The MS Bike Ride

18 The MS Bike Ride

Each year since 2016 I have looked forward to photographing the MS Bike Ride called MS Bike. The ride is sponsored by the Multiple Sclerosis Society of the Mid-South. The ride is in Mississippi and the title includes MS (The postal code for Mississippi), but most of the riders are from Memphis.

In 2016 I volunteered with the Memphis Camera Club to document the event. In years past the two-day ride was a very big event with hundreds of riders and a media following. In 2016 I don't think there were 100 riders and in 2019 there were probably less than 70.

Barry from the Camera Club also volunteered and I loved working with him. I helped out with "team photos" and we followed the riders throughout the day. On Sunday I picked the spots I thought would make compelling photos - I returned to the same places in 2019.

The start of the race is a mess. Many people want a "team photo" but they don't have the structure to get the whole team together. Barry and I did not have the organization to control the crowd at the start and there were always stray cyclists wandering through and behind the frame. I made a list of all the teams that year, but there was no time for administration, the photographs were chaos.

Barry is a great guy and a fantastic photographer. He was unphased by the mess at the start. I saw how he was comfortable and made people feel great. I cannot naturally do this but for future rides I practiced this at home and would ask people to raise their arms in a "victory" pose to help them feel more comfortable.

I had a ladder and I was attempting to get a timelapse of the start. What I found was that the start with less than 100 riders lasts only a couple of seconds. The good part of the time-lapse was the sunrise over the start with dramatic skies.

After the start, Barry and I followed the riders to some on the planned stops. We didn’t coordinate our approach so we ended up at a couple at the same time, missing the riders at the other stops. This turned out to be advantageous to me because I took one of my favorite photos at one rest-stop. It was behind Barry in a photographer's stance as he was taking a photo of a cyclist. Barry put that photo on his webpage and captioned it with “my good side.”

Barry is also a funny guy.

In 2017, photographing the MS ride, I got low on gas as I chased the bikes around rural Mississippi. I was concentrating on the photos when I realized that it may be over 20 miles to a gas station in this rural part of the state. I stopped in a rural church that was having an early service to ask about a nearby gas station.

There were six people in the church and they must have been waiting to begin or just stopped to see what I was doing there. Suddenly I was the center of attention. I asked about gas, I told them what I was doing so they wouldn't feel obligated to ask me to stay. Honestly, I felt that they would tell me it would be more than a couple of miles to a station and that was what I estimated was my limit.

I was hoping that one of them may offer to help. My 1990 Honda Civic got great gas mileage, but in my mind I was playing out a scenario where I had to wait with them until after the church service to go to a gas station fifteen or twenty minutes away. I could imagin the church service with speaking in tongues, healing and all types of snakes that they may bring out.

But they said I must have just passed the gas station. They told me it was almost in sight of the small church and that it was open on Sunday. I did pass that gas station. It was so dilapidated and in ruins, I did not believe it was open. As I passed it I paused and looked at the single pump remaining out front. It had no cover or sides, it was just the rusty inner workings exposed. There had been other pumps, but they were all removed.

The building itself had no sign to suggest it was a business and there was ivy growing down from the roof that made me believe it had not been used in a long time. The most compelling reason I did not stop is because the cars outside were rubbish. It did not look like anyone was there or had been in a very long time.

But I was wrong. Those Christians had steered by right and I did get gas from that skinless pump. There were actually two men at the service station. I suspect they either lived nearby or one of those junk cars may have worked.

I think you have to dive around and meet people in rural Mississippi to understand how you can be wrong about life. I think I may have missed the best photo subjects by not just photographing the old church, dilapidated gas station and the people who kindly helped me.

Because of the pandemic, there was no ride in 2020. In 2019, I got a hotel room at one of the Casino’s to follow the race, but it rained so hard they cancelled the ride that Sunday.

I still love the outdoors and the MS Bike ride. I am looking forward to it in 2021. Here are links to my photos from the past rides:

MS Bike: Memphis Rockin' Ride

Photo by Tim Wheat.

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