Shooting Peeps with a Slingshot and Other Mature Bachelor Party Shenanigans

It turns out I am getting older. One clear sign is the significant number of 40th birthday parties I have attended in the past few years. I can’t say exactly how many because my memory is starting to go, but there have been a lot, by cracky! And at each one, it is generally the same group of people, only a different person is wearing a silly hat or a sash. I don’t need numerous 40th birthday parties to point out the fact that I’m getting older. My aching bones do a perfectly good job of that. Nevertheless, my aching bones went to another 40th birthday party two weeks ago and there are many more on my schedule in the near future. When at last they taper off, the cycle of 50th birthday parties will begin and I’m sure my bones will still be aching. As for my own 40th birthday party coming up in less than two years, you’re all invited. Please come and have a great time. When it’s over, give me a shout. I’ll be curious to know how it went.

Weddings and bachelor parties have also become regular affairs, as many of my close friends, family members, and fellow coworkers who are also getting older are deciding it’s finally time to grow up. Recently, I attended a bachelor party in honor of Land Beaver, Bart’s older brother. Bart of course, as the four or five of you who read this column know, is hands down, without question, one of my most favorite fellow coworkers, and although Land Beaver has a real job and doesn’t work at the bike shop, he is nevertheless a very colorful patch stitched into the patchwork quilt that is the bike shop extended family. He is a regular on our shop bike rides and ski excursions and he helps out each year at our annual bike swap as well as joins us in our bike brigade during the annual 4th of July parade. If you’ve ever been to the bike swap, he is the guy wearing a sombrero, loading up all the free abandoned junk bikes in the back of his car. If you’ve watched the parade, he’s the guy wearing knee-high tube socks and a backpack zooming around on inline skates with a tow rope in his hands who I am cursing at for attaching his tow hook to the back of my Penny-Farthing.

Land Beaver’s bachelor party was nothing like your archetypal bachelor party in Las Vegas, Montreal, or at a rented condo a few towns over. There were no inappropriate shenanigans involving adult entertainment professionals. No tigers or chickens were harmed and no one lost any teeth. There were no cigars, no drinking games, and no keg stands. A mason jar full of fresh corn whiskey, generously donated to our cause by Jesus H. Renko’s fiancée, remained unopened. And even though by 11 pm the nine of us were all sitting quietly around a campfire struggling to stay awake, we all had a swell time, by cracky!

Seriously though, we did have a swell time. Perhaps the swellest time anyone has ever had at a bachelor party, or at least at a mature bachelor party, which is what I would call it, because we are all very mature gentlemen who are all married or engaged. We enjoyed a very mature bachelor party involving two mature days and two mature nights of tenting, mountain biking, archery, primitive weapon making, pine pitch torch burning, glass sculpting, and shooting Peeps at each other with sling shots. We enjoyed a lot of good mature camp food including sausages and beans (insert joke here) as well as polenta, peanut butter, potatoes, and of course, Peeps. Yes we enjoyed a few beers, but as a true indicator of how mature we all are, all but one of us listened to our wives’ recommendations and remembered to drink lots and lots of water. If this bachelor party sounds like a good time to you, feel free to take notes.

Aside from celebrating Land Beaver’s imminent nuptials, and bemoaning his fleeting bachelorhood, the main purpose of this trip, of course, was the mountain biking. We are all mountain bikers, and even though it was early spring, and most of us hadn’t sat on a bicycle since last fall, the idea of two days of epic mountain biking following two nights of mature bachelor party action sounded like a great idea to us. And even though by the end of the second day, the ache in my bones had spread to my back, neck, legs, and especially my bottom, I would do it all over again. I would just enjoy a few less beers and I would bring a much more significant and cushy sleeping pad to rest my aching body upon. Fortunately, the aches in my body have retreated back to their home in my bones, and I’m walking in a normal fashion again. I’m feeling ready as ever for the next mature event, which is another 40th birthday party. As for a gift for the lucky 40 year old, I’m thinking an unopened mason jar full of corn whiskey is a swell idea.

Stark Raving Mud

Like any good Mainer, my Mom has a lot of great expressions. “I’ve never seen luggage on a hearse,” and “It would take a hell of a man to replace no man,” are two classics. One of my favorites has always been “uglier than a mud fence,” which she uses when describing people and objects that are simply too ugly to look at. “That statue is uglier than a mud fence!” she’ll proclaim. I’ve seen a lot of fences in my 38 years, but I have never seen a mud fence, and I’m not sure she has either, but judging from that expression, a mud fence must be pretty darn ugly.

When my time comes to build a fence, I’ll be sure to look into other types—picket, wrought iron, wattle, palisade, split rail, or maybe even chain-link if money is, as Mom would say, “tighter than the skin on a hotdog”—but definitely not mud. Although I have never seen a mud fence, I have seen a lot of mud, especially this spring, which has rolled in on the coattails of one doozy of a winter. Let’s not forget, Old Man Winter has a mom too, and apparently she came to visit this year to show her reprehensible son how they did things back in the day.

When I was a muddy-kneed little kid, I used to make great mud pies. I would fill a pie pan with wet soupy mud and pat the surface with my little hand, maybe sprinkle some grass on top, and it was done. My lovely wife had a different method. She would find thicker mud and shape out a mud pie on the driveway, let it bake in the sun, and then feed it to her little brother.

Imagine the mud pie you could make with the muddy dirt roads that are out there this spring. “Home of the World’s Largest Mud Pie” could become a distinction for your town. I consider myself an exceptionally good driver, but having grown up surrounded by paved roads, I was never taught how to navigate a vehicle on the open sea, or down muddy dirt roads with huge swells and tall waves of mud crashing down, all of it working to swallow my Mazda like a leather boot. We recently went to a dinner party at Uncle Robby’s cabin, which is located on a very muddy dirt road at the bottom of a very long hill. For most of the drive, all was going well, and we were almost there, when suddenly the road came alive. My lovely wife did her best to instruct me, telling me to go that way and that way, but that no matter which way, not to stop! Fortunately, we were going downhill, so we had gravity on our side, and by the skin of our clenched teeth, we made it down. I was convinced, however, that when it was time to go, we’d never make it up.

The image of the Mazda sunken in a muddy ditch, and the prospect of being marooned at Uncle Robby’s cabin preoccupied me throughout the evening. You might say I was a stick in the mud. My lovely wife however, who was born on a muddy dirt road, wasn’t concerned in the least. When it was time to go, she turned the ignition key and put it in drive, pulled out of the driveway, and headed directly into the belly of the beast.

There was no turning back.

The journey up the road was tense, harrowing, and perilous. We were yelling and hooting, “Go! Come on! Yes! No! Yes! Oh no!” At one point she skirted the very edge of the road and it looked like we were doomed, but she held on and never stopped, never gave it too much gas, never kept the steering wheel turning in one direction, never stopped believing, and we made it out. The Mazda came out covered in mud pies, but it was nonetheless a triumphant, exhilarating moment.

Monster truck enthusiasts aside, I can’t think of too many people who particularly like mud. Most people complain about it, make efforts to avoid it, or try to get rid of it. That is, until they get on a mountain bike. Why anyone who generally avoids mud would suddenly aim for it, just because they’re riding a mountain bike, is beyond me. Mud is gritty paste that, like sand at the beach, gets everywhere. Short of tying an anchor to your bike and throwing it into the ocean, or placing it beneath the wheels of a monster truck, riding in mud is the single worst thing you can do to your bicycle. Mud is great for making mud pies or mud fences, but it wreaks havoc on every part of a bicycle: the braking pads and braking surfaces, suspension seals and suspension pivots, bearings and bearing races, chain and chainrings, and cables and cable housings. It drastically decreases the performance of your shifting and braking systems while exponentially enhancing the performance of your creaks, squeaks, and chirps. Riding in mud, of course, has also been shown to promote trail erosion, but that is another argument for another day.

I’m not saying that you can avoid mud entirely, but you can cut back by simply waiting until the trails are dry enough to ride, which around here, is usually not until May. During riding season, if it is still a little wet out there, choose the trails that are the least wet, and when you come upon a giant mud puddle or muddy section, stop and walk around. If what I am saying is as clear as mud, or you just plain can’t stay away from the stuff, at least clean your bike after your ride. If you don’t, so be it, but when your creaky, mud-caked bicycle isn’t working so great on your next ride, please don’t drag your bike shop’s name through the mud.