Tag Archives: Magic

I lumbered along the Dauset trail in middle Georgia wheezing from the heat, lurching through roots and rocks with my mouth hanging open, sucking soggy air that gave me nothing.  Just put your tires on the dirt and roll a little while, that was all I wanted.  95 degrees at 6 O’clock, I could blame that.  Suffocating 78% humidity, I can definitely blame that.  Consecutive weeks of road and air travel, driving in the rutted out lanes of FL Highway 20, twin tracks full of water and methed out passers over double yellow lines, that– or freefalling in my seat as the Bombardier CRJ200 thumps through billowing nimbus clouds dropping into the Atlanta airport, where more germs than an elementary school await, life on the road ain’t easy. 

I pulled up at a picnic table to sort things out.  Let’s just get real here Juancho, you feel like shit and you’re riding like a middle age traveling salesman. 

I stripped off helmet, gloves, and sweat gutter, then noticed I was not alone.  A lone doe watched me from 20 yards away in the edge of the trees, curious with ears pointed forward.  How does one call a deer?  I tried the skich,skich, skich, and the smch, smch, smch but it just watched me.  I threw some dried mango on the ground, ran the hose over my head, then geared up for the sad ride back to the van. 

I needed something, some magic, so I put off I-75 for a little bit longer and barreled down GA 42 to Indian Springs State Park.  A lead pipe trickles sulphorous water in a stone spring-house, and the locals believe it will heal you.  A couple is busy filling dozens of containers: milk jugs, jerry cans, Gatorade bottles, Coleman thermoses, two-liter Mountain Dew bottles, and more.  The woman motions me to the spigot and I fill a water bottle.  The man silently totes the full containers up the hill to his car over and over without stopping. 

I want to ask them what they think about the water, why they covet it so highly, but instead I just climb the hill back to the van.  Back on the interstate, with 8 lanes of traffic blasting north, I wrinkle my nose at the egg smell and gulp it down.

Juancho

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

1996-

We frequently had to push-start the Peace Chicken.  It turned over with a little nudge, back-fired and roared in first gear while the pusher climbed back in the sliding bay door and said, “Hit it!”

With that, the driver would ease the clutch out and in that last inch of play the old air-cooled pancake motor would thrum us away in a coughing cloud of blue.  The Peace Chicken was an early 1970’s VW bus, brick-red with bags of stale to moldy bagels piled so high  the rear-view mirror was useless.

The bagels were cast-offs we intended to give to the poor and hungry, although I do not know what we had against those people.  We would pile in the Chicken and attend meetings around town with other noble idealists, sweat running down our backs, into the cracks of our asses, puddling on the vinyl seats before dripping out the rusty holes in the floorboards.  Boxes of STOP GENOCIDE flyers mouldered in our laps waiting to bring people down as they ate pizza, or shopped for a Bob Marley poster in the student union at FSU.  For those who needed further explanation, we carried folders of color-copied photographs depicting children murdered in the streets, old women cooking grass soup, and city parks lined with tombstones and freshly dug graves.  This was our calling card.

That winter, the Peace Chicken carried two of our emissaries to a meeting in Washington D.C.
Prior to their departure we collectively worried over the Chicken.  Those with abilities changed oil, tightened throttle cables, and checked brake pads.  Those of us without lined the floor with blankets, made peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches by the dozen and passed bottles of Dewar’s around and watched the others work.  I have pictures from that trip north of the Peace Chicken coated in clear ice so thick they couldn’t open the doors, the driver and passenger swaddled in sleeping bags as they rumbled up I-95 to join the voices for Bosnia, prosthetic stump socks on their heads to keep them warm.

Sometimes I think I see it around town.

-Juancho

Tiny vintage trailers, broken transmissions, and the vile creeping crud that grabs us by the lungs and drags us down– it was a weekend of unexpected adversaries.

I got up early to ride on Saturday still suffering from the butter lung disease, but determined to ride it out of my system. I lurched over to the dogboy’s house straight of of the warmth of my berth in the lungers’wing. A lap around the neighborhood would have been a triumph, but every option dogboy mentioned seemed to involve crossing either the county line or a large body of water. I had not the legs to ride. I had not the lungs to ride. I had not the desire to ride. In spite of my deficits I had the one thing that matters more than all. I had the deep in the gut, sour spit taste, broken glass in the knees, fuck you and all the riders of the world combined by God will to ride.

I’m sure it was not too exciting for the dogboy, but he is a good friend and he adapted to the reality of the situation. We cut no corners and rode a hefty selection of single track, turf, mulch, sand, gutter, road and sidewalk across the east side of Tallahassee and there, in front of the hospital, a block from the end I put a foot down to wait for the sick dizzies to pass– then one slow rotation at a time, I cranked up hill to the waiting van and a hot toddy.

And it has always been such no? So many reason to not be who we wish to be, to not do what we must to become who we are. Call it what you want: Three chords and the truth, the X factor, chutzpah, balls, will, the only essential ingredient.

Juancho