and to my girlfriend leaving me over the phone during my graduate school finals in Boston, I fell into a major depression. I became as a pebble falling through a body of water. The only question: how deep is the ravine? Turned out it was pretty deep. For months I could barely speak, sleep, follow conversations, execute simple tasks, or feel anything beyond a sort of deadness. When initial treatments failed, I stopped believing I would get better. I was commenced on lithium and, once that element reached the target level in my blood, I recovered within 48 hours. I was like a hoover switched on again at the wall. My nervous breakdown was over, and I had a new reality to accommodate: I have bipolar II disorder.

Restored, I pronounced myself ready to begin my rotation in child and adolescent psychiatry but was advised to calm my jets and take a few weeks to reconnect with life before reloading myself into the NHS cannon.

That’s what took me to the Minch Moor at Innerleithen in the Scottish Borders. It was early November, clock’s’d changed, first frost’d nipped the grass, and the water in the rivers was running cold. I was at the start of a weeks riding which would take in the Borders, Dunkeld, Laggan, Tarland and Glenlivet. Who wants gardening leave when you can have mountain-biking leave?

Although known principally for its downhill runs, Innerleithen’s cross-country loop offers 19 kilometres of the finest single-track in Scotland. I made the climb dozens of times during my first year as a doctor when I worked at the Borders General Hospital in Melrose. Midsummer evenings found me often among the pines, listening to Lawrence Freedman’s Strategy: A History through my iPod as I spun to the top of the sweeping descent. Then the trails of the Tweed Valley were as integral to my life as the wards, the squash court in the doctors’ residence, and the bar of Burt’s Hotel. They are in my memory attributes of the same substance, threads of the same cloth.

Having barely sat on a mountain bike in fifteen months, owing first to a year as library gremlin at Harvard then to a stint as a near-stuporous wreck in my childhood bedroom, I struggled to handle the technical parts of the climb. I called to my friend Joe Winstanely:
‘Was it always this difficult? I feel like an old man who’s just been discharged from a three-week hospital stay’.

Looking down, I saw the dark form of my Genesis Mantle. I bought it in 2010 for £600. It’s featherweight, on account of a double-butted heat-treated aluminium frame and because most of the paint has been scraped off by hard yards across Scotland and West Africa.

The trouble with riding a hardtail ragged for thirteen-years with infrequent maintenance is that it is vulnerable to catastrophic mechanical failure at any moment. So it was that, two kilometres from the top of the Minch Moor, my left crank fell off.

Fiddling with a hex key yielded little, so I rode the old chariot of rust like a mini-scooter for the remainder of the climb then on one leg for the ten kilometre descent to the carpark. This proved a severe trial for my deltoids and right Achilles’ tendon. 

To relieve my cramping quadriceps on a strip of fire road, I tucked both my legs in front of the seat tube to form the lotus position. This was comfortable until the first pothole, which transmitted a violent shock through my perineum. I changed posture for the rest of the Caddon Bank descent.

Returning to Innerleithen, I walked into the No1 Peebles Road café waving the disarticulated crank.
‘Does anyone know where I can buy a bike to attach this to?’ I asked.

I was directed towards I-Cycles on Leithen Road.
Getting there involved a trudge to the edge of town and I arrived tired, hungry and bearish, grumbling loudly about a stationary truck making an awful racket.
‘What is he doing?'
‘It’s a skip lorry’, the mechanic replied, looking me as though I might be deranged. 
She studied my bicycle skeptically. Admittedly it was not a picture of health: being coated in mud and missing a pedal. She was further appalled when I mentioned I was doing a trip for Singletrack. 
‘What do you write about?’ She asked, trying to maintain a neutral expression. 
‘Mediaeval history, Nordic sagas, Crofting. I don’t really know about bikes.’ 
‘Right…’
She clearly did not believe me, but she patched-up the damage (I’m not sure how) and I set off again.

That night I sent a warning shot to Peter Munnoch, with whom I was to ride at Dunkeld the following day.
‘The Genesis lost a crank in the Tweed Valley today. It’s been mended but tomorrow could be a Russian roulette job’.
He responded with a crying with laughter emoticon.

Peter and I grew up together, and have cycled across Corsica, the Dolomites, and the Atlas Mountains. We rode through Morocco during Ramadan for a month in July, which was a poor idea insofar as it was extremely hot and there was little to eat. In the car to Perthshire, Peter reminisced about an infestation of bedbugs which took hold of his sleeping bag near Tubkal.
‘It grew pretty wearing. Riding hungry all day, then going to bed knowing: I’m going to get bitten’.
Eventually he fixed on a solution. We’d stopped to shelter from the midday sun in a house with an old bathtub outside. Peter ran water and submerged the sleeping bag, placing bricks on top to keep it down and shook in a sachet of washing powder for good measure.
‘I needed to drown the fuckers’, he explained.
This worked, though his bag was too wet to sleep in for two nights.

We pulled into Dunkeld past the statue of Niel Gow, the fiddler, and saw the colours of fall: ochre and yellow, ruby and brown. I turned to Peter.
‘What’s the order of play?’
‘Across the Tay, down the Hermitage access path, up a forestry road, then all sorts of trails: Pink Floyd, Rake & Ruin, Rudder, Slaters, with climbs up Balhomish and Birnam Hill. Should be about twenty kilometres’.
He showed me the route profile on Trailforks, which looked like a hacksaw blade.
‘We’d better have a cup of coffee’.

The last time I was in Dunkeld I approached the town by river. It was the weekend of my medical school graduation ball and my friends Jamie Morrish, Doug Allan and Rob Torrance inflated Rob’s blow-up boat at Pitlochry, loaded it with beer, and floated off down the River Tay. We pulled ashore at the Dunkeld Hilton like Jack Sparrow coming into port in Pirates of the Caribbean as our classmates supped champagne on the lawn.

Beside Douglas firs in the Hermitage, Peter checked the map. Frost had set hard by the side of the path. The crashing of the River Braan through the Black Linn Falls was not far off. We got going.
Most of the climbing took fire roads, save for the clay slurry which constituted the access path up Birnam Hill. By this point our legs were tan and the back of our shorts dysenteric, though at least we avoided hitting The Wall on Pink Floyd. The locally-dug trails were wet, rooty, steep, exposed, slate-strewn, and fabulous. I could smell my brakes running hot on the discs. The riding was at the limit of my ability. I fell off five times. 

By the end I looked like an extra in Michael Fassbender’s rendition of Macbeth: filthy and covered in blood. 
Riding the last run of the day, the magnificent Slaters, I noticed the shine of the Tay. Peter noticed a problem with his rear tyre. Something about it didn’t sit right. Moments later the tyre wall blew out with a sensational bang and I swerved to avoid piledriving into his rear mechanism. 
For once it wasn’t my Genesis holding up proceedings. 

We rattled back into Dunkeld embalmed in sweat and I dunked my head in the River Tay. No longer hot and bothered, I shuffled on a thick Cheviot wool jumper with enormous suede elbow and shoulder patches (my friend Jack Cunningham calls the look "Squadron Leader Boggon"), and set out for chips.

Heading for the train which would take me to the Highlands I passed again the statue of Niel Gow, whose Lament for his Second Wife may be the saddest and loveliest of all the airs in Scottish music. As night began to fold around the river valley and trees, I remembered an observation of David Attenborough’s from his White House interview with President Obama in 2015:
‘The natural world is […] where you go in moments of celebration and in moments of grief. It is the greatest prop and stay for humanities own feeling for himself, itself, herself, ourself’.

I remembered the moment my heart broke while holding my phone to my ear as I watched a squirrel in St. Nicholas Park at 8.29am on a Sunday morning in Harlem in May, and how thereafter I walked for fourteen hours the dimensions of Manhattan until my feet cut. I recalled the abyss I fell into thereafter. The near-complete disintegration of my self, which endured so long that I forgot what it was to be me.

The restoration, at least the chemical part, had been so abrupt as to have been stunning. It felt good, in fact almost ecstatic: I was like a child wide-eyed walking through the woods for the first time.

The following morning I set out for Laggan Wolftrax near Newtonmore with Rob Jenkins. Rob and I had met in a psychiatry rotation in Inverness some years prior. He is now a GP, and I’m a psychiatrist. He spoke about some of what his job contains, and of how many of his patients’ mental health difficulties could be managed by exercise, time in nature, better sleep, healthier food, being with friends, finding a sense of purpose through contribution and meaningful work, and learning to be more present in their circumstances. Of course there’ll always be need for medication, therapists and psychiatrists; but helping people find the agency to command these simpler human things is often enough.

Mountain biking helps me like this. For I love to climb in a high gear, to feel the drawing in of breath, to see the light on lichen and the minute buddings of gorse, and to know the way in flow that my bicycle, even my old buster, follows its own line through root and rock while I hold on and sing inside myself.

The trails of Laggan Forest run to a little over 30 kilometres with views over the Monadhliath Mountains. The rock gardens on the upper trails, Alpha and The Wolf of Badenoch, are rowdy affairs but lower down the berms are smooth and quick on Leapin’ Wolf, The Pict and Slaba-Dabba-Doo. The only truly frightening drop was Air’s Rock: a long, steep, greasy slab on which I nearly lost my front wheel. Fortunately my cerebellum squeezed in time, so I avoided snowploughing down it on my face.

We drove East to our next stop: Tarland Trails. The new setup at Pittenderich (known as Tarland 2) was dug by a construction company, CRC Trails, at a cost of over £1 million. Funding was provided by the Scottish Government and by members of the local community, the idea being to make Aberdeenshire a destination for adventure tourism and to create jobs in the area. The trails opened in June 2023 and have become immensely popular. With six blues, six reds, and one black there’s an ample range, and the fresh berms and generally smooth surface make for fast riding.
The new facility has, however, courted a degree of controversy. In May a helicopter landed to extricate an injured rider. The noise of the chopper apparently led to the death of three sheep in a neighbouring field. Local Facebook groups ignited in acrimony.
The sheep, I gather, were eaten.

Having grown increasingly fearful that my bicycle would rattle apart beneath me Wacky Races-style, I borrowed a Trek Fuel EX 7 from Chris Page at Wilderness Scotland. This was the first full-suspension bike I’d used for more than three minutes, and I noticed the difference right away: my bones stopped jangling, I could handle rock gardens at speed, my spine no longer pursed together like an accordion. It felt smooth. I liked it.

Climbing, I saw a cow on the trail (escaped), a hare, a sparrowhawk, and a murder of crows. The Travelator climb treated me to a murder of lungs, and I stopped to clear condensation from my spectacles and to eat a snack. That week I relied on dark chocolate Brazil nuts, crayfish sandwiches, avocado wraps, bacon rolls, various mushed fruit bars, coffee (lots of), fistfuls of nuts, and tartiflette (not on the trails). Even then I was hungry most of the time.

My favourite trails at Pittenderich were High Pressure and Fools Gold, but I was more surprised by how much I enjoyed our warm-down laps of the original Tarland Trails at Drummy Woods. These are for children and beginners, really, but are narrow and winding with but a short shared climb to the top. I could picture myself riding Red Squirrel and Spiky Hedgehog, the red and blue loops, for hours, falling deeper and deeper into reverie and trance.

This time night fell on our fifth lap, a freezing fog set in, and my feet grew cold, so we returned to Rob’s car and I swapped into my smart shoes. 
‘I can’t image many people come to Tarland 2 in Nantucket penny loafers’, I said to Rob.
‘No’, he said.

At 7am the following morning, my friend Katie Smith’s mother entered my bedroom and put down a mug of lemon juice sweetened with honey from her bees. She’d heard me coughing all night and was concerned I might expectorate my spleen.

A week’s hard riding had exacted a toll. I texted Millie Earle-Wright, whom Rob and I had agreed to meet later that morning.
‘We’ll get to Glenlivet just before 11am. Unfortunately I have a terrible cold made worse by a bad night. Not sure I’ll ride today but will see you at the carpark for a chat before I decide’.

The consensus within the medical community on taking strenuous exercise with a hacking cough and aching muscles is that it worsens symptoms, prolongs recovery, and is a bad idea. That said, I wouldn’t have an opportunity to ride Glenlivet in the foreseeable future.

The morning’s cafetière and Lemsip had rebooted my limbs by the time we made it to the trailhead. The day was cold and clear again. There were thrushes, blue tits, robins and red squirrels among the trees. It was too good not to ride.

This was in many respects a poor decision. Although I donned my Dachsteins (enormous pre-shrunk Austrian wool mittens) and doubled-up on merino base layers, my body shuddered and felt cold much of the way. My shorts were encased in mud, which should have conferred a degree of additional insulation but even so I felt like hell on a piece of toast.

Yet for all that, as I admired the eerie blue light under cloud over the winter’s first dusting of snow on the Cairngorms, and the lonely farmhouses and the thin roads going, I felt in the Glenlivet climb a sturdy sense, as if I were an old tractor: muddy; cumbersome; mechanically simple; detested by motorists; good at keeping going.

That week I had ridden with, visited, or bumped into two dozen friends and acquaintances. The land and trails were mapped and charted, but overlaid with my own private geography of friendship and error and joy.

Something happened then, as the day’s last sunbeams streaked through the trees. I knew that I may never share another word with Amélie on the earth, but I saw how much goodness we had brought to one another, and that she would be in my heart somewhere when I lay down to die.

I was alone again, as we all must go alone from time to time. For life is not as we thought, when first we learned to ride our bicycles. For it is weeded with bewilderment. For its valleys run with spilt cups of tea. Yet it is relentless for all that, and comes thumping out of the woods clattering its drums.
It mattered not then that for all my shiny badges I had nothing to my name but a broken mountain bike and a broken heart. For I knew there were other richnesses: of ideals; of friends; of a body capable of stern endeavour; of a loving heart.

For I was not the same as I was before I met her, before I went to America, before I cracked-up. I was sadder, but more relaxed, more ordinary, perhaps more human. I wondered if this illness and this loneliness was simply a toll exacted for gifts. A warmth filled my chest then, and I felt some of the mystery of the world and of my own limbs and ventricles churning in the immensity of it.
I knew it was not for nothing that I had lived.

Nan Shepherd observed in ‘The Living Mountain’, her near-mystical account of the Cairngorms, that
‘Often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him’.
I have come to see it that way.

Needles of pine and fallen sprigs of spruce peppered the trail as I kicked on, knowing at day’s end that I would find the warm hearth of Hamish and Cara Myers’ croft and their child Magnus who talks faster and faster and faster until his words merge unintelligibly.
I heard the rasp of my tyres tyres biting trail and the deep harsh tear of my breath, and recalled Shepherd’s final line
‘To know being, that is the final gift accorded by the mountain’. Yes, I thought, but allow another syllable. Bike.