Ocho

The afternoon of rage when I ended up in Joshua Tree rather than Arcadia turned strangely surreal. While I’d like to tell you about vision quests, spirit guides, alien abductions, profound rapture and such, I cannot—at least not yet. Coyotes make their other-worldy presence known only at far odder times in one’s life, you know. I suppose I’m fortunate that I drew Hiram from the spirit guide hiring pool, for Moishe the Banana Slug or Sol the Lichen wouldn’t have proven nearly so psycho-therapeutic in the months to come, emphasis on “psycho.”

I sat, I grieved, I raged at the world around me until a strange but nonetheless profound thing happened. (Profound to you not so much, but to me? Well, I am, after all, the person who counts in this story. No, wait, that’s not true either. What the shit ever. I’m rambling again, but that’s not too abnormal nor is it unexpected.) But I’ll get to that in a moment.

Again, like I’ve told you, I was/am/always shall be enthralled with California. The state has geographic diversity unheard of in any other state of the country, and I don’t say that lightly. I’ve been to many if not most of the lower 48, and in spite of the desert beauty of Nevada’s Clan Alpine mountains, the surreal, luxuriant alpine lushness of Arizona’s Sedona rift valley, the rolling green hills and quaint red barns of the Pennsylvania Dutch country, the sprawling, white-picket-fenced horse ranches of the Bluegrass or the sheer mountainous elegance of costal Washington state, no other state has so much to offer as California.

Oh, and for whatever the shit it’s worth, I really don’t give two squirts of piss about Texas in reference to this rant.

For the uneducated, unenlightened who have never experienced nature’s grace in all her glory in the Golden State, I highly recommend reading Caught Inside by Dan Duane, in which he provides an eloquent, detailed history of California’s coastal geology and early settlement. That’s a good starting point, but still one must explore for oneself.

Start at the bottom. Make the drive from Yuma, Arizona, across the expanse of the southern American Sonoran Desert to San Diego. After crossing the red iron rocks and eroded sandstone monoliths of the Yuma range, you will descend into Pilot Knob Mesa, upon which ancient alluvial run-off of long-ago withered waters will lead you to the remnants of the detritus that once ran forth from the great inland sea a million-zillion years ago. There you will find the Sand Hills, perfectly white sand dunes that are home to some sort of endangered desert tortoise that plagued many a Navy training flight, countless off-roaders (apparently NOT plagued by Greenpeace and the like) and also substituted for Tatooine in Star Wars. As you pass that, you will quickly cross the ocotillo-bespotted Holtville flats (seemingly dead and dry but, in reality, amazingly diverse in terms of their animal inhabitants, goofy coyote animal spirit guides included) and proceed to the Coachella Valley—a fertile plain fed by the desalinated waters of the Salton Sea to the immediate north, itself an accidental “whoopsie” that resulted from Los Angeles’ insatiable thirst and man’s insatiable hunger for financial advancement. Here you will find waving fields of alfalfa, corn, lettuce, oranges and a sizeable portion of the nation’s produce. Like the sign says that welcomes you to the valley, this is the place “where the sun spends the winter.” And it smells like it. Agrismog sucks, incidentally, but the region is still quite compelling in an otherworldly sort of way given the stark surrounds that are defined by the Chocolate and In-Koh-Pa Mountains. Imagine stark white desert punctuated by fields of alternating shades of green, gently waving in the heat wind generated by the convection-generated roasting oven that has proven perfect for agriculture and farming in the odd, semi-surreal darkness of night (when the temperatures drop to a manageable 90 degrees or so). Odd, for sure, but oddly alluring.

Trust me on this one.

As you leave the valley, you pass one of my many home-away-from-homes—Naval Air Facility El Centro (winter home of the Navy’s Blue Angels and site of many special warfare aviation training detachments)—and then you’ll progress up the back side of the Jacumba Mountains after passing through the rising sandstone erosion of the Anza Borrego desert. Yet again, countless centuries and eons ago, water flowed freely, twisting and turning down from the mountains above in sinuey, erosive torrents, carving a landscape that looks oddly familiar, as if it’s a large-scale reproduction of the creased, leathery hands of an aged New England fisherman. Nooks, cracks and draws spread vascularly from central arroyos as the constructs stream from the high ground to the low, sandy terrain below. And even here, life abounds as small oases spring forth where ground water bubbles up from below and melt/rain water collects from above. Date Palms, Queen Palms, leafy Ocotillo, coyotes, rabbits and Yaqui bats abound.
Somewhere up those surrounding mountains, you’ll transition across climactic moisture boundaries and in Pine Valley at roughly 5,000 feet above sea level, you will depart the scrubby chaparral for thick pine forests. If you were to venture north along Sunrise Highway, you’d find yourself atop Cuyamaca or Laguna mountains, at almost 7,000 feet, often shrouded in clouds or covered in snow.

In fact, people often ask why I love California so much, particularly given That Which Happened. My response is always the same, and refers directly to Laguna and Cuyamaca; “Because, on a warm Spring day, I can stand on a beach where it’s sunny and 75 and look at snow covered mountains in the background.”

Match that Texas? …I thought not.

Black bear live up here, as do deer and, in certain, sheltered areas, antelope. The air is crisp and free from the particulate hell of the Los Angeles basin to the north. Mountain bikers, goats, eagles and starry nights that seem more like projections from planetariums than the mystical reality of nature abound up here. A long, lung scorching bike ride up Sunrise Highway through Cuyamaca Meadows over Laguna Summit and back down to Pine Valley is hardly a match for a single night spent atop Stonewall mountain with the love of one’s life, a cozy set of adjoining down sleeping bags and a bottle of cheap red wine.

Leave behind the esoteric dreamy memories of past experiences, however, and continue down the hard reality of life and Interstate 8. Somewhere near the urban sprawl of Alpine, you’ll start your descent into San Diego proper, which is still blessed by vistas with mountains and forested valleys (and $500,000+, 50-year-old fixer-upper houses) until at last you pass through Mission Valley along side the San Diego River to Ocean Beach, and my/our home. And that is only Southern California, and a cursory glance at best.

I won’t belabor the point, but go north from there and you’ll encounter the quaint small townishness and surf Mecca of North County San Diego. Ignore Orange, Riverside and LA Counties and you’re in the Chocolate, San Gabriel and Santa Barbara mountains, far above the smog and plastic of Los Angeles in forests still filled with black bears and deer. West towards Point Conception lies the sprawling beauty of the Tejon Ranch, where alpine vistas descend to rolling, deciduously-forested meadows and eventually pass into the Central Coastal region of hilly wonderment and vineyards, north past Gaviota and Lompoc, all the way past Pismo Beach of Bugs Bunny fame and Santa Maria. You make the cut northwest of Gaviota and enter the Central Coast proper—guarded stoically and eternally by the fog-shrouded ethereal mysticism of Moro Rock--up, up the Southern Central Range to the rocky cliffsides of San Simeon, Carmel, Monterey and Half Moon Bay. Pause briefly in San Francisco, eat some fresh Ahi and squid and head north past Mount Tamalpais, past the rolling vineyards of the parallel valleys of Alexander, Sonoma and Napa and into the high country of the Northern Coastal Range, where the flora begins to resemble a cool climate rain forest and the black bears grow large and fat on berries and bee honey. North still lie the fog-shrouded seal sanctuaries near Stinson Beach and Ft Ross until you eventually lose yourself in the temperate rain forested expanses of the Lost Coast north of Arcata where the demarcation from California and Oregon are blurred by vistas of sheer cliffs, powerful waves, pods of orcas, the Trinity Alps and Torrey Pines.

…And still I’ve only taken you “coastal” on this journey of the mind. Inland, you go through several other equally distinct regions, each equally stunning. It goes on and on, and I am quite certain that nothing else within the lower 48 offers as much diversity, stunning beauty and decisive lack of really big belt buckles. Oh and lest I forget, mid-state (west to east) at the northern border with Oregon, you’ll find one of most humorous towns in the lower 48. As Steve Poltz likes to say in his song, nothing is quite as funny or quite as inspiring as the final three signs along Intersate 5, traveling up through the San Joaquin Valley, through Redding, past the hollowed-out, alien-infested (or so the rasta-natives say) majesty of Shasta, towards the Klammath border with Oregon. A tiny town separates the two states, buried deeply in the forests of the Eastern Cascades—a town that invokes hysterical laughter no matter how many times you make the drive or the flight (to Fairchild Air Force Base in your trusty H-60 Seahawk). Like Poltz quips, herein lies a tiny town of dubious but prophetic nomenclature, as the street sign says, “Weed, next three exits.”

In this particular case, on this particular day I didn’t have the luxury or the entertainment factor of weed—the town or the pastime. I had loathing and violence. Not very nice and not very fun, but the reality of my existence nonetheless. I had irrational thoughts—thoughts about hurting myself, about killing myself even, and these were thoughts that I had shared with no one since It happened. The alarming part to the rational quarters of my muddled brain was that these thoughts were growing in frequency and severity. I couldn’t stop them. Somewhere in the recesses of my right lobe, Robbie was waiving his noodly, metallic arms and bellowing forth a warning: “Danger, Joshua Green, danger!”

I knew that there was no way I could join Beth, thanks to my Jewish heritage and our definitive lack of an afterlife, although I supposed now that it could be argued that eternal paradise for a Jew was freedom for the remainder of eternity from one’s mother.

You can figure out damnation.

Nonetheless, I was not destined to join Her—Beth—and I knew it. My reasoning in stead was freedom from the pain, the agony that was with me like a terminal disease, only this one was slowly devouring the remnants of my soul. The loss of one’s soul mate, it seemed, left little in which to take solace and laid bare the inner dragon and its attendant demons that only the care and affection of a life partner can quell and quiet. In that person’s absence, it seemed, those monsters were free to run amok and reek havoc within one’s psyche. Fuckers. Suicide, I knew, was at best a temporary solution to a permanent problem, but what else was there?

Psychoanalysts are jackasses, incidentally.

I was still too caring and too responsible to plant an aircraft, for that would mean taking three more people to their graves with me. That wasn’t an option, yet I was strangely attuned to that fact that a suicide would still affect others, namely my family, hers, and our shared friends. Still, at that point, those issues mattered little even if the possible death of my crewmen did.
I didn’t have the answer, but I had plenty of desperation.

So, I raged, I hated, I lamented and I unwittingly drove on to Joshua Tree, somehow drawn by a force or an echo, perhaps, of a love still viscerally real to me. This place, it seemed, still had vibrations of our courtship, the residual energy that Beth bequeathed to all around her. What a gift she had; she was infectious, both to people, places and even a toad like me. And after three hours, I ended up in Hidden Valley, sitting upon a rock, high above my car, gazing through the tears towards the west where the sun danced with a shadowy partner across the massifs of San Antonio and San Gorgonio. And I sat there with my head cocked to the side, entranced, mesmerized, tears drying and choked throat slowly opening. A strange but nonetheless funny site it must have been, the tall skinny kid in a Hawaiian shirt, cut off shorts and Chuck Tailor high tops sitting atop a Paleolithic rock of house-sized proportions, staring slack-jawed at two mountains distant in the West while the sun sank behind him.

Said one cactus to another “Hey Leroy, you see that crazy-ass white boy sitting on that rock?”

“Yup.”

“Whaddya think he’s doing?”

“Dunno, Pierre.”

“Sure looks silly.”

“Yup.”

“And sad.”

“Yup.”

“Let’s watch. This might be good.”

“Yup.”

Nope, sorry to disappoint you fellahs, no melodrama…just me, sitting there mesmorized.
A disappointed clucking sound from the left revealed a profoundly consternated looking coyote staring back with distinctive disapprobation. Alliteration and shit in my semi-lucid hallucinogenic state, I figure(d). True to form, the coyote lost interest and began licking its balls. I didn’t think there was any food nearby, so I quietly cleared my throat as disarmingly as possible. The coyote didn’t jump or start in fear, as one might reasonable expect. Quite the contrary, I was quite sure in the dusky gloom that the scruffy bastard (said out of mutual respect of course; many props Hiram) looked at me as if to ponder my intentions, its dogish eyebrows furrowed suspiciously, caught mid nut-lick. I continued to watch. The dog stopped slurping, sniffed the air slowly with its sandy brown snout high in the air, and then it snapped its head to look directly at the two imagined insulting cacti. Then it looked back at me with a decided quizzical expression of bemused puzzlement. I’m not making this shit up, I swear (why I feel compelled to swear I don’t know; you can go fuck yourself for all I care).

I shrugged my shoulders as if to say “yeah, what-the-fuck-ever, poochie” and I continued my self-absorbed yet somewhat aware descent into myself, not fully noticing the clucking sound yet again as the creature moved off into the shadows.

Night fell.

As I fell deeper into the spell of the dancing lights and the scarlet and ochre whisps of shadow and shading that defined the spurs and fingers of the San Gabriel Mountains, I noticed within an itch, a tingling that, at that moment, was indistinguishable for what it would grow to become, but was nonetheless noticeable enough that steadily I grew restless and uneasy not unlike hunger creeping up on you in the late morning. And in that moment the pain of It was not necessarily forgotten but was most certainly lessened somehow. Hope perhaps? Life maybe? I couldn’t tell at the time, but as I gazed upon the glory of nature all around me, swirling like a warm, protective shawl, I somehow felt her presence with me, reassuring me and imploring me to search deeply, to gain insight and discover myself again. Life was meant to be experienced and lived through love and interaction, not hellish self-withdrawl and denial. Self-imposed penance for nothing done wrong would not redeem happiness I heard Beth plead in my swimming head.

Live, she said quiety.

Live.

It was as simple as that.

Death or pain ceased to be answers, and in that instant, my life was saved even if I didn’t have presence or sense enough to realize it. Until then I had been on a steady downward spiral, lead by the tail slide of my soul, for if it was to become nothing short of black, then surely one’s life force couldn’t be too far behind. My mortality had been fast approaching like a runaway freight train, yet an out-of-cotnrol emotionally inspired trip to the high desert had thrown the life ring that I needed, even if I couldn’t quite grasp that moment at the time.

The coyote barked/yelped somewhere in the distant inky darkness. Oddly enough, it sounded approving.

I slept on the rocks that night, returning to my car only for a jacket, a headlamp and a Mexican blanket that I always kept in my trunk for “just in case” situations. There was no way I could have ever guessed this to be the just in case for which the goodies would come in handy. Dinner was a Powerbar and a small jug of Gatoraide; all the highly processed complex carbs and electrolytes that a desperate person needs. It was cold that night, or so I remember, but I seemed to notice little of it. In stead, I stared at the stars and the vast Milky Way until finally falling into asleep. I say into because as near as I can remember now, I had the distinct impression of falling up and away from the rocks, swept into the massive collection of stars and gasses above me, far removed from the fragility of my wrecked body down below on the sandstone. I felt the rock melt away from beneath me, and I experienced the lucid understanding that my body had transcended my willful ability to control it. As the stars swept about me, their visage changed and somehow transmuted into dirty blonde hair; hair that I remembered all too well and missed with palpable agony. I dreamed of Beth, but wasn’t sad For Once; it was good. In a strangely funny way, life in the Navy made me a lucid dreamer, a defense mechanism I suppose so that one could remain alert to man-overboards or alert launches which always seemed to happen in the wee hours of the early, early morning while at sea. Thus, I knew I was dreaming, and I knew that the images I was experiencing were little more than manifestations of my subconscious mind’s attempt to reconcile the polar spectrum of emotions that I was reeling from every hour of every day. To come to terms with one’s suffering and to eschew suicide in favor of sanity and forward progress must certainly be monumental achievements in times of duress and extreme crisis, and my mind must have been busily coming to terms with the events of the day.

Weed? Who needs weed when one is jacked on raw emotion? In stead, I saw images of Beth, always framed by the sun, always radiant, and always smiling at me. I bore witness to our years together, our shared vision, our bond. I saw images and scenes of the life we lived and the things we experienced, and I knew that I had to relive as many of them as I could in order to grieve and move forward. And, in the midst of all that, I heard her sweet voice imploring me to do so.

“Go, Silly Josh,” she said from deep within. “Go and do what you need to do to let go of the pain. That’s not how you should remember us. Not pain. Now, wake up and go.”

And shortly thereafter, the sun peaked above the Chocolate Mountains to the east and I opened my eyes slowly. I awoke that Saturday renewed in the slightest sense but, more accurately, driven to see and hear and feel some things that needed to be revisited. This, it seemed, was to be my salvation, not so much in a frenzy of self-hatred and misery, but rather in a renewed emphasis that one must remember and appreciate in order to regain momentum, inertia and, most importantly, freedom with wisdom.

In that hazy moment between the waking and sleeping world I caught one more glimpse of my dear Beth. She was smiling. I got up and shook the cold away from my limbs and away from my soul. It was a start.

Chuck Tailors might not be state-of-the-art athletic shoes anymore, but something about the archless, flat soles makes them well suited to rock climbing, and I downclimed from the rock and made for my car, a spectacle to behold for sure. Tall, goofy kid in shorts, a Marmot 3-layer Gore Tex mountaineering jacket, a bright orange rayon Hawaiian shirt and baggy khaki cargo shorts stumbling down from a rock with an armful of stuff, traipsing towards his car in one helluva hurry. I hopped in, rubbed the goobers from my eyes and started out of the park. The cacti, I’m sure, were curious and most likely slightly frustrated that they were deeply rooted to the earth, for surely whatever the goon would do next would be worth watching; and they couldn’t.

Damned shame, I suppose.

Out of the park, I stopped briefly for coffee and little chocolate doughnuts in town—my testament to the preternatural brilliance of John Belushi—and off towards Interstate 10 I raced. The 10 lead me a long way, past San Dimas, past Ontario, into LA and then eventually to Santa Monica. From there I took a right hand turn onto US1 and drove up into Malibu, past the cliffsides of Ventura County, through Oxnard and the cloned architecture of Santa Barbara to Gaviota. Approaching the southern reach of Point Conception I took a turn northwards and cut inland towards Lompoc, where the rocky seaside gave way to the wooded rolling hills of California’s Central Coast, a land where the fog is a daily occurrence and the vineyards stretch for miles upon miles. Moro Rock, Pismo Beach and Santa Maria. I raced northwards, driven while driving and stopping only for gas and fast food. The Southern Coastal Range was my destination and my target. Somewhere near Solvang I managed a brief call to my buddy Felcher, a fellow pilot from my squadron who was on duty that day. He asked where I was and said that I missed a great party the night prior in Ocean Beach. I corrected him briefly—he missed a helluva party in J Tree. Could he clear some unofficial leave through the Commanding Officer? We wouldn’t be flying the next week and I needed to get away. He paused and said sure. The CO and XO would understand, and if not, their wives would and that would be enough.

“Josh?”

“Yeah, Felch?”

“Umm, are you okay? I mean, where the hell are you going and what’s going on? You’re, um, not planning on doing something stupid are you?”

“No dude, no I’m not. Don’t worry. I had an epiphany last night, and I need start something to get past this. Trust me, bud.”

“Okay, call us alright? Call me if you need anything.”

“You got it Felcher. I will. I’ll be back by the end of the week.”

“Josh?”

“Yeah, Felch?”

“What’s an epiphany?”

“That’s what you get for going to Boat School in stead of a real college.” I snickered, then I laughed. It felt good for a change; well, at least as close to “good” as I could remember.

And with that I hung up the cell phone and sped off towards the rolling ranches east of the Hearst Estate, just south of Fort Hunter Liggett. I was bound for Lake San Antonio. I called Chuck to let him in on my plan. Four hours on the road were starting to make me question my intentions just a bit.

“Sounds like a plan, Tex,” he said. “Stick with it. Find what you need, Pal.”

Chuck was good for things like that; I was assured that he wouldn’t go all rational on me, trying to convince me to forgo my wild-hair-up-my-arse trip in lieu of “talking it out,” nor would he do something immensely stupid like calling my parents; “Hi, Mr. And Mrs. Green? Yeah, this is your son’s friend Chuck. I thought you should know that Josh is, at present, speeding north along Interstate 5 looking to have a smash-up derby with his soul somewhere north of Paso Robles. But don’t worry, he’ll be fine; after all, he drives a station wagon. But, can I have first dibs on his stuff if he checks out?”

I chuckled, because the sight of my mother spontaneously combusting yet somehow managing to beat the holy hell out of my pop was funnier than a wet willie. I hung up the cell and hit the gas.

Wildflower. What a hoot, and I’m talking about the fauna not the flora. To understand the sublimely hysterical goofiness of Wildflower, one must attend the festival, slog it out through one of the three races that weekend, listen to the reggae, and drink and party with abandon, not necessarily in that order. It was (is) the Woodstock of triathlon, complete with free love, halucenogenics, alcohol, rain, mud, and nudity—lots of nudity. Oh, did I mention that the festival also includes a series of triathlons? Now, nearing the year mark of our courtship, Beth and I have decided to ditch work, take vacation time together, pack her truck with bikes, camping gear and booze, and lite off for all points north, specifically Lake San Antonio and the Wildflower Triathlons Festival. It is early May in Southern California and we are definitively in love, using the word with reckless abandon and thinking about a future together. On this day, however, we are anticipating the nation’s best four-day, outdoor party and the three triathlons that accompany it every year.

Wildflower is an anachronistic triathlon of sorts since it’s character flies on the face of standard triathlon conventions, yet one must have a fair working knowledge of the “tri geek” set in order to understand the duplicitous nature of this race. Triathletes are, without fail, type A personalities, often given to fits of obsessive/compulsive exercise addiction such that their lives typically revolve secondarily around swimming, biking, running, and eating. Primarily, they focus on gear and toys and toys and gear, and therein lies the tragic comedy of triathlon, for no $500 hydrophobic wetsuit, no $4,000 steep angled, feather light bicycle (yes, you read that price correctly…wait for this…), no $1,000 set of extraordinarily aerodynamic bicycle wheels, no $150 set of racing flats, and no $150 pair of high speed, low drag designer sport sun glasses will make one any faster without the appropriate levels of dedication and endless hours of high quality, high intensity training in the pool, in the saddle, or on one’s feet. But that doesn’t deter us, you know, and we still willing spend sizable chunks of our yearly disposable income on the latest goodies in the hopes that by shaving one one-thousandth of a second off of our total race time will win us that most holy of holies, the elusive Ironman Hawaii age group qualifiers’ entry.

For those of you unfamiliar with the silly sport of triathlon, the “World Series” of sorts takes place every October in the laval fields of Kailua Kona, on the Big Island of Hawaii, where Madam Pele blows the hot, steamy mukluks into the faces of the hapless but oh-so-fortunate competitors. This race is where you might recall watching Julie Moss drag her limp body across the finish line in the early 1980s on the Wide World of Sports. This is the Mecca of the sport, where every triathlete no matter how much he or she denies it, secretly hopes to get some day. And this is where a limited field of less than 1,500 are allowed to compete, most securing their coveted entrance by winning first through third place in their age group at a limited number of qualifying races held throughout the preceding year. I won’t even bother to go into detail about the $300 mandatory entrance fee after you get a slot or the $1200 mandatory travel package that aspiring Hawaii Ironmen are forced to purchase.

Also, triathlons come in various shapes, sizes and flavors, from the uber silly of the Ironman distance—2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, 26.2 mile run—to the Half IM, to the Olympic distance—1.5 kilometer swim, 40 kilometer bike, 10 kilometer run—to the various shorter sprint distances. The Wildflower race that we are headed to, it just so happens, is a Half IM distance, and at the time that I’m sharing with you, is still a Hawaii qualifier, meaning that the top three male and female athletes in each age group will win slots to go to The Show. More importantly, it also means that the race organizers pay a sizeable bribe/royalty in order to ensure that they maintain their qualifier status. Did I also mention that triathlon has become a business? Lawyers and accountants, it seems, are in fact intent on ruining the world. Nontheless, Wildflower also has two other races, an Olympic and a Sprint distance mountain bike race. Whichever one chooses, however, will prove to be the race of one’s lifetime, for the swim is in Lake San Antonio, a preternaturally cold glacial lake high in the Southern Coastal Range, the bike course rolls through several thousand feet of elevation differential in the hills and valleys that are dotted with picturesque stands of deciduous trees and rolling dales of vineyards, and the run often varies on and off road, trail and foot path on equally daunting hills but also equally breathtaking. In short, it’s a real nut-busting ass kicker with a killer view.

But, that still isn’t the good part. Lake San Antonio’s nearest metropolitan neighbor is the quaint burg of Paso Robles, where my father almost shot a man when he was in the California National Guard in the early 60s, but that’s another story for another time. When I say quaint, I mean small. When I say small, I mean tiny. The nearest town of reasonable size is San Louis Obispo, about 45 minutes to the south, also and incidentally the home of Calinornia Polytechnic Institute. CalPoly, in turn and not unexpectedly, is the home of 20,000 or so college students, for in spite of their seeming random behavior patterns, young professionally-oriented adults do at least tend to congregate wherever colleges are located, even those that are nearby annual triathlon festivals. The two activities it seems—higher education and obsessive altheticism—can actually exist in the same part of the time space continuum, as opposed to tequila and bourbon, which should never actually be mixed in a drink together. Trust me. Anyhow, I digress, so please allow me to get back to the significant fact that CalPoly is essentially co-located with the race festival. That’s where the Woodstock factor comes into play.

Gidee-up.

CalPoly, for whatever reasons and via whatever means, somehow became intimately tied to Wildflower over the years, with a large part of the student body providing volunteer services in support of the races held the first weekend in May. What began as one of America’s most ass-kicking races eventually transmuted into one helluva blow out party, complete with lots of recreational drug use, copius amounts of fermented hop and barley beverages, loud reggae music everywhere, and scantily clad (if clad at all) college students serving water, fluid replacement drinks and carbohydrates for a couple thousand tri-geeks over the course of two days. Add to that the fact that there’s no hotel accommodations and that the race participants and volunteers alike have to camp out in a large state park and you essentially get a huge reefer party with a small ass-whoopin’ triathlon or three. It’s a hoot.

And, therein lies the rub, my friends, for any participant of any of the three Wildflower races has to choose whether or not he/she is there to race or to party. There is a gifted minority who have the ability to do both and so choose that path, god bless them. Beth and I are realists, however, thus we joke in her truck headed north past Santa Maria that we’re going to a blow-out party in the Central Coast mountains. Oh yeah, we’re also gonna do the Conitnental United States’ hardest Half Ironman race. Well, at least we hope to, providing our hangovers from the first night’s partying aren’t too overwhelming. Did I mention that sandwiched nicely between our two ridiculously expensive tri-bikes in the back of her sport utility vehicle is a large, white cooler filled with ice, a case of Tecate and a dozen limes? Food? That’s why God invented Power Bars.

It’s all about the beer.

We are laughing, enjoying one another, and almost forgetting that we’ll soon enduring gobs of pain for seven to eight hours when we race in two days. For now, we’re in the truck driving north through some beautiful countryside, passing pastures, rolling hills, lush forests, vineyards and quaint country towns. We stop for gas in San Louis Obispo, where it’s hot, damned hot, and that doesn’t make us too confident in the events two days hence. We buy two 2.5 gallon jugs of water and four large plastic bottles of Gatoraide. …And another sixer of beer, just in case. San Louis Obispo is strangely deserted, and we remember then that the better part of the student body has already staked out a large, bohemian camp ground just south of the race staging area. They are already no doubt loaded and naked, not necessarily in that order. We sincerely hope to join them soon.

North past San Louis Obispo, we drive through a fairly tight canyon with steep cliffs on either side of the highway. Amazingly, deciduous trees and conifers grow out from the cliffsides and abruptly make 90 degree turns, reaching longingly for the sunlight that manages to peek into the valley. At the northern end, we drive up to the top of a large box canyon and crest out into another landscape of rolling hills and wild grasses. In the sunlight, it’s positively dreamy, as if the smooth, gentle lines of the hills call to you to come run through the grass and to take a restful afternoon nap underneath a nice shade tree. We fall silent after many hours of conversation, giggling and singing along with Brother Bob on the CD player, to look about us as we continue north for the final half hour of the trip. Beth breaks the silence first.

“Cute Josh?”

“Yeah?”

“Is this what Lake San Antonio is going to be like?” This is her first year doing the race; it’s my second.

“Yeah, Sweetie, actually it is. Nice isn’t it,” I say as I turn, smile and squeeze her hand.

“Oh my. We should move here some day.”

Oh my indeed, but the latter we’ll never have the opportunity to do. I don’t know that yet.
Passing Paso Robles (that sounds like the perfect title for a Country Western song), we find clouds, lots of them in fact. As we turn off towards Lake Nacimiento—our lake’s neighbor to the south—it begins to rain. This is an El Nino year after all, wherein the earth, nature, and the currents of the Pacific have deliberately conspired to pee on us every single weekend along the Pacific Seaboard. That makes for fine skiing in the mountains, but it makes for lousy traithling (Triathle; verb; transitive; to participate in a profoundly silly but nonetheless fun sport). Our descent into the park is no less breathtaking in spite of the rain and atmospheric gloominess. If anything, the filtered, muted light somehow magnifies the zillions of wild flowers dotting the hillsides as far as the eye can see. It’s a palate of nature’s colors and it’s on display just for us.

“Oh, how pretty,” she says.

“Thus the name, I’m assuming. Reminds me of Texas in the spring,” I say.

“Really?”

“Yup, just no big belt buckles.”

“Wha…?”

“Nevermind, Sweetie.”

We enter the park after waiting in a brief line, stake out our camp ground, set up my tent (it’s stopped raining but it’s still cloudy although the temperature is quite nice at 65 degrees), and then we head for race registration and bike check in with a fortuitous stop at the beer tent first. We’re smart, college-educated professionals, you know, and we’ve remembered to bring spare water bottles on our bikes, which we have to take for safety checks and rack check-in. The bikes, not the bottles. The latter are filled with Arrogant Bastard Ale, and after we’re done we head off to cop our buzz and get into the groove of the weekend. Peter Tosh is blaring from the loudspeakers spaced all around the check-in/vendor area and college kids are running around everywhere, caked in mud and grinning like stoned college kids, which of course, they are.

“Josh, it’s a damned shame you’re in the Navy.”

“Yeah, you know, it’s times like this I realize that. Still a rule is a rule.”

We check in the bikes, get our race packets, and refill our beer bottles. The sun finally begins to break through the clouds and we stake out some ground on the lawn that sits amidst the vendor tents. Sublime is blaring through the speakers, we’re buzzed as hell, we’re at Wildflower, and we’re in love. This is good.

The race proves to be better two days later. Prior to that the park gradually fills up with other racers. Amazingly, some come equipped with tents like us—climbers/hikers/outdoor enthusiasts posing as triathletes we figure—mutually inclusive hobbies methinks. Some come in large recreational vehicles that are little more than rolling, motorized hotel rooms. They are the ones who tend to have the $4,000 + bicycles and the nifty, high zoot gear. They also look to be in the midst of mid-life crises. Still, if this experience provides respite, relief, or entertainment, then who the hell are we to judge? Dance and enjoy; come one, come all.

Others still come in cars with little more than their race gear and a Mexican blanket to spread on the ground. We’re fortunate indeed that the people who select the camp spots next to us are of the latter variety. We build a fire that night and share the Tecate. One of our campsite neighbors turns out to be a television producer from LA, and has brought a cooler of cold fruit, cheese, fresh bread and crackers. He shares that with us. Another neighbor is a musician/triathlete from the San Fransisco Bay Area, and she’s brought a 12-string guitar, upon which she plays Simon and Garfunkle songs for us while singing and entertaining requests. I answer that I’d like to hear the theme from “Shaft.” Beth pinches me and we all laugh. “That Shaft is one bad mother fu…” the producer laughs. “Shut your mouth,” we answer. “Just talking about Shaft.” It’s Wildflower, I’m with Beth. What could be better? It’s me, her, and Julio down on the school yard and then some.

The race is on Saturday, two days later. It’s typical. We’re rushed getting to T1 to set up our gear, and we quickly slather on sunscreen before donning our wetsuits while shivering in the early morning, semi-high altitude air. Beth and I are hungover, which would normally be a harbinger of bad tiding in the coming six to eight hours of pain. Given our surroundings and environment, all we can do is smile at each other while we adjust our bikes, readjust our wetsuits and waddle down to the lake’s edge. We start in separate waves but not before sharing a long, toungie kiss after the national anthem is played by the Paso Robles Senior High School Marching Band, and we actually get a round of applause from the crowd of athletes and well-wishers alike. I blush and Beth bows to the crowd, at least as best she can bow in her Quintana Roo LongJane wetsuit. Then she reaches around and pinches my rubber-clad ass.

“I love you,” I say, grinning like a teenage idiot encased in a full body condom.

“I know that, Silly,” she giggles back.

I’m going to marry this girl, this woman, and I know it every time I see her smile. I waddle into the water grinning like a Chessire Cat, waiting for my wave to start. I don’t even notice that the lake’s water is a weenie-shrinking 62 degrees. A half hour later, Beth’s wave begins the race. Our swims are good and we progress through the bike course, separate from one another but together in spirit and together with all of the other racers. I find the TV producer 35 miles into it, along side the road with a flat. I stop to see if he’s okay.

“Sure, Josh,” he says.

“Do you need me to help you with the flat tire?”

“Oh that? No, but thanks. I was just looking as that hillside. Have you ever seen so many flowers in your life?” he asks.

“You’re right.” I pause and share the moment, the energy. We’re both smiling. Then I wish him a good race and tell him that I’m looking forward to another night to drunken abandon at our communal camp site. He smiles as I remount my bike and continue towards the run transition. It’s Wildflower and it’s like this.

Remember what I said about scantily clad college students? Well, what I didn’t mention to Beth when I asked if she’d come up and race with me is that there’s something of a tradition at the eight mile aid station on the run course. All of the aid stations on the bike and run are hosted/supported by the CalPoly students, but Mile 8 is famous for its fleshiness. The kids running the water station do so stark-ass naked. It’s a hoot. What makes it even better is that the approach to the Mile 8 station is the large pasture you hit after clawing your way up a particularly steep embankment. The pasture, while part of the state park, is also grazing land for all of the local cattle herds. On this particular day, the herd’s bull is standing beside the run trail, grunting loudly and no doubt wondering what in the name of all that is spotted and uddered are these silly, spindly humans doing running so hell bent towards those goofy naked young ones. My writer’s mind can’t help but laugh. I make a mental note to remember to ask Beth what she thought of this part of the course after we’re finished, showered, and happily rehydrating with Tecate later that day. I take a paper cup of orange colored fluid replacement drink from a butt-ass naked red head girl.

“Keep going,” she implores and bounces. “You’ve only got five more miles.”

I laugh and choke on the fluid. Beth will be pleased; there are male students here too, equally clad. Or not.

Many hours later we are both lounging in the central lawn amidst the vendors, the food stands, and the other athletes, all equally festooned with silly grins, for those like us who have just finished the Wildflower long course are proud, excited, and stoned out of our gourds on endorphins, whereas the other doing the short course or the mountain bike triathlon tomorrow are nervous but nonetheless feeding off of our positive energy. It also helps that we’ve been throwing back beers. Beth finished her first Wildflower in a record pace that has become her best half-ironman time to date. She’s positively beaming. My race went well too, although nowhere near as impressive as Beth’s. We finished in 5 hours 52 minutes and 5 hours 17 minutes, her and me, respectively. We’ve already showered at the camp grounds, and now we’re pulling fuzzy fleece pull-overs from our backpacks to stave-off the evening chill as the sun sets behind the flower-covered and tree-dotted hills across the lake while the cool sounds of Common Sense set the one-love, one-peace, one-great-race tone in the background. We’re grinning and holding hands and thankful—oh so thankful—to be here together at this moment in time, sharing such a wonderful, positive experience.

“Hi,” the ranger at the entrance booth said as I pulled up that afternoon. “Park entrance fee is $5.00, $10.00 if you’d like to camp over night.”

I fished out the ten-spot and handed it through. “Is the mini-mart open?” I asked, knowing that I’d need to get some food and drink.

“Yup, down by the lake. You know the way?”

“Yes,” I trailed off a bit.

“Yes, I do. How crowded is it in there?” The road into the Lake San Antonio Park winds around to the right from the entrance booths and gets lost in the trees before passing three campgrounds before descended to the lake and the lower sites.

“Well, lessee,” he said. “It’s Friday, so that usually means that some of the CalPoly kids show up, but I haven’t seen any yet. So, basically, aside from you and me and a couple of trout fishermen, that’s about it.”

“Good, thanks, Ranger.”

“You’re welcome. Have a nice stay.”

I drove on after waiving. Nice stay? Maybe, although I doubt it more and more as the echoes and vibrations of events past become resoundingly real and thunderously loud in my head as soon as I started descending the hill down to the lake and the lower campground, and, as it was, the central area of Wildflower. The sun seemed a bit lower on the horizon, a bit more opaque as the moisture-laden atmosphere cooled and the Central Coast fog rolled in from the West. I got down to the bottom, selected a camp site close enough to the mini mart so as to minimize my walk for vittles but far enough so as to not be intruded upon by the lights and the caretakers, and I walked to the lawn and sat. The vibrations were severe, pounding noises deep within my chest that made it hard to breath and were hard to distinguish from the languid beating of my wounded heart. I briefly thought that perhaps this wasn’t a good idea, coming to this place where love was more than realized, where a lifestyle together with my soul mate had been forged. I noticed that my breathing was labored, I was sweating, and I was shivering.
And then a familiar thing happened that soothed the lump in my throat and eased the stinging in my eyes. I looked out across the lake towards the gently rolling hill on the other side, and, much to my surprise given the time of year, I saw them. Thousands upon thousands of wild flowers blowing in the late afternoon breeze. The hills were awash in subdued, sublimely intoxicating color. Nature, it seemed, grieved for winter’s harshness by decorating her splendor with the hope of life and rebirth. Nature knew more and knew better than I did, and I realized that.
Maybe, then, that’s what drew me back. I sat, lost in thought, for the next two hours while the sun slowly sank into the Pacific, far beyond the hills bordering my western side. The vibrations were still there, but not quite so violently making their presence known. Perhaps, I thought, there’s a way to learn to live with them, to move in kind and use them to help me make it through.

Hope.

The edges of the map might be marked with warnings, but the edges need not be limiting factors. Hope, then, is quite possibly born from the ashes of the experience of life. Even if that experience is a horror visited upon a body, or so I thought as I got up, walked to the mini mart for a can of Dintey Moore Beef Stew, a box of Pop Tarts and a six pack of Tecate. But, it seemed, nature also had a devilishly deviant sense of humor as if to help keep me grounded. Tecate yes, limes no--this, I guessed, was going to be an odd path to journey upon. That’s insightful, and shit, you know.

Yeah, something like that.

Sieben

“Just step up.”
I pause.
The bright, high desert sun is beating down upon me.
My heart is racing within me.
“Common. Just step up.”
I think about it, but doubtfully so.
“Joshua Green!” It was more of a command, but with a slight hint of a girlish giggle that somehow manages to bounce lightly off of the granite and sandstone rock walls around me. “Take your right foot, put it on that little jib lip and just step up.”
I start and then pause again, which isn’t helping because blood is rushing to my forearms to help my fingers maintain their death crimp on two miniscule, almost invisible projections of granite rock that wouldn’t even be visible from more than five feet away. I’m inches away and my mind stalwartly refuses to believe that either one offers enough purchase to help support my weight while I “just step up” to the next equally and stupidly small foot hold. God bless Boreal and their proprietary rubber soled climbing shoes. They’re sticky. My fingers, not so much.
Presenttly, I’m about two thirds of my way up a climb sardonically called Road Rash in Joshua Tree National Monument. Joshua Tree is a breathtakingly beautiful park located in the high desert of Southern California’s Mojave, located somwhere north and east of the sprawling hellish, shallow expanse of the LA Basin. To the south, the Chocolate Mountains separate it (and me and my shaky forearms) from the upper Morongo Valley and the Salton Sea flats that lead down to Palm Springs. To the west are the mountain resorts of Big Bear and Arrowhead, where the desert gives up its aridity to the fragrant pine forests of the San Gabriel Mountains. To the north and east, the world effectively ends, turning sandy, brown, ugly and eventually leading to Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico or Texas.
Nuff said.
I’ve heard tell, but have yet to confirm, that the earth turns green again somewhere near the fabled, rumored land known as Arkan-sauce, although I remain skeptical.
But Joshua Tree is strangely beautiful. Large clumps of granite rocks that look like huge piles of boulders form interesting citadels of shade in the surrounding desert, where enormous and ancient Joshua Tree cacti point their middle fingers upwards towards the heavens as if to say “Thanks, God. Thanks a shit-ton for making these goofy-ass bipeds come climb rocks in my scenic wonderland. We need these polluting undulates like we need property developers and/or rectal polyps, but then I repeat myself.”
God doesn’t often listen to Joshua Tree cacti, at least I don’t think so.
The climb I’m pausing on is a mere 5.9 rating—a low intermediate rating in the parlance of rock climbers and nothing worthy of so much trepidation and hesitation. I’m normally a solid mid-range 5.10 climber in the gym, but as any rock nerd will tell you, the gym, like all man-made artificial realities, is a piss poor substitute for the real world. The cacti, meantime, like Beth, are mocking me. In this case, Road Rash is so named because of the quality of granite that forms the building-sized Paleolithic boulder that the climb is on. All climbs are named—an honor generally bestowed upon the first person to standardize the route—and many if not most have simple, adolescent names that reek of youthful exuberance and the hubris of young adulthood. Names like Poo-In-Your-Britches, Ass Whooper, Lurking Fear and Butt Munch come to mind. Thus, Road Rash is a more subtle reference to the possibilities offered therein. You can easily hike up the back side of Road Rash to set your anchor atop. You can then simply toss the rope back down, hike down and around, and set about to climbing the Rash while your partner belays from below. It’s a simple top rope problem. No, really, that’s what the guide book says. Guide books never lie.
Mostly.
The problem, it seems, is that 100 million years of nature haven’t yet managed to dull the infinitesimally small and countless crystalline granules of the granite extrusion that eons of water flow eroded to look like a large boulder. The silly bitch has the texture of rough grit sandpaper. While that makes for good friction against the sticky rubber soles of climbing shoes, it also makes for not-so-good friction against one’s exposed skin should one slip and tumble down. The danger on this climb is not from death due to falling or cranial avulsion or anything quite so easy and/or pleasant. Rather, it’s the excruciating flaying of one’s flesh while scraping and grinding against the wall as the belayer’s anchor catches. Granite when polished makes for grand countertops, but it enjoys its revenge against us for such an inglorious use by shredding the skin off of goof-ball climbers. Thus the climb’s name: Road Rash. The cacti watch with their eternal patience, no doubt hoping the goofy kid, namely me, puts on a good show.
I pause again. Beth at least, doesn’t want my blood. At least I hope not. She’s impatient, but she won’t say or show it. God bless her. She—like all climbers of merit—secretly cheers for others in the hopes that they will not only send the climb (send—verb, transitive: climber parlance for kicking rock ass and, more importantly, not flaying the flesh from oneself) but will also prove the line up the route, thus providing the visual cues as to where to go when it is her turn, clues known in climbing lingo as “beta” (beta—noun: climber parlance for “you go first and see if this silly thing makes you bleed”). I’m doing a poor job providing said beta, but my forearms are looking rather Popey-esque. Neato.
“You’re doing great, Josh. Take your time and step up when you’re ready. I’ve got you.”
Thanks, my love. Do you, by chance have a new set of forearms for your man? Now I’m looking around in desperation. There’s a philosophy in outdoor climbing that you have to develop trust in your shoes. Whereas the rock gym provides man-made, plastic and appliqué-textured walls upon which to schmear one’s shoes, the great outdoors provides an endless variety of conglomerates, granites and other crystallized stone alloys upon which high tech, modern rock shoes/boots/slippers gain incredible purchase. A skilled climber, in fact, can virtually dance up most 5.10a climbs and less without so much as the occasional balancing hand hold. Tragically, I am no such climber, and as I ponder my next step up (it’s all in the feet, you know) while my forearms and calves prepare to rip free from their confining tendons and ligaments such that they might bludgeon me to death in their utter frustration at my lack of spinal fortitude, I look around in even more desperation.
I know that large cacti 100 yards to the left is positively convulsing in laughter, at me rather than with me, I might add. I also notice a rather conspicuous coyote, looking equally bemused and apparently rolling its beady eyes at the stupid biped. Great, the flora and fauna are all friggin’ critics, it seems.
I’m hoping to find a nice hidden ledge upon which to rest for a spell. That’s the silly thing about granite rock. The crystals somehow align themselves so as to form a natural camouflage of sorts. It’s almost as if about a zillion years ago nature said to herself, “Self, someday there will be this horridly dorky critter named Mankind who will do stupid things like bungee jumping and rock climbing and NASCAR Racing and Really Big Belt Buckle Wearing. Therefore it’s my duty if not altogether my holy responsibility to design things such as tensile breaking points, gnarly, sharp granite, redneck alcoholism and lightening to take care of such problems lest this foolish creature destroy my lovely planet.” I always thought that she was a bitch, even if I envy her sardonically dark sense of humor.
No ledges though. And, much to my chagrin and annoyance, a spry, lithe little climb monkey has mounted the rock base beside Beth and proceeds to free climb the rock as if he’s dancing his way across a ballroom floor. Granted I’m a hefty 175 pounds—positively gargantuan by sport climbing standards—but this little elfin prick weighs a buck twenty at best. And he’s free soloing, which means he’s got no ropes, no anchors, no belays. And he zooms right up to the point that’s taken me over 30 minutes to haul my lame ass up to, huffing and puffing. He’s not breathing, the freakish little rock vampire, his blonde locks flowing down from his oh-so-chic poneytail. In a little over a minute he’s equal to me.
“Gutentagen.” How ever the shit you spell “hi” in Kraut.
Great, I think, the master race.
“You are delaying too long, meun freund. Just stepenze oop.”
And with that, he deftly dances his way up and over the next lip about ten feet above me and disappears high above. This is, no doubt, Lil’ Rock Hitler’s warm-up for the 5.14b he’s going to try to redpoint later (redpoint—noun: climbing parlance for “don’t even think about it Josh”). And suddenly I become enraged. My pituitary and adrenal go to work and I lunge forward and upwards with a newfound strength that propels me towards his imagined foot, which I imaginatively grab and hurl him to his death below. In stead I find the next hidden ledge, this one a generous one inch deep and haul myself up another five feet.
“See, Honey,” she giggles from below, “all you had to do was just step up.”
Did she call me “Honey?” Dunno, because as quickly as it hit me, the adrenaline goes away and suddenly I’m shaky again.
“Hey Josh?”
“Yeah, Beth? Just taking another little breather.”
“Did you talk to Gunther?”
“Wha?…”
“That guy who just sent beside you?”
“Oh, him.” My arms are resting and my calves are starting to shake now.
“Yeah, the German guy. Gosh, he was sure cute.”
Sonofabitch. Surge number deuce and suddenly I’m positively sprinting my way up the rest of Road Rage. Either I climb this bitch, I fall and skin myself silly, or I catch the prick and grind his uber-mensch face into the granite. And then I’m on top, chest heaving, forearms pumping and belayer hysterically giggling down below.
“Off belay,” she laughs, and I laugh too. It worked.
Okay, let’s consider the score. She asked me to a long weekend at Joshua Tree, just the two of us in a two person tent. She called me Honey. She used jealousy as a means to get something she wanted, namely me off this stinking route, presumably so that she can climb some before we return to Hidden Valley Campground, our tent and, most importantly, our cooler of Tecate beer. Hmmm, this could prove to be a promising start to a glorious weekend. Now I’ve just got to down hike off of this pig of a rock with legs made of warm jello. Nice. But Beth waits below, and that’s motivation enough.

One would think that the American punk rock movement of the early to mid-1980s was predicated on anger, angst and hatred. All I wanted was a Pepsi and such. As opposed to the music genre’s origin in post-60’s England where the thematic message was one of arrogance combined with obnoxious anti-social behavior festooned with really skinny neck ties, the American movement that came of age during the first Reagan Administration (ironically enough, the same time as me) seemed far more angry and aggressive than it’s oh-so-gitchy-anti-establishment roots. It’s simple, really. Compare the Sex Pitsols with anything by Black Flag, the Dead Kennedys or the Meatmen. Sure, Sid might have had that whole self-mutilation, kill the chica thingy going, but can anything he and the lads did really compare with “We’re The Meatmen And You Suck?” What did John Rocker possibly have on T. Boone? Did the entirety of the Buzzcocks lineup weigh-up to the same beefy standard of Hank? Nope.
Don’t get me started.
More importantly, don’t get me wrong. I’m not goofing on the ancestral roots of the seminal musical genre of the 1980s. For the record, the Big Hair Metal movement was not seminal. Semenal perhaps. Glitzy and glammy definitely, but not seminal. Winger will fall into obscurity as will, with any luck, EnoughZEnough. Bad Religion, Husker Du, the Ramones and Oingo Boingo, however, endure. Thank the powers that be for that. Yes, we’ve already hashed through my monotonous lifestyle and upbringing, and yes, we’ previously discussed my nonsensical ravings on Kiss, Rollins and my musical meanderings. Frankly I don’t expect any of you to agree with me or, more importantly, to understand. This is MY story after all. If you don’t like it, suck up the amount you’ve read, chalk it up to the opportunity cost of doing something else with your time other than rotting in front of the idiot box, and put the story down. Go ahead. Better yet, you could do yourself a favor and listen to the brilliance of “Chemical Warfare” or “Clean Sheets.” Think about the sublime message contained in one sentence, so much said with such profound economy: “Clean sheets mean a lot, for a guy who sleeps on the floor.” Get it? Read it again, slam back a quadruple uber super mega late, throw down a machaca burrito or two and listen anything by Descendants or Fear or Mojo Nixon or the Beatfarmers.
Nevertheless, the object lesson contained herein is that the American Punk Rock movement is/was not about violence. The latter was a byproduct of tight-assed, no-hair-having, swastika-wearing goons who glommed onto the subject matter. The material itself was not about hate or violence, self-hatred maybe but not about hurting others.
For a while, a long while, you know, I was all about violence, both internal and external. It occurred none too long after IT happened. For that period of time, violence consumed my soul, my essence and my purpose of being. Kind words and deeds by benevolent strangers on Fiesta Island notwithstanding, most of my time was spent, either waking, sleeping or breathing in a constant state of rage. Most of the time it was silent, a pent-up aggression that led to countless waking fantasies that included torture, beatings and occasionally evisceration. I was able to focus that inward violence, and my work productivity soared. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when appropriately motivated and when you have nothing to go home to.
Unfortunately, sometimes my anger took the form of naked, raw, out-in-the-open rage that seethed forth until I had to let it out. I always felt it coming, mind you, and I was typically astute enough to hop in the car immediately in order to drive somewhere to vent. Mostly I spent my wad in the car, screaming until I was horse and often banging the steering wheel until the entire column shook with each blow. In retrospect, I cannot fathom how I didn’t have an accident or lite-off my airbag. There’s a nice endorsement for my car, my coping mechanisms not so much.
More often than not, the rage hit on my way home from Arcadia. It’s funny, really, because I would have thought myself completely spent after another Friday night sitting beside her headstone, carrying on conversation with and declaring my love for someone far beyond my reach. Like darkness oddly seeping and oozing from an open door into a lit room, I could often feel the rage flood into my soul as I realized that I would never again hear her lovely, girlish voice nor ever again feel the brush of her soft blonde hair against my cheek as she hugged me goodbye every morning before I went to work.
The dragon would growl, roar, recoil and attack. It would typically build, gradually at first and then faster and more chaotically until I inevitably found myself somewhere at the side of the road in the middle of the night, lost on a side street off of Interstate 15 in the Inland Empire screaming, physically screaming, standing beside my car until I thought for sure my head would explode or my heart would rupture. I screamed and I screamed and I screamed. And it would always end the same too. Me huddled at the side of my car, engine still running and radio still blaring some sort of fast tempo’ed American Punk Rock. The coyotes that always seemed to linger just beyond the edge of ambient light, I’m sure, wondered who the insane biped was who was shrieking into the darkness of the night and pounding his foreheard into the dirt, for they, or it, were/was always there, staring with odd intensity as I played out my weekly passion. And there I would kneel, worshiping at the altar of angry, violent realization of lives lost, until at last my thoughts would return to the living and I would hear her voice telling me how foolish the goofy Jewish kid from Texas must look, Ramones blaring “Somebody Put Something In My Drink” while his forehead oozed blood. “Get up, Sweet Josh,” she’d implore within my aching head. “You’re very sweet, but this is foolish. My husband should not be sitting in expensive dirt on the side of the frontage road off of I15 at 3 a.m. on a Friday night.” I never listened to her in those moments.
As always, though, the sobs eventually slowed and finally stopped. Empty, no more gas in the tear tanks. And then I would begin the long drive home to Ocean Beach, hoping that I didn’t get pulled over by the California Highway Patrol for drunk driving (which I wasn’t) or for wholesale self-pity (guilty as charged). The violent thoughts, however, remained.
Thus, it came to pass that during a rare daytime rage that on-set while I was driving to Arcadia rather than from, I kept driving. I got on the 60 to the 210 until I joined the 10, upon which I drove east until I passed the huge windmill power farm and made the offramp up, past the Morongo Valley up and into Joshua Tree. And somehow, the rage, the violence and the profound sadness subsided as I watched the shadows of the boulder cities grow long in the setting sun of the high desert sky. In the distance, little points of light became visible as camp fires lit in Hidden Valley and the other sanctioned fire-safe areas. The multiliths of the San Gabriels to the west grew into large, dark masses with a hint of ochre in the sky behind them. And the rage subsided. Joshua Tree, it seemed, was a place of peace, a place that her ghost and I could both enjoy. It was truly sublime, and the tiniest inkling of hope crept into my tabernacle of hatred, and for a moment the hatred subsided. But I was still without her, and while Joshua Tree had soothed the fire within, the park nonetheless reminded me of what had been, the promises of love and friendship, and the stark loneliness of the high dessert took me back to that trip where I had bested Road Rash and forged memories with my soul mate. Memories and experience, after all, are the only things that we truly posses.

Five hours later it’s night time and Beth and I are sitting around a fire we’ve built in the approved fire pit that the National Park Service provides for campers. Now, if only the NPS would also provide kegerators full of Dos XX Lager. Still, we’ve got a lot for a last minute camping trip to Joshua Tree. The park is frequented nearly all year long, save for the hottest months of late summer. People come from all over the country, but mostly from California, Arizona and Nevada to climb, to hike, to mountain bike or perhaps to simply get away from things for a while in order to commune with Nature as a means to get in touch with oneself. Me? I’m hoping to get more in touch with Beth.
Now, lest you brand me a dog, a maggot or a player merely in quest of a quick piece of ass, I need to qualify a few things about myself. You see, in spite of all of my prior ramblings about normalcy and the Really Big Belt Buckle/neo-punk doldrums of Josh’s life, I was never—never ever—a player. I was by most standards a late bloomer, not really dating until midway through high school, and even then favoring the outcast girls. While they were the antithesis of pure punk, I nonetheless dug the goth girlies with a passion. Something about pasty pale, morose girls dressed in black and festooned with far too much black eyeliner finally piqued my curiosity in the fairer and, in this case, significantly more neurotic sex. Even then, however, I was anything but a player. Sex happened (as it often does at that age), and it was awkward and foolish and messy (as it often is). There wasn’t nearly as much animal passion as I had been lead to expect after years spent watching late night soft core pornography on Cinemax. I dabbled in it from my junior year of high school onwards, but more as an occasional pastime rather than an adolescent obsession. It’s often said that it’s better to be lucky rather than good; tragically I was neither. Player? Not on your or my life.
College? Yeah, I dabbled in “it” there too, but I seemed to spend more time draining the keg and sleeping off the after effects in-stead of chasing skirts. Flight school? That is, ostensibly, a target rich environment, yet I was busy immersing myself in things like the Federal Aviation Regulations Part 91, or Vertical S-1 instrument patterns rather than partaking of Pensacola’s seemingly endless supply of southern belles all searching for Navy husbands. Whereas “An Officer and a Gentleman” might have been geographically misplaced, the cliché of Navy town girls hunting for aviator husbands was still true. Fortuitously, I was skilled at avoiding them. Besides, P’cola is in reality the other LA—Lower Alabama—and the girls there, much like those in Texas, were into Really Big Belt Buckles. I was into Hawaiian shirts. The two don’t readily mix except in fission/fusion explosions often resulting in bar room brawls.
That’s another story.
Anyhow, I finished my purgatory sentence there and moved to Southern California—the Green ancestral homeland. What I found shocked, amazed and delighted me. Here the women were natural, deeply tanned, definitively athletic and eschewed anything relating to line dancing, mullet tossing or Really Big Belt Buckles. Still, I was anything but a player, much to Chuck’s eternal disappointment. I was loath to “jump on the grenade” on his behalf when we went out hunting in pairs. How does one explain at the end of the date, when one’s partner has hooked up and departed, that one was really only talking to the other girl in order for the guy friend to hook-up with chica nombre dos? One doesn’t when you’re Josh Green, although on a rare occasion I was surprised to be told “it’s okay, I don’t mind, can I spend the night with you anyway?”
Okay, I might not have been a player, but I wasn’t daft. Sex is still nifty no matter what, and it’s even better when it’s with somebody other than myself.

But I digress. Like I was saying, at this point it’s not my goal necessarily to hook up and have sex with Beth. The stirring in my naughty bits aside, I am as content to hold her hand as I am to kiss, and both seem to elicit the same response down under. In stead, I’m simply looking for an excuse to get a little closer to her, to establish This and Something Special and perhaps even Exclusive, although to tell the truth, I’ve been exclusively hers since that first evening at the rock gym. Great, she’s turned me into a sap. Love, perhaps?
Our campground is fairly nice as far as Joshua Tree campgrounds go. By that I mean that there’s a paucity of large-fanged tarantulas, which I always figure to be a plus on most dates, and to this point nothing has exploded nor have any flesh eating zombies tried to feast on our brains—also things that benefit dating decorum. So I figure I’ve got that going for me. In addition to that, we’ve managed to snag a Hidden Valley camp site that has a fire pit and a fresh water spigot. Fires, by the way, are typically disallowed at J Tree, no doubt due to the extensive lobbying by the cacti and the gila monsters. But, since we were intuitive enough to play hookie from work and come to J Tree on a Wednesday rather than the weekend, we’ve found ourselves alone in the beautiful desolation of the high desert. Hidden Valley is mostly ours tonight, and in the distance we can see the camp fires of a few other mid-week climbers, all no doubt delighted by their/our collective decision to ditch work in favor of the grandeur of nature. Remember what I said before about California? It’s all true. Texas not so much.
I’ve brought with us a large cooler, lots of camping gear, a pair cold weather North Face sleeping bags for the two of us, one tent (an important point when one is on a camping date), food, a case of Mexican beer, a couple of Mexican blankets, two Crazy Creek camping chairs that can also be used as bivy pads under the sleeping bags and a portable stereo including several Kiss and Bob Marley CDs. What I didn’t bring were condoms (remember, I’m not a player but I am a realist), Cheeze Whiz (contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t have a purpose in every occasion) or extra sleeping bag pads.
That last point might seem somewhat obscure, particularly compared to the sublime nuances of Cheeze Whiz, so please allow me to explain. The thing is, it’s generally thought that a person camping in cool or cold weather should have no less than two inches of padding between their sleeping bag and the ground. The issue isn’t one of cushion; rather, it’s one of insulation, for without a sufficient amount it gets bone-numbingly cold at night even in a 0 degree sleeping bag. And therein lies my brilliance, or so I think. It’s going to get very cold tonight at Joshua Tree, perhaps as low as 30 degrees. I didn’t bring enough insulating pads for both of us, but I did bring those blankets which I plan to spread on the floor of the SINGLE tent I brought, after which I intend to suggest we put our sleeping bags so close that we’ll be touching in order to share our warmth. See? I’m not a player, but I am a devious, sneaky little bastard.
I put a CD in, Kiss’ “Smashes, Thrashes and Hits” (one has to pack judiciously when being devious), I pop us a couple of Dos XX Lagers and I cut two slices of lime while Beth cooks the weenies that she’s skewered on two sticks over the fire. The first song, humorously enough, is “Let’s Put the X in Sex.” I blush and it’s good that it’s dark.
“Hmm. Interesting choice in music, Josh.” She’s grinning in the fire-light’s dancing rhythm and blushing too, but I can’t see the latter. I hear a coyote howl in the distance as I look up to see Beth’s award winning smile.
“What?”
“The Kiss, I mean. Is one of those for me?” she points in the fire’s glow at the two beers that I’m holding.
“Nope.”
“What?”
“Actually, I was going to put these out on a rock over there to satisfy Quetsapoochie—the ancient tarantula god—so that we won’t be bothered by creepy crawlies in our sleep tonight. Well, that and I figured on double fisting for a while or at least until you get my weenie cooked.”
“Okay, Flyboy, I’ll cook your weenie alright, but I also guarantee that it’ll be all shriveled and blackened. Not much good between two buns, you know.”
“Whoa. That’s a pretty convincing argument Beth.” I hand her a beer.
“Quetsapoochie?” she smiles as she takes it.
“Yeah, well, that’s my poetic license again. ‘Sides, it sounded good on the spur of the moment, donchathink?”
“Something like that.” She says warmly. “Now about this song….”
“I thought you liked Kiss.” The coyote howled again.
“Oh, I do, but I’m curious about your choice in music, Josh. Incidentally, I don’t think the wildlife approves.”
I take a drag on my beer. Hopefully this sounds convincing. “I had to pack lightly and couldn’t bring a ton of CDs. This seemed a good choice.”
“Uh-hu. I might believe that. But I don’t.” The coyote howled yet again. “She most certainly doesn’t.”
She smiled again and I blushed again. Paul wailed his innuendo. Vinnie Vincent wailed the guitar (this was post-Ace Kiss, you know). Thanks guys.
“Nice try, though, Flyboy. How about this in stead? Let’s play ‘Let’s put the T in Tequila?’”
And with that she produced a small bottle of Sauza and a shaker of salt from her backpack. “You cut the limes and then we’ll do a couple of shots, but we’d better hurry before your weenie shrinks. ‘Sides, this should help us warm up.”
Trust me. Believe me. There isn’t anything shrinking on me at present. And I’m positively on fire.
Two shots go down quickly and we chase with our Dos XX. Joshua Tree incidentally sits at about four and-a-half thousand feet above sea level. The air is arguably rarified here, but I think I can make a safe and fairly convincing argument that the ozone and pheremones that Beth and I are oozing are displacing more than enough oxygen to help speed the liquor on its way. She pours another shot, cuts a slice of lime and sprinkles some salt on her hand.
“Come here Josh.” I kneel in front of her. She holds her hand to my mouth. “Suck.” It’s a command that I obey. My naughty bits feel heavy. “Drink.” Another command as she lifts the shot glass to my mouth. The fire in my gut hardly matches what’s down below. “Suck.” God bless this woman; she puts the lime backwards in her mouth and leans into me. Again, I do as commanded and her tongue pushes the lime into my mouth following closely behind. For a very brief second I enjoy the beauty of the moment, our mouths locked together, her hands pulling my head to hers while her fingers run through my hair. And then she somehow knocks the lime slice down the back of my throat and I choke. Literally. And hack and cough and probably turn a bright shade of crimson although it’s hard to see in the fire’s glow.
At least she has sense enough to whack me hard on the back, and I spit up the lime slice, which lands in the nape of her fleece pullover somewhere in the region of her breasts. She’s laughing hardily and I can’t help but join her. The coyote, I swear, is also laughing in the distance.
The other reason I was never a player? I’m a clutz and a goon. This entire scene is sooo Josh the Toad.
“You’re weenie’s on fire, Josh,” She laughs.
It’s still not the only thing on fire. Trust me. “Yeah, well, you got your boobies wrapped about my lime, Beth.”
“So it is. So it is,” she giggles. “Maybe if you’re a good boy I’ll let you go a huntin’ later. In the meantime, let’s eat that weenie.”
Somehow, someway, in that moment I miraculously manage to not spontaneously combust, melt into a gelatinous puddle of goo and/or explode. I’m not a player, but I’m playing well enough. Perhaps sincerity has something to do with it.

APIS6

Flash forward with me, back to the closer-to-now rather than the pleasant summer dream time of evenings past with a beautiful woman who would habitually alternatively either call me Tex, Cutie or by my given name.
It—she—was a reality that was defined by the lightness of being and happiness of the soul. She was a warm ray of sunlight, a vibrant flower bloom, a brilliant sunset in the ocean-sky as the sun leaves the day behind on a warm summer beach. She was the green flash; all elusive but enthralling while briefly experienced. It was short lived period in my life. Way too short, and while it had profound impact and the ripples in the pond that it started have yet to fully spread from shore to shore, I nonetheless cannot linger too much there lest the emotions overwhelm my defenses and the tempestuous waves of horrific cataclysm set the gunwales of my meager defenses awash. I nearly foundered last time, and it’s my hope to serve Her memory by being brave and strong and able to cope with all things living having taken to heart the lessons that she so lovingly and selflessly imparted on me during our existence together.
Yeah, whatever. Something the fuck like that. Wine is fine, liquor might be quicker, but a bullet to the forehead stops the pain permanently.
I’ve thought about it, believe me I have.
Regardless, I cannot stay there. I’ve said that; I’m repeating. I know the all-too-familiar sound of my mantra of these past months. It’s a survival issue, you see.
Thus, we find ourselves somewhere else, although still in San Diego. It’s closer to now, farther from then. I’m back at work, slowly rebuilding. I’m racing again, and training, and seeking the solace of endorphins and the emancipation of pain. Am I really living? I doubted it then as much as I do now, but it was a start, and all things must begin somewhere, even the Rebuilding Aftewards.
Beth would have wanted that.
So, I buy new running shoes and take intricate care of my bike. I run, swim, bike, lift, and, most importantly, consciously remember to breathe in each moment of every day. Baby steps and shit.

I am on my bike. I am in the water. My soul might have been drowning, but my cognitive abilities remain acutely aware of everything around me, as if in my death throws I was granted preternatural omnipresence and clarity. Here are my thoughts from that time.

The edges of the map of the human condition are, unfortunately, marked with a simple, ominous warning:

Here there be idiots.

Tragically, there are many, so many of us who fall prey to that bitter, cynical law, and I’ve been no exception. Efforts to the contrary be damned, I find that my behavior has often been less than what is expected of me by nature, by my friends and by myself. One can easily play the nobility of loss such that you ostensibly become the better person, forged anew in the crucible of agony. It’s never quite so romantic, however, and time, if anything, serves only to remind us that we are a faulted critter indeed. It’s a sad, sad testament to the frailty of humanity that the weaknesses of the soul that can spread like cracks in a windshield. I discovered how stark things can be on this day even if the storm had already passed.
It was Thursday and Memorial Day Weekend was fast approaching. I decided to start it a wee bit early since I still wasn’t back on the flight schedule per the Flight Surgeon’s suggestion to my Commanding Officer, my CO. I couldn’t blame Fist, the doc, really, since he was charged with the heavy task to being both doctor and psychologist to our squadron. If he said I wasn’t ready to strap-on an airplane, then he was most likely right. After all, it wasn’t just my ass and a $20 million aircraft if my distraction caused me to put it in the water, since my heart-sick distraction would also take three other people to the bottom. Major trauma equates to no flying.
What else is an aviator to do? Play hooky, that’s what. So I thought to strap on my bicycle in stead. The race season was in its infancy for the year and the events of the past year had left me bedraggled, beleaguered and bereft of the fitness—emotional and physical—that I was accustomed to. I had lofty goals that included at the very least my first Ironman and an Eastern Sierra summit or two.

Mere survival? Notsomuch.
I took advantage of the leeway offered me by the CO and afforded me by my band of brothers and sisters; my squadron. I took a personal day, slept in, showered lazily and savored a bagel and a steaming mug of the sacred juice before donning my Coolmax and Spandex. It was warm and sunny—a grand day indeed to spin the gears and knock the dust off my bike, my quads and my rattled sense of reality alike.
I headed out of Ocean Beach along Sunset Cliffs Boulevard, across the San Diego River bridge, pausing only briefly to look at the fog swirling like a gray, opaque wall not even 500 feet from me, threatening to engulf my corporal presence in the same cold, wet funk that pervaded my soul.

“No, don’t linger here,” I thought. “Keep charging ahead. It’s the only way through.”

Typical aviator’s stubborn resolve. I blazed through the traffic, pumping and spinning, turned right onto Ingraham Drive and started around Mission Bay towards Fiesta Island, into the bright sun light.
Here it was warm for a change and the air pollution courtesy of Los Angeles was casting a strangely alluring hue over the city, whose downtown was plainly visible to the immediate south and towards the ocean too, which lay to the west of the bay. In short, it was a perfect day for ditching work, ditching the burden of Everything Else, and for seeking the solace of a Softride Powerwing 650 triathlon bike in resplendent banana yellow. I felt noticeably lighter until, that is, I turned onto Fiesta Island—a man-made garbage heap turned overnight beach bonfire spot in the middle of Mission Bay—and cruised along the rough pavement to the second hidden cove beyond the screaming of the seagulls and the screaming of the Jet Skis alike.
I noticed as I rode along that people with recreational vehicles and campers and station wagons were beginning to stake out and claim portions of the shoreline in preparation for the coming long weekend. Fiesta Island allows bonfires and overnight camping. In fact, the entrance road closes at sunset, sequestering the campers and rabble-rousers who take keen advantage of that fact and turn the Island into a festive albeit debaucherous testament to pagan drinking and screwing rituals that somehow have grown to accompany America’s holiday in supposed tribute to its fallen heroes.

Some things are best not understood fully, you know.

Families were gathering with cars, personal watercraft, tents, food, and music every 50 yards or so. What caught my attention, however, was a single car parked inconspicuously between two widely spaced family tribal units. As I rode by, I noticed the car’s apparent owner: a very large woman, sitting on a beach towel in the sand beside the car’s open door. She was sitting Indian style with a hunched back and a down-turned head, and every so often she would languidly throw a dog toy of some sort into the water for her chocolate lab to fetch. What really struck me in the brief instant was the combination of her posture, indicative of utter defeat, combined with her gaze, which was pointed about a thousand yards beyond her feet, through the sand and deep into the earth. She was extremely obese, so much so that health problems were a “when” rather than an “if,” but the most striking and halting aspect of the scene before me was the look of profound sadness and loneliness on her face.

She was fat. It was Memorial Day Weekend. She was alone—most likely again.

And that’s what got me. Out of the sun and back to the darkness.
Her dog didn’t seem to mind so much, though, as dogs never judge based on looks, further proof that they are in fact a far nobler species than we. It charged repeatedly into the water, retrieved the fetch toy, and returned it to her with a wagging tail, an ear-to-floppy-ear grin and plenty of gratuitous licking and furious body wiggling. It was happy yet she still sat there staring through her feet and the sand into the depths of inner space.

She was fat. It was Memorial Day Weekend. She was alone—most definitely again.

Mind you, I noticed this in a rather short space of time as I approached, slowed briefly and rode by. Time compression, the phenomena is called. Still, somehow I managed to take it all in, perhaps thanks to my heightened senses at the time. I don’t know. Several hundred yards later I slowed, stopped and straddled my bike while I thought about what I had just seen as several things occurred to me. I shivered in the cold of my heart.

First, in spite of all of the injustices and prejudices that still exist in this land, I think that none are as simply mean spirited as our institutional ostracizing of the obese. Nothing is worse in our fluffy, silicon and collagen implanted society than being fat, except being fat in SoCal where the fluffy silicon and collagen implanted live in droves, gorging themselves upon the utter shallowness of pop culture and nearly impossible unnatural standards of so-called physical beauty.

(My Beth was beautiful—stunningly so in every neo-classic sense of physical standards. And it was all natural, all her. But it was that which defined the facets of her inner diamond that showed the true fire within that shone so brightly in her. It’d be romantic indeed to presume that so many of the glam pop-culture elite of the LA Basin would have stood in awe of such light, but that ultimately gives those fuckers far too much credit wherein self and situational awareness are concerned. Fools, all of them.)

Second, I came to the clear conclusion that we as a nation are the loneliest people on the planet, a strange paradox given our undisputed lead in instantaneous communications technologies and voluminous information exchange.

Combine the two, I rationed, and life—those of others and not just mine—must be pretty bleak in spite of our best efforts to convince ourselves of otherwise. We construct vast walls and chasms to separate us from each other emotionally and intellectually, and then we develop artificial means to re-establish communications provided, of course, that those communications are conducted only at our convenience and only to our liking. I stared at her a little bit longer and then sped away on my bike, intent on putting the scene behind me that I might get on with my day and not be overwhelmed by the vast consequences of my realization. More darkness I most certainly did not need, I figured.

“No, don’t linger here. Keep charging through. It’s the only way to survive.” But the thought persisted, punctuated only by the dragon’s growl deep within.

Hollow. And empty. I stopped again.

My thoughts returned to her and to even more self-recriminations as if that was possible at the time. My chest was heaving but it wasn’t due to oxygen debt. I personified the nation’s problems, and I knew it.

We (I) are alone among a sea of people.

Herein lay the rub. While this may seem an esoteric, obtuse argument to champion, I was seeing it every day in every facet of my life, particularly given my heightened sense of societal loneliness. How quaint. Lost within, I still retained the ability to note that society was lost without. Irony is a bitch.

It’s not that we, America, lack the basic resources to be involved, active, and satisfied by our interactions with those around us. On the contrary, like I’ve already mentioned, we have perhaps the most well developed tools at our disposal than any other culture on earth. Digital wireless technology. Satellite communications. Pagers. Personal Digital Assistants. Email. Voicemail. Snailmail. Bit-streaming music and pornography over the office local area network. Ours is a culture rich in the basic resources and necessities of communications, much less the advanced aspects that only the richest, most powerful nation of earth can have. So why then do we use those devices to shut ourselves out and off from the world and, more importantly, the people around us?

It’s a paradox of advancement, I suppose. Then again maybe we’re all just pricks. I wasn’t sure, and my chest was heaving harder and my eyes were stinging. I could still faintly see her in the distance.

Need proof about our isolation? I had been recognizing the symptoms of our shared selective isolationism as each day passed. As I sat in my car and burned dead dinosaurs in tribute to CalTrans and the ever-present quest for more lanes, I took the time to take stock of my surroundings. I looked around at the people in the other cars, and bear in mind that is not a task to be taken lightly since seemingly innocent eye contact on Interstate 5 can easily be a prelude to violence. Nevertheless, I bravely looked around at the other people and I noticed that without fail everybody was either talking on a cell phone pretending to be interested to the disembodied voice on the other end of the line; or they were staring blankly into inner space, unaware of and disenfranchised from their surroundings. Of course, there were always a small number who would make better use of their time, digging fingers deeply into their noses in quest of mucoid treasures (I never understood the curiosity that drove them to look at the treasures they recovered), but I tended to discount them since they were the people no doubt listening to Billy Ray Cyrus on the car radio and watching Jerry Springer on the idiot box at home.
The selective isolationism, I figured, didn’t end when they got out of their cars either. How many people were walking from the parking lot, cell phone strapped to one ear or PDA firmly grasped in hand? No eye contact with passers-by. No “hellos” or “good days” for anyone. It was as if we sought and/or created technologies that delivered us from the need to interact with society at large. Meanwhile, we steadily retreated/retreat into a land of cyber-reality where we could effectively shut out the real world and interpersonal interaction in favor of introversion, down cast eyes, and isolation from one another.

Now, lest you misunderstand, I wasn’t advocating the abandonment of technology. I harbored no intentions of moving to a powerless cabin in Montana, nor did I own large amounts of ammonium nitrate and blasting caps. I freely admit that I enjoyed web surfing yet I still enjoyed the sublime barbarism of reading a book (gasp!). I owned a cell phone which, incidentally also had games on it that were ideal for playing while on the crapper. Some people read whilst taking a shit; I play Tetras.

But that is more than you need to know.

The point of my observation was that our quantum advancements in technology have only made it that much more critical to seek out and foster communications with the outside world. I feared that humanity was in grave danger of becoming Bill Gates’ Boys From Brazil—shut indoors, strapped to our DSL-equipped computers with no physical links to the outside world save opening the front door for our on-line orders from HomeGrocer.com, Housecalls.com, OnlinePlumber.com, Hookersonthenet.com, etc….. We should not allow these tools of the modern age to supplant our basic human needs to talk to those of the same species—in person. We have to interact with people and, yes, we have to look up and say hello. Unfortunately it seemed that we were doing that less and less, and in my despair I feared that humanity was terminally ill with morasmus, dying due to profound sadness.

Anyhow, I slowed my breathing and got things under control. It was a scene that I was becoming accustomed to repeating throughout the day when little things—a smell, a sound, a thought or memory—would open the door and the dragon would escape. I thought back to the lady faintly still in sight behind me. Should one be audacious and brash enough, I figured, to be overweight or suffer from some sort of physical malady or difference, than the world surely becomes a much smaller and lonelier place. What a sad, sad testament to human advancement. My father had always been an avid science fiction fan and was an ardent believer in the utopian perfection of the world of Star Trek, where there was no war, no hunger, no unhappiness. At that moment, I knew better. Our future was not Star Trek, it was Blade Runner.

Three weeks came and went. Summer took over from spring. I began flying again, finally cleared but still under the close scrutiny of other senior pilots. I wasn’t getting much better, but I was becoming quite adept at hiding the grief, the rage and the shock. People lauded me for getting on with life. They didn’t know that my Friday nights were spent sitting beside a gravestone at Forest Lawn in Arcadia, 100 miles north, talking with a ghost.

But my days were spent coping or at least pretending to. And, I even managed to ride my bike, run my shoes worn-through and swim countless laps across the La Jolla Cove. Thus, on an otherwise un-noteworthy Saturday afternoon I hopped on my resplendent banana yellow bike again and rode to Fiesta Island, opting for a shorter sprint workout rather than my usual leisurely spin up the coast. The island was deserted, and I enjoyed pushing big gears in my aero bars, savoring the burning in my quads and my lungs, lost within like the rest of our pathetic society. How utterly fucking quaint.

I rounded the corner to the hidden cove on the east side and there she was again. It suddenly flooded back. The dragon was loose and reeking havoc in an instant. I wobbled, momentarily lost my balance, caught my front wheel in the sand beside the asphalt and tumbled over my bars into the sand.

I lay there dazed momentarily until I realized that I was okay and not simply awaiting the onset of the pain associated with broken bones or dislocated joints. I sat up, and I looked at her. She was there again, but she was up and moving, playing with her dog and showing a hint of a smile. Did she steal a glance in my direction? No, she kept playing fetch with the lab. Or did she?

At first, I thought she was happier because it wasn’t a holiday weekend and there were no visceral reminders of her aloneness. Yes, I figured, that might have something to do with it. But there was also something else, namely that the dog didn’t give a shit. He romped to and fro, tail wagging and tongue hanging out. He was having fun with the human he loved, and he loved her because she was his human, his pack mate and his companion. He loved her regardless of her physical limitations and he didn’t require her to log onto an instant messenger to make contact. His contact was a stick, the bay and a furiously wagging tail. She smiled back, no mistaking the facial expression. He—the dog—was her link to life. “Hello, how are you” she was saying in her soul, courtesy of real interaction and not via the filters of technology, facades and/or defense mechanisms.

I stared dumbly, sitting in the sand having just taken what should have been a horridly painful bicycle accident. Sometimes pain can be mitigated by experience.

I once read a book by Dean Koontz where he postulated through the eyes of his main character that dog rather than man was surely made in God’s image. It suddenly seemed pretty damned close to the truth. And then the dog ran up to me, the goofy, damaged-goods sitting in the sand with a busted helmet, skinned knees and elbows, and the dumbfounded look on his face. He sniffed only for a moment, judged me no threat and ran over to coat my skinned knees with gentle licks.

“Ohmygosh,” she said as she puffed up a moment later. “You’re a bloody mess. Are you okay?”

I kept staring at the dog, and then I looked up. Hello. How are you? “Uh, yeah, I think I’m fine; just caught my wheel in the sand and endo-ed. Thanks.”

“Well, you don’t look fine, Silly. Does it hurt? I’ve got a first aid kit in my trunk. Why don’t you wait here a minute while I get some Bactine.”

I couldn’t answer because she shuffled off to her car. The dog stayed by me, licking, whining just a bit and wagging like only a lab can do. I scratched him between his chocolate ears. And then the stinging commenced.

She returned. “Here, let me help you.” And she did. Bactine, by the way, hurts, whether you’re a kid or an adult; it’s just that adult sensibilities allow one to appreciate the latter ramifications of staff infections. I only winced a tiny bit.

“You’re very kind.”

“Chester likes you.” She motioned towards the lab that was grinning and creating a half a sand angel with his tail. “That’s a good sign of character, otherwise I probably wouldn’t have noticed you.”

“He’s got good taste in bloody bikers then.” I giggled just a bit.

“Sorry, uhm, does it hurt much?” She was using some gauze to clean off the excess Bactine, blood and sand from my right knee.

“Only when I breathe.” I smiled back. Hello. How are you? Me? Yes, I’m fine. “You’re awfully cavalier for a guy who just face planted into the sand, you know. My name is Callie, by the way.”

“Hi Callie, mother of Chester, I’m Josh. I’m bleeding.”

“Yup, you sure are. Hold this gauze on your knee. Do you do this often?”

“Bleed? Well, I try not to, but I find it a good way to meet new dogs.” Chester, being a typically intelligent lab, wagged even harder (as if that was possible) and licked me in the face.

“Well, Josh, you seem like you’ll be okay. Can I give you a ride home or anything?” She was nice and her voice, it sounded like…. No.

“Uuhmmm, no thanks, Callie. As long as my bike is okay I’ll limp my way home. I only live down in Ocean Beach.”

“OB? That’s five miles away, Silly Josh. Throw the bike in the trunk and you, me and Chester will go for a ride.” Silly Josh was a jolt to the heart that she must have recognized given her stiffening posture and immediate unease. I thought to disarm the situation and set her at ease, but bleeding more wasn’t the appropriate response. I accepted Callie’s gracious offer.

“Well, okay. Thanks.”

And with that, I staggered to my feet and picked up my mangled bike. A quick shake of excess sand and I followed Callie to her car. Chester stayed between us, eyeing my not-so-resplendent banana yellow bike with doggie suspicion. Surely, he figured, this was the thing that hurt Momma’s new friend. That can’t be good in a dog’s sensibilities.

We loaded the bike into the trunk of the sport ute and she drove me off Fiesta Island, towards home. During that brief ride Callie and I spoke and laughed and shared a stolen bit of human interaction. It was disarming and, well, nice. She was, it turned out, an attorney working for a local biotech firm. She had lived in San Diego since graduation from law school and Chester was her family. They lived in North Pacific Beach, up the hill towards La Jolla, in a house that she purchased with stock options.

She learned a little bit of me. Mostly I sat and listened and bled a bit and flapped my arms a bit from the stinging. Chester barked at passing cars. We pulled up to my bungalow.

“722 Naranganset?” She said. “This is a familiar address.”

I paused. She couldn’t have known Beth. God, I hoped not, as the color drained from the day.

“Isn’t this where that gal who worked at Immunogenetics lived before she was…” she saw my face.

“Beth, Beth Green.” I breathed heavily and composed myself. “My wife. I was wondering if maybe you knew each other, working up on Torrey Pines and all.” Torrey Pines was the heart of San Diego’s biotech district.

“God, Josh, no I didn’t. I mean I didn’t know her but I knew of her, and I didn’t mean to, well, uhm, you know.”

“It’s okay, Callie. It still hurts if I dwell on it.” Actually it hurt every second of every minute of every day. “Mentioning it just let the door to open a bit more than I usually allow, that’s all. Nothing to be sorry for.”

She didn’t look like she believed me. In fact, she looked terribly sad, but for me rather than herself.

“Callie, it’s OKAY. Look, you just gave a complete, bloody stranger a ride home in your nice truck. And you got to torture him with Bactine while your trusty dog barked at his bike. Take the day for what it has been—fun for the two of you and funny at my expense after my crash. You earned a fair bit of karmic credit today too.”

Another pause, but her face brightened a bit. Chester woofed in approval.

“Okay, Josh the Bleeder, that’s fair enough.”

I thanked her again and we got out (me gingerly) and unloaded my bike. Chester got a well-deserved rub between the ears. I looked at her in wonderment. Here was a tremendously obese woman who had been arbitrarily ostracized by society and had suffered horridly at its arrogant fickleness, yet she hadn’t succumbed at all to the pain inflicted upon her. She could still find the power to give aid to a goofy-ass bloody stranger in need and she could still empathize with the pain of others. She was far advanced compared to the rest of us.

“Alright, Josh, if you’ll be okay. Hey, Chester and I go to Fiesta Island most Saturday mornings. Please stop by and say hi next time you go riding by. Just be sure it’s a proper stop.”

“Deal! Count on it, Callie. Thanks again.” And then I did something wholly uncharacteristic for me—I leaned forward and gave her a long hug. It felt strangely good. I lingered for only a moment and released her. She beamed back.

“Okay, then, see you sometime on the Island of Bloody Knees.”

And with that, she got back in her truck, whistled to Chester who barked once and hopped in beside her and drove off with a wave. I stared, knees stinging and scabbing but chest no longer heaving. The color returned to the day, and I thought about the sublime powers of simple interaction.

There might be idiots, but there are also human beings left here, and that makes all the difference. Hello. How are you? Me? I’m fine thank you. It was nice talking to you, friend.

The sun warmed my back, even if only for a short while.