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.