The Bakery: Community

Bamfield is not a city. It is more of a small town or village. You can not pass through it to go anywhere and you are lucky to arrive there, over the logging road, with your car intact. This is where I grew up. It is where I learned the value of being a part of a community. Our commonality was our location and, as a result, we also shared the desire to survive the winters of isolation, power outages and harsh west coast storms. Some of us are drawn to Bamfield, some driven to it. Some long for a simpler existence, some are social outcasts, others are retired, or entrepreneurs, and still others have been there for many generations; the reasons that their families originally called it home, long since forgotten.

We form a motley and mismatched extended family. All ages, ethnicities, denominations, opinions (of which there are many), and abilities exist within our community and because of that we function and we have identity. I grew up learning from people I may never otherwise have had the opportunity to meet and I enjoyed a sense of safety that came from many caring eyes, which was great unless you were trying to get into the community hall dance underage.

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The Bakery: Hangry

Hypoglycemia goes by a few different names; ‘hitting the wall’ conjures up images of men running marathons in headbands and short shorts circa 1982 and ‘bonking’ makes me think of people in spandex slumped over their handlebars trying to remember where they went wrong with their carb intake from the night before. Neither of these two descriptions are what I experience. I get ‘hangry’.

Hangry is described on the Internet as ‘a state of anger caused by lack of food; hunger causing a negative change in emotional state.’ Well ‘a negative change in emotional state’ may be an understatement. I have shredded my share of purple pants while attempting to throw my bike in a hulk-like rage. At best, when my blood sugar drops, I sever all communication and focus the energy I have left, drawn from the depths of my glycogen stores, to find food. I communicate only in grunts, head nods and spontaneous tears until I am fed. I, all but, foam at the mouth.

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The Bakery: Can You Keep a Secret?

Secret trails are something of a currency in the bike world and about the only thing that makes our sport remotely punk rock. We trade them for cool points or hold on to them, dropping subtle hints in conversations to elevate our perceived social status. “If you don’t know about it, you shouldn’t ride it.” Mountain biking is not sexy, so secret trails cascading down our mountains like the phantom octopi tentacles is about all we’ve got. People go hunting for them like treasure. And develop feelings of ownership, much like Gollum and his precious. Joeys shouldn’t ride them, but they always do. So who tells them where they are and why shouldn’t they? Who actually owns a secret trail? With hands raised, there is the trail builder who doesn’t own the land, the landowner who didn’t build the trail, the inner circle of the first riders to know about it (who didn’t build the trail nor do they own the land) and the community as a whole.

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