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Outside Magazine March 2002
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A Modest Proposal
Looking for adventure? It's right outside your door.

By Mark Jenkins

ONCE WE WERE COWBOYS. The vast prairie began at the end of the block. It was like living next to the ocean—all this boundless adventure waiting just beyond our backyard. That was back when parents would give boys of eight or nine as much freedom as they would take. So we'd take it all. In cutoffs, a sandwich in the pocket of our windbreaker, we'd leap into the saddle and head out into the red-dirt hills for another day of heroic deeds and dangerous riding.

Bikes were our ponies. To us a bicycle was better than a horse. It was patient and wouldn't kick and never needed feeding or brushing. It was boy-size and built like we were—lithe, light, invincible.

We'd ride dirt trails from sunup to sundown, from one make-believe shoot-out or showdown to the next. When the sun sank over the distant horizon, we'd take one last, longing look out into the beckoning prairie, then wheel around and canter back to town. We'd crawl into our bunk beds covered in fine red talcum, exhausted, glowing with the grandness of the day.

And in our dreams? What else: We dreamed of not coming back. We dreamed of just riding off across the plains like a sailboat glides out to sea. Of riding into the sunset. Thirty years later.

Reed's brother Buzz was in town. Reed Zars, a zealous, take-no-prisoners environmental attorney, is my cycling and skate-skiing companion. Like many younger brothers, Buzz turns out to be the antidote to Reed. A Caterpillar mechanic living in Tenino, Washington, Buzz is easygoing and imperturbable.

Reed and Buzz grew up on a remote ranch near Hayden, Colorado. Although they make light of it, it was a difficult, cold, lonely childhood—a hardscrabble upbringing that annealed them into tall, leanly muscled men with wry, resourceful minds. Physically and psychologically, both are built for endurance—like all cowboys. And both are serious cyclists. Buzz had brought his mountain bike to Laramie.

That night, through the potion of beer, we regressed back to boys and hatched a homemade adventure: At sunrise, we'd ride out of town.

That's it.


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Mark Jenkin's first collection of Outside columns, The Hard Way, will be published in the summer of 2002 by Simon & Schuster.