I rescue earthworms from the road and probably flatten slow worms at the same time. Mountain biking is a wonderful sport - unfortunately with collateral damage. And at some point there's suddenly a dead amphibian on the trail.
The good man of the cycle path
I believe in karma.
If you do good, you get good back. If you're an arsehole, you'll end up breaking your collarbone in a ditch in the rain. That's roughly how I imagine the universe.
That's why I sometimes stop when gravel biking to rescue earthworms from the road. Yes, really. There's some poor worm lying on the hot tarmac, wriggling in slow motion towards its death by evaporation.
I dismount, pick him up carefully and place him on the damp grass. "Come on, Buddy," I say inwardly. Maybe he'll live to be ten. Earthworms can supposedly do that.
For a brief moment, I feel like Gandhi on studded tyres.
The rubber guillotine
The problem starts in the forest.
You see animals on tarmac. Not on trails.
At 40 km/h, the ground blurs into a brown-green sauce. Anything can sit, crawl or snooze there: common toad, newt, shrew, slow worm - I rush over it and probably don't notice a thing.
After all, a mountain bike tyre is not a gentle experience of nature. It is a rotating rubber guillotine. Particularly feared by slow worms. They love warm trails. Unfortunately, they react about as quickly as a Windows update.
Every biker knows the result: those flat, sad shadows on the ground.
Fun or salamander?
Of course you could drive slower.
But let's be honest: no-one is hurtling down a trail thinking: "Be extra careful of amphibians today." Mountain biking is too much about instinct, flow and euphoria.
Sport thrives on speed.
And that's where the conflict of conscience begins.
Fun or consideration?
Flow or fire salamander?
The fun usually wins. You tell yourself that the animals are already fast enough. They are not.
The dead Lurchi
There was one on the trail recently.
A fire salamander. Crushed. Clearly visible next to it: tyre tracks in the damp ground.
Not mine, after all. But that hardly makes things any better.
Fire salamanders are not normal animals for me. They are childhood. Home. The smell of the forest. Lurchi comics. That strange West German security of the seventies, when salamanders bravely and upright with leather shoes went on adventures in little booklets.
And now there was this Lurchi. Flattened like chewing gum.
Karma travels with you
It was not murder. No premeditation.
But manslaughter? Difficult to deny.
Since then, I've been thinking about it more often when I drive through the forest. Not for long, of course. My action-loving ego takes over again in the next bend at the latest.
The karma log probably keeps a record anyway.
Earthworm saved: plus one.
Blindworm killed: minus twenty.
I can already guess how this is going to end:
At some point, an e-biker with a JBL box in his rucksack catches me in the bike park and clears me off.
Dimitri Lehner
Editor
