I spent a long Sunday shepherding 620 bicycle riders through 140 miles of very mountainous terrain, and while serving as Ride Director for the Shasta Summit Century is a gratifying thing, the whole gig becomes a little weighty the second you receive radio reports of cyclists being run off the road and shots being fired from the truck doing it.

So much for my calm, bike-friendly Sunday.

Without delving into stupefying amounts of detail, suffice it to say that five morons in two pickups managed to – in 30 minutes – threaten a couple dozen cyclists (swerving at them, throwing things at them, squeezing them off the road, etc), brandish a shotgun out the window of their truck (in front of literally hundreds of people at our biggest rest stop), and actually fire the damn thing repeatedly from a moving vehicle.

It’s not a wholly unusual story; humanity’s bell curve enforces the notion of a certain population of idiots, and on this Sunday, five of them found each other on my century course.

What is unusual is that they got caught, which should offer us all a moment of warm fuzziness – until you learn that they were promptly let go.

So much for the moment.

Now the Backstory

I’m the Ride Director for the Shasta Summit Century – a really, really hard bike ride here in Mt. Shasta. The way it works is this: maniac bicyclists send us money, and we let them ride up and down (mostly up) four really big summits around town.

After 140 miles of that foolishness (and three vertical miles of climbing), we take the money from the now-barely-conscious bike riders and use it to fund youth sports in the area – mostly the school sports teams that don’t have any budget at all.

To our riders, that seems like a pretty fair trade. Us? We think the economics of value are a wonderful thing.

For example, the Mt. Shasta High School X-Country Team is one of the best small-school running teams in the entire state, yet their official athletic budget doesn’t quite cover the postage needed to send applications to races, much less travel to those races.

In other words, we’re pretty protective of our bike ride up here. As ride director, I’m pretty protective of my riders too.

So when you hear some group of assholes is threatening people and waving a shotgun around, you call the cops, and to their credit, the Forest Service police got there pretty quick.

Still, life isn’t like the movies, where the bad guys get what’s coming to them in the final eight blazing minutes, and in fact, almost all of them have (so far) walked away.

After some arguing, one will likely face a citation for firing from a road, a charge which lacks the kind of explosive satisfaction provided by action movies.

Still, the last word on this matter hasn’t been written, and while I’m unhappy I’ll be investing more time in something that doesn’t generate any money for my fave local sports teams, sometimes you have to help the assholes get what’s coming, even if it comes with legal slowness.

That much of this happened in a miniature river gorge carved by a tiny stream only reinforces my realization the ride’s sucked up a great deal of fishing time the last two weeks, and – now that I may be asked to serve as an instrument of karma – it’s going to suck up some more.

See you on the river (soon enough), Tom Chandler.