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The mind forgets, but the legs have a memory all their own. They remember middle age, they remember pain. They remember the lay of the land and the gradients, however, in a different light than in the busky glow of last September, when personal cycling immortality seemed. . .well, less absurd than now. Those hills you took in strong pulls not so long ago the legs remember differently. You skied the winter through? You swam weekly? Remember, says the leg. Remember pain.

It is still only late winter -- not spring yet, not really. But there have been occasional afternoons that tempt us to make a start, when watery sunlight might last into early evening and the snow may be forestalled until tomorrow or next week. Out comes the bike and the little bottle of essence de Teflon and the WD40 and the first PowerBar of the season (cardboard/carob), you hear the firm clean click of your shoe, then the old familiar breeze in the face, and motion. Motion is our only reprieve.

It is still not quite spring, the roads are gritty and unrelievedly gray. But even in the first mile or two you realize, slowly at first, that the local dogs have somehow been subtly rearranged. You cannot for a moment put your finger on it. Perhaps Rover who used to spring frenetically from the rear of the third trailer has perished in a spasm of winter-induced domestic violence, or justly become a part of his Maker's Plan under the humble instrumentality of a wayward pizza deliverer.

 And this mangy yellow cur who will doubtless, later in the season, fade easily into the middle distance, is at once unfamiliar and yet all too vulgarly familiar in his approach. What a dog lacks in subtelty or social grace he more than compensates in unconcealed enthusiasm for his work. In this he is an unimaginative and complacent bureaucrat. And then you remember Rominger's Second Law: that the incidence of human beings in the visible range of ambient vibration occurs in inverse proportion to the measurable decibels produced in the audible range by their dogs. Anyway, he never bites. You remember that, at least, from last season.

The same cannot be said for the motorists who frequent the back roads you choose because you wish to be free of traffic. One thing the legs never remember is the sound of a horn just at your elbow -- this invariably startles, which is the whole point of the exercise. You only remember, after it has already transpired, that these things do occur, but not in such a way as to allow you to remember and to learn the pattern and to predict, as you eventually will with their dogs, who are frequently seen at their most benign as passengers in these same vehicles. For human beings are a more whimsical and ambulatory lot. For the most part.

Still, the road stretches into the distance before you, dappled in late-winter fog and weak sun. So long as it runs out level beyond your front wheel it retains its familiar feel. It may tease you with a little rise, just to put a twinge in the legs. But you begin to remember the lightness of the bicycle and a primal fluidity of motion, and you become content in your own work, dog-like in the complacence of movement, instinctively migratory in the changing season. The sap moves, you move, and something peculiarly human induces us to interpose beautiful machinery and move that, too.

But there ahead (it is always there ahead) looms the First Hill, perhaps neither steep nor long. Nonetheless a Chastisement, a Lesson and a Remembrance. And though you have forgotten it, the legs will remember. Instinct is no salvation. Work and pray.

 Robert Hill

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