Author Archives: Juancho

Oyster and Pearl

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A pearl is no blessing if you crack a tooth on it, and a rainy day is no fun if you can’t get wet.

You might lead a horse to water, and it just stands there hungry-

or you teach a man to fish when he’d rather have a hot dog.

The world is your oyster so you better suck it up, or if that’s not your thing then a little hot sauce on a cracker’s the same difference to most.

Hindsight is twenty twenty if you’re standing on a chair, and if you put your hand over your eyes you can see my house from here.

If every day is the same then tomorrow might be different.

Is it poetry if the words hang together like scotch tape with a little hair stuck on it?

Is it still a merry-go-round if you aren’t having fun, or is it just a go round?

You’ve got the oyster and the pearl, one’s good for now, the other’s good forever.

Which one do you want and which one do you get?

Shit cuz, I’ll take the oyster-

Just because you saw the sun rise don’t mean you get to see it set.

-Juancho

Now

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Who is that and where did he come from? I asked myself, startled to catch a rider closing fast in my periphery. Oh, that’s right. That’s my friend Stevie, and we are in Tallahassee, FL. It is the winter of 2013. It is Saturday morning. All of these facts ticked back into place, securing me back in time and space. Briefly, or possibly forever, I was someplace different than here. I was no where. I was no thing. I was an empty vessel hurtling through the cosmosphere, free from ego and self-awareness. Maybe I was not an empty vessel hurtling? Maybe the cosmos hurtled through me, and I was the full vessel containing all things?

Thousands of micro-decisions, adjustments, and judgements were processed in my absence from the moment. Chattering over roots, letting the front end go in tight, banked turns, and constantly, effortlessly performing the ceremony of force to pedals.

With ego rushing back in my thoughts cried more, more! And with that I heard my breath, then smelled the lake, then felt my legs- just flesh and tiring flesh at that, then I was fully again myself and on a bike, but for that moment I dropped myself, if not Stevie.

Juancho

The Forgotten Coast

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It’s tourists inside and locals outside on a Friday night at the Indian Pass Raw Bar. Grinning people with sunburns and dogs smoke cigarettes and visit around a cast iron smoker on the patio, while out-of-towners from Orlando to Atlanta line up elbow to elbow at tables inside to partake of the authenticity. It’s beer and oysters on the honor system at the Raw Bar and I don’t know how anyone keeps track. The crowd is well over 50, scrubbed clean, men casual in their Columbia shirts and Sperry topsiders, the women in gauzy shawls, rough cotton capris, and linen. We aren’t local and we aren’t rich so I feel like we should remain in the doorway, but we take two chairs at a table with a couple, bankers from Atlanta they say, who own a little place on the gulf front along Cape San Blas rd. It’s tiny, Linda says, just 900 square feet. That’s all they want to keep up with, and I understand as that is the size of our house. They are retired now, after years working for the Savings and Loan Associations. They are nice, engaging in conversation about their 43 years of marriage, the years in the finance sector spent overseas in Asia, and how Gary can eat oysters until they quit bringing them. I wonder if they bought their little place on the water before or after the Savings and Loan scandal in the late 80’s -early 90’s, the debacle that provided the blueprint for the 2008 sub-prime mortgage dividend bonanza.

This forgotten coast was once all paper mill land. Paper became unprofitable at the tail end of the 20th century, and St. Joe, the company that owns these, and 500 million other acres of Florida land retooled itself to develop the land. They moved U.S. Highway 98 inland and built utopian communities with playful names like SummerCamp and Watercolor.

The Raw Bar is an old company store from a Turpentine company a hundred years back. It remains as an icon to the true panhandle coast culture, so all can drop in and anoint themselves with Crystal hot sauce. Pour yourself a beer, slurp oysters off the half-shell, trade stories about catching Red fish and where were you when Kate came through and flooded out the bay?

I don’t think this coast is forgotten, people just don’t really remember much about it.

Juancho

The Perfect Ride

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If I could put together the ultimate ride from all of the rides I have ever done I would start with that session of bike joust where I met my friend Todd back in 1991. He hopped onto a picnic table, leaving us speechless and enamored. We would ride to the top of the hill on campus on College Avenue and roll through the gazebo on Park, clearing the impatiens. Past the fountain at Ruby Diamond auditorium, launching the drops in front of the dorms, but when we turned left towards Landis Green we would find ourselves climbing an unnamed hill in western Wyoming, where we would pause in the dusk and watch two wapiti in rut, blocking our way. When the way was clear we would continue on, cresting the hill and dropping down the back side of the Hawthorne bridge into downtown Portland where we would Pick it Up! Super-Rush! down the 5th Avenue bus mall, one hand on the side of a moving bus, tucked in the crease between the curb and death, grey grit splattering into our mouths. Package delivered we turn to the forest and make that bad decision again to circumnavigate Cedar Rock in Pisgah National Forest. We would pass that night hungry, damp, shivering, then rise at pre-dawn and grind our way up the mountain to the familiar Munson Hills trail, before the clay. We would be fat. Miserable. Broken. Determined. We would exit that loop changed and strong again, chasing a mere boy in cutoffs through obscure Mississippi single track and watching him drift ahead. Locals rule everywhere do they not!

We would catch him, but he would be J.B. and we would be at the Pole Barn, snapping into cleats for a nighttime ride of Razorback, everyone at least 3 Orange Whips in the bag. We would watch the Doctor plow through the trees, unhurt and unaware as we laughed until we couldn’t see for the tears in our eyes.

Who would be there? All of us of course.

Juancho

Boom Boom

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Left leg, right leg, King and Kong, twin cannons of fury!

Riding less frequently does nothing good for my mental balance, but for the legs? Wow.

I don’t know what else to attribute it to, but these pins of mine should be included in the proposed ban on assault weapons. The magazine just never empties, there is always another round in there. They are like Juancho with the gun analogies, bam! bam! bam! they just keep coming. Last week it was long miles of misery on sand, road, and trail, this weekend nothing but singletrack sport shooting. It’s time to change my set-up because the technical skills are slowing me more than fitness and that is the kind of problem I want to have.

Bikes, bikes, bikes, remember when it was all about the bikes and the riding, and the complaining around here?

Those were the days!

Juancho

Worship or War Ship?

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I put this photo of a Piliated Woodpecker up today because for the first two hours of Bike Church yesterday this was the lone thing I remember seeing other than my handlebars. Fifty-five miles of riding that included hiking through snarled thickets of briar and muck, a 20 mph peloton for 40 minutes, and one endless hour of sugar sand riding exposed under an 80 degree January sun. All of that was just to get to the entry point for the real ride deep into the Wildlife Refuge to the fabled Pinhook River.

I missed the Pinhook, yet again, happy to escort my old friend Mystery back to town. I promised him a 3 hour excursion that ended behind a dewy pint of ale, and his accusing eyes, so far far from home, made me feel guilty for being the liar that I indeed was at that moment. Besides, I could have gone on, and ridden further into the salt-marsh and possibly even out of it, but at some point I would be left broken and alone and far from a pint myself.

We turned around and bid the other church-goers adieu, and the day immediately brightened into a benevolent place. Lunch by the St. Marks River, a dirt road track to a newly discovered swimming hole, followed by the final soul-crushing miles back to town.

Mystery gave it up after 44 miles, many of which were unfriendly in pace and surface. He sent me ahead with his blessing to get the van and return, but I found I could not do it. A mile on from our parting I called in a rescue, thanks Magnum! I went back to tell him the good news only to find him darting into the grass behind a church and curling up for a nap. While he mewled and moaned, I coaxed him back into the saddle and up the road to a rendezvous point.

Me? I felt fine thank you for asking, and I sampled some Munson single track on the way home just to put a fine point on things, then I ached and creaked across town, arriving at the van 5.5 hours later, with 55 mixed-surface miles that nobody can ever take away from me. That is 68% of the 80 mile total the rest of the group completed, and that is a D+ in any school district.

Juancho

Service

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I spent my high school prom night working the night shift at the Village Inn, happier to be folding dollars into my pocket than shelling them out for carnations and wine coolers. I got traded to the other team, and worked at Howard Johnson’s for a brief stretch. I showed such promise in the service industry so I was recruited by Ginnie, a 72 year-old waitress who smoked Benson and Hedges Deluxe Ultra-Light Menthol 100’s, the cigarette with the longest name. Ginnie respected work above all, and as the story goes her dying words to the evening shift manager of a 24 hour chain pancake house were, “I’m sorry.” True to her values, not finishing her side-work was her final regret on this earth. She was good people, and if I could find her kin today, I would tell them that she was a ball-buster who treated this high school kid right and despite my frequent requests, she never let me bum a smoke.

I studiously avoid topical blogging, but service is on my mind today.

To be honest, I always meant to be a famous writer, which is a plan with some flaws. I know now that the goal is to be an honest writer, and through that to hope to be a good writer, but back then I just wanted to be paid for my words. I wrote a lot about people who helped people. Being close to those kind of folks and telling their stories seemed like a good way to go. As I suffered through early rejections and numerous unpaid publications I questioned my motives. I decided that helping people was a safer bet. If it turned out to not be my calling, I thought, I could rest easy that it was still time well-spent.

Service and charity are not altruistic, far from it. Giving someone a leg up, or standing next to those who need support is both priceless and intoxicating. Those who choose to help others are not self-sacrificing, they are self-fulfilling. They chase a good buzz.

A little secret for you- dealing with volunteers is a pain in the ass. If you volunteer one hour of your time, it probably costs some full-timer two hours to prepare for you to be there, get your feel-good, stroke you up, and send you on your way. Don’t stop doing it, just understand it is for you more than for anyone else. Each time you do it, you require a little less handling, and eventually you might break even on the day.

There is still time for me to be a real writer. It might be too late for you to become a trapeze artist, but the circus still comes to town.

Juancho

Hajj

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Some rides deliver beyond the capacity for words to capture, and pictures fail as well. Like every day though, as we each grope our way with arms outstretched through the dark hallways of our lives, some light appears in the corners of our vision to show us we are on the right path.

This is Henry. Giant friendly dogs need no explanations.

This is what it looks like to live here and ride bikes.

Somewhere along the way.

Bicycle House filing system.

I don’t care if there were only three of us. It was Bike Church and I was there.

Juancho

Melting

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It is sadly predictable to be squeezing into one’s fat jeans in the beginning of January. The holiday bully sits upon our chests and rubs cake in our face for sixty days and before you can slur your way through Auld Lang Syne it is too late. Say what you wish about moderation, but the holiday bully on my block won’t tolerate it.

I ride pretty well as a Clydesdale, in some ways better. More depth to the legs, more assertive, just more of more in general. Still, measures must be taken.

Still monk, not angry now, I have my ways. I am natural-born Spartan, never happier than flexing the self-denial muscles of a true hunger artist.

I have been over the mountain and back, as they say, so this? A smallish hike, a wander on the road. The Skateboard of Great Clarity greets me everyday, reminding me of the hardships that came during the Unraveling of 2010. In this club, the Redemption Gang, you must re-certify on occasion, but you are only initiated once.

Stay raveled-

Juancho

Drift

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He wants to go to Montana, he said, where people get him. He talks to people here in Jefferson County and all they care about is where he is from, or isn’t from, he says. He can go to Costco in Tallahassee and speak to anybody, have a nice conversation, then it’s have a nice day and never see them again, but back here on the Aucilla River? People treat him like he’s nuts.

He sealed the picnic table with vegetable oil? None of that varnish or chemical sealants. That stuff’s terrible for you. The table smells like old french fries even though it has been out in the weather for seven years. In spite of the smell and the tacky surface, the table is bomb-proof. It’s the kind of table a king could build an empire around, or a rebel could lead an insurrection. I’m not sure which I am, but I intend to have the table with which I will lead my empire or tear yours down, whichever must be done.

I can see the hurt in this guy’s face. The discouragement and embarrassment of having left Broward county behind for a North Florida dream of land and freedom. Turkeys wander about, curious and docile. Whatever may have gone sour for him, he is gifted with poultry and takes pride in the brassy plumed Toms which eye him for a handout while we speak.

I’m holding out $100 in twenties and Steve looks at me like I’m crazy, but you can’t drive all the way out here to get a Craig’s list table and come home empty-handed. To offer less is to make this guy grovel in his defeated state and I don’t have the stomach for that. Besides, I want the table. It’s built to last.

He is searching my eyes for something, and though it pains me, I close that door and move for the van. “Thanks man, go to Montana. Worry about the details when you get there. That’s what I did.”

Of course, I was twenty-three with a couple grand in my pocket and he’s not twenty-three, with two kids (two too many he says wryly) and his sense of wonder is long trampled and gone.

Still, I hope he goes for it.

Juancho