April and May is arrowing season, and while you may take crocuses sprouting out of the ground as a harbinger of Spring, the sight of freshly painted arrows always does it for me.
Arrowers are a breed in themselves. We all know each other, and admire each other’s handiwork. It’s not exactly like painting the Sistine chapel, but a finely turned out arrow always makes my heart swell with pride.
You can always tell an arrower. Unlike the gardener with a green thumb, the arrower ends up with a white thumb (or yellow if you’re a Climb to the Clouds arrower). They also end up with a customized bike, clothing and shoes since some of the cans tend to blast out in odd directions. My Cannondale now sports an interesting pattern of white paint around the head tube from a recent paint can malfunction.
Like any undertaking, there are tricks to the trade. If you can come by the highway marking type paint cans, where you hold the nozzle upside down and shoot, that’s the best. The real pros have a necessary accessory, a sawed off water bottle to hold the can so that it doesn’t rattle around in your water bottle cage. I’m of course too cheap to destroy a perfectly good water bottle despite the fact I’ve got several boxes of them, but Melinda gave me some, which I prize highly. Raising the bar even more are the people who arrow with stencils. That’s way too much work for me, and it takes the personal touch out of my arrows. Fortunately, the designs I pick (or have inherited) for my rides are quite simple, so freehand works quite well.
Sometimes when you have different clubs or charities arrowing much the same route you can get into arrow wars. The guiding principle of arrowing is never black out another ride’s arrows. Unless of course. they mess with your arrows, then all bets are off. You’re in for a rumble the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the Sharks and the Jets duked it out.
Arrowers are candidates for sainthood. While their buddies are out there trying to break land speed records, they are out there stopping at every turn and running the risk of incarceration to perform a service for said buddies. I’m always surprised at how tired I am after arrowing a ride, but when you consider I have to come to a dead stop and accelerate back to cruising speed about 50 or so times, it’s not that surprising.
Still there is a certain satisfaction to it. Being a particularly anal arrower, I try hard to reuse the previous arrows, and spend a lot of time looking for traces of what may have been an arrow before being repeatedly scoured by the sand trucks, etc. It’s very satisfying to discover that faintest outline that you know used to be an arrow. On the other hand, it’s very sad when I decide that it really is time for an arrow, only to find an old one 100 yards down the road. Then when you get a new can, it tends to spray in a shotgun pattern. But when you craft that perfectly formed arrow, that makes it all worth while.
Please send corrections, additions, comments and praise to