When I was in college at the University of Arizona I had a fantastic metabolism. I also rode my bicycle a lot. As a result, I ate pretty much what I wanted and in large quantities. Often what I wanted was Ben & Jerry’s Rainforest Crunch ice cream. A pint of Rainforest Crunch. All at once. I would walk down to the 7-11 at the end of our block and pick up a pint. It was the epitome of freedom.
One Sunday afternoon I decided it was such a time. While I stood in line at the cashier to pay for my pint of Rainforest Crunch I glanced down at the stack of Sunday papers. There, taking up most of the front page, was a picture of me on my mountain bike.
The day before it had snowed on Mt. Lemmon. It was the first significant snow of the season, and when it’s 80 degrees at your house (ok, probably not that warm) and you can drive less than an hour and be in feet of snow, it never stops being fun. They’d closed the road to vehicles without chains at a certain elevation, so a friend and I took our mountain bikes as far up as we could in his little car, then rode and hitched a ride in the back of a pickup truck to the top. We then rode from the base of the ski hill to the top on the fire road. It was as we were riding from the ski area’s parking lot that the newspaper photographer snapped the photo of me. Riding away.
My friend and I then rode down the ski slopes, rather ungracefully, and got yelled at by someone from the ski resort, but that isn’t the point of the story. The point is I had no idea that my photo had been taken until the next day while I was buying my Rainforest Crunch. It was cool to be on the front page of the Sunday paper. Apparently, it was a novel thing to see someone bundled up and riding a mountain bike in the snow in Arizona. But why hadn’t the photographer yelled at me to get me to stop and take a better picture? Why did they run a picture of my backside on the front page?
And why did Ben and Jerry’s discontinue Rainforest Crunch shortly thereafter?
I hope to return to Mt. Lemmon someday soon and once again climb it on my bicycle. But not when it’s snowing.