Skin Game

“It’s the best kind of cancer you can get,” she says hanging up the phone.  I don’t like “best” and “cancer” in the same sentence.  She knew it wasn’t going to be good news when the clinic left a message to call back.  We were camping in a state park in southern Vermont.  All of the little pressing needs of sleeping in tents and living off a picnic table swept us back into the present.

More people have skin cancer than all other types of cancer combined.  Rates of melanoma -- the worst kind of skin cancer -- have gone up 200 percent between 1973 and 2011, according to acting US Surgeon General Boris Luchniak in a recent report.  This type of cancer kills 9,000 people a year.  Despite the alarming rise, skin cancer is both treatable and preventable.


Later, my wife made the appointment to have the growth removed.  Melanin-challenged, I like to call her.  Sun-deprived Northern Europe runs deep in her genes.  She sees a dermatologist regularly who’s mapped and measured the little constellation of moles on her back.  She’s supposed to use wide-brim hats and sunscreen.  Sometimes she forgets the hat.  I nag her about hats all the time.


When I was a kid in the late 70s, we spent all day getting baked by the sun at a pool.  You burned once in the spring, then spent the rest of the summer in a speedo, brown as a bean.  My mother read crime novels while sunbathing on the patio.  Now we make our kids wear swim shirts, and we slather them with a layer of 50 sunscreen.  


Just under 5 million people were treated for skin cancer last year, so most cases of skin cancer are treatable.  But it turns out that a whole lot of them are preventable as well.  Aside from blocking the sun from hitting your skin with shirts, hats, and screens, you can stay out of tanning beds.  


The use of tanning beds is the American cheese of the beauty industry.  Both are ultimately fakes; while they might look tasty at first, they leave you unnourished; and they both give off an unnatural orangey glow.  Thanks in part to the popularity of tanning beds with particular demographics, “over the last three decades, the number of people with skin cancer has grown higher than that of all other cancers combined.”


Among other findings, The Surgeon General’s report concluded that tanning with electricity contributes to two thirds of the new melanoma cases each year, over 6,000 cases.  Additionally, skin cancer is the most widespread type of cancer among youth and young adults.  And so they’ve taken some corrective action by banning the use of tanning beds for people under 18.  


The Indoor Tanning Association -- yes, there really is such an organization -- disputes the link between melanoma and fabricated ultraviolet light.  If tanning on a tanning bed is American Cheese, the ITA must be Kraft.  


Like hats, you can wear them or not.  Hey, it’s a free country, right?  I can go on down to the store and buy myself a pack of Marlboro Reds if I want.  Maybe a better analogy for indoor tanning and the ITA is Philip Morris.


“Proponents of sun avoidance always exaggerate the risks of exposure to ultraviolet light in order to get the attention of the public, the media and the government,” the association said.  But let’s just take a look at the motives here for a second: tanning beds are about turning profit by appealing to vanity, and the SG is about promoting health by appealing to common sense.  


As for me I’ll keep trying to promote common sense in my family: I’ll keep packing the hats.

MTB in the VT

At the top of the hill, I slide my fingers into a fresh, dry pair of gloves, flex then ball them into a fist to get the fit right.  I cinch on my helmet, slide my glasses into place, and swing my backpack onto my shoulders.  My bike leans against a small hemlock.  It’s a full-suspension rig, which means that both the front and the rear-end have shocks (with over 5” of “travel”) to absorb and smooth out the roots and rocks of the trail.  It has hydraulic disc brakes to control speed with a finger or two, and the seat-post is also on a hydraulic lift so that I can drop it low on technical descents, get way out over the rear wheel for stability and flow.  I lift the rear-end to check for wobble, but it feels solid -- so I mount up and push off into the first feature series of the descent: a rocky spine of schist which drops off into to a series of switchbacks cut into the hill with hand-dug berms.  I let go the brakes and let the bike run into the corners.  It hums right over roots and small boulders.  I’m a kid again.  A boy in the woods on a bike with a grin on his face looking down the line of the next dirt jump.

And that for me is what it’s all about.  The aerobic exercise is good, and the adrenaline is fun -- but getting back to the kid in the 43 year-old me is more than just exercise.  It’s a near daily purification ritual that involves getting dirty.  The thing is, I have a few more resources than when I was twelve, and my toys are a little more sophisticated.  While the main idea is still rolling on two wheels, Mountain biking has come a long way since the late 80s when off-road specific bicycles first became popular -- a long way.  Even if riders resist it, the sport has grown up.

First developed in the late 70s, mostly in Marin County, CA, the sport of mountain biking began with the old newsie “klunker” and Mount Tam.  The pioneers of the sport -- some of whom are the empresarios of today’s industry -- began with bikes of the 50s because they were solid, steel, heavy, and most importantly: durable.  These guys, and some women too, would take these klunker-beasts to the top of Mount Tamalpais and then “race” down.  Allegedly, first prize was often “smokable”.  As they began to break theses bikes, they began to innovate.  As the frames were too heavy for climbs, they began to build more durable off-road frames.   Easy as that, a new sport was born.

But it would take another couple of decades for the bikes to get really burly -- a lot of them even look more like off-road motorcycles than they do their now distant “roadie” cousins.  And they certainly owe some of the technological advances to the motor-sport as well, namely hydraulic suspension, hydraulic disc brakes, and big, fat knobby tires.  Time after time, I am amazed at what the technology has allowed me to do.  Sure, I can ride the same trails on an old “rigid” bike with no suspension -- sometimes I do -- but with the new version, I can tear down the trail at twice the speed, huck my 210 pound self off of ledges four or five feet above the landing, land with a gentle ka-thunk, and flow on.  

Not only has the bike evolved, but the surface on which we ride has been significantly and mind-alteringly improved, just in the last six or eight years.  In the “old days”, we either found old logging roads, fire-roads to ride.  We made “rake and ride” trails -- that is, we raked off what we wanted to ride, and then we rode it -- over and over until it was officially a trail.  

Now trails are designed, and they use some sophisticated tools to get the job done.  Trail builders even plan and use math!  They scrape off the first layers of earth, down to the clay if possible; they rake it out, fill it with rock that drains, and pack it back in.  They build huge earthen walls called berms that are specifically calibrated to let a bike tear around a corner, 180 degrees, downhill -- without braking!  And uphill climbs are now so full of switchbacks and contour-following lines that it hardly even feels like you’re climbing a hill.  These designers have learned to work with Vermont hills so that it’s all about “flow”.  They design and build trails that wind through the woods and mesh with the environment so well that you forget the massive amount of work that went into them.  

But a lot does go into them.  A typical mountain bike trail in VT costs about five bucks a foot, on average.  This cost comes from machinery, often full-time staffers for various areas, and materials.  VT is wet, and it takes some decking and engineering to build over some of low areas.  We used to cut trail at night, without permission, but organizations like VMBA (VT Mountain Bike Association) coordinate projects with private land-owners and public lands.  This organization takes infrastructure.  Maturity.

Vermont has become a Mecca for mountain biking in the Northeast with hundreds of miles of these bike-specific single-track trails.  When I go to several of my local spots -- and I’m lucky to have a dozen great trail networks within a 30 minute drive -- there are always cars from Massachusetts, New York, and especially Quebec.  These have become “destination” riding centers.  

It’s easy to take things for granted when you have it good.  I don’t though, even after twenty years in Vermont.  I did my time in the flat, tree-deprived, soybeans-and-corn midwest as a teenage pent-up ski bum and road biker.  I know Vermont is weird; we like it that way.  We do things here like ban roadside billboards and offer free, universal health-care up to age 24.  We know our neighbors, and we know we can depend on them in a pinch.  Sometimes we even work on the neighborhood trails together.  Mainstream doesn’t count for much in the 802, and that goes for “fringe” sports as much as anything else.  The fact that I can hop on my bike, spin out my driveway for a good ride on mountain bike trails keeps me grinning like a kid.