Lucky suns and ditches
Starting in the dark with good company and a simple plan has always worked for me.
A homogeneous, untouchable, lightless velvet cloaked the pines. We plunged zombie armed into the fabric of night, groping through the darkness for a spot to pee, fingers extended, ready to touch god or be obliterated against blackjack trunks. On the way back, we took cautious steps until our outstretched digits jammed into steel then slid them along the truck’s contours searching for the door handle to 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 weather and time, 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.
After the solar rim ritual our pilgrimage took us to another ditch. A multi-component site. An overlooked feat of civil engineering that quietly spares the city from snow melt and monsoon floods. A heroin den or wayward home for some. A bordello, prophet’s tablet or canvas for others. For us, the megalith beneath the street was a shrine to the carve, where we paid tribute in turns, offering sweat for joy until lunch.
Heather’s first pipe. Over unders in the Tunnel of Love.
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. That 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 ripped apart like viscera velcro. The dry hinge joint was creaky, had been for months, and reduced gripping my bars to a symbolic gesture. Tendonitis is shitty, but not a deal breaker. Besides, riding isn’t the half of it. Prospecting for transition gold in the mountains with old friends is enough. I’d take what I could get and 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
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.
Pavement gravel dirt nothing Everything
Leave the pavement.
Leave the gravel.
Leave the dirt.
Find nothing.
Leave yourself.
Find everything.
ELEVATION
Farther than the sun, the distant breeze, The spheres that wilt to infinity
The moon somewhere in northern California.
Another favorite from Baudelaire.
Elevation
by Charles Baudelaire
Translated by William A. Sigler
Above the ponds, beyond the valleys,
The woods, the mountains, the clouds, the seas,
Farther than the sun, the distant breeze,
The spheres that wilt to infinity
My spirit, you move with agility
And, like a good swimmer who swoons in the wave
You groove the depths immensity gave,
The inexpressible and male ecstasy.
>From this miasma of waste,
You will be purified in superior air
And drink a pure and divine liqueur,
A clear fire to replace the limpid space
Behind this boredom and fatigue, this vast chagrin
Whose weight moves the mists of existence,
Happy is he who vigorously fans the senses
Toward serene and luminous fields—wincing!
The one whose thoughts are like skylarks taken wing
Across the heavens mornings in full flight
—Who hovers over life, understanding without effort
The language of flowers and mute things.
The Good waiting
The good doesn't care how you get there, but it’s waiting.
My Credence MOD, one vessel that’s carried me through life in a city, life in the mountains, life in the forest, life in the desert, life by the sea, life after surgery, life out of my car. life with clocking in and life after.
“There is always so much good out there for us, waiting.” a friend wrote in response to some travel photos I shared in our years long, but intermittent email chain.
I agree, but I’m sure he played some role in shaping my opinion when in 2004 his BMX company put out a world tour video.
The riding in the video was raw, powerful, and inspiring, but the context of the riding was the belle of the ball, not the progression of tricks, the promotion of products, not even the riders.
The spirit of exploration imbued every part of the trip.
A world tour seeking out ruined ramps in vast, desolate landscapes, immaculate architecture calling for a carve betwixt esoteric sculptures in ancient cities, improbable skateparks lacquered in vibrant graffiti embedded in equally vivid cultures in stark contrast to our own, and plenty of bizarre, shreddable, infrastructure monoliths rising from distant no man's land horizons that act as anchors, beacons, portals, and corridors to an experience that is greater than the sum of its parts. Many of which became pilgrimage sites for following generations.
In that context the bike is just the vessel ferrying us, and our friends, through our experience.
How rad we get, or how much fun we have along the way is up to us, and if we make these experiences entirely about the bike and how we're riding it, we risk making our vessel into a cardboard boat, permeable, soggy with time, and easily sunk by the waves and rain from the inevitable storm of entropy.
26 years into my own riding, I still wake up with this electrostatic feeling in my skin, a hunger for a carve on the edge of traction, the cresting arc of a good air, wall rides, and the buzz of discovering new ridescapes.
But, I know the bike is just a vessel, an avatar, and it could easily look like a skateboard, a pair of shoes, walking your dog, a guitar, a pen, a camera, anything, any activity.
It can take any form because the power isn't in the vessel, it's in the understanding that "There is always so much good out there, waiting."
When you know that, the vessel appears in a form just for you.
MOUNTAIN TIME
Shipping for winter is going down to once per week.
Wintering in a remote location. Orders will ship on Thursdays.
Thank you—N
Float or Swim
“The answer—and, in a sense, the tragedy of life—is that we seek to understand the goal and not the man.”//Hunter S. Thompson
“The answer—and, in a sense, the tragedy of life—is that we seek to understand the goal and not the man.”//Hunter S. Thompson
De Profundis Clamavi
From The Depths I Cried. My favorite from his turbulence Baudelaire.
My favorite translation of my favorite poem by Charles Baudelaire.
**De Profundis Clamavi**
*(From the Depths I Cried)*
Have pity, you alone whom I adore
From down this black pit where my heart is sped,
A sombre universe ringed round with lead
Where fear and curses the long night explore.
Six months a cold sun hovers overhead;
The other six is night upon this land.
No beast; no stream; no wood; no leaves expand.
The desert pole is not a waste so dead.
Now in the whole world there's no horror quite
So cold and cruel as this glacial sun,
So like old Chaos as this boundless night;
I envy the least animals that run,
Which can find respite in brute slumber drowned,
So slowly is the skein of time unwound.