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Column: Solstice night ride brings together diverse group

Phillip Barron
The Herald Sun
July 14, 2005

DURHAM — Back in the winter, Curt and Judy Eshelman had an idea. They though it would be fun to celebrate the summer solstice with an organized cycling event. At night. A night ride in honor of the longest day of the year.

“They made one fatal error,” says friend and fellow cyclist Peter Anlyan. “They put it out to the cycling community for opinions.”

It seems no one could agree on anything — the time, the route, whether to make it a benefit ride. But Curt Eshelman is quick to point out that the idea died for lack of consensus, not a lack of interest.

A week before the solstice, Anlyan and the Eschelmans revived the idea, passed the word among friends, and gathered twenty or more riders at the American Tobacco Campus for a 17 mile ride.

As we head off around 8:30pm, the sun is setting and the riders are giddy. Not many have ever ridden their bikes at night before, and for a good number of the riders, this event is their first foray into group bike rides. Fitting that an ad-hoc event brings together such an unlikely group of people.

“Well, [it's my] first intentional night ride,” says Muriel Moody. There was that time, in the Peace Corps, in Madagascar, “but that’s a long story.” Moody, a first year Duke Law School student getting a jump on her studies this summer, is excited to get tapped into the loacl cycling community.

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For Tate Little, the solstice ride is also his first group ride in Durham. Little moved to Durham only two days before the summer solstice when his girlfriend, Roxanne Hall of Durham’s Habitat for Humanity, told him about the ride. Little and Hall are training for the local MS 150 ride in September. “I’d just like to get in as many rides as I can,” says Little. “This is a nice, safe ride.”

Hall says she can’t believe all the fireflies. It’s “nice and cool. I’m really enjoying it. It’s a different experience. Durham by night.”

Rusty Miller, a cycling coach and “ex-professional cyclist” joins the ride midway through it. On his way home from his own ride, he spots a pack of riders with lights. “A night time ride on the Tobacco Trail… how could I say ‘no’?”

Near the end of our route, we cross the bridge over Lakewood Avenue. Any hint of sunlight is gone; the sky is a deep blue-gray. Facing north, all you can see are the lights of Durham’s skyline and the blinking tail-lights of other cyclists.

As rider Matt DeMargel puts it, the solstice was the “perfect night for it.”

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