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.

"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.

Ew, seriously, so gross!

There are times when you're just so proud of your kid.

Like when she first stands to walk, or speaks her first subject-verb sentence, or pedals her bike up the sidewalk all by herself.

And then there are other times when you just stand in awe.  Like when she belts out her first real solo audition for a role in the cast of the local community theater's upcoming production, or recites an entirely memorized long poem or Bible passage by heart with palpable expression, or stands up on her pedals and maneuvers her bike through a tricky rock-garden with natural finesse.

Or when, while out on an evening walk together, she chomps down on the last bite of her store-bought peach and observes, "Look, my pit has a hole in it."

Red Tank Draw

We hiked into Red Tank Draw east of I-17 at exit 298 today.

We'd set out with the intent to hike a few miles up the Bell Trail beside Beaver Creek this morning, but it was slammed, both the main parking lot and the overflow lot up the hill from the trailhead were full.  So we backtracked about a half-mile and parked the car in a turn-out near the one-lane bridge that passes over Red Tank Draw, which looked quite inviting beneath an ample canopy of cottonwoods and sycamores and was flowing a bit with monsoon runoff.

Be not afraid

Yesterday, as we pulled the tandem off the trail at one of our well-established top-of-the-ride snack-stops, my daughter noticed a young horned lizard darting through the duff and detritus nearby.

"Look, daddy!  A lizard!" she shouted.

"Catch it!" I proposed.  And, after a brief chase, she did, cupping her hands gently over the tiny beast and bringing it back for me to admire.  I was pleased to see how confidently she pursued and caught it, and also with how tenderly she handled it while it was in her grasp.

Her mother's nose and chin

She has her mother's nose and chin and beaming, bright smile.  But I am pleased to say she seems to share my affinity for bikes and trails and the woods.

Leaf Peeping

It feels as though family-time has come at a premium of late.  My work always conspires to pull time away from us.  But lately, because my wife and daughter are cast in another Flagstaff Youth Theater production (Narnia), our weekends have been somewhat compromised by long rehearsals the past few weeks, too.

So today we ditched church, including our monthly obligation to lead singing, and went for donuts and then for a lovely long walk in the woods together, just the three of us and the dog, to peep some leaves up toward Brookbank's Tank.  

We were rewarded with a near-perfect morning: 47 degrees, bluebird skies, a light breeze, and a million aspens exploding in color!

Thus the woods are filled with this sound

The other day, while we were out riding together on the Arizona Trail, my daughter and I stopped off to the side of one of the trails we ride regularly to inspect a little check-dam she made a springtime or two ago.  She was pleased to find that it was working well, holding back a small pool of bubbly, dark-green water.  Nevertheless, she added a rock or two to the top of the dam to stem the water's egress due to the pool's rising tide.

And then, as she was crossing back to the bank where I was sitting, she slipped and fell in.

Nope. No berries. Not yet.

For the past few years, about this time of the season, we've gone down to a nice, kinda secret, quiet spot on Oak Creek to harvest blackberries.  This year we went too early and harvested maybe 12 ripe berries in all.  The rest were all still small and green, weeks away from being ready.  

Fortunately, we did arrive right after a rain, so the air was misty and cool and the creek clear and cold. We waded around for a bit and then drove down to Sedona for lunch.

We'll go again in a few weeks, sometime mid-August, I think.  The berries in our secret spot should be ripe by then.

Just about a bike: Specialized Deja Two tandem

When we got married in January of 1997 they closed the bike shop for the afternoon so that everyone could attend our wedding. That was pretty special, and not something that I can recall them doing very often, if ever again, otherwise.  It was great to have everyone there (except for Ken, who's mother was getting married back-East on the same day) to celebrate with us.  Their presence alone surely would have been sufficient to please us.

Nevertheless, we were made doubly-happy at our reception when they presented us with an unexpected "shop gift" which they had all chipped-in together to purchase for us: a brand new Specialized Deja Two tandem mountain bike frame.

In my opinion it remains, without a doubt, the most satisfying and enduring gift we got that day, rivaled, of course, only by our abiding love for one another.

My wife agrees.

And we have spent hundreds of hours together on our tandem (occasionally with our kid attached by Trail-a-Bike, too), all over the southwest, during the past 16+ years, reaffirming both of these facts.

Thanks, again, Absolute Bikes-friends!

Thanks, as well, to our friend Chris, who "sold" us his old crank-reducers (I've yet to pay him for them... for like four years), these days it's pretty much my daughter and I who ride the tandem together.  It's kinda become "our thing" and a wonderful means for spending time together, just the two of us, doing something we both enjoy.

She's become a great little stoker and already knows the local trail system like a native (which she is).  Her endurance continues to impress me as well.  We can turn around a 15-mile loop without complaint or fatigue in a little over an hour together, talking the entire time, motoring up hills, and descending like fiends, whooping at the top of our lungs!

Fact: I've never once returned from any tandem ride, ever, either with my wife or my kid, unsatisfied or wishing that I'd ridden by myself.

I read or heard somewhere, once-upon-a-time, that Specialized's tandems were fabricated by American Bicycle Manufacturing in the early 1990s.  The Deja Two's big, beautiful welds and the unique derailleur hanger certainly support this contention.

Our tandem's basic build has changed very little over the years, since I initially put it together shortly after our wedding.

Ken built the wheelset for me, Mavic hoops on high-flange XT tandem hubs.  Shimano DX top-mount thumbies, XT front and rear derailleurs, plus first-generation XT v-brakes are all adequate equipment most of the time.  A Ritchey tandem crankset, a Specialized stoker-stem, and a Rock Shox Duke (perfectly color-matched out of the box, natch) round out the very basic, no-frills parts mix that's served us well, with very few failures, for more than 16 years now.

For the record: our tandem's staying in the family.  There's no other bike in the garage that we would be less inclined to sell, no matter how much we might need the money.  It's a part of our family, like a good dog or a cherished heirloom.  In fact, our daughter's already asked us to promise to give her our tandem when she has kids of her own so that she can take them riding when they're big enough to stoke for her.

That's pretty high-praise, I think.

And, one thing's for certain: we will.

First Flight

Today our old friend Derrill flew into town to ride his bike around in the woods with me.  We had a great ride!

But the best part of the day was when Derrill was kind enough to take us for quick fly over Schultz Pass, past Sunset Crater, and around Mount Elden in his rented Cessna 172 this morning after he arrived.  It was Bekah's first time flying.  She found the whole experience thoroughly invigorating.

Heck, we all did.  Thanks, Derrill!

Chilled near zero

Snack stop

"Hey, today is the first day of spring!" my daughter gleefully reminded me as we rode off on the tandem together early this morning.  The wind twisting through the treetops, the frozen morning mud crunching beneath our tires like cornflakes, the patches of persistent snow on every north-facing slope, often bisected by small creeks flowing in the deeper drainages,  all stood in support this fact: spring has arrived.

Our ride today was excellent.  We charged up Dogfood and ripped across AZ Trail through the meadow to Moto so that we could plow through the dozen-or-more creek crossings that have formed on the Easter Island trail... just like Schultz in the old days!

I wish you could have heard us as we descended.  There's something quite uplifting for a father on hearing the joyful, primal squeal of his (nearly) eight-year-old kid as her shoes fill with water chilled near-zero (just hours ago it was brook-ice), as a rooster-tail of muddy cold water arcs high over her head and breaks like a wave on her pink helmet.

Carsonite rock-tossing.

Parson Springs

We drove down to Cottonwood early this morning and hiked part of the Parson Springs Trail in Sycamore Canyon.  Just the three of us.  And the dog.

Didn't see another soul.

'Twas lovely.

Little Horse Wash

We walked a bit down the Little Horse Wash near Sedona today, without our dog, who stayed home, sick and on several meds for some horrible strain of kennel cough... the kid's got a bit of a cold, too, as her rashy nose-holes will attest.