In Beauty

In beauty I ride

With beauty before me I ride

With beauty behind me I ride

With beauty above me I ride

With beauty around me I ride

It has become beauty again

-- adapted from a Navajo prayer

Swell Trail - 09 October 2023

Between every two pine trees

 "Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life."

- John Muir

A deeply personal thematic photoblog:
A half-century or so of inadvertent tree-doorway photography

Cosmic Ray [UPDATED]

It is no small thing to say that the course of my life was, quite literally changed forever, when, shortly after moving to Flagstaff, on one of my first visits to our town's original mountain bike shop, Cosmic Cycles, I spent a few of my then very-limited funds ($5.95 plus tax to be exact) on an early edition of a little day-glo green self-published guidebook entitled Fat Tire Tales and Trails written by some dude who called himself Cosmic Ray.

I moved to Flagstaff, into a dank charmless little studio apartment, located conveniently right next door to the Greyhound bus station, in the middle of the summer of 1991, admittedly quite broke and, also, more than a little bit broken of heart/spirit/mind/body as well. 

During my first weeks in Flagstaff I had absolutely no idea (and no friends to show me) where to ride my bike. To learn the lay of the land, I regularly bumped around my neighborhood, rambled around downtown, and cruised through north campus on my bike. A couple times I rode down the two-track dirt service road that ran beside the railroad tracks as far as a big red-sandstone bridge. Nevertheless, despite my best efforts, I struggled in my first days in town to find a good way into the woods. All I found on my first forays along the railroad tracks were a few abandoned transient camps, the shell of a wrecked car or two, and several piles of surreptitiously dumped trash.

Cosmic Ray's little green book changed all that. I was hooked on page 4. 

Let's adopt a rezdog!

Nellie

Skadi

A few years ago the Internet introduced my wife to the plight of the abandoned pets at Dead Dog Beach on the island of Puerto Rico. As her awareness and concern for mistreated and misbegotten mongrels grew, she and my daughter both became occasional volunteers at a local no-kill shelter.  It was a short distance between this formative experience, helping in the recovery, care, and re-homing of unwanted animals, and the adoption of our own first rescue-pet, an adorable-but-feral little black puppy. She had been found a few weeks prior by some travelers, wandering alone and mortally ailing on the roadside not far from the town of Kayenta, Arizona.  Her bowels distended and  infested with worms and infection, the travelers took her straight to an animal hospital here in Flagstaff where she received emergency surgery to repair her destroyed prolapsed rectum, and intravenous antibiotics for several days.  Her care was made possible by High Country Puppy Rescue, from whom we acquired her.  We call her Nellie.

Our younger dog and her sole surviving sibling were clever enough to be able to evade capture by the good people at the Tuba City Humane Society for several days after they were first reported as strays to them.  Just another set of feral black puppies scavenging, motherless, in trashcans near the center of town, but my wife and daughter immediately fell in love with them the day their pictures were first posted to the agency's website.  After a brief in-person get-to-know-you session, they brought the more gentle of the pups home.  As with our first rezdog, she's quickly socialized positively into our domestic life, though, because she's still not quite a year old yet, she continues to be inclined to be cautious and nervous when out in the world beyond our home. She is never far from Nellie’s side no matter where we are.  We call her Skadi.

Let's make a Burton DIY Throwback snowboard!

To spice things up a bit this winter, rather than, you know,  just going out to snowbike on the Pugs, or just doing your basic cross-country ski loop out in the woods above my neighborhood, I determined to try to find a few other fun things to do when I'm out in the winter snow when I'm not skiing up at Snowbowl, 'cause, well, I'm 53 now. I really do need to find new innovative ways to hurt myself.

Mounting a Cooziecage™ to the downtube of my Pugsley made beer-drinking in the winterwoods possible and, so, that was a great and rewarding first-effort in this regard.

I've also been doing some fun multisport snowbike-to-xc-ski excursions up Schultz Creek toward Schultz Pass.  Probably got the first-ever ski descent of Kentucky Waterfall in the process. Wasn't pretty. Hellno! But it definitely happened.

past summer

This past summer was filled with good music, good rides, good books, good dogs, and, most especially, a whole bunch of really, really good people.

adiós buen invierno

A winter Eden...

...lifts existence on a plane of snow

One level higher than the earth below,

One level nearer heaven overhead

- Robert Frost

I have nothing to say

I have nothing to say

and I am saying it

and that is poetry
as I need it.

 -- John Cage 

Mid-summertime and the livin' is easy

Left my shoes under my desk on the last day of the school year, just found them there yesterday, and hadn't missed them for even a minute.

Thus far, with some three weeks to go, summer has been just what I needed it to be: the opposite of work, filled with good rides with good friends, time spent together as a family, visits each week from faraway friends and family passing through town, and ample quantities of cheap hot grilled food and cheaper cold Tecates consumed in good company, and a bit of new ink for good measure.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light

As spring turns to summer, my father, dead now for a full year, continues to occupy my thoughts almost daily.

Not because I am sad that he is gone, though I am.
Not because I am unmoored without him, though I might be.
He is with me, in the center of my mind, because I cannot seek his wise counsel, his particularly prescient insights, in the midst of these trying times.

Our culture stands on the sharp precipice of history.  We have been here before, surely, though perhaps never before like this.  Yet my father, regardless of circumstance, always seemed to know what was going on.  Would that he could tell me of such things now.

Overwinter

Fall was nice.  Winter was great.  Spring has been amazing.

Life is good. #BLE

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

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

[audio]

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 wisdom.  Opinions.  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.

"It has been reported that I was seriously ill..."

---

"It has been reported that I was seriously ill -- it was another man; dying -- it was another man; dead...
As far as I can see, nothing remains to be reported." - Mark Twain

---

Whenever I stumble back upon a blog I've not read in some time, only to find it has languished, unposted to, since my last visit, I tend to wonder.  I wonder what the reasons are that the blog has not seen words, that posts have gone unmade for so long a time.  And I worry.  I worry that perhaps some tragedy has struck in said blogger's life, and that this is the reason for their absence from the 'net.

A significant addiction

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.” – Edward Abbey.
Looking at the last few months of my Instagram and Facebook accounts, I've noticed a theme, and I believe it reveals a significant addiction which I have acquired over the course of many years.

To trails, as seen over the handlebars of a bicycle. And also to the tracks I've left behind. #BLE

Arizona Trail

Slow ride with flowers

This morning I reattached the Surly Nice Rear rack to the Pugsley and loaded up one of our big JANDD trunk-bags with my tools and tubes so I could wear my Cotton Carrier camera vest and carry my D40 on my ride today instead of my Camelback hydration pack.

These days I always have my iPhone with me when I'm out.  And, because it takes such nice pictures, I hardly ever take my Nikon on rides any more.  The iPhone is undeniably a fine lightweight camera, especially with an Olloclip lens attached, but it will never compare to a DSLR with a 50mm f/1.8 lens.

The unforeseen tragedy of the day

Today was a long day.

However, I came home after work and was compelled to smile, finding my wife happily walking the dog down the street, just as the sky began to drizzle.  Such beauty in so mundane a thing.

We drove over the hill together to retrieve our daughter from dance class.  I'm pretty sure I said very little.  Not out of animosity.  From exhaustion.

Once home again, I settled in by myself on the couch in the garage, with my feet propped up on the bumper of the Subie (I'm still so-posed right now), to listen to a little music while I flipped quickly through the new issue of Mountain Gazette, which had arrived in the mail this afternoon.

Instead of flipping aimlessly as I'd planned, I ended up completely engrossed in the editor's excellent three-part article about Ed Abbey and Hunter S. Thompson and read for perhaps 30 minutes, undisturbed, and for a few moments there, completely forgot about the tears and tragedy that had otherwise indelibly marred the day.

You know, I imagine myself as a kind of writer sometimes.  And I'm pleased that my friends at Commute By Bike occasionally give my words a somewhat more public venue, such as they have again today.

But, having now spent most of my day dealing with profound grief and a community's collective sorrow, and subsequently a part of my afternoon being reminded of what good writing really sounds like, and what good writing can really accomplish, my online review of a crate to carry beer bottles, which I'd hope to tout to you today with great fanfare, seems a little trite.

Therefore, with the unforeseen tragedy of the day in mind, and for a guy I didn't really know all that well, but who seemed to me to be a man who, while he lived lived Life with great purpose and vitality, I'd like to pass along a few great words, from another great writer, Henry Thoreau, of which I've been reminded repeatedly today:

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. "

Orange hat and pink hood

Today we went walking in the snow.	She wore her orange hat and pink hood.
Snow was thrown.	Most of it at me.
I used to wear this same orange cap when I was about her age.	I think it's cool that she wears it now.
She often wears her Muppet gloves.	But she throws a killer snowball with them.