Ride on!

Late summer and early fall have been good to me, lots of love, lots of happiness, lots of time riding bikes with my kid, her friends, and a few of my own, too.

Also: new puppy!

Color me blessed.  Ride on! #BLE

The stoke goes ever on

Summer's over, at least by my reckoning it is.  Was a good one.

The stoke goes ever on. #BLE

Just about a bike: Surly Cross-Check [UPDATED]

Early in the summer of 2001, about six months after I bought my first Surly, a Steamroller, I bought my second, a Cross-Check.

I had visions in my head back then of trying my hand at cyclocross racing.  At the time I thought I might excel in the format.  But to this day, I've yet to enter such a race and don't think I ever will.  That ship has surely sailed.

Just about a bike: Surly Steamroller [UPDATED]

4.8:1 gain ratio, 65.6 gear inches

Long before I got my Pugsley, which of all my Surly bikes I hands-down ride the most these days, I got a Steamroller (and a little later, a Cross Check). Mud brown, my first-generation Steamroller was sold then, as it is still now, as a frame-set only.  I like to imagine that I was an early-adopter of the whole fixed-gear thing.  Not true by a century or two, I know.  But still, in these parts, when I bought it back in 2000, there weren't very many of us riding fixed, that's for sure.

In other news, the stoke has been ample

Since my last photo-dump in November... and despite our recent sadness... there have been other moments, too, where fortunately the stoke has been ample.

These are some of them.

Jack

Jack was a consolation, as was Jackie, which preceded it for a time.  Each a nod to his mother's side of the family, the Jacksons.

He was Jack every day of his life.

But John Ellis was his given name, as it is, at least in part, mine as well.  Eldest sons on his side of our family have bounced around in naming between Percy and John, Ellis and Taylor, for many a generation.

Like all good dads, he was full of stories.  And lessons.  Patience.  And advice.

He died yesterday.  Peacefully.  In my mother's arms, his wife of 52 years.  It was beautiful.  And so sad.  The way a death should be, I suppose.

Archival footage: My ghosts are engraved on this landscape

The following post was originally published in-part at FlagstaffBiking.org in March 2004.

---

Out in the woods, there is a long climbing section of singletrack that always reminds me of Wade. There's a difficult rock trap that recalls Chris to my mind and a log that always bears Lyle's name. There are also various overlooks, well-kept secret trails, twisty paths through widely spaced trees, and remote waypoints as well, all of which awaken long dormant but distinct memories of longtime and mostly long-gone friends like Ken, Shawn, Scotty, Mark, Huge, T-roy, Hils and the Bens. 

The recollection of friends, the ghostly apparitions these places and trails conjure, is profound and impressed upon me repeatedly, whenever I ride them.

Give me rainclouds

Give me darkness when I'm dreaming
Give me moonlight when I'm leaving
Give me shoes that weren't made for standing
Give me treeline 
Give me big sky 
Give me snowbound
Give me rainclouds
-- Gregory Alan Isakov, 3 A.M.

---

Dark clouds poured rain over the untarped load, the entirety of my material possessions, stacked-and-tied in the back of my buddy Kevin's red Toyota pickup the day I moved to Flagstaff.  

In my mind, the dark clouds that hung over my life that day were nearly as oppressive. In the figurative wake of my old friend's ersatz moving-truck, as of the fifteenth of August 1991, I wasn't just leaving Scottsdale behind, I was also leaving a still-bitter former fiancé and the smoldering remains of one truly bad relationship, a hardly-started career that I'd nevertheless washed clean out of, as well as every friend I'd made during the first 24 years of my life, including my best-friend, Kevin, who would within the hour turn his truck left onto Blackbird Roost, out of my run-down studio apartment's parking lot and, quite literally, out of my life.