A little kid pedaled his beat-up bike through the streets of a town in El Salvador. The bike's frame was weather-beaten and its shock absorbers looked like modified soccer shin pads.
That image might not have meant much for most tourists, but for mountain biker and filmmaker Steve Storey, spotting the cyclist was a bit like Alice catching sight of the rabbit: it was his ticket to another world. "It just made me want to come back and explore that country on a bike," Storey explains. About nine months later, Storey and five friends left Canada bearing bikes and cameras — and showed up in Central America with no bikes and no cameras.
"The airport lost them and they couldn't even tell us where they were," Storey reports.
Air Canada had either given the gear to the other airline — or they hadn't, depending on which party you believe, recalls Justa Jeskova, Storey's fellow filmmaker and photographer on the shoot.
The team lost five days of their six-week shoot haranguing airport staff about the whereabouts of their bikes. "Everything is manana, manana," Jeskova recalls.
They got the bikes back but paid a price in raised pulses, according to Storey. "It was kind of stressful because there was about 20 grand in bikes vanished into thin air." While the bikes might have found some thin air, Jeskova found the atmosphere thick, debilitating and hot.
"I remember just getting off the plane and thinking: 'You want me to do something in this heat?" she says, laughing. "And that was like 10 o'clock in the evening."
Things weren't much better when the crew was schlepping gear and pushing bikes uphill at 4:30 a.m. "The humidity is almost 100 per cent there — so you're just sweating pretty much non-stop, you don't sleep properly," Jeskova says. Besides braving the climate, Jeskova was the only woman on the movie's six-member crew. The arrangement suited her fine 90 per cent of the time, the other 10 per cent was another issue.
"There were a few moments like, 'What was I thinking? I need a woman here because I can't handle this,'" she says, laughing. Despite all the problems of making Searching for Singletrack, including a few very close lightning strikes and a fall on slick rock that left Storey nursing a crushed hand that kept him off his bike for a year, shooting wrapped as scheduled.
The crew captured images of Storey's exploration along remote bike trails and beautiful vistas in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.
Storey says the word "explore" with just a bit of reverence, the same way an artist pronounces "Da Vinci" or an Oompa Loompa says "cocoa." Storey returns to the concept of exploring when he talks about just what made him love mountain biking in the first place.
"As a kid it was just a way to get out, explore the world around me. I guess that feeling has stuck to me," he reflects, taking a break from construction work to talk about the movie.
One of his fondest memories of the trip is being stuck near a farmer's village during a rainstorm in Guatemala.
A family invited the crew into their home and offered the soaking cyclists clothes and shelter while rain pounded their tin roof.
"It was incredibly humbling," he says. "They were looking for nothing in return other than just to share their country with other people."
The locals are also very knowledgeable about mountain biking, according to Jeskova.
"They know everything. They know about every product, they know about every World Cup rider," she says.
As a filmmaker, Storey is inspired by a youth spent religiously watching ski movies like Global Storming and The Game. Searching for Singletrack is a little shorter than those movies, which is to be expected, according to Storey. "Now that everyone can afford a decent camera and can put out edits in a short amount of time the whole media landscape has changed," he says.
"Lots of short edits are coming out now instead of full-length movies." Asked what he hopes the Vancouver International Film Festival audience gets from the movie, Storey comes back to exploration.
"I hope it gets them to want to travel more and explore new places where they have no idea about the riding. That's kind of how it was for us and that's what made it so exciting."
Justa Jeskova and Steve Storey: Searching for Singletrack screens as part of Mountain Bike Night at the Rio Theatre Feb. 16, 7:30 p.m. at this year's Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival. For more info, visit vimff.org.
