Heavy and Painful

Heavy and painful, he breathes, almost suffocated by the immensity of the crush of the dank, decaying dampness of the unexpectedly humid October afternoon. Panicked and pleading with his lungs to fill and supply the much needed oxygen he grins. Regardless of the pain, the panic, there is a beauty in the moment where agitation may give way to unconsciousness and seizure. In the woods near home he straddles his bike and knows that this moment is a blessing. Pneumonia may have recently kicked the shit out of him, and made him even more fearful of living life, and dying after a life not lived; seemingly contrary yet the same, all at once. But, in this oppressive, air hungry moment there is clarity. One gets up. Living is in the getting up. Not everyone stands atop a mountain, dives headlong into machine gun fire to save pals, or donates a kidney. Sometimes you become your own hero with your head spinning and the back of your throat acrid and burning; having left the family to fend for themselves so that, at 38 years old, you could play on your bike. And now atop the bike, atop no more then a hill, pain easing he steps down on his pedal and motorcycle noises down the series of switchbacks that so quickly steal the altitude gained at such a death defying cost.

“How was the ride?” she asks.

“Great,” he responds with a hug and kiss on her neck. His hand lingering on the slide down that familiar back to cup gently an ass that has no right to remain shapely and hard after all of these years and three wacky kids.

“Easy there cowboy, we’ve got ourselves an audience.” A gentle rebuff, and in truth the unseeing, captivated eyes of their 4 month old daughter and the embarrassed flash of half hidden and keenly observant eyes of a brown mop headed seven year old are focused their way. “Go get a shower and then come on back and roll out the pizza dough. Oh, and open my wine for me please.” A kiss and a gentle push, given a brief stop to make the baby giggle and tossel the head of the oldest boy in the family, and he’s down the stairs to the shower.

Showers are funny places; a place of paradox, at once a steam filled birthplace of clarity, a place where we wash away the confusion of the endless modern cacophony of spiritual and intellectual noise. Newly clean, able to come to the answer long searched for but missed. And other times in the slurry of mud, blood, broken promises and dead dreams; head spinning in the heat and the mingled smells of body-grime and soap one loses way and stumbles out more lost, clean but lost. On days like today, showers are showers. Home to ritual long established and mind numbing. Ritual is a wonderful thing. Sure life is change – so obviously non-obsequiously true. Life has been so eloquently and rightly been rhapsodized by literary masters and the Boss as a river, ritual however, is the required anchor. From time to time we find comfort in forgetting how quickly we will revert to star dust; find comfort in the false all important belief that rituals breed immortality. In the shower he subconsciously revels in the robotic scrubbing, so long following the same pattern. A keen voyeur would swear that every sweep of hand over limb would not vary a centimeter over time.

And in fact he is a rabid collector of ritual. In moments of thoughtfulness has noticed that he gravitates to people and activities respecting of or dependent on ritual. For him much of the appeal of cycling is in its tribe like feel and associated ritual. Pull, dump and refill the water reservoir; never clean, just refill. Stooping, pulling the plastic thing that rolls under the bed out and retrieving his riding gear, at the same time creating a Wild West frontier town feel as dog hair tumble weeds are sucked out of hiding and roll maniacally between his feet. He may have six or so pairs of cycling shorts – he will only wear one of two pair. Always the same merino wool blue shirt in cooler weather and short sleeve RNH t-shirt in warm weather. Black Pearl Izumi socks and the SPD vans that bite his ankle follow. The knowing squeeze of the sidewalls of his bikes tires and a quick shot of lube to an already gummy drive train sees man and bike prepared for the loading of bike on rack and the drive to the trail head. Every seemingly unimportant aspect of the ritual, by degree, blasting away the bull-shit until he sits and drives and dreams of ribbons of single track.

“I’m back,” he says as he reaches for the flour in the cupboard, preparing to roll out the dough. And in he is; back from the brink, the crisis of faith brought on by too much sickness at the wrong time. How closely do we all stand everyday to the point of loss; when we just give up and change; when we stop dreaming, stop caring? How cool is it that most of us stand everyday in the whitewater struggling? Fearful and faltering, yet we stand. On days when pitchers die by smashing into buildings in countries run by hot fingered death cult lunatics and opera composing, scratch golfing, comb-over despots take a big nuclear shit on the world you just got to get on a bike and pedal. What else are you going to do?