Author Archives: Juancho

On the way to the south trails for another mundane trip around the hamster wheel Taco remarked that he wanted to scout a route to the western edge of town. He plans to ride his bike out to the forest, shoot a deer, then haul it back through town across his handlebars. Something different, anything, sounded better than the safety of the known.

We rode through the south-side neighborhoods, back through our very early twenties. I easily pictured him on his yellow Giant ATX 760 that he bought with the money he got from an insurance settlement involving a Taco Bell drive-through.

Out the Cascade Lakes area, dry as dust, with the Cypress trees planted like spears, we found the deep sand. The sky was overcast and I was able to nurse my half-filled water bottle and empty stomach until pain gave way to elation and my legs found the deep reserve.

Juancho

The day is soft and warm, and it calls to me this morning.

Last night I rode the sun down with my lover through the sticky, wet clay and cloying green grasses of her first mountain bike ride. We heard the train rush by after crossing the tracks and I felt anxious, and jealous of the conductor. We turned around then, so as not to get caught in the dark, and slip-slopped our way back up the hill to the car. After a shower, and a walk of the little dog we stayed up too late.

I have been a lot places.

I once rode the E line from Queens to Manhattan outside, between cars in February, my feet slipping on the corrugated stainless decking. I have climbed a rope 90 feet out of Big Horse Cave after 10 hours underground, to see the Northern Lights wavering beyond the sub-zero winds. The streets of Mostar, all buildings reduced to dwindling sand castles from bullets. Underneath the Burnside bridge smoking cigarettes on my bike watching the skaters grind coping and smoke cocaine. I spent the night on a paper map in North Carolina, stranded on the trail at dark. Drank Kalimotxo and watched the sun rise from the parapet of the Sagrada Familia. Bean Point watching a hurricane blow by in the Gulf. Overheated in Amboy. Parliament in Missoula.

My advice? Don’t come in from the cold unless you must.

Juancho

I got picked up by two riders at Hannah Park in Jacksonville yesterday, because they are nicer guys than the degenerates I ride with at home. They gave me the proper tour and for the first time I put that place together in a proper ride. Hannah Park is the original silk purse from the sow’s ear, as there is no good reason to have a bike trail through terrain that is sandy when it isn’t swampy and has a net elevation gain of 7 feet. The biting flies complained about the mosquitoes and the raccoons stole food from my pack while I was riding. The trail is woven through a salt marsh along the Atlantic coastline which just means it is hot and hazy, the air sticky with salt. You break a sweat immediately when you exit your car and that first sheen never leaves you, as the air can’t accommodate another drop. The trail is tight and winding, brutish and ugly, and interrupted by logs and mud, which is a shame because that means it is too technical for Tallahassee riders. We prefer our trails groomed, with valets stationed at intervals to powder our bottoms and tell us what good boys and girls we are (yes we are!)

Jacksonville riders I salute you. Like a surf town with one break, riders pile into Hannah Park, otherwise known as the only game in town. This smallish park supports a hardcore ecosystem of sightseers, weekend warriors, and fat-tire aficionados.

To finish a trail ride and cool off in the ocean is an exotic novelty, so I pulled the rental Impala to the last beach access point and flip flopped down to the water in my chamois. Angry waves piled up right at the shoreline, a rip tide sucking sand and shells out to sea like a straw at the bottom of a milkshake. I saw no one in the water as far as I could see in either direction. That ocean wanted to drag out everything it could get.

I waded in enough to tease it, and in her petulance she filled my shorts with gravel and silt. I retreated to the beach and watched cruise ships positioned far offshore like pink pencil erasers.