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By Kurt Gensheimer

Having lived in Bloomington, Indiana for five years, I’ve had my fair share of encounters with rabid dogs trained to attack cyclists and angry hillbillies winging projectiles at me like a duck in a shooting gallery. I had become very accustomed to defending myself whether it meant having a spare water bottle to douse man-eating mutts in chase or carrying a rock in my jersey to use in retaliation when I became the unwilling target in a Big Gulp chucking incident.

But once I moved to San Jose and didn’t have one run in with a driver for four years, all of that hyper-defensive behavior disappeared; the extra water bottle is gone and my rock has been replaced with an iPod.  Therefore, even two years after the incident, it strikes me with great irony that the most memorable run-in I’ve ever had with a deranged and disgruntled motorist was actually on the quiet peaceful roads south of San Jose.

I met the South Bay contingent of our dominant Village Pedaler crew at Los Gatos Coffee Company around 8AM on a Saturday in February 2005. “Megafit” Mike Matthews, “Kiwi” Steve McGrath, Rob “Hooptie” Evans, Timmy C, Caesar “No Espanol” Chavez and “B-rad” Brice Renshaw were all sipping on hot bean water and gawking at the choicest MILFs from behind their dark lens glasses when I rolled up.

“You gonna have some coffee, mate?” asked Kiwi Steve as his eyes followed a tight buttocks.

“Nah. I get my coffee at home.”

“Well sit down and stay a while, will ya? Enjoy the sights, mate.”

After ten minutes of styling on the front step with our colorful lycra soaking in the scenery, we gathered our team issue S-Works bikes and headed south. After a few miles we picked up the Jacques-Maynes contingent of Ben and Andy and continued with our ride. By the time we got out of San Jose proper and onto the more rural McKean Road, we had amassed close to twenty hammerheads in our posse.

We rode up the short riser past Calero Reservoir on a picture perfect Northern California morning in February: 65 degrees without a cloud in the sky. The road was wide open, so our large group took the liberty of going two abreast even though the shoulder was little more than six inches wide.

The Jacques-Maynes brothers were taking us on an epic ride of theirs which went all the way out past Uvas Reservior, west towards Watsonville, up a dirt road climb called Redwood Retreat, and then down to part of the Santa Cruz Saturday ride which went over “the dell” and into Corralitos. From there, we would climb about ten miles on Eureka Canyon Road, past the Demo Forest, and up to Summit Road, where we could descend down Old Santa Cruz Highway back to Los Gatos.

As we all chatted it up while the pace was still calm and civilized, I felt a rush of wind blaze past me followed by the sight of a white Ford Econoline utility van with pipes and ladders on the top. The van not only came dangerously close to us for no reason other than to be a schmuck, but when the driver went to reenter his lane, he yanked the wheel aggressively to communicate his displeasure with our presence. Fortunately for him and unfortunately for us, he jerked the wheel hard enough to make the entire van wobble back and forth, but not hard enough to roll it off the road.

At first we gave him the collective bird and an assortment of cussing, but when we saw that clown almost roll his van off the road, we all burst out into laughter. What a jackass. Here it is, 9 o’clock in the morning on a Saturday with nary a car on the road. What could this guy be so bent out of shape about?

After a few minutes of laughing and concluding he must have been on his way home from an all- night bender, we saw the white van parked up a driveway off the side of Uvas Road. Smoke was billowing out from the exhaust pipe, and I could see a figure in the side mirror. All 20 of us started heckling and making obscene hand gestures to get his attention, but the van didn’t back down the driveway. We continued on without incident, but having ridden in the backwoods of Indiana for several years, I knew how these types were. I drifted to the back of our group and motioned to Hooptie.

“Dude, keep your eyes open. That guy is going to roll up behind us. Guaranteed.”

“You think so?”

“Trust me.”

A half mile later, and whadda ya know? The van was behind us once again. Only this time, he was keeping about a 100 meter distance off the back of our group and going at our speed as to try and hide the fact he was about to bum rush us with his mass of American scrap iron and PVC piping strapped to the roof. I hollered to Kiwi Steve and Megafit Mike who were at the front that we had company, and they pulled off to the side onto a dirt road blocked by a fence.

With half of us off the pavement and half in the middle of it, the van slowly drove up to us with its deranged occupant hanging his head out the window. Mike was the first to chime in.

“Did you forget to take your stupid pills today, buddy?”

“Get off my property!” A line which is most popular with six-year-old children and hillbillies with the education of a six-year-old.

“This road is not your property, dumbass.”

“I mean those assholes over there, shit for brains!” The perturbed plumber pointed to Hooptie and I who watched the action from the dirt road. Since almost everyone in our group was on the asphalt by this point congregating in a human roadblock, I got off his precious property so I wouldn’t make him cry like a six-year-old.

The plumber’s anger and frustration escalated as we blocked up the entire road in a ridiculously lopsided 20 versus 1 confrontation. I know that men don’t look particularly tough in lycra, but come on, 20 guys versus one dude who looked like he was still drunk and high from the night before? We weren’t a group of shelias either. The Jacques-Maynes brothers are over six feet and Kiwi Steve is six and a half feet weighing in at 220 with an extremely volatile demeanor when threatened. Those three alone would have crushed this guy.

As the plumber hollered and whooped up a storm about his private property and other nonsense sprinkled with cussing and spitting, I watched Kiwi Steve pull a banana, not a kiwi, out of his jersey pocket and skulk around the back of the van while still on his bike. With the plumber in full-blown tirade mode screaming at Megafit Mike, Kiwi Steve calmly rolled up and WHAM! The plumber got tagged in the face point blank with a peeled banana.

If a mushy banana in your face isn’t ego crushing enough, then the roaring laughter of 20 colorfully spandexed men with shaved legs and odd looking helmets surely is. The perturbed and now embarrassed plumber with smeared banana all over his face immediately dropped his van into gear and laid rubber, almost slamming into B-rad and Timmy C in the process.

Our tear-jerking laughter continued for several minutes as every single rider in the group gave Kiwi Steve a much-deserved congratulations. Usually he would get into a heated argument, but on this day, Kiwi Steve let his banana do the talking. Once the gut-busting guffaws subsided, we got back on our bikes, but there would be a fourth and final chapter to this epic incident of hillbilly road rage.

I was still paying attention to the road and looking ahead to make sure our nemesis in overalls wouldn’t strike again. Because of my Indiana experience, I knew the type. There is no way this guy was going down with a banana in his face. Retaliation was imminent. Peril was certain. We had to be very careful. Just as I was thinking these phrases of caution to myself, I saw him perched 15 feet above the road in a driveway hidden by trees with a massive tree branch in his possession, but not for long.

“YOU MUTHERFU…” The plumber hucked a ginormous tree branch which must have been eight feet long, a foot in diameter, and at least 100 pounds in weight, over the road and right in the path of our peloton.

“DUCK!” I screamed out as most of the group didn’t even see the humungous hunk of wood flying at them like a SCUD missile. As my brain recorded the entire shot in slow motion, I remember seeing fifteen riders touch their chins to their stems as the tree branch spun only inches above their heads and off the road into a ditch.

The slow-motion branch finally landed in the woods and I concluded that this guy must be whacked out on coke. No human his size could throw a piece of wood that high and far without some kind of illegally-aided substance.

Now it was on like Donkey Kong. Our nemesis was out of his van and exposed. All 20 of us gathered up rocks and started hucking them at him as he scrambled up a hill to his staircase. As we pelted him with rocks, we could hear the incessant cussing between gasps for air until he finally reached his house and took cover. We congregated on his front yard, and from behind a pane of glass came a panting proclamation.

“Get…off…my…property!”

The response was nothing but a rain of rocks descending upon his house until one broke a window. We all concluded that the broken window was as far as we wanted to go with this adventure, and quickly got back on our bikes. Thankfully, the perturbed plumber wised up and opted not to come after us again.

We finished our epic ride without incident, but every time I ride on Uvas Road or think about the thousands of cyclists who travel back and forth on that stretch of asphalt, I can’t help but ask myself whether or not what we did was the right thing. Responding to aggression with escalated aggression may backfire in the future, or worse, backfire on people who had nothing to do with the original altercation.

Because after his experience with us, the perturbed plumber will associate all cyclists with the run-in we had with him. On the opposite end of the argument, maybe it’s a good thing Steve tagged him with a phallic piece of fruit. Next time, before swerving his van across the road like a drunken fool, it’s possible the plumber might think to himself, “I’d better not mess with cyclists, because the last time I did I got an eyeful of mushy banana and a rock through my window.”