Monthly Archives: June 2013

A dead Canadian goose moulders against the curb on my way to work.  I noticed it freshly killed last week and today it is almost gone, dismantled and rendered for  carrion.  So sad to see it last week with soft brown feathers fluttering in the wind of annoyed traffic revving to make the light.  I wonder who hit it and how they felt, and if they cared.  Did it ruin their day? Did it cause them to reel in momentary horror, like seeing your fingernail pulled back, un-moored from the quick and fleshy before bleeding?

We rode across the forest on Saturday, early but not early enough, out to the sinkholes.  There’s been no rain for days and days so the water was settled and calm, clear and cold.  Nobody was there, and we fell into the cold water one at a time, and told stories of Darin jumping from the top of the tree and collapsing a lung, and how Germans appreciate it when you speak English with a cartoonish German accent.

We lingered as long as we could, postponing the stifling march back across the forest, battling gravity, the sun, the sand, ignoring the folly of two and a half hours in the saddle for a twenty minute swim.

I got woozy, dizzy, and wondered what happens when you really can’t turn another pedal and you are somewhere in the woods without a cold coke in sight.  I spoke up.  I gave notice.  I got help in the form of a salt capsule.  A pittance, I thought.  A kindness, a final communion, a placebo, but no solution.  It made all the difference.

Juancho

Every person only gets so much steam.  It is up to each of us to decide how to use it or let it leak out of its own accord.

No pictures, just words.  Steady rain knocking fat magnolia blossoms onto the sidewalk like fried eggs slipping onto the Waffle House floor.  The smell of them so sweet it is pornographic and I blush just driving over them in the road.

A bike ride last night 20 years overdue with Joey B and an old friend who ate potato soup on a cold day while carving out the first mountain bike trail in Tallahassee that I ever knew of, sweet Grandma Munson.  Maybe it was potato soup, or maybe said he built a chicken coop, his pink bike spinning so fast I heard nothing but wind.

A fresh clean burn on the forest, setting the crest of Woodpeckers off in contrast with the matte black floor of the burned pine needles, green shoots of grass already reaching up over pedals. Long views through the missing underbrush, blueberries hidden off the trail not quite ready.

Just falling into each pedal stroke hoping to never hit the bottom, yarding the next one up around the 12 O’ clock and then hammering towards earth.  I can hear them back there, one wrong move and they will have me.  No wrong moves tonight though.  I’m all on the one and riffing on the breaks.

The way points north to Alabama tomorrow.  I’ll lay my head back and watch the sun shine down on the great south and loll away the miles while my girl pins it to the white line and cocks her foot up on the dash.

Juancho