THE VIEW AT TWILIGHT
THE photographer’s hands sit steady on the bar top, palms down, relaxed, a glass of beer between them. These are hands that have seen some work; decades of bartending, gripping handlebars on rocky singletrack descents, aiming big-lensed SLR cameras with the steadiness and patience of a surgeon. He has to be careful to lift this glass of beer with his left hand. It’s just a little too oddly shaped and heavy for him to trust the job to his right hand anymore. He explains this with a smile and a gentle slur, a thickening of speech that a bystander would probably dismiss as slight drunkenness. He’s not drunk. This is the first beer of what might be two, if it’s a big night.
This is Colin Meagher’s life now. Strong hands that are losing their former strength along with their coordination. Difficulty forming words as his tongue stops obeying his neural signals. Disappearing shoulders. “I’m mellllltiiiing,” he jokes, breaking up his Wicked Witch of the West impression with laughter. Meagher has ALS—amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—a rare disease, difficult to diagnose, incurable and ultimately terminal. As defined by the ALS association, it is “a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. A-myo-trophic comes from the Greek language. ‘A’ means no. ‘Myo’ refers to muscle, and ‘Trophic’ means nourishment: No muscle nourishment.”
What this means for Meagher is that right now, at 51, he expects he will be dead sometime in the next two to four years. This is not an easy truth to accept. Meagher is, and always has been, an energetic and jovial man. He has lived life in the moment, traveled the world in pursuit of that perfectly framed split second of action. While paying obsessive, intimate attention to those perfect moments, living in them, he developed into one of mountain biking’s more prolific photographers. Until very recently, his life revolved almost entirely around riding bikes and getting the shots. Bills could be paid later. Organization, settling down, planning out a future, later.
“Colin is as ADHD as they come,” says his wife, Nikki Rohan. “Whatever is bright and shiny and right in front of him
