A Showdown

I watched this guy stand and fire a roman candle into the woods next to the bathrooms at the Munson trailhead. The rain just quit as I pulled into the parking lot so I wasn't specifically concerned about a fire, but more the general disresepect for Dr. Munson's lounge. It boomed from his hand three times and then he flung it into the woods.

"Hey! What in the hell is wrong with you?" This-my tactful lead-in.

Stammer, sputter, unintelligible mutterings, and then he charged towards me.

I quickly got off the bike and prepared to be shot at, stabbed, or confronted with a bad odor. As he closed in the focus improved through his coke bottle thick lenses. Emboldened by my lycra wrapper, he might have assumed he was backing down a James Taylor fan, or a man who buys free range eggs.

I think I was a bigger wad of gum than he was ready to chew. The only scary part is how much I wanted it.

I asked him to please pick up the debris and think about the rest of us who care about the forest.

After it was over I realized that's what a guy who buys free range eggs would say.

Oh well, better that than jail.

Juancho
now in italics!

Feasting at the Barbed Wire Buffet

Jill Homer, a blogworld sister from Juneau, AK, finished the Tour Divide mtb race from Banff, Canada to Antelope Wells, NM last night. Something like 2800 miles of mostly solo pedaling. Can you imagine walking out the door to go for a ride and being gone for 24 days? I mean, I have had some rides where the Wrecking Ball tormented me so the ride felt like it was three weeks long, but it was actually about 2 or 3 hours.

You can check out more about the race, and find Jill's "call in" updates here. The pain and isolation is at times so apparent it is hard to listen to, but she never quit- and so today us bloggers are proud to raise one of our own on our shoulders.

Congratulations Jill Homer, you did a hell of a thing.

Juancho

Rendering

Coming back on the Cadillac trail this morning I had to take things kind of slow due to the film of slime that accumulates all over my cockpit, which is a ridiculous word to describe the handlebars of a bicycle, but that's how we do it I suppose.

Still, all slime aside I am glad to be back to a riding routine that allows me to ignore and postpone so many other pressing issues in life. The great heat wave of 2009 exposed the fragility of a lifestyle based on unfulfilled expectations, revenge fantasies, and a diet of candy corn ,hummus, and tuna pasta- or maybe it was just hot.

The Tour de France is on. I am pulling for the Schleck brothers to spoil LA's shot at a comeback. Why must I be a hater? I guess I can never forgive him for that ride with George w. Bush at the ranch. We are all to be judged by the company we keep.

Last night at St. Marks, as some friends rocked Oye Como Va from a flatbed trailer and fireworks shot off over the river- I couldn't help myself, I smiled and felt vaguely patriotic, like maybe things are going to work out okay for us all in the next couple years. If they don't, I'll just keep what I have got and keep working with that.

On and off the bike.

Juancho

The Recipe

I guess it started with the ribs and slaw at Huckleberry's BBQ, and the dive in Fanning Springs while spitwad sized raindrops plopped all over the surface of the water. On top was about 8 feet of tannic Suwanee River water. This warm water laid on the cold topaz spring water below like a 151 floater.

A couple of nights sleeping in Mom's spare bed, where I always sleep the unworried and collapsing sleep you only get when you have no doubts you are where you are supposed to be at the moment.

I watched the Gulf showing out in all kinds of aggressive ways before the sun came up at Bean Point, the northernmost tip of the island and a dramatic view of Tampa Bay and the wide open sea. I saw four thunderstorms scattered in a skirmish line across the morning and knew I would be driving in them and all the storms yet to cross that rise where the earth slants away towards Mexico.

A hellish soaking whiteout drive up the Interstate yesterday, and a good night's sleep in my own bed, equally restful as the spare one at Mom's but different. No lilting dreams of caring people smiling, but back to dreams of dismantling apparatae of unspecified purpose and putting it in boxes, but nobody cares about our weird dreams.

A visit to the doctor, wherever death lurks he has not announced himself, nor left clues of any kind. In the face of such evidence how can you not ride, and ride joyfully? 103 degrees says the van, at 5:00 P:M? We will ride for the shade and enjoy the easing of the temperature as the day slips away.

The legs feel too good for caution. I smile and try to turn the screws a little bit, but old CC is not impressed, and when we see him riding the other way, and he joins us, and he thumps us through a mulchy bracken of ticks and vines clinging, neither is Dogyboy impressed.

And yet here we are, riding the day down in summer, and death will have to be patient.

Juancho

Striking Out

Words really do fascinate me. Like, how can the above title phrase mean to set out on a journey while also meaning to come to the end of an opportunity in a game established in the United States where players travel around bases, ultimately coming home?

That is the sort of thing that keeps me up at night.

In this situation I mean the phrase in the sense, "to strike out on a journey." I am getting out of town for a few days, traveling down to see my kin.

Alafia, Balm Boyette (could the rumors be true? Does it no longer suck?)Santos, San Felasco, Fanning Springs, Pole Barn, Bean Point, Highlands Hammock, Huckleberry's BBQ, Payne's Prairie, all of these points of interest are in play along the way.

I'm happy to go too. So far this summer of 2009 in Tallahassee gets an F.

Time for a change of scene.

Juancho

Finger Crossers

Big Worm? Wrecking Ball? They lie.

Spanish Mack said it best and he said it just like this, "The thing to remember is that everyone is a sandbagger and everyone is a liar. Every single one of them!"

We rode real nice and friendly, except when we didn't. The heat has cranked down from, "You are dying as we stand in this parking lot contemplating the heat" to "I didn't realize I could breathe warm cheese dip."

A slight improvement.

Juancho

Silent, but deadly

Bigworm is riding north tonight at 5:45 P:M. I guess that means the riding moratorium is called off due to temps below 100. Amazing what kind of notions people get after 15 minutes of rain.

I'm going to hunt him down.

John

Mercy

Tiny drops of water falling in the swimming pool. Right out of the blessed sky itself. I dog paddled through 600,000 gallons of chlorine and urine seeking a little exercise and relief; the lone swimmer in the water being watched over by a bored but dutiful lifeguard named Lindsey. She must have been at least 12 years old.

I heard her speak through the slosh and gurgle in my ears.
( I was doing my manatees where I bob to the surface then slowly descend.)

"Rain." She clearly said the word rain. I rolled to port and looked into the sun- tormentor of my days, ruler of my universe, the relentless fucking sun.

Tiny cool drops hit my face. Lindsey put down her umbrella and let the raindrops bounce off of her gigantic 1970's shades.

Almost 15 minutes the shower continued, cooling my face, burned from the hotly acidic pool water. As the shower faded down to a sprinkle, I made my way to the ladder.

"That's it?" said smug Lindsey.

"That's it." I said, "and it was more than enough."

Juancho

A Day of Record

Compelled by a morbid sense of ceremony and notability I plan to ride in the morning to commemorate the "hottest day of the year" ride. Projected high temps of 103 with the heat index approaching 575 degrees means that in a series of nasty days tomorrow will truly be the big hungry bear lurking in the forest. I intend to ride pre-dawn and in the controlled arena of the St. Marks trail.

I am billing it as a little me time with the Fuji Del Rey.

I scramble to adapt my schedule to accommodate not riding and the results are too sad to bother providing a full reckoning here. I have been to every swimming hole in two counties in recent days, worked all night and slept half the days, eaten ice cream for breakfast, and ridden spin bike time trials at the gym listening to music made by people who hate music.

I sat in a sinkhole so brown it looked like a pitcher of tea, with a film of duckweed carpeting the surface, a cloud of mosquitoes in nostrils, earholes, and eyes. That trip, specifically, was most unsatisfying.

I have rearranged my library from genre to alphabetical, before settling on color and size as the preferred demarcation. This was done at 5:00 in the morning before I ran around the block wrapped in hospital green bedsheets and wearing cowboy boots.

I am, in actual fact, crazy from this heat. Crazy ass crazy crazy.

Might as well go ahead and ride.

Juancho

Oh, and Cupcake and his dear wife Blanche had a baby girl this morning,

Mae Elizabeth Cupcake- please welcome her to the trails.

Hydropathy

In the pure and golden years I lived in Bozeman, MT the most most pure and golden thing I did was trek over the Bozeman pass on Interstate 90 before dawn in a 1980's Subaru with 6 people crammed inside. Exiting in Livingston and rolling down through Paradise Valley on the black ice in the dark, all for the glory of watching the sunrise over the Absarokas while sunk to my nose, naked in the Boiling River.

In the coldest months of winter we would rise at 4:30 A:M whenever we had the gas money to go. I am certain that if I lived by that water, and soaked every day, I would live forever. A sunrise trip to the Boiling river was my last official act in Montana before moving to Portland to wear stupid shirts and carry terra cotta around in the rain.




I thought of that time and place while loading my kayak onto the van in the driveway yesterday. The thermometer read 108, which would be a scalding, but ideal soaking temperature if you were in the water surrounded by rocks covered in translucent water ice and the Wapiti grazed on the hillsides above you, scratching at frozen mud for a scrap of grass.

72 degrees is the ideal soaking temperature in this part of the world. Blue Hole is a short paddle down from the Wacissa headwaters. Still sunk to my nose, no longer naked, and watching the sun go down instead of up, I nonetheless feel very close to that steaming river thousands of miles away.

Juancho