Author Archives: Juancho

I have hung onto that old pack since I got it in Bozeman, MT. It is hand-made by a local and so durable it has not a single popped stitch to show for its 18 years.  It has one broken zipper, to be fair and not drift into hyperbole. It is 5300 cubic centimeters, forest green,  with an extra-thick patch of military grade Cordura on the bottom and now- covered in laundry lint from the dryer vent.

I suppose it is the way of things that this once rebellious and profane venue turn into the maudlin vita of a man currently sheltering from a chill rain on a day off, when any number of noble challenges blurt raspberries through their hands taunting me to come outside.  I may yet get off this couch and run one of them squealing down the block, cuffing its ears and kicking it in the pants.  Could be a bike ride.  Could not be a bike ride.  One must wait and see.

So this backpack– it carried me to pastures to watch comets, deep beneath the sedimentary bed and limestone tunnels of the continental divide, in and out of dozens of rental homes and relationships.  I crossed many borders, some barely. This pack strapped snug to my hips and chest, my hands free and available to brush aside a hand reaching for my pocket, or to hold  as in prayer, pleading for empathy.

I can only speak for myself, but I think this is likely true of anyone. You have in your closets, garages, and beneath the bed items so stewed in your sweat that they are now more of you, than not.

I filled it this morning as though I was going on a trip.  Tent, tarp, pad, stove, gas, thermals, coffee, butter.

It is going to someone I doubt I will meet.  My journey is far from over, but I hung those guns up years ago.  I hope this pack helps this person who is getting it. I hope that they strap it on and feel the subtle knowledge in its fabric.  I wish they knew that it carried one traveler (with the courage to walk out a door in the first place) into unknown world and all the way back to a warm, safe place, where I am not alone, and I have extra sticks of butter.

Hold and maintain.

Juancho

Let’s just blog it out here for a minute and skip the moody prose, although you can expect a lot more of that in 2014.  Here’s what’s going on: that last crash rattled me.  I’ve been waddling into hot yoga 3 or 4 times a week, working to get back to that good feeling, that supple twisting spine and split second visits to the empty mind.   The heater whirs in the back corner, right above where I stand with two walls to lean on.  The class reaches back left hand to left foot, the open palm, the bend at the hip, like the toy drinking bird my grandfather had on the coffee table- bobbing and rising, bobbing and rising.  The class tips over their teapots to pour out their spouts.  Meanwhile, the beast in the corner grimaces.  Grasping his hairy, sweaty shin, he inches towards the ankle, then over the toes, then finally somewhere near the soft in-step by the scar he got swimming in the Adriatic sea 18 years ago.    The class moves on to the next pose, Warrior One, Virabhadrasana.  Never mind that.  This warrior still fights to get a hold on that slippery foot, then to arch the back and pull the foot towards the sky.  The spot in my ribs, up under my armpit, feels like it has a toy fire engine wedged into it.  Not pain exactly, but obstructed.  Something out of place?  Scar tissue? Swelling?  Who knows.  The subcutaneous and the cutaneous fat compress, although there is nowhere for it to redistribute. Just pressure and squeezing and then finally my teapot tips over, if only for a moment.  The other side is just a bit easier, but damn, still so humiliating.

This is nothing new though.  Practice self-observation without judgement, the highest calling of all.  I do it.  I observe without judgement, after I get the judgement thoroughly recorded and stored for safe keeping.   Sending power to my standing foot I tremble with the Elvis leg and take one full breath.  Sparkly tracers fill my vision when I release the foot.  Yoga makes me swoon and sway right on the edge between quitting and growing.  There’s really nothing to regret.  Just do what you can and save the bitching for later.

I’m a bit afraid of my bike, like when Old Yeller turned rabid. How could it do that to me?  A new bike might solve this, because a new bike solves just about everything.  New bikes are the cure for cancer, broken hearts, and the national deficit.

The big lumbering yogi lets the chitta vritti of bicycles clank around in his mind, holding onto his slippery squirming foot, he’s been worse off than this he thinks.  Then his mind goes blank.

-Juancho

Today is a good day to go out and break some bottles under a railroad overpass and smoke a pack of menthol cigarettes with a friend.  Wet and drizzly, just a little nameless day between Christmas and New Year’s.  You could put notes in the bottles and deliver them to the tracks, air mail.  When the train runs over the paper, “This note will never go anywhere” gets swept along for a second before dissolving in a puddle. Light another Newport and contemplate your sure to be cool-ass future, once you decide what you want to do.  You feel angst, so you write, “I feel angst” on the side of a lit cigarette and drop it in a Heineken bottle full of bum spit, then wing it sidearm into the abutment across the tracks.  Smashing into another message, “Everyone knows this is Nowhere” painted in fluorescent pink and fading.  “The two thoughts smash together, one burning the other enduring, but certain to disappear eventually.  The abutment has nothing but time.   I guess you could call that a meeting of the minds.

You’re not that kid anymore, if you ever were, more time having been spent craving melancholy than actually coly-ing any melons.  Still, you were dangerous right? Totally.

Clickety clack turning pedals over the tracks, no trains in the distance, no trains today.  You could stop to put your ear to the rail, wait for one to get close then stand with your arms outstretched to either side as close as you dare, staring at the onrush of sulfur-dioxide tanks and benzine containers with illegible tags blurring by painted somewhere in Gary, Indiana or Jacksonville, FL.   If there were any trains, you could do that.

Ride along until the twilight, then lay your head down in a pasture underneath some sky you will never look at the same way ever again, maybe that’s the Hale-Bopp comet or maybe there’s just something on your glasses.  With no dissenting opinions present you declare it the Hale-Bopp comet.  “Behold the comet!” you proclaim to a bunch of cows clustered around your grassy nest.  The cows believe you.  They  look at you in fearful awe.  They might think you disembarked from the sky and landed in their field, wrapped in  flannel and Quallofil like some paper mache baby jesus delivered unto their manger.  No, you’re not that.  You are just today’s disembodied thought stuck in a 1997 cul desac, trying to remember if that was Montana or Colorado.   Probably Nevada.

Juancho

Comeback number eleven begins with madly registering for endurance events around the state. This is like learning to fight by taunting bullies. Send them harassing messages, talk about them in front of their friends, then three weeks later take a carefree stroll down their block after school. So stupid. I don’t even like events.

I’m all sheet-rocked into adulthood, with no way out except to run madly, blindly, into the walls and hope to not hit a stud. Eventually I’ m going to see daylight.

Like this post, sometimes you have to just blog your way out of a slump and get on with it, rather than wait for the precious stone forming in your bowels to drop.

Packing up to fly west for a 48 hour turnaround trip to Albuquerque. I have my court/church clothes pressed and rolled into my suitcase. It is the perfect Neo-Con disguise, but only I know where the glitter on the bottom of my black derbies came from.

Juancho

I can smell the sawdust from my dad cutting the pieces of plywood that would fit into the bed of his green Ford pickup.  I think it was a ’76?  Compartmentalized gear storage underneath and compartmentalized kid storage above it.  Compartmentalized from he and his new bride that is.  Soon after they married, bringing two kids each into a new family they decided a quest was needed to bond us all together in a common love, or loathing, of the outdoors.  Us kids, ranging from about 7 to 15, two older sisters joining two younger brothers, piled under the topper of the truck with our pillows and blankets and a thick foam pad to make the ride from central Florida to Murphy, North Carolina and the Nantahala River Valley.  I wish I could remember our detailed list of supplies, but I imagine there were boxes of Little Debbie Pinwheels, canteens of iced tea, GI Joe action figures- in the era of COBRA not the Barbie-sized doll man.  I do remember throwing a tennis ball over and over at the rear window of the truck topper making the drivers behind us blink, and blink, and blink before roaring around us in 80’s road rage.

We had no concerns about seat belts, perched as we were atop a plywood launch pad secured by a fiberglass bubble.  The only thing between us and the road its own self the caring hands of a cautious parent.  I am sure the grown-ups worried some, but in the back of the truck?  It was all party time.  With a new little brother to lead astray, and an extra big sister to irritate, we had a lot going on.  I am sure we whined through the pass-through when we needed to go to the bathroom, or re-stock the candy supply, but I remember it as an idyllic float along the American asphalt river.

We all remember my dad veering dramatically to the side of a mountain highway to shoo a bee out of his trousers.  And we remember tumbling down the Nantahala falls under the direction of a fairly amateur guide.  There we are in the picture, my brother’s tiny determined arm the only part you can see of him, while the rest of us hang on, mouths wide open, charging into the drop.  All in one boat, headed down the rapids, no better metaphor for family.

This weekend I am headed north again to see the mountains, the humble hills of Cheaha in Alabama.  I have a family of my own now, a plus one not including the dog and cat, but the quest remains the same.  Get closer, think slower, and appreciate the magnificent taste of coffee by a campfire, and food eaten while seated on dirt.  Whether by destiny or design, I can’t really say why there will be no pack of mongrel children in the back of the van.  I just know I am lucky to be here at all, on this earth.

To have one person beside me, and a trekking tribe of friends to meet me there is more than anyone has the right to expect at birth so I will take it and try to remember the details.

Sappy ole Juancho