Glenn Kubish

At the Winter Bike Congress in Calgary earlier this month, I said, in a kind of convoluted manner that took six minutes and 40 seconds to spit out...I said, in 20 slides, some of which were painful to relive, some nostalgic...I said, in words I tried to get right in the one shot I had in front of some of the very people who I most wanted to say the word to...I said: thanks. Here's my Pecha Kucha called We Winter Together. This was me. Making a heartfelt point about Russia at last year's Pecha Kucha night in Moscow. I fell in with a stellar band of winter bike riders and storytellers that night. It would take me another month to fully appreciate what I'm doing in this picture. I mean, look! I am lifting my left arm. This was a month later. This was my left arm. My shoulder is fractured and dislocated. I fell off my bike. Like Caesar, I did not beware the ice of March. But I was aware of how beautiful the ride was on the decline before the fall! ...

The front tire wasn't a front tire as much as an oversized windshield wiper clearing snow from the glass. The transformation was rapid, and complete: Now I was pedalling down a riverbank utility road, and now I was thinking how lovely it is when the brown city gets a fresh set of linens, and now my front tire was skidding across the ice hidden beneath the snow—and now I was clearly falling. And now, sitting propped up on an emergency room stretcher, I was signing my name to a form without lifting the pen off the page before things went black under a veil of fentanyl and propofol. The scan shows the dislocated shoulder bone  back in place (it looks like a pork chop) and the chunk of bone that fractured off. Frickity fracture Here is another view inside: The fall happened on March 30. I was riding back home with a friend from a meeting of Coffee Outside. For more than three years a growing group of bicycle commuters in Edmonton have met on Friday mornings in a...

The silent snowflakes spun to the earth like paratroopers. Pekka Tahkola was the first to notice the invasion. He jumped from his chair in the hotel room we were in, some fifty or so of us in one room, and he ran to the window and the world beyond. Decades of his life seemed to melt away, so that by the time he reached the window he was again a boy, or, what's more accurate, he was again the boy we chase on the other side of the man. "Look!" he said. "The snow is here!" We clapped and cheered. Not for long, but for long enough to make a mark. I had never before in my life clapped for snow. I have admired its beauty. I have photographed it. I have marvelled at it. But cheering for it? Never. Now, there I was sitting in Minneapolis at the World Winter Bike Congress breakout session on Finland's preeminent position in the pantheon of winter cycling and I was cheering as the snowflakes twisted and turned down down down. Down. They were big, fluffy, beau...