The Paranormal Looms - 10/19/19 at 4 PM

The SM100 came and went last weekend.  Most notable moment actually came the night before the race when, while camping, it rained 4 inches and my wife and I had a waterfall in our tent.  Not as romantic as it sounds.

But with that foolishness now in the rearview, it occurs to me that in six weeks The Paranormal will be upon us.



Six. Short. Weeks.

But there you are, hiding out in the bathroom at work, slobbing and dribbling and thumbing at your phone, possibly vaping, too busy watching videos of Jolanda Neff slurping three bowls of oatmeal to go back to your desk, and you haven't even found your slutty catboy costume yet.  And it's already September.  This world, she is passing you by.


Doing trail work last week, I found a piece of Paranormal history that I'll share with you here.

It might not look like much to the untrained eye.  But this little relic happens to be the campaign pin that Joanna Krauss wore when she dressed up like Hillary Clinton to match James' Barrack Obama costume, in what was certainly one of the top 10 paranormal team costumes of all time.  The finer details - this campaign pin being just one example - carried the costume, which naturally won the day.

I sit here, banging the keys at 530 AM on a Friday morning because I can't sleep, and I contemplate the miles between that day and this day.  That would have been 2008, the end of the Bush Era, when Clinton and Obama were vying for the democratic ticket to challenge McCain.  At the time, I recall it felt like we were teetering on the very edge of democracy.  How little we knew.  If that feels to you like an entire lifetime ago at this point, you are not alone.

Back to my original point though: your fucking costume.  Pull yourself together.  Get on this.









To assist you, I put together a chart that you can use to better understand the relationship between costume quality and racing performance, various examples, and what I like to call the danger zone.  Please feel free to plot your own variables for alcohol consumption, e-bikes, etc.  This is, after all, a resource for all of us - the people.


Yes, this is also happens to be a paper towel, because genius strikes without notice sometimes.

Outside of that, I have very little to offer you in the way of real advice.  I can tell you that The Paranormal will go live at 4 PM on Saturday 10/19.  Costume check at 3 ish.  Kids race (cover your eyes, Billy) around 230ish?  All of that happening right here at the Rancho Relaxo.

Until then, do as the pros do.  Dress as Goldilocks and shred absolutely everything.

The haunted head awaits you. 
Up, up, up.

Immigration. E-bikes.

For an interesting exercise in self-reflection, try this:

The next time you start to get worked up about how e-bikes don't belong on your local trails, stop, and write down whatever you just said.  Ruminate on how much you mean it and how much it makes sense to you and how pissed off you are that e-bikes are a threat to ruin your trails.

Then, simply substitute "immigrants" for "e-bikes" and substitute "the border" for "your trails" - and imagine yourself in the Oval Office, on twitter, the color and shape of a rotting orange.

The many faces of intolerance.

Up, up, up.

Timebomb, Part 2

July, 2019

Eventually, what you realize is that the metaphor, the timebomb, doesn't blow up.  It grows up, or at least he starts to.
Rowan has a scar the color of a pearl across his hairline and one to match it right below his chin, and halfway between the two rests his huge, toothy smile.  But his balance is otherworldly now.  He's deft, fast on his feet, he dances on the pedals when he climbs the hill between my house and Shawn's.  He stands up when he climbs, I understand, because I stand up when I climb.  But where I'm a masher still at 41, he's light on the pedals like a feather, like Contador.  

I'm well aware that comparing ones child to Contador isn't healthy, for anyone, but I see what I see.

For now, we ride together.  As they say, the family that rides together stays together.  They also get chiggers together.  They run out of chain lube at the same time and sound like a nest of hungry mice together.  They fight over who gets which clif bar today, and where are my fucking gloves, etc.  It's not all sunshine and Saturdays.

"Where's mommy, "Avery demands from over my shoulder.  I'm sitting on the couch, exhausted, and she's draped across the back of it, like a bored cat looking for trouble.
"Mommy is riding, sweetie," I tell her.
"Why is Mommy riding so early?"  The swish of her tail.
"Because Mommy is doing the Hundo this year."
"What even is the Hundo?" Avery groans.
"The Hundo is part of the reason you exist."
She doesn't click that link, not yet.  For now she tolerates simple answers.  But someday when she does I hope she'll understand that what we're doing out there at this hour isn't riding bikes so much as it is becoming a more complete person, one who has been somewhere.

I try to explain the abstract to Rowan, that as a culture we are now so far removed from real, natural adversity that we have made it a recreation - something we pay for - no longer something that, like life, just happens to us.  It's a game we play so we don't forget how.  He eyes me, skeptical of my story, but I show him how to sharpen a chainsaw, or plug a tire, or clean fish while the latest bad news streams 24/7 on a television that we pretty much don't even turn on anymore, and I hope to God he doesn't need it.

When your wife becomes your riding buddy, your world changes a little.  We cover details now that we didn't get into before: Pre-race bathroom habits.  Soil color as it relates to traction.  Chaffing.  We spend two huge, dreamlike days in The Forest together, riding big miles and enjoying the freedom to love each other with no one else around, just a huge green blanket of summer leaves overhead between us and the bright blue sky.  We are afforded this, I know, because she's chosen it.  I'm proud of her, but also, selfishly, I'm in my happiest place with my favorite person, something most people never get the chance to do.

There is worry, of course.  I follow her down Dowel's draft, careful to point out from behind her all the places that the trail wants to eat you, pull you down into the forest on your left, end your day.  There are just so many obstacles.  The bees near the top of Bridge Hollow.  The way your valve stems can fill with sealant and leak all day.  The pizza at aid 5.  So many of these lessons, I got to learn as a 20-something kid out in Colorado, where the consequence of my mistakes were just so...I'm not sure. But all of the errors that I survived then, I'm determined to guide my wife around them the easy way now.  But why?

You forget, narrator, that the metaphor barely applies now.  The timebomb never blew up.  It's taken some falls, sure, but it's wearing a $300 helmet.  The people you love in your life simply have to make their own mistakes now, learn their own lessons.  You can't shortcut the hardest, most important parts of the truth.

So I try to ride behind them, watch the world roll out before them.  I see their tracks sometimes in the dirt on trails I've already taken, some of them my line and some of them...not.

The trail splits and dowels's goes left, but magic moss goes right.  Make no mistake, you're straddling your bike at one of the best places on this planet, and sure, there's one direction you'd prefer over the other.

But they get to choose.

Up, up, up.

Timebomb, Part 1

December, 2014

“How long’s a minute?” Rowan asks me over lunch.  I see that he has torn through the board games while I made sandwiches, and he’s distributed monopoly money, playing cards, chess pieces, everything, in a trail from the closet to the kitchen table.  Now he’s sitting, finally, and he clutches a little plastic hourglass in his hand and holds it forth, the stitches in his chin framing his big, toothy smile.   “What’s this?”  

We usually don’t allow him to have toys at the table, but at least he’s sitting still.  Also, we’re exhausted.  “You need to put that all back in the closet when you’re done with lunch,” my wife tells him, eyeing the latest mess.  Around us, Rowan’s imagination stretches across the floor from the front door to the back porch, so many legos and books that we can hardly walk.  

“What’s this?” he asks again, peering into the hourglass as the sand flows through the tight plastic funnel.  

“That’s an hourglass,” I tell him.  

“No,” he replies, “Not an hour.”  

He is correct.  In the broken sentences of a 3-year-old, he explains to me that it only takes a minute for the sand to traverse from one side of the little plastic tube to the other.  

“It’s still called an hourglass, though,” I tell him, though I’m not actually sure if that’s true. The minutes pass like hours and we don’t know what to do.  

After lunch, Rowan cleans up.  Then he builds a fort with the couch cushions, and he knocks over a potted plant in the front hall. “Find something else to play with,” my wife tells him.  

He attempts to ride his bike up the stairs.  

He flips the kitchen chairs on their sides to build a wall.  

He jumps from the back of the couch to the mantle and hits his head, and he howls like a wild animal. 

We give him some ice for his head, but he eats it and almost chokes.  

He turns on every sink in the house and runs around with his pants off.  

We redress him and send him outside, and he constructs a trap out of sticks on the front steps to try to capture Santa.  

“Santa already came on Sunday,” I try to reason with him.  He doesn’t come back for one year.  

“How long’s a year?” Rowan asks.  

I check my watch, and it’s only been 20 minutes since lunch.

I start to answer him, but he’s already digging for grubs in the front flowerbed, churning up last years’ bulbs with a plastic shovel.  

He tries to jam his shovel into the heat pump next to the house.  

He rides his bike into a tree on purpose.  

He rushes around back to get a garden hose, but he trips and skins his knee.

Part of his problem is simple physics.  Little boys grow fast, but it comes in fits and starts, and it’s not always proportionate. His short legs are quick, but his head and feet seem huge by comparison.  He leans forward and runs full speed through the kitchen, but his legs can’t keep up, so he falls forward and hits his face on the corner of the wall. 

“It’s like trying to parent an explosion,” my wife observes, trying to see how bad it is this time through the blood and dirt.    

Part of his problem is hard-wired.  The security guard at the entrance to the Emergency Room welcomes us back for our second trip this week: “Hi, Rowan.”

Shannon fills out paperwork at the front desk, and I try to manage our son who is still on the hunt for trouble.  It required five stitches to sew his chin last week, and I’m guessing it will take at least five more in his forehead this time.  I chase him through the waiting room, “Perhaps now would be an OK time not to jump on the couch, Rowan.” 

When we return home, Rowan is finally asleep in the back seat, fresh stitches in his forehead.  I carry him through the darkness.  He’s limp and warm in my arms, momentarily defused. At the threshold of his room, I trip on some kind of trap he built earlier in the day, and I almost drop him. 

My wife takes a knee to inspect the trap, like a Vietnam War film.  This time, it appears he used pillows, scissors, a Godzilla action figure, and he wrapped it all together with leftover Christmas ribbon. 

Shannon clears the trap, a professional by now, but still none of this is making sense to her.  

“Why does he keep doing this?” She whispers as we tuck him in, but her voice is tense, bewildered.

“He’s dynamite,” I tell my wife.  “This is how he learns.”

Grains of powder in an hourglass of crash and burns.  

Undeterred

Jack walks through the puddles, not around them.  It has rained 72 inches here in Virginia since his 3^rdbirthday, more than the foggy coast of Seattle, more than the jungles of Borneo.  Of those 300 days, 200 of them have yielded measurable rainfall, and one of them, a baby sister.  

A boy in a climate like this tends to keep moving.    

“Untle Dave,” Jack chirps, unable to pronounce his c’s yet, “I tan yell outside.” He pulls on his red boots and hops in the wagon, and we roll out of his backyard and down the trail.  

The pitter-patter of rain has faded, and the sun is out for a few minutes, and I explain the plan to him, “We’ll just gather some rocks, haul them in the wagon, and we'll press them into the trail down below where it's muddy.  It'll be like armor, but rock, and for the trail."

Smiling back, Jack explains the plan to me.  I have a hard time understanding him, but I hear some phrases like “Build a worm house” and “Swim in the forest.”  

We carefully step the wagon down the trail through the roots, green and slippery this year where usually they are baked dry by the sun.  Jack bails from the wagon with glee, then he holds my hand and leads me up the old logging road, now more like a stream of water flowing against us.  He stops to stare at the rush and gush of it all.  The road-river pushes up and over the toes of his little red boots.  

I have never seen it rain like this, months upon months of downpours and gloom.  The trail here has been gutted by storms, a deep red rut running down the center and then veering hard left, downhill, into climate we don’t yet understand.  I wonder, as we stand and stare at the flooding, what a young boy makes of this.  Is it still climate change if you were born after it already happened?  

Jack giggles, and I turn to look at him, and he’s peeing, straight down into the torrent, and it’s washing back over his feet.    

41

I turned 41 on Wednesday.  When you turn 41, a lot of people ask you basically the same thing: how do you feel?  Old?  Sore?  Are you falling apart yet?

Answer is: sort of, yes.  I mean, things hurt about the same amount as they hurt before, they just hurt longer now.  It's livable, but damn.  I rode Death Star 6 days ago.

And it's Friday, lunchtime, and my legs still kinda hurt a little.
That's what 41 is I guess.

41 is having turned 40 about two weeks ago, and then bang, Wednesday, you turned 41 too.  And about 5 days from now, you have to turn 42 also, so get ready and good luck with that.

41 is realizing that all the best things you got for your birthday, and pretty much life itself, you found in the woods.

41 is realizing that the component upgrade that will really make you psyched to ride your bike is already sitting in your spare parts bin, you've just got to find an hour to bolt it on.  And then it takes you a month to find that hour.

41 is one poorly timed handstand by your daughter at the exact moment you were bending over to pick up an Easter egg, and it puts you right on the floor.  FAST.

41 is ruminating over beers at dinner why all of the best people in your life you met through bikes?

It's a great mystery, 41 is.

I'll let you know how 42 is next week.

Up, up, up.

Points

My grandfather called them points instead of arrowheads.  The first time he took me point hunting, I was very young.  It’s one of my first memories, walking beside him through the pine forest near my house – the Paranormal course today -  after a summer storm.  The loblollies spread bright green overhead like a screen against the dark blue sky, and ferns the color of lime peels pushed up from below, from our bright red Virginia clay.  After a hard rain, the clay gets shoved around, layers upon layers of soil re-shuffled. It leaves the little rocks exposed. 

That first time, and right away he showed me a point, a big one, quartz, washed clean and white by the rain.  I scooped it up from right beside a huge loblolly pine in a clearing, an easy find. In hindsight, I’ve come to suspect that my grandfather planted it there so I wouldn’t go home empty-handed.  

He knelt beside me, held it between his thumb and forefinger at arm’s length, and he dropped his bottom jaw as low as he could to exaggerate his admiration.  Then he drew it in close, right up against our faces, and he spoke seriously, “This is an artifact.  Do you understand that?  The last person to touch this was a wild Indian.”  

Later, I became that wild Indian, or at least I tried.  I practiced with a little compound bow in my yard, arrows making a loud thwack against the pie plate that I pinned to a haybale.  I learned to feel the wind switch directions, to draw back when the wind gusts and shoot when the wind subsides, like a wave.  I lost almost every arrow in my quiver chasing grey squirrels. I painted my face.  

One October, I bought a 3-pack of metal broadheads, sharp enough to shave the hairs growing dark from my forearms.  They were bright silver, a dangerous mix of aluminum and steel, and I threaded them into the tips of the straightest arrows I had remaining.  My dad eyed them suspiciously, but he nodded his head, and he pulled me into the bathroom by my elbow and turned off the light.  From his pocket, he brandished a small flashlight, opened his mouth, and pointed the little beam of light at the back of his throat. Behind his tongue and above his tonsils rested a long, jagged scar the color of a pearl.  He confided in me that, a few weeks before, he’d been in a rush to go hunting, running up a flight of stairs with an arrow in his hand, and he had tripped.  

“Just a target point,” he explained.  “A broadhead would have come through the back of my neck.”

A month ago, I found a point with my daughter.  We were strolling through a stand of jack pines near the bottom of the twin lakes trail at Blue Ridge School, doing trailwork together again, right where it spoons the edge of a dry wash that had flooded the week before.  It was misty, overcast, grey: poor light for arrowhead hunting.  But as I raked the flooded debris away from a low spot in the trail, I kept an eye downward out of habit, searching the edges for the white speck of a point.  And there it rested, my daughter’s first, washed down from the mountain and cradled in the corner of a grove of beach trees.  She cupped the little treasure in both hands, the way she holds warm water to wash her face, smiling, and the clean point glimmered white like her toothy grin.   

It shocked me when my grandfather’s voice - my dad’s voice - spilled out of me when I spoke to my daughter there, and I told her everything I could remember.

That the Monacans used quartz because they could make a sturdy, sharp point without too much work. 

That they used to paddle up these creeks and rivers in canoes, the Rivanna, the Mechums, the Moormans, long before those rivers ever had those names.  

That they shot deer mostly, but also sometimes elk – elk! – and they floated their kills back downstream.

Her face was bewildered as she listened, like she didn’t recognize me.  I spat up facts about these things that no longer exist until she interrupted me, “Daddy?”  

But I couldn’t hold it in, all these things that I forgot I knew came spilling out from some kind of wound in my mouth, like blood.  

That the Monacans would trade quartz points with the Iroquois to the North in exchange for flints, churts, and warmer furs.  

That the Monacans and the Iroquois were all gone.  

That we’re standing on stolen land.  

Avery pleaded again, “Daddy!” 

I stopped, and it was absolutely quiet, just a grey mist falling through the dark pine trees. Avery didn’t follow up with a question.  She took my hand and we walked back down the wash to our car as the daylight faded.    

But lately when Avery walks in the forest to do trail work with me, she sings, and I see that she’s looking down.