The Apprentice Writes
One thing I’ve noticed since moving to Vancouver is the constant presence of mountain bikes, particularly during seasons when there should not be mountain bikes. Sure, the climate here is mild, but I expected at least a stretch of winter that made riding impossible. I was wrong, and even when the snow comes all the way down into the city, there are riders on the North Shore who drag themselves to the trails. They claim to love riding in the snow, though I remain dubious about that one.
The trails here are built to withstand the worst of riding conditions. Softer and more delicate trails endure seasonal closures, but there’s enough armour and woodwork elsewhere to keep us riding all year long. Off-season, then, is a question of moral fortitude and one’s ability to grin and bear it. That, and a good, hefty set of mud tires.
I am equally fascinated by what happens to the forest in the winter months. The mossy groves, so warm and inviting in May, are damp and claustrophobic thickets come January. Those massive, stoic trees choose the dark and wet season to give in to gravity’s demands and fall across your favourite section of trail. Fog chokes out the sun and settles in among the towering cedars, as the hillsides of the North Shore morph into a damp and uninviting wilderness.
This fascinates me. In the deep, dark woods, time seems to melt away. These are the woods as they have been for thousands of years, and people have always displayed a remarkable desire to find what hides among the pillars of moss and fog. They come back with stories, and in those stories, the woods become another world entirely. There’s an Old English phrase for this: Among the holtes hore.
When I’m not moonlighting as the Writer’s Apprentice, I spend my time combing through centuries-old poems about knights and faeries and giants. I’m a grad student, and my area of specialty is Late Medieval Arthurian poetry. The poems I work on were written sometime between the 14th and 15th century, and most of them only exist in one or two tattered manuscripts. They were written in what we call Middle English, which somewhat resembles the tongue we speak today, but often doesn’t. It is more easily understood than Old English, although Middle English dialects cling to plenty of inherited phrases, words, and grammar. Consider also that spelling wasn’t standardized, and you have a real beast of a language.
Though I love it, reading these poems is tedious work. I liven it up with the thought that the poets who wrote them and the folks who listened were just people, more or less the same as us. On a rainy winter night, the peasants of Britain’s North Midlands might have lingered around the pub for one more pint. Maybe they would have egged the local poet to tell them once more the story of Sir Amadace, or Sir Percyval, or any one of King Arthur’s knights. The characters and stories were familiar, perhaps comforting, and existed in many iterations over the handful of centuries we call the late Middle Ages.
Many of these poems rehearse a similar trope, which is that of a lonely knight who turns to the woods in search of adventure. It is not always clear what the knight expects to find in the woods, nor should it be. This uncertainty is central to these quests, which produce a dizzying number of narratives. There are magic rings, bewitching women, and seductive faeries, as well as enchanted knights, benevolent giants, and militant dwarves. The woods are a fickle and fortunate place, and the knights are drawn back, time and time again. The poems often use that Old English phrase to describe their forays into wilderness.
Among the holtes hore roughly translates to “In the deep, dark woods.” Holtes is an Old English variant for a forest or wooded area, but it specifically connotes a thick, dense wood. Hore means anything from grey and dark, to white, wintry, or ancient. It is where we get the modern words “hoary” and “hoarfrost”. Middle English is a challenging language because most words have vastly different regional and historical contexts. Different spellings or meanings often crop up within the same poem, making translation difficult. Still, when the poet in the pub told of a knight who went among the holtes hore, the gist was that of a dark and inhospitable wilderness.
Into the deep, dark woods, or something like that.
But mountain biking, right? There’s a connection, I assure you, and it begins with technology unimaginable to my medieval poets. It begins with an email to Pete, shortly after the apprenticeship began. I’m a prairie kid; where bikes go into winter storage sometime in October and re-emerge around May long weekend as the foothills thaw. When it rains, we don’t ride. We’re not supposed to, at least. In my mind, winter presents a recurring seasonal problem for a mountain bike magazine, much like the long summer drought weathered by my favourite ski publications. I asked Pete what they do in the winter. He replied, short and sweet: “We ride. And so will you.”
Among the holtes hore I go.
With gear best suited for mild fall riding, a new set of vicious mud tires, and cautious optimism, I steeled myself for the worst of winter riding on The Shore. Bring on the elements, I thought. Bring on the mud and slop and lord knows what else. When the rain eventually came, it came in sheets and buckets, and it stayed for days. It rained so much on The Shore in the first half of January that we were all forced to stay inside. I know, I know, this isn’t the year-round riding I promised you, but there must be an exception.
The day after the rain ended, I woke up early, dragged myself and my bike through the fog-laden city, and rolled into a lot near the base of Mt. Seymour. I’d love to tell you that it was cold and miserable, that the forest was damp, treacherous, and uninviting, but I won’t. The fog cleared, the dirt was tacky, the puddles were few and far between. The holtes hore were not so hoary after all.
My next foray into the woods offered more of the same. While another heavy blanket of fog smothered the city, the North Shore hillsides of were blissfully clear. The sun shone hot and high above. I wore a T-shirt on the way up and a thin jacket on the way down. The loam was plentiful, the woodwork was dry, and the rocks had just enough grip for my purposes. Even the dreaded off-camber roots were not nearly as greasy as I feared. I don’t think I’m far off in saying that these were the best riding conditions of the year.
Awful lot of sun for a midwinter day.
This isn’t the story I wanted to tell. I wanted to brave the worst of a North Shore winter, and come out the other side shivering, but better for it. I wanted to feel like the knights in those poems, armoured up and riding my trusty steed into the holtes hore to seek some adventure, some greater existence. I wanted to know why, on the nastiest, coldest day in January, you’ll find a gaggle of brave souls loading their bikes into the back of a truck at the base of Mt. Seymour.
At a time of year when mountain biking should be the furthest thing from our minds, when the woods are at their deepest and darkest, why do we return? There must be something hiding in the fog and rain, tucked away in one of the countless mossy hollows. Maybe, as those knights believed, there are magic tokens and faeries and giants just beyond the shadows. Maybe the moss hides a cure to all the ailments of modern living, an escape from the great rat-trap of the city. Maybe it’s just peace, quiet, and solitude, because it sure as hell can’t be about hero dirt, right?
Right? But my clean bike begs to differ. This January begs to differ. If I’d put my bike away in October, as I do every year, I never would have seen the sun that day. I would have stayed in the foggy city, far away from the deep, dark woods. I would have been the peasant hunkered down in the bar, watching all my favourite knights on Instagram slapping soggy berms and riding their horses ragged, among the holtes hore. Instead, I found hero dirt, right when I least expected it.
The winter isn’t over yet, and the forecast promises rain. There’s plenty of slop and damp, dark days to come. The holtes will be hoary once again, and I’ll hopefully have a set of waterproof shoes by then, but I’ll ride no matter what. I’ll ride until I find the giants, wherever they are, and I’ll try to make friends with them. I’ll come back to tell their stories, the secrets of the deep, dark woods.
