Compass

When the only rule is gravity and the only important direction out, it hardly seems right to set out in search of maps. But some things may forever be in want of order, so the pile is packed and ordered (waterproof, tear-resistant, vision-quest approved!) and the trailer half-loaded, an unknown still weeks away. I've never been much for waiting.

So push off these goodbyes that just keep lingering; I'll lap up the sweet open road, hoard the sweat that stings eyes and burns raw sores. Forget these backwards friendships -- sweet as they may be -- and all the ways we've broken through the years. As always before, prescribed the standard treatment: set off in search of something new, another beginning. Amnesia in distance. In the absence of a history, what regrets can time still shoulder?

Still these are lies: all these miles are forever no more than strings across memory and sensation, all these aches just repetitions of so many days past, over and over and over again. Forever cliché: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Summers back, sitting on the curb with beers in our hands and the sun in our face, we decided the only constants were hunger and loss. An addendum, then: love and memory are just as eternal, two more words for one same, like breath and time.

Two weeks of waiting, three and a half or four of traveling. Only two more weeks of only an easy run away from each of those ghosts, two women and six years and six hundred conversations of somedays, and if the sun won't shine, by god how fast I'll run. Run and ride and run and ride and the great open west awaits, and what won't be forgotten will at least start fresh. I'll always find a new bearing.

Image: Peter Cohen

Current

Blood in thin streams, rivulets down jelly legs, and yet still running: maybe that's determination, laudable; perhaps I'm just a chafed fool, already condemned. Another marathon plus (and a few 5ks besides); I'll forever bandit these things, and they'll always ask why, always wondering. Laughing, of course, but drinking in the warm night & the giddiness of all these beauties sore and drunk, and the details are bygones, blurred: we are the celebration, and these nights are oh so fine, and all this training and smart decision making -- all that can wait until Monday.

These days, sweaty shimmer and glis turn to slimy white paste, the process repeating dozens and dozens of times, and each day's close marks the deposit of salty miles cashed in banks whose ledgers I cannot keep. There'll always be miles, and always one foot more. & if somehow it's been a week, or a month, even... & if I haven't showered nor shaved nor... well, consider it not laziness but practiced reinvention – a mountain man routine. This is some dream slightly less practiced, steeped in folly and forever-ago exhaled lost dreams.

So, three weeks more of these cities, and then off, the newest caper and oh how the anxieties and adrenalines already cut burbling, gurgling, moaning through tossing-turning nights. This hand still healing – managed to break it after all – and sure I could call it off, but for a measly hand? These legs were built for half-continents of bad ideas and a trailer of history pared down and towed behind. Across the windy and forsaken plains into the mountains I'll ride, and I'll find myself there beneath the wide open sky I've too many years now only found in dreams.

It'll rain. And I'll get wet. The winds will howl. And I'll be sore. Inevitably, I'll curse whatever made me think this was a good idea -- at least a few nights, I'm sure – but, so what? Idaho, in six weeks, another home and another beginning and another start. Open skies were made for this sort of dreaming. If you catch me, throw me back.

Walkthrough

Three nights running been around for the sunrise, and if I've only slept in my bed one night in the past week – well, it's probably both entirely and not all what you may think. What need is there to chunk time into days, anyways, and under this weather, all manner of delight and begging for adventure and merriment - under what circumstance could I refuse? Restfulness has never been much my style, not beside this living and playing.

So shenanigans: running from Craigslist bike lead to Craigslist bike lead, sure I'll find a worthy successor to Go-Go Gadget; closing down the bar & seeking out fights (I just wanna fuck something up, he says, trying to put his fist through a bus stop). Seems every time this particular group drinks, there's someone stupidly calling somebody a fag and somebody getting backed down and one of these times it'll be more than a Meathead Eddie whipping out a taser. I'll never understand this particular sort of primal, but so be it. And this even before cameras, those being such a dangerous thing when these boys will forever be twelve; there will always be opportunities for gratuitous nudity & ^#@%! shots. Take the boys out of the locker room, sure, but... beside memories of past runs and shenanigans, stories repeat until full circle; past re-becomes present. Of course this is (in)sanity – but then so is such a collection of miles, our cumulative tallies.

Or, wonder: the sun rising proudly orange through the fine haze of purples and bluish-gray and it'd be bedtime, maybe, if I hadn't other concerns. We're all coming together in the name of a friend clearly departed only in the physical, and those sun-kissed Idaho summers may be increasingly further behind us in years (four years since we've even talked!, she exclaims), but in such merry company, time's not a string but a ball, and we'll roll right along inside it, tumbling from all manner of past and present and future into laughter and smiles and all those hours that have threatened to take us before. We'll all fear the day these stories disappear, but of course they won't. Some magics are eternal, even if memories are not.

And fool's gold: back to the cities at ten, and sure, there's a race tomorrow and the reasonable thing would be sleep, but friend's first show of the summer, taking the stage in twenty, and when the bar's a mile and a half away, the timing's just too perfect. Bar's closing now, and the race is only twenty-five miles and five hours away, and 'why not?' is always such a dangerously enticing question. No matter have I of reasonable.

So pack loaded and two hands full of beverage beside, the night cool and crisp and springtime perfect, and soon enough there's nothing more than miles and the thin black snake of a trail before me and legs, one foot after another. There are few things more perfect than the silence of floating, theses differences - dreams & the real, ghosts & flesh and blood – more semantics than anything. Cotton wisp, I'll float off to Neverland any day now.

Another morning comes brilliant with the memorial, light wind in the cedars a requiem. It's only five; I'll have some time with the memories, and if the years have passed they'll still do nothing to dilute these memories of peaks and lakes and sweaty runs under the hot Idaho sun, will do nothing to diminish shared beers beside the Salmon and days spent in the backcountry discussing theology and philosophy and the nature of everything and nothing. Leopold and Berry and Emerson and Thoreau, that small cramped trailer and the wall tent, these places we called home? Oh, the days, they were good. How he would have laughed at this absurdity, of running to 'his' race, that merry full laugh of his, a whole body in a smile.
There's the race itself, of course, and if my half is respectable (amazing!, they say, heads shaking), I can't help but think of how he'd have laughed and laughed at one more night of foolishness – then replaced my top ten with a top three (if not the win) of his own. When a former teammate wins the full, the differences couldn't be more striking, but of course, that was the magic of those days, and even more so, of him, all the oddities and quirks and eccentricities. No saint, of course – but most times, close is damn near good enough, and all our memories are rosy with love beside these passed years.

Festivities, of course, will always find a way to derail this wistfulness, and that's just how it is. So festivities and shenanigans, indeed: a blowout the scale of which hasn't been seen in least a year, 'home-town-he-ro' and girls giggling exclaiming ohmygodthatsabeereverytwoseconds!. The champ, he'll hold it (always!), and if some fools never outgrow the frat house... well, there are worse things. There are the standards, of course – these parties always open with the grill and the beer bong and tippy cup, segue into drunken 'November Rain' and those poems (improvised night of, always); there will always be a few underage teens (and we'll all hope that none of them are former students of his), a few altogether too-willing cougars, runners and drunks, everything both normal and odd in between. Lord knows who's had what at this point, or even who matches what name, but seems there's a pirate bar in town and supposedly the yelling at the mic is rapping. Fools with forties and others brown-bagging it (because that's style, one says), and how the hell did this even happen, all these rounds? Several of us are double- or even triple-fisting if only because we're not embracing our annihilation quite so quick as the others and the drinks just keep coming, one after another; nursing several drinks makes it less likely we'll be given another. It'd be easy enough to plunge right into the center of the fireball, of course, mischief and mayhem and spontaneous combustion not a possibility but a near certainty – but by god seems perhaps I've developed some mild sense of restraint after all, and how odd it is to watch this from outside the epicenter. Still merry, sure, but maybe too old or too tired or too reflective (you think far too damn much, she says; and you think far too damn little, I'll retort; of course I forget her name and she remembers mine, an uneven slur on drunk lips) and it's sad and beautiful and somehow perfect too, all broken bottles and spilled beer and interest both sexual and feigned; a giant summer stew, all this simmering in folly reduced to basics.

Seems no matter the failures and losses surrounding – stolen bike (30,000 miles!), friends' layoffs, broken bodies we may never quite escape – these days can't help but find themselves tinged with greatness: starlight and sunshine and riding the moon beam of glorious evening after glorious evening. Every track runs out eventually I suppose, but I'll gladly ride this one a bit longer. Instinct tells me he'd have done the same.