Monthly Archives: April 2014

Snaky days my friends, and the summer yet not arrived? Snakier soon for certain.  Joey B and I saw a juvenile Cottonmouth on the Goose Pond trail the other day, out there where the little toddlers run ahead of their waddling parents, and little  companion dogs rush belligerently to the ends of leashes.  Snakes, snakes, snakes, everybody watch for snakes.

S’quatch blasted over this little sweetheart, not touching it, but causing it to jump and spin so in the next moment I passed it we both, snake and I, were coiled in menacing postures.  I tacked around her in detente and called ahead to S’quatch, whom I knew I could trust to take my phone to an uncomfortably close distance and get this picture.

And there we were, goofing around with a poisonous snake when none other than Bill O came steaming down the trail.  I could make out the red, white, and green Joe’s jersey through the trees, but it took another moment to recognize that relaxed, low-slung posture of Mr. Forest himself.

So there I was, at the end of a beautiful day with the darkly glowing afternoon sun shining through the pines.  After weeks of everything but a bike ride being the most important thing, it is just that easy.  Meet a friend, see a snake, find another friend, then fox squirrel, sinkhole, and churning white powder sand out of corners and counter-steering through washed out lines.  A simple, magnificent, bike ride.

Fast enough to know better, too slow to care,

Juancho

Standing on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, traffic carumps over the worn joints behind us while our Apricot poodle gazes over the muddy water of the Alabama river.  I don’t think she understands what happened here, and if you weren’t actually standing there- with the working class landscape of Selma at your back, and the hungry violent eyes in front of you, you don’t know either.  You might know the events of the day, or the legacy burnished by a thousand speeches straining to claim some ownership of that sacrifice, but you don’t know what happened.  You don’t know what you ate for breakfast, or tried to eat but only staring, unable to eat for the fear in your stomach before you got up with your empty belly and put on your coat, and walked out over the water with nowhere to run and the certainty that your ears would ring with fractures and the bile in your gut would run in viscous rivulets into the blood of your girlfriend beside you.  Stunned and feeling failure, you would be driven back to Selma that night, where soothing hands would care for you while you moaned.  A song played on the radio, Come See About Me by the Supremes,  climbing towards number 1 on the Billboard charts.

Forty-nine years later, Happy rules the airwaves, by Pharrel Williams.  Someone came and saw about him back in 1965 and now people dance to his song in Syria, Ukraine, the West Bank, and among the ruins of Cadiz City. What is more non-violent than dancing?  So the struggle continues, and right now marchers are massing to get their skulls cracked somewhere.

Straight from Selma, AL  to Lloyd, FL we drove to sit at a table last weekend and listen to a 40 year love story celebrating our neighbors Judy and Betsy. Old friends and like us, new friends shared stories.  I had to laugh as I listened to stories from a family about a family.   Love has been made, children have been raised who now raise children, and refrigerators have been carried upstairs on wobbly feminist legs without the aid of men. In spite of all efforts to stop it, full and rich lives are lived in the absence of rights, so getting such rights will not signal a beginning of a new way of life, but a promise to do better by future generations and an apology for all the skulls cracked along the way.

But for us and our poodle?  Our symbolic walk to the middle of the Edmund Pettus bridge was just a moment in a sanguinely beautiful day in the Black Belt of Alabama, following an evening of gin and tonics at the St. James Hotel. We laughed with another couple our age that night about the insanity of Alabama football while we ate catfish and french fries.  Turn Your Love Around, by George Benson  played through the bar, out the french doors and into the night air where the melody was lost in the turbulence of all that heavy water flowing beneath that bridge.

Juancho

We saw it at Munson tonight, not the biggest fox squirrel in the forest, but an indigo black pelt.  S’quatch will tell you he may have seen some grey, but he did not.  He just can’t let himself believe.  We got off the bikes to try and verify, but there is no chance of seeing a black squirrel that does not want to be seen.

We met Dan from Tampa, and directed him here to this place that used to be about bikes, and now is a place about what will happen next- and bikes. So hi Dan, good ride tonight.

There is an awful lot of Young Goodman Brown going on around here, putting in earnest effort toward forthright goals naive to the forces that wield power over you in darkness.  Are we born in a state of infinite grace that we erode with human weakness?  Are we born in a moral vacuum that must be filled with meaning and virtue, squeezed into the inky void with the bellows of ambition?

I don’t know man.  I mean I got no idea.  I just want more sunny days, more lazy ways, less 401k’s.

Juancho