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Archive | October, 2011
Tucson, Tuscan, Two Sun, Too Soon
31 Oct
Free (aka Bria) and I are about halfway to New Orleans! Ben has passed his 1000th mile mark. And today, the 7 billionth human was born.
Much has happened. Too much to write in one coherent blog post, and I have neglected to communicate with the outside world (that is, the world beyond Ben, Bria and myself) with regularity. It is hard to take a step out of my world and take a bird eye view on life when I rarely stop experiencing it so completely. That said, it is relieving to let go of my mind except to think about survival and the accomplishment of more immediate goals. Those being – eat – sleep – get to camp – sing – play – entertain – observe – absorb – survive. And be unserious as often as possible in interpersonal communication.
Not to say that I am totally thoughtless! I daydream, consider possibilities, try to analyze myself and my experiences. Business Ventures, my Achingly Beautiful Crush, the World Beyond the Bike Tour, frequently cross my mind. But nothing lingers. Everything passes through my mind like the air blowing around my body, leaving me only with the moment and the comforting certainty of infinite possibility. You never know for sure what is going to happen.
This morning, lost in thought, I remembered the New Yorker cover of “New Yorkistan,” in which my parent’s neighborhood was renamed “Psychobabylon.” ”Babylon” is the name we have taken to calling any urban area which we are heading towards. It was an expression I’d heard at Rainbow Gatherings, from Portland Hippies, and most recently from the Messianic Jews in the Northern California Redwoods. I enjoyed aspects of my time in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tucson. But the urban environment consistently extracts the satisfaction from my soul. Psychobabylon. Your mind exiles you from your self, your homeland. Wilderness, Babylon, the Promised Land, everything is in your mind. And if I had as clear a mission in any of these Babylons as I do when I leave them on my bicycle, the Imprisoning Towers would crumble and the city would feel as free and wild as the thunderstorm over Saddle Mountain, and as infinite as the night sky over the Mojave.
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just a quick note
27 Oct
the desert is rampant with generosity! since arriving in arizona we have been the recipients of such wonderful kindness. it is nearly 3:30 and we still have some 40 miles to cover today so we can make it to our gig in sells tomorrow, but i thought while i was online i would make a quick post just to check in. details to follow later. in the meantime chew on these lovely tidbits:
1. heat slows time
2. we all have road names now. one of us is called Usul. can you guess who?
3. joshua trees (do not actually chew, could be quite unpleasant)
4. you’ve never known night till you’ve known the new moon in the dessert
this has been something. tune in again soon for something else .
peace :)
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facts
16 Oct
fact #1
some signs on the road
say, “end road work” as if in
protest. let the roads
be as craggy as
they chose, let them retire to
being holes and dirt
sand and rock and mud;
let the mountains reclaim
kinship to the sea.
fact #2
i almost called this
“no man’s land” when it hit me:
this is some dude’s land.
my steed is given
the chance to prove herself as
a creature of earth
and rock. she bucks and bumps up
and down with the land
i coo gentle words
her way. despite her lack of
ears, she understands.
i pat her steel, speak
to her spokes, call her pet names,
her title too formal
to calm nerves. she is
a pink panther when
the road is smooth. she sweats stealth
spins whistles through air
prepares meals of dust
for those caught behind her, so
generous a chef.
today, however,
she trots. works. pants. goes slow, a
beast of burden more
clearly than i am
used to noticing. and i
am grateful for her.
thank god, thank google
for scenic routes through unpaved
muddy tractor roads!
fact #3: sick
could blame stagnant late
afternoon heat, brown grass hills.
i blame the chinese.
food.
#4
i am finding each
day a new challenge in love.
or perhaps it is
the same challenge and
it wears new masks, or i like
pretending that it’s
new when indeed it
is always the same; to be
mindful and loving
at all times to those
who are here and those who are
elsewhere and always
crossing my mind.
i discovered while
en route to wa-la-la, weeks
ago, that when i
place myself under
certain physical pressure,
(sense of urgency
as it was labeled
by the manager of a
restaurant i worked
under briefly) i
get wound up. angry.
that time for instance. en route
1 to wa-la-la,
i was surprised to
find myself arguing with
my father in my
head. nothing real.
all just hypotheticals
i created out
of god knows where but
it stuck somewhere inside me
bubbled up in my
bile, gave a bitter-
ness to my spit, dented my
brow and gritted my
jaw. more recently,
i’ve been finding a shorter
fuse, which i quickly
stamp out, but it is
unsettling. it has been
so long since i have
allowed the venom
i associate with my
youth to poison my
friendships. the anger
is not quite as apparent,
i imagine, as
the shortness, the curt
the dry heat that respires
like a sleeping wolf
at the top of my
lungs. i try to keep
quiet in light of this fact
for fear the beast will
rattle in its cage
spring forth and slash to bits the
frail ties that bind me
to my companions.
still it breathes a vapor of
acid and when i
am not careful, which
is quite often of late, it
hisses through my teeth,
threatens my homies-
evermore threatening is
the wolf in the house
than the one at the
window. curbing the
beast requires another kind
of violence, to
wrestle its teeth to
the ground and stomp on its head
in which case, have i
beaten the beast or
allowed it to eat
my heart and inhabit the
space behind my eyes?
fact #5:
ben quotes dune, he knows
the history of middle
earth. this is awesome.
fact #6:
i need a road name.
pronto. any ideas?
mine are all silly.
fact #7:
biking through LA
is like wearing a meat dress
in a pit of wolves
keep it real. not too real though. don’t get too real on yourself.
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Made it to Orcutt!
13 Oct
We made it to Orcutt! After fording through streams and riding on farm and horse paths for a few miles, the Google Maps route dead-ended at some train tracks, so we had to backtrack a little. We probably lost an hour. Fortunately, as we stopped for a moment for me to take some ibuprofin, someone from the Adventure Cycling team stopped by in a car! They took all of our bags so we got to zoom through the night on unweighted bicycles. We arrived, after some disoriented wanderings through suburban Orcutt (my GPS phone went in the car too…) at the house of Bill Korn, whose wife served us delicious enchiladas. And beer. And Rocky Road Ice Cream.
We will be in Los Angeles in 3 days! The stops are: Lake Cachuma, Ventura, and Los Angeles! Yahoo!
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San Luis Obispo
12 Oct
Does this city truly exist?
I have not been so sure during this trip. Seeing this somehow familiar name as a dot on the map, a place we must pass through yet I’ve never previously thought of as existing. Who knew there was so much coast between San Francisco and Los Angeles?
It has been so, so, so beautiful. Impossibly vast oceans of blue, blue, blue. I sing to them when we ride. And I stumble, and get up, and keep riding. I’ve never thought much about the space between San Francisco and Los Angeles – they could be in different countries for all I know.
In Santa Cruz, we encountered beautiful people in the Food-Not-Lawns house, across the street from an amazing natural food store, and around the corner from a dance party of hula-hoopers and fire. We had an epic jam with Matthew, our host, a friend of my friend Rebecca Deutch, who played the Irish Bouzouki like a Celtic cousin of Zorba.
The next day, my fender breaks, and so we pull it off as best we can. Then, riding through strawberry fields, we bumped into a Fulbright Scholar named Dennis who had spent the past year in Kyrgyzstan studying falconry. We had a nice conversation in Russian and discussed the subtleties of Central Asian culture and Turkic language and music. He headed off to Watsonville to visit some friends on a farm, and we kept trucking on. And then my back pannier rack broke! We hastily bandaged it with duct tape as evening started to set on. The tape held until we got to REI so I could get another rack, but with 28 miles to go to our destination, we realized we needed a plan B. I saw there was a campground in Monterey, so we rolled out along a bike path in the darkness of a foggy mid-coast night. Somehow we had developed a pattern of ending each day biking at night on a beautiful bike path. This one rolled along the sand dunes around the Monterey Bay. We ended the night eating burgers and drinking beer in downtown Monterey and sleeping atop a steep, steep, hill.
We keep bumping into the same people. We met a 25 year old Canadian named Sebastian on the way into Santa Cruz. He somehow seemed more aerodynamic than us, so we thought we’d seen the last of him. Waking up on top of the hill in Monterey surrounded by Dead-heads, we saw him hustling about early in the morning. And we met, that same day, a group of mostly older men doing an adventure cycling tour from the Canadian border down to San Diego. They were taking a day off in Monterey, and we had hoped to be on our friend Solomon’s farm/Wwoof site the night before, so we set out those last 18 miles through Carmel and up into Big Sur.
Solomon and his crew were wonderful hosts. The place was beautiful and cozy and cool, two miles up in a canyon, with redwoods at the bottom by the stream and typical California coastal scrub on top. We played music and scrubbed floors and washed dishes and ate delicious food. We also met some interesting people on the farm; a Trinidadian Harvard student taking a semester off to think about her identity; a former competitive bicycle racer and skateboard trickster who became fed up with the materialistic, high-intensity life of Babylon he was living and became a hermit in the woods; and a few friendly folk simply getting away from home.
The next day, after eating toads-in-a-hole/rocky mountain toast/eggs in a basket for breakfast, we set out south! Towards Big Sur! And on the way, who should we bump into but the charming and beautiful Hannah, who we’d met up in Oregon at the Umpqua lighthouse touring with her brother. She was last seen in Trinidad, California. This time, she had her exceedingly cute 2 year old son with her.
We went through Big Sur and had some grand climbs, and kept crossing paths with the Adventure Cycling group, who was led by Joe, a man about our age from Montana. We shared a campsite with them that day at Limekiln State Park, gave them a private concert (they let us use their stove) and slept next to a beautiful brook.
The next day we finally got an early start! We surpassed the Adventure Cycling group in distance. After a couple huge climbs, we passed Hearst castle and were soaring with an amazing tailwind. We ended the day in Morro Bay and slept under the full moon. Spaghetti with chard! Yum.
The landscape has changed drastically in the past few days. And it is HOT HOT HOT outside. Which is why we are here, in the High Grounds Cafe, drinking iced coffee. The plan is to bike 40 miles more today, and stay at the house of someone on the Adventure Cycling tour. Hopefully we’ll make it. There has been a crazy headwind, and it is really too hot to be outside. But we’ll do it. And it will be great.
Also, Bria and I passed our 1000 mile mark yesterday! Somewhere between a third and a quarter of the way…!
We should hit the road. Picture some other time, and maybe music if we get around to recording things.
(almost) Southern California love to ya’ll,
Alex
(and a caffeinated Ben and Bria)
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right
4 Oct
details.
when we last left our heroes they were in calypso’s clutches in the enchanted isle of wah-la-laah. the morning meandered into late afternoon, packing up gear, drying out gear, playing instruments, rapping, getting hella heady bout shit… after a late lunch we concluded that neither of us really wanted to leave. so instead we approached the bones roadhouse, who graciously allowed us to sing for our supper. the next day, september 27th, we biked to bodega bay.
we arrived in san francisco wednesday september 28th at approximately 9 pm. it was a long day.
we woke in bodega bay in yet another raccoon infested campground. alex says he woke to find one next to his head at one point in the night. lucky for us, you have to talk to alex to know how sweet he is, so the raccoons remained pretty harmless :) the morning was spent singing, rapping, laughing. alex and i have developed some kind of language between us, keeps us entertained. a man at the campsite, told us we were perfect traveling companions.
not an hour into the ride, alex let out a small explitive with incredible calm and nonchalance. i think they call it a derailer because it can really derail ya. ask a biker “what ails ya?” they’ll say, “my deraila is a failya.” this time it snapped in two. there was little we could do except hitch to the nearest town, and lucky for us were under a hundred yards from the turn off to sebastopol, so, we coasted back down, i stuck out my thumb, and in exactly 7.63 seconds a surfer with a subaru stopped and gave alex a lift. eternally grateful. i didn’t catch his name as i rode the 11 miles into town. by the time i got there he was nearly all fixed up. we ended up leaving there after lunch, around noon.
so. this detour altered the route. after much deliberation and receiving some advice from the bike guru at west county cycle service, we concluded the best bet for getting to the city the fastest that day was to take an inland route through petaluma. so we did.
and it was 96 degrees that day.
i fear that writing a bicycle blog can evolve into a series of complaints or even merely awe over hills and climbs. for this reason i tend to shy away from relating day to day details. no two ways about it we had several monsterous climbs that day, the first of which was exiting sonoma county. tough to say what was more persistent the heat or the climb. we stopped part way up to share a grapefruit that enjoyed being more fully appreciated than any other fruit in the history of earth.
when we arrived in marin county, almost immediately, we came across the marin county fire department who gave us bottled water (the running water was somehow unsafe) and gaterade, to which i dutifully upturned my hippy nose. alex was smart, thank god almighty and shoved the fire engine red liquid in his rig. it saved me when the dizzy overcame me an hour or so later. we stopped on the side of the road in san geronimo and i took it like cough medicine.
this was also the first place i recognized on the journey since portland, really. i’d been to arcata for a few hours a couple of years ago, but my aunt lived in the san gerinomo valley when i was in high school and i went to high school in marin county and honestly haven’t been back in at least 5 years, maybe more. we stopped at the grocery in fairfax where my uncle dave and i would sometimes buy ice cream. here we learned that figs are so basic (as in opposite of acidic) that they can burn your mouth. no matter how tasty they are.
san anselmo, san rafael, a flash through ross, corte madera, larkspur, mill valley – where the climbing continued.
finally: we crossed the golden gate bridge
halfway across i heard my name simultaneous with recognizing a face. a crew of four bikers, three of which i’d met in portland a few days before leaving – christine, ross and …? sorry dude. it was amazing though. i had wondered where they were on their journey and what more epic meeting location could there have been, truly?
at last we arrived in soma at the home of jacob kramer who had cooked for us a lovely meal. we slept very hard.
and now, the quest continues. we missed some sweet coastline going inland, so, we’ll up and see point reyes tomorrow. we have, as well, a new addition to the party, mr. ben glass-siegel; eagle scout with multiple knot related merit badges. welcome aboard ben. we are very pleased to have you.
thanks again for tuning in to whatever this is. tune in next time for something else
love y’all :) b
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the wild
4 Oct
flashback : day 5. 38 west.
something of this river valley – sharp descent of rock and tree to water, green and quiet as mottled glass – smacks of the tongass, where i first was blindsighted by the innocence of ignorance, and the evil of the same.
one thing about the tongass is it will not be tamed.
one thing about industry is it knows no compromise.
funny thing about that is it cannot be sustained.
if you ask about my experience in alaska, i find it difficult to muster the enthusiasm i felt for the landscape over the heaping mound of industrial waste that has lodged itself between my love of nature and my amygdala. the details of that particular experience are moot in the context of this blog, and thus the reader will be spared. it is important to note, though, that this experience hatched, with the heat of canned rage, some key concepts that, under the nourishment of Portland’s unrelenting winter sog, bloomed into what i now understand as some core beliefs:
number 1: the greatest wilderness there is is in the human heart
number 2: if there exists a greater wilderness it is between men*
*i say “men” meaning “people” and i chose the word “men” because of the timelessness of the music it adds to the phrase and because if we are to live lives where gender is what we make it we must bend the words to our will
number 3: regardless of the laws of men, the schemes he cooks, or what false idols fuel his whims, the land and water and the wind speak silently in ancient tongues and magistrate with gravity the fate of all mankind.
the tongass will not be tamed.
i relate this to you here because these thoughts have fueled my movements ever since i left that place. the next couple of months were spent escaping myself, half of it hiding inside a cloud of canadian herb and the other half playing house on a farm with a man whose love i treated like a craig’slist rideshare. that’s a long story, that. maybe another time.
i fluked my way into a warm furnished room among friends in the friendliest city in america, with exactly one month’s rent in my viola case. within a month i had work, and my very own government sugar daddy (Eggs Benedict Thomas). livin the dream. though, come independence day (about) the tight knit free box find had begun to itch at the tip of my skin, the neckline, once cozy, now cinched like the collars worn by plato’s cave dwellers, and though i loved the puppet show dancing before me, the glow and warmth of the fire at my back, the collective quality of our congregated laughter, there were tiny cracks in the stone of the cave that let hints of fresh air seduce my nostrils from the must of comfort into the open air of the great unknown.
and here we are.
one of the reasons i decided to leave portland is that i felt there were challenges calling me that would not show their faces there. sometimes in my darker dreams they whisper from behind labyrinth walls and i follow the snake of the echo through mineral darkness, the tip of the tail just out of reach of my eyes and when i have slept hard enough to chase down and corner the beast, there is no fraction small enough for the instant; the eyes flash yellow and the teeth leap out and the weight of the creature is upon me and i am deeper in darkness and the dream has dissolved to sweat in my eyelashes and i still have never heard the demon’s name.
there is of course the possibility that the animal is no fiend, that my pursuit angers it or at least inspires defense. it is possible it says its name with every breath and that i simply do not speak the language.
it is also possible that it is the devil himself.
people ask what there is for me in new orleans and i can honestly say it is of yet unclear. i feel however that perhaps the aforementioned beast’s native tongue laps round the rush of water there. that there are aches lodged in my back and neck that have their roots in that soil, though my skin has never touched it. there is land on this planet that knows the name i forgot before i was born. perhaps in louisiana.
•••
today, new time country kitchen was honored to spend an hour navigating through miss roth’s 7th grade performing arts “elective”. miss roth is a noble spirit, and dear friend – and boy do we commend her, out there try’n'a make hell a better place for the children. it stirred the embers of the ongoing conflict i feel between acute social responsibility and my more worldly urges to just fuckin go everywhere and soak up as much good vibration as my pores will allow. make music. make love. what could be better for the world than for someone to constantly be making new love?
then i think of the girl in the back of the room, thirteen year old with the “no” mask on, and i think, what better place to make new love than here?
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