The previous part of our bike ride through the Braslaw region ended with us rolling up to a river with the remains of a bridge. It looked pretty deep — neck-deep, if not more. What were we to do? I checked the map. To the left is Lake Strusty, and to our right are a whole two lakes with the curious names of "midnight hair and midday hair". Turns out, if we want to bypass the river, we have to backtrack a long way and trudge around these lakes for another 20km. Situations like this pop up quite often when planning bike rides, even if in different formats. As Alfred Korzybski told us back in the early twentieth century, "The map is not the territory". Here, without any philosophical subtext whatsoever, we experienced this powerful idea on ourselves so intensely that it hit us right in the guts. We are soldiers of hardcore, and decided to crash straight through the river. This is true MTB adventure, after all!
Right around this time, a fisherwoman and fisherman were returning to the shore nearby. After mulling it over, we decided that asking them to ferry a bike on their rubber boat was dangerous. We still exchanged a few words with the fishers, just to explain that we didn't have swimming trunks and would be going through the river buck naked.
I am not particularly shy about nudity. The reason isn't entirely obvious. I am an atheist and a rationalist, but at the same time a rather gullible person. When secular psychologists and philosophers tell me that there is nothing all that special, let alone sinful, about the human body, I believe them. Of course, the explanation has to be logical and reasonable, humanistic, and consistent with the scientific picture of the world. From this it directly follows that the human body is just meat, skin, and bones, packaged into a form that is aesthetically pleasing or otherwise. There is no need to sexualize the body. And even if the form isn't aesthetic, everyone has the right to be who they are, because no one has canceled humanism.
The fisherwoman replied that her ethical framework also allows for nudity (though not in such lofty words). The sun had turned red and swelled up, and there was no reason to wait. We quickly stripped off our things, stuffed them wherever we could. Grabbed our trusty aluminum steeds and our gear. One of us couldn't swim. For him, dragging a bike neck-deep in water through a river with a current was a real adrenaline rush.
Did the current sweep us away into the hair lakes? Or did the fisherman fish us out? You'll find out in the next part.