field of one

I GOT A MESSAGE FROM A WOMAN THE other day. She wrote to tell me that we’d crossed paths 15 years before. She saw me riding my mountain bike, but I never saw her. Like usual, I was in a world of my own, practicing skinnies and trying to figure out the elusive wheelie drop.

She told me that I was her first.

I was the first woman who she ever saw on the trails. Just like me, she would have kept riding even if she never saw another dirt-covered female outside of the one in the mirror. But in that