My name is Scott and today I am declaring myself Element.ly’s Midwest Editor. I’m not sure I know what that means, but I love the way it sounds. Anyway, The Paris Review has one, so I’m pretty sure that it is a thing. I don’t know where you live, but here in the Midwest, we are a rugged folk. On a good day, we wake up and do two ice-bucket challenges before breakfast. And then we get on our bikes and head out onto endlessly flat, chip n’ sealed country roads where it is nothing but head wind, head wind, and more headwind: behind corn and soy our fields grow paradox and we are used to it. On an especially good day, we might get to see another cyclist and give them a nod as they pass and we judge their ride and the funny shape of their calves.
We ride on trails, too. Where you live, they probably put public spaces at the tops of mountains of various sizes, but here we shove them all into the floodplains that line our slow, brown rivers. It affects the view, the number of bugs. Our climbs are short and steep and redundant, but we love them because they elevate the heart-rate and help us earn our gluten-free beer. As I write this, I know that riders on the work crew are daydreaming about berm contours on our local single-track and arguing online about the mysterious defacement of a log. On one side of the debate are those who say that if you don’t have 12” of travel, you shouldn’t be out there, and on the other side is no one because when you chainsaw a root that pisses you off, you melt into the night; you don’t show up in a forum to brag about it.
Here in the Midwest, the two coasts fit right around us, like the speakers in the tinny headphones we wear while mowing our massive lawns. Which is a way of saying this: don’t think we don’t know what’s going on out there or realize what we don’t have. But we’ve got all these places, too, these tiny landscapes that, when we drag our kids there, make my wife and me say to each other “you know, if this were in California, it would be world famous,” or at least in Sunset magazine or something. So these are some of the places I know about, and I hope I can do some of them justice here.