Lucky Us
This usually works: Start in the dark with simple rituals, good company, and lose plans. Read about one such day over at The Dojo of Do Well.
We plunged zombie armed into the fabric of night, a homogenized, untouchable, lightless velvet that cloaked the pines. We groped through the darkness for a spot to pee with fingers extended ready to touch god or be obliterated against blackjack trunks. On the way back we took cautious steps until we jammed our searching hands into steel and slid them along the truck’s curves to find the door handle and go back to sleep.
A last look at the sky through the window revealed towering silhouettes, pine shaped off-black cut outs in the stars. So many stars. None of them ours.
Our sun is a black pinhole compared to the biggest and brightest stars, but it’s our star and it was rising soon. And the Grand Canyon is a ditch carved by time and weather, but it’s our ditch, and watching the one rise over the other is a site we feel lucky to see. So we drove out of the forest in twilight to catch the dawn properly from the South Rim of the canyon.
After the South Rim ritual our pilgrimage took us to another ditch. A multi-component site. An overlooked feat of civil engineering quietly sparing the city from snow melt and monsoon floods. For some it’s a wayward home or heroin den, a bordello, prophet’s tablet or canvas. For us, the megalith beneath the street was a shrine to the carve, where we worshipped in turns, offering our sweat for joy until lunch.
Heather’s first full-pipe
(I originally wrote this for The Dojo of Do Well site on June 16th, 2023.)
Meet Me in the Hills
It was 2019, mid-September, the long taper of a summer without demarcation. It was the evening. My phone rang.
Slobber strands dangle from a hound’s jowls.
The last steam-bath days of St.Louis heat stretched on. It was 2019, mid-September, the long taper of a summer without demarcation. It was the evening. My phone rang. It was Jackson. He pitched a rendezvous. Meet in Colorado to hitch along for a short leg of the 6th Maiden America tour, joining the FBM/Profile crew and some of the extended ménage for 48 hours of riding in the Rockies. It was short notice and a short trip—a blink, really.
Maybe I’d get in a few airs before my elbow began ripping apart like viscera velcro. The dry hinge joint was creaky, had been for months, and gripping my bars was more of a symbolic gesture. Tendonitis, shitty, but not a deal breaker. And the road tugs. And prospecting for transition gold in the mountains with long time friends, the call drowns excuses. I’d take what I could get. I booked the flight to Denver.
Summer boiled off without a hiss besides the brushes on Bohren’s Black Earth, but Jackson’s call promised fall wouldn’t evaporate the same way. I was ready, and in the dark before dawn on the equinox I pulled on my backpack and tugged my bike bag 6 blocks to the Red Line and took it to Lambert.
Jackson and I became close friends during my two stints living in Santa Cruz. I watched Garrett grow up ripping Ramp Riders in Saint Louis with his brothers. And Steve Crandall, whose party I’d be crashing, was a friend from years of crossing paths on the road.
I knew a few of the renegade BMX nobility loitering in the motel parking lot from Woodward, BMX events, or previous meet-ups with FBM. Some: The Leeper Bros, Jay from QBP, Vic from Circuit, Matt from Profile, and the bizarrely talented Declan Murray, were new to me and—
A cosmopolitan vagabond approached the van.
”I’m so horny.” he said.
Eric Holladay was grinning behind black sunglasses as he strolled up in a billowing un-buttoned short sleeve, khaki shorts, and slides, banana in hand.
”I’m horrnyyy,” replied a voice from the shadows of the van interior, Seamus I think.
”Man, I’m so horny. Is anybody else horny?” called Garrett.
Pockets of voices spread around the asphalt called back, “I’m horny,” “Whooo’s horny?” “Soo, horny.”
The call died off as suddenly as it started—this was a pack of coyotes.
Time dilation is wild. Two days, and that’s being generous, felt like a week. On day one I managed a few carves at The Hook and a few airs at the Milliken park which earned me six more months of frayed cable friction in my arms. So, I was sidelined right away but happy and shot tons of photos.
This trip marked the conclusion of FBM operating as a handmade in the USA BMX bike company. Steve made the announcement while everyone was taking a break at Frisco. But, he also made clear this wasn’t the end of the road for friendships or road trips.
FBM was always more people than product anyway.
The road—we met there, we meet there, and if we see each other again, that’s where it’ll be.
*Click’em to make’em big and un-cropped.
a Little extra—2016 Memphis rendezvous on film
For the Love of Fog
For the love of fog.
FOR THE LOVE OF FOG. WINDOW FOG.
Sunrise, Western Iowa
Sunrise, Nor Cal
Sunrise, Northern Montana
Bury Me in Tumacacori
S P E E D H E A L S
My brother taking some hot laps between ranch duties.
Prelude and Initiate
Waves hammering stone walls, gulls hanging in the vent, riders roaming for the ride, not a care is spent.
I stood on the edge of a cliff for a decade watching the waves below eat stone spires and swallow rocks so large I choked as they lodged in my imagination.
I saw waves hammering stone walls, gulls hanging in the vent, riders roaming for the ride, not a care was spent.
