24 November 2023

Archival footage: My Week of Riding Dangerously [UPDATED]

The following essay was posted to both the Rigid/Hardtail and the 50+ Years Old forums at mtbr.com on 24 November 2023.



Turned 57 a couple weeks ago. Means I've been riding mountain bikes for close to 40 years now. 

As happens to some of us, I ended up hanging on to many of my old bikes, and have acquired and restored a couple other vintage rigs over the years, too.  Several of my older bikes are still intact and quite rideable.  The rest have essentially become organ donors or wall-art, so in a sense still "around" if only in spirit.
Quite literally hanging on (the ceiling) to several old bikes
Had an idea pop into my head the other day, as a kind of 57th birthday commemoration, that I'd ride (as-in really ride, on singletrack trails, out in the woods, just like I used to back-in-the-day) some of my oldest bikes over the course of a few days in the vicinity of my birthday and try to hit as close to an aggregate 57 miles as I could in the process. Rounding upward by just a few tenths, I pretty much nailed it at the end of Day 4 of what I've decided to call: My Week of Riding Dangerously

It was brutal. It was amazing. Effort was expended. Flow was elusive. Skin was lost. Blood was shed.

Flats: 0
Broken body/bike parts: 0
Dabs, portages, mulligans: lost count

I've no regrets. 

My Week of Riding Dangerously was everything I wanted/needed it to be: a fully analog, thoroughly tactile, uninsulated reminder of so many of the aesthetics and sensations that initially drew me into the sport in the first place so many years ago.  

If you've still got an old bike or two hanging around in your garage, I encourage you to dust it off, pump up the tires, and take if for a legit spin on your local XC trails... Just one old dood's opinion, but I think it's good for our aging souls to reminisce, and to reflect on how far things have come in the decades that have passed since we first got started riding bikes on trails.  

I'll leave you with a few terribly obvious observations from My Week of Riding Dangerously:
  • Disc brakes are so much better than cantis... but cantis worked back then, and they still do today.
  • Dropper posts are essential to effective and responsive bike handling... but ride an old bike around for a bit and you'll quickly recall how steep and quick you can still ride without ever lowering your saddle.
  • Suspension forks, tubeless tires, wide bars, short stems, beefy rims, and slack geometry definitely enhance bike handling in innumerable positive ways... but the truth of the matter is, you can still have a great nostalgic time shredding around on rigid, narrow, long, and steep sh!t, too.  You're just not going to be able to do it as fast or effectively as you're accustomed to.  And in my book, to on occasion be reminded of how far you've come, and how much things have changed (mostly for the better), isn't really a bad thing,
Below are some sexy iPhone portrait-mode pictures of the bikes and the distances/elevations I rode during My Week of Riding Dangerously.

1994 Breezer Lightning -- 12 miles -- 1000 feet elev.

1991 Ibis Mountain Trials -- 13 miles -- 1100 feet elev.

1992 Retrotec -- 16 miles -- 1800 feet elev.

1985 Rock Lobster -- 16 miles -- 1300 feet elev.

Update: 25 November 2023
 
Thought this response to my original post in MTBR's Rigid/Hardtail forum, along with my reply, merited inclusion here.
I make a rule that every new bike purchase must be followed by selling a bike.
Thanks for confirming this is a good policy.
I guess I could see your point... if we were talking about shoes, or T-shirts, or even skis... there are lots of things that we own which were at one point cool or fashionable or top-tier-tech that tend to lose their luster or efficacy over time. That kind of stuff is consumable, it wears out and becomes just so much trash.

But there are other things, like old bikes and cars and tractors, which, while no longer top-tier by any means, are nonetheless, if they've been well-maintained or carefully restored, still perfectly viable, even dare-I-say pleasurable, as modes of transport if you're willing to shift your mental space into a more nostalgic mode whenever you intend to enjoy them.

I'm really, really glad I've kept my old bikes.

Pretty sure my urge to hang on to, and likewise to ride these old bikes out in the woods once in a while, is triggered by the same part of my brain-stem that salves the old dude's desire to drive around town on Friday night in his sweet 1970 Oldsmobile 442, which it just so happens is exactly like the one he drove in high school... or the the war vet's compulsion to meticulously restore and tractor around the fairgrounds on Labor Day weekend in his old 1928 John Deere, which looks, sounds and smells just like the one he grew up driving on the farm back-home.

19 October 2023

Archival footage: Vintage Chris King Angry Bee swag [UPDATED]

The following essay was originally posted to the Vintage, Retro, Classic forum at mtbr.com on 18 October 2023.



A little history per chrisking.com: Back when hub warranty registration was done my [sic] mailing us a postcard, Akiyoshi Takamura coined an infamous [sic] quote in the comment field of his card; "It rolls good with angry bee sound". This was the birth of the angry bees and so much more.

Aki-the-bear loading up on wild raspberries
before descending Pluto trail
Here in my hometown of Flagstaff, AZ (and likewise among the FLG-diaspora currently residing in Bend, OR) coiner-of-the-phrase "It rolls good with angry bee sound" (which, let's be frank, Chris King Precision Components has taken to-the-bank as it's now ubiquitous marketing theme), @angrybee Akiyoshi Takamura, has become nothing less than a legit folk hero. By no means "infamous," in our estimation Aki has, instead, become well-respected by handmade bike-builders and riders alike. All who have had the pleasure to know and ride with him have found his knowledge and enthusiasm for small-batch mountain bike sh!t to be deeply sincere, knowledgeable, and endearing.

Since I-don't-know-when, Aki has made an annual trip to ride in Flagstaff and, over the years, has purchased a respectable sampling of North American small-builder bikes to take back to shred in the hills and forests around Osaka, Japan. Sadly, COVID-19 made Aki's trip to the USA impossible for the past two seasons. So everyone that knew him was super stoked when word got around late in the spring of 2023 that Aki would be traveling to northern Arizona once again in the summertime.

While he was here this summer I traded him a custom-made "red Pepsi" Cooziecage in exchange for his Kanji-signature on my first-gen "It rolls good with angry bee sound" T-shirt which now proudly hangs in "the place of honor" (on the wall above my workbench) in my garage.





A few more pictures from Aki's recent visit...






UPDATE: 27 October 2023
I picked up this piece of new “angry bee” swag while I was on the Chris King site researching my original post the other day. Installed it on the Chester. Does what it says on the tin, as the saying goes.



09 October 2023

In Beauty

In beauty I ride
With beauty before me I ride
With beauty behind me I ride
With beauty above me I ride
With beauty around me I ride
It has become beauty again

-- adapted from a Navajo prayer

Swell Trail - 09 October 2023


30 September 2023

Let's lurk!

See Nate lurk.
In the course of my life there have been several things that I knew I would love the very first moment I saw them. That list includes:
  • my wife
  • our daughter
  • our home
  • riding singletrack on a mountain bike
  • making sweet dropped-knee Tele-turns
  • paddle-boarding gracefully across a lake
  • and skiing with a lurk

I've written about many of these subjects elsewhere on this blog. But never before about lurking. And if I'm being honest, as with the other things listed above, lurking has pretty much changed my life, entirely for-the-better.

It all started when I watched this video at some point in the fall of 2022. 



The video features a guy named Marshell Thomson testing Bishop Telemark's San Juan Stick during the 2021 season. The moment I saw him shredding the backcountry near Silverton on his Tele-skis, carving big turns with a single, long, two-ended ski-pole called a lurk, I was hooked.

Sadly, by the time I caught the bug, Bishop's website showed that the $275 (plus shipping) San Juan Stick was sold-out(2) .

Nate(1) is lurking.
So, for a time, early in the 2022-2023 ski season, I just experimented with bamboo, which I had easy access to as a volunteer with the Courtesy Patrol at Arizona Snowbowl.  I spend a lot of time running bamboo around the mountain anyway, so in the process I just started holding it like Thomson had in his King of the Lurk video, often lashed together as a small bundle with a tele-strap, as I transported it to various projects around the hill.  Despite the 'boo's inherent flexibility, which isn't a desirable quality in a ski-pole of any kind, I could nonetheless tell that skiing Tele with a lurk made a lot of sense, as it equipped me to power my rear foot more and lean back into the hillside to initiate better turns and carve more aggressively and naturally into the ski's turn-radius.

Given that I wasn't going to be able to get my hands on one of Bishop's Sticks, I began searching the Internet for other fabricators of lurks, and likewise preparing to adapt a plan to hack together a lurk of own if my searching proved fruitless.  Which it nearly did. 

Not including an ancient, one-ended, peeled and seasoned natural pine Altai tiak ($44.75 plus shipping), which I didn't find nearly as enticing(3)  because, well, it is not a lurk it's a tiak, I could find only a couple legitimate lurk makers other than Bishop selling their products online: TreePole ($187 plus shipping), and an Etsy shop called MountainSports ($149 plus shipping) owned by a guy named Dennis. 

Nate has lurked.
I've gotta be honest: TreePole's natural peeled pine lurk looked a lot like Altai's tiak, just longer and with two-ends rather than one, which I wasn't too stoked on for nearly $200.  However, I really liked the machined and lathe-turned look of Dennis' MountainSports lurk a lot, and was compelled to purchase it, not only because it was less expensive than the TreePole, but also because it shipped with three different tips plus a set of baskets, a sticker for my beer-fridge, and also featured a machined aluminum decoupler mid-pole, similar to Bishop's design (video).

Dennis at MountainSports makes lurks in three colors and three sizes, 7 feet, 7.5 feet, and 8 feet. I'm six-feet tall and tend to set my traditional adjustable ski poles at about 115-120cm when I'm Tele-skiing in the area. But when it came time to pull the trigger on purchasing a lurk, I wasn't really sure what length to get. Fortunately Bishop has a brief "Lurk Sizing" tab on their San Juan Stick page, which recommends that someone like me should use a 100-inch lurk, which is a bit over 8 feet end-to-end.  In order to be sure I got the right size for me and the kind of Tele-skiing I like to do, I eventually ended up ordering both a 7.5 and an 8 footer from MountainSports, which came to just a few bucks more than one San Juan Stick.

Nate and his friend are lurkers.
As a 30-year (1993-2023) Tele-skier, I am stoked to give my 100% tried-and-tested five-star recommendation to the lurks I purchased last season from MountainSports.  They're made of poplar wood, so they're not too heavy. They're super stiff.  And they're pretty dang rugged. I've whapped mine on more than a few trees, fallen on top of them a time or two, and basically put both through a season-long series of unforgiving on-the-job trials. They've never failed me.

Skiing with both lurks during my shifts over the course of some 75 days on my local hill during the 2022-2023 season, I can tell you: most days when I'm working with Snowbowl Courtesy Patrol riding my Blizzard Rustler 10s, I like the lighter weight and somewhat faster tip-to-tip operation of my 7.5 foot pole. However, on bigger, deeper days, or whenever I'm on my wider Blizzard Rustler 11s, the 8-foot pole makes tons of sense.

Everyone asks, "What is that thing," when I'm riding up the chair with my lurk. I like to make up a different purpose for it every time... "It's a wizard-staff for casting spells; you shall not pass!" or "I'm training for the summer Olympics in kayaking and my coach wants me to ski with a paddle." or "It's a COVID-distancing stick, please stand back." or "It's a porcupine-prodder for coaxing them back into the woods when they wander out onto the runs." Stuff like that.  People always go, "Ha, right... seriously?" and then I explain what a lurk is and why, especially as a Tele-skier, I like to shred around the mountain with it.

As I said before, Tele-skiing with a lurk puts you in an more advantageous position to use the slope angle and your momentum to engage solid turns, stay in the sweet-spot on both your turning edges through the entire turn, and then initiate confident, precise, fast transitions turn-to-turn as you work your way down the hill.  Once mastered, it really is an amazing sensation, flipping the lurk left and right, like a kayak paddler does with their oar, as you rail the skis' edges around the long-pole's tip.  

Nate likes to lurk.
Some practice is required to transition your Tele-skiing style from traditional poles to a lurk. And, while it's definitely most ideally suited to open runs and big open terrain (video), it doesn't really matter if you're working it on hard-pack groomers, a few inches of early-morning freshies, or deep, deep pow. You learn pretty quickly to smear it across the fall line on the piste, and rudder it like a canoe paddle in the deeper conditions; it doesn't punch into the snow if you're doing it right, which is why standard ski pole baskets are unnecessary. The ball tip (see image below) is what works best, and the one with the pointed end is particularly nice when polling across the flats becomes necessary.

Even in the trees (video), the lurk is a great snow-tool with few, if any, liabilities, particularly for an experienced Tele-skier who's practiced with it a bit.  In fact, I think it's enhanced my meadow-skipping just as much as it has my on-piste activities. Remember: when you're using the lurk correctly, both in and out of the trees, you're placing it on the hillside behind and beside you, just a bit above your turn (not in front of you and your turn as with standard ski poles), so it doesn't get in the way of sticking to your path in and around the trees.  

Lurk, Nate, lurk!
Transitioning quickly between left and right fall-line turns in the trees, however, requires the most practice with the lurk and demands that your situational awareness spatial monitoring systems be set to optimal. More than once I've gotten sloppy or inattentive and clipped a tip on a tree or a low hanging limb which, depending on your speed, will cause the lurk to recoil in your hands with little warning. But again, it's not that hard to figure out how to avoid these situations. With a little practice, tree-lurking quickly becomes just another skill to master and put in your Tele-skier's toolbag.

I'm also convinced the lurk helps you reduce Tele-fatigue and conserve energy, too. Because of it's rigidity, you learn to put some of your weight onto it as you're dropping down into your turn. Then, as you're unweighting your body mass toward the bottom of your turn, you can push against the stick to raise your body upward into a more upright position to complete your turn-transition, taking some of the strain out of your legs.  

Using the lurk in this way has helped me extend my days as well as my ability to get down long sustained runs from the top to anywhere on the hill capably and quickly without my legs blowing up. I've got a lot more gas in my tank since switching to lurking full-time. My six-run days have now become 12 to 15 and sometimes 20+ run days, almost always with enough juice leftover to get up and do it all again tomorrow, which for me equals nothing less than stoke-factor: maximum!
Nate's friend uses his lurk at work.

Bishop's site echo's my observations, citing the following as "Lurk Benefits" for beginner to expert Tele-skiers: 
  • Creates a strong upper body posture
  • Allows you to lean into the hillside and carve aggressively
  • A solid tool to improve back foot weighting issues or losing balance
Turns out, the aluminum coupler that both MountainSports and Bishop install in the center of their lurk sticks isn't all that useful, at least not to me.  Initially I used it a lot when loading the lift, so that I could shove the decoupled poles beneath my thigh as I've always done with my standard ski poles.  But in fairly short order, after a few days getting used to lurking, I found that this "extra step" really wasn't necessary. 

porcupine prodder
These days, when loading the chair, I just cradle the lurk inside the elbow of my arm, raise the rearward tip enough that it clears the back of the seat and any footrest apparatus, and seat myself when the carrier comes around as usual.  I hold the lurk between my body and my arm, gripped with one hand, as we travel uphill.  It's easy. 

Finally, after thorough experimentation, I've settled on using the thermoplastic ball-shaped tip with the stainless point which Dennis provides with every order. With it installed on both ends of my lurk I'm ready to "pole" to and from the chair when we load/disembark just as well as the skiers with traditional poles, and of course, much better than the one-footed snowboarders.





1. Many thanks to my good pal and fellow beer-drinkerfatbiker, singlespeeder, snurfer, and Tele-skier, Nate, for demonstrating effective lurk skiing in many of the pictures used in this post. 

2. When this post was first published in late September 2023 Bishop's website indicated there were just 9 San Juan Sticks in-stock at that time prior to the start of the 2023-2024 season.  As far as I can tell, MountainSports lurks are all custom made-to-order, therefore Dennis appears to have a more than abundant supply!

3. I did end up purchasing an Altai tiak, just to try it... And, I was right: it's okay as a snow-tool, but definitely not as intuitive or inspiring as a lurk. A tiak works more like a drag-brake, slowing and controlling the skier's progress down the hill. But it's not a lurk, which is thing for making better and more satisfying turns and transitions. The tiak hangs in my garage alongside my ski quiver and looks interesting, but I rarely if ever use it.


26 August 2023

Archival footage: When did you get slower?

The following essay was originally posted to the Fifty+ Years Old forum at mtbr.com on 25 August 2023.



Am I slower? I really don't know. That's the honest answer.

I mean, I've got almost a dozen years of Strava data that conclusively says: maybe?

How do I really know? And how much do I really care?

Facts are facts: My bikes have all changed for-the-better by several iterations in the aforementioned dozen-year time-period; fires, floods, and new construction have radically changed our local trails, in some cases for-the-better; technology, frame- and tire-design have all changed my riding style and abilities for-the-better a thousand-fold; and sure, inevitably, so has my body changed (tho not always for-the-better) as well as the way that I sometimes feel before, during, and after I ride (again, not always for-the-better)... So, which of these variables am I looking at when trying to determine if I'm slowing down?

I still get the occasional Strava PR, though they're certainly fewer and further between these days... but does the interval between improvements mean I'm getting slower? Maybe? Or perhaps I'm just drawing closer to the top-of-my-game given where current technology and new, better-built trails have gotten me.

I know I'm getting older, and maybe I am slowing down some. But, hand-on-my-heart, having done this mountain-bike thing for 30-plus years, I've never enjoyed riding more than I am right now, in the present moment, at my present age. I know one of these "days" my last ride will ultimately literally be my last. But for now I'm committed to try to "live to ride another day" and to savor each moment of each of today's rides, and push against the unavoidable envelope of entropy as best I am able. Rage, rage against the dying of the light, right?

So slow, fast, or somewhere in-between doesn't really make a lot of sense to me anymore. Sure, I still like to check where I stand in the Strava pecking-order after most rides... and I'll be honest, I'm never the KOM, but when was I ever, really? Nevertheless, in general my times going up and going down are, to my mind, well within the respectable range and nothing to be ashamed of for a hairy-legged 200-pound 56-year-old dood on a hardtail.

But, to tell the truth, despite my somewhat voyeuristic interest in where I stand on the segment-achievements list, my heart-of-hearts simply wants to know after each ride:

Was it Good?
Did it Flow?
Did it get Rad?

25 August 2023

Archival footage: Should I move to Flagstaff?

The following essay was originally posted to the Arizona forum at mtbr.com on 28 June 2023.



I've been "trapped" in this little mountain town since 1991 with no way out, but likewise also with little desire to leave (that's both a pro and a con, I suppose... I'll explain below). It's a good thing I like it here.

What's a pro to living in Flagstaff? That's easy: all the trails (more all the time thx to @rockman and his crew), lakes, ski runs within easy striking distance of town. For me these features are the reasons I find myself so content living here. Also, there's a couple grocery stores, a few places to eat pretty good food, and about 1000 bars. It might sound like I'm speaking hyperbolically, but I most definitely am not. Other pros? Hmmm... there's mostly decent people here. I've know a few assholes, and heard about several others (we're kinda a one-degree-of-separation sort of place). But most of the folks I know are pretty cool. I think it's because almost everyone is here on purpose, so you don't meet too many people who are "this place sucks" except high-school kids who don't know any better.

Cons? It's a bit expensive. My wife and I got lucky and got our toe-hold established in the 1990s when things were a little cheaper, if not perceivably so at the time, they certainly were looking back in comparison to today.

Bureaucratic things move slowly around here, be it the town council, or the local USFS agency, the school board, or the county government... it all just kinda churns around the same drain most of the time. Until disaster strikes... then everyone's pretty good at rallying together.

Turns out we've had some practice in this regard (the striking of disaster), which brings me to "the big con" which is: the simple truth that we're all just here bronc-riding a giant bomb-casing, hoping like hell it doesn't explode and kill us all... and by that, of course, I mean: THE THREAT OF WILDFIRE.

If you're really good at pretending... or super-good at putting all your hope/trust/assurance in any of a half-dozen or so public service agencies that you think might be able to try valiantly to save you and/or personal property, then how-doo! Welcome to Flagstaff, pardner!

If, on the other hand, the prospect of losing all you have (and possibly, let's be honest, everyone you love) to a massive out of control FIRESTORM (or the flooding thereafter) that will probably be started by some tweaker a-hole living in his van "down by the river" (note: we have no river) who believes his right to a high-summer campfire is enshrined in the Second Amendment, then maybe take a beat, think it thru... perhaps a townhouse in Anthem, within easy striking distance of Flag but well out of the burn-zone, is better suited to you.

'Cause here's the hard reality of life in Flagstaff: always knowing, in the back of your brain: it's all gonna burn. We don't like to talk about it. We like to pretend we can do something to mitigate the risk of it (thinning projects, controlled Rx fire, closure orders, let-burn lightning strikes, etc). But the bottom line is, these things don't really work, we're merely "tilting at windmills" trying to look like we know what we're doing, but basically we're just fukt.

Those of us whose roots are set too deep, who have been here so long, most of us can't do much to get out of the path of what's coming... And maybe we just don't want to. I gotta admit, there's the constant draw of all the sweet singletrack out your back door, just begging for a shred, which, I think, causes a lot of us to live rather cavalierly day-to-day perched on the razor's edge of disaster, like the good lord said, "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die." The riding and the skiing and the paddling really are that good most days. I think we're just kinda hoping it's not coming for us today... maybe even that "the big one" will wait 'til we're gone, aged out of the living process, ya know. But who the hell knows... Nobody does.

Except, truth is, we all know: it's coming, bummer of it is: we just don't know when.

24 August 2023

Archival footage: A MacGyver Story

The following essay was originally posted to the Vintage, Retro, Classic forum at mtbr.com on 13 June 2023.



JRA in a lonesome meadow which runs for a couple quiet foresty miles between two outlying upscale neighborhoods on the north side of town, I determined, as per usual, to take the higher-harder track this afternoon, the one that climbs over a rough basalt bench, rather than the other, which nearly everyone else takes because it's less angular (in all dimensions) and heads more directly and expediently back into town.

Threading the needle, I pushed the front wheel of my 1987 Panasonic Mountain Cat 7500, oh-so gently between two pointy black rocks embedded in the track, both firmly bolted down with the force of eons of volcanic glue, when, despite the confident finesse with which I executed this fine maneuver, the stem slipped, quite unexpectedly, about 15 degrees to the right of center.

No big deal. Hop off, out with the six-mil hex, a bit of righty-tighty and viola! With the last twist of the wrench, the unpainted aluminum top-cap on the ain't-she-sweet 1" quill Salsa roller stem crumbles to a mixture of crappy metal bits and a smattering of what I'm guessing is fully adulterated AL2O3. The bars now swing freely side-to-side...

A tube, a pump, a couple nylon tire levers, and a Cool Tool seat-post quick release are all the tools I've got. The Mountain Cat is my slackcountry commuter rig, afterall. Hasn't been on a long ride in the woods in decades (it's got seatstay breather-hole cancer). But for years it’s gotten me around town via the sidecountry and interstitials so darn well. So, there I am, not so far from home that I can't self-extract on foot, but reluctant to do so because, in some 30 years of riding, I've only ever walked out twice, once for a broken rear triangle (snapped both chainstays on the only FS bike I've ever owned), and once for a broken fork (fully snapped off one leg of a red Ritchey biplane... didn't want to risk snapping off the other, ya know).

A couple minutes looking at the bike, trying to puzzle out where a flat washer with an ID close to the stembolt's OD might be hiding, and I can't think if a thing... 'cept prolly there's a washer behind the crankbolts that would work (can't actually recall), but the Cool Tool QR tool doesn't have a 15mm socket for this purpose like the original Cool Tool does, just a 10.

Clock ticks off another minute or two as I contemplate other options... not. walking. home.

And then it occurs to me: I might could flip the two remaining parts of the top-cap so what remains of the flange will act as a washer to the recessed retainer and see if it'll bind enough without crumbling to steer without slippage sufficient to get my ass home. One foot-pound of tork, twist-check the bars, then another and another half-a-turn 'til it's juuuust tight enough to ride as slow and as straight as I can.

Something like this:


06 October 2022

ex evangelical et al: losing my religion


That's me in the corner 
That's me in the spotlight 
Losing my religion 
Trying to keep up with you
And I don't know if I can do it...
Oh no, I've said too much
Michael Stipe, R.E.M. (1991)

I was born early on a Sunday morning in the second week of November 1966. 

Some years later, the presidential election of 1984 was held on Tuesday, November 6, exactly one week before my 18th birthday. At that time I was senior at an exclusive private evangelical Christian high school in Phoenix, Arizona, and I was crushed that I wouldn't be able to cast my first-ever vote to re-elect Ronald Reagan to a second term as president of the United States, even though he didn't need it.

Not long after that, as an undergraduate at Arizona State University, I can still recollect the visceral intrinsic disdain that I felt toward the Young Democrats whenever they would gather on the lawn near the Hayden Library to exercise their First Amendment rights, shouting down the wild-eyed itinerant preachers holding their horrific anti-abortion banners, demanding fair treatment and representation in student government, better access to campus facilities and healthcare, and any number of other liberal concerns du jour.  Despite my membership on the ASU Forensics Team, and my sincere, abiding friendships with my left-leaning teammates at the time, many of whom were also a part of the flourishing "out" community on campus, I nonetheless eventually gravitated toward the ASU College Republicans organization and soon rose to various leadership positions within it. As an pro-life, born-again, lifelong twice-weekly-attending evangelical church member, I had hopes that my involvement in CRs would fulfill my desire to have an outlet for demonstrating and professing my faith while at the very secular ASU. At this point in my life, I genuinely perceived these two things, my religious faith and my membership in the GOP, as two sides of the same coin, actively and inextricably intertwined one with the other.

Shortly after he left office, in March 1989 Ronald Reagan visited Arizona State University. Reagan gave a well-attended speech to the student body and a pantheon of local conservative dignitaries in the ASU Activity Center.  Despite now being the brand-new duly-elected president of the school's College Republicans, I was afforded no special access nor did I receive any kind of invitation to the event, not that I really expected one.  Instead, I attended the speech with everyone else, as a walk-in general-admission member of the public, and listened excitedly with great interest to the former president's words from an otherwise anonymous seat high-up near the top of the stands.  Reagan was the epitome of Celebrity in my world at that moment in time.

Likewise in the spring semester of 1989, my Arizona Government class hosted former US Senator Barry Goldwater for an in-person hour-long lecture one day. I was thrilled to be able to spend a few minutes speaking with him one-on-one after the class period concluded. As a native son of Arizona with burgeoning political aspirations, on the brush-with-greatness scale, this was, for me, a moment likely akin to a Catholic penitent having the chance to meet the pope

Around this same time, I made arrangements for the then executive director of the Arizona Republican Party, Kurt Davis, to speak to the College Republicans in a meeting room we'd booked in the Memorial Union on campus.  Mr. Davis asked to be provided with a ride that afternoon to the Tempe-campus event from his office at the state party headquarters in the Barry Goldwater Building on 24th Street in Phoenix. As the proud president of the CRs, I was more than happy to oblige.  As we drove there, and likewise afterward as I returned him to his office that evening, we discussed a number of issues and concerns that were before him as the de facto leader of the state Republican organization.  He encouraged me to seek him out, in anticipation of my need to complete an internship prior to my graduation from the Cronkite Journalism School, if I wished to discuss "working" with the party in an in-house capacity in the future.  Some time later I did so, and was given my first-ever legitimate sounding job-title (communications intern) and a small office in the back of the building doing public- and media-relations work for the Party.

I did not last long in this position, however.  Just a few months after stepping into my role as communications-intern with the Party, I was given the chance in June 1989 to move into a somewhat more elevated and exciting (albeit still pro-bono) role as an assistant communications director when Burt Kruglick, then the Chairman of the Arizona Republican Party, determined to run for mayor of Phoenix against popular incumbent, Democrat Terry Goddard.  I soon moved myself into a noticeably larger office space in Kruglick's newly leased campaign headquarters in a Central Avenue high-rise in downtown Phoenix.  I was extremely excited to be given this opportunity, which to me felt quite prodigious since I was still nearly a year away from receiving my degree.

It was here, I am certain, that my exvangelical awakening began. I was 22 years old.

The Kruglick for mayor team was, to put it bluntly, an odd bunch, if not a cross-section then surely a reliable random sampling of the innate strangeness, privilege, suspicion, lurking duplicity and xenophobia that permeated conservative circles even back then.  All of them GOP party functionaries who had quickly become, at least by name, well-known to me during my time at the Goldwater Building. Now, by virtue of our common membership as campaign staff and volunteers, I was thrust into a situation where I was compelled to get to know any number of them personally, now not only by name, but sometimes, and quite shockingly so, by their unusual predilections and prejudices.

Without naming names or delving into the details of the abundant weirdness, selfishness, and super-paranoid xenophobic bullshit that I encountered while working with many of these individuals, while trying to get the City of Phoenix' grumpiest, most uncharismatic, king of coin-operated-laundromats elected mayor, I was disgusted to learn that their central-strategy in doing so was to sully the reputation of the incumbent mayor by impugning his sexual orientation through thinly veiled innuendo. Suffice to say, my eyes were opened to who and what the GOP is and was through this experience.  I did not want to be associated with them. I did not want to become like them.

Because of this, I spent less and less time "volunteering" as the campaign neared election day. And because I lived in Scottsdale at the time, I was logistically released from the burden of having to deliberate about how to cast my vote in the Phoenix mayoral election. Fortunately, in the end, Kruglick lost. Goddard was always the better candidate. And I was pleased to be able to vote for him several times in subsequent years, first when he was seeking the office of Arizona Governor and later Attorney General. 

I finished the Kruglick campaign disgusted with the GOP, disgusted with myself, and determined to rescind my party affiliation immediately. I resigned from the College Republicans and registered myself as an independent soon thereafter. To the best of my recollection, I haven't cast a vote for a Republican candidate for any office since 1989.

---

Our church made me an elder in the summer of 2007. I was 41 years old. 

Most of the congregation was willing to defer to the current board members in their recommendation of me that day, and showed up to deliberate and vote for the agenda at the quarterly meeting only out of dutiful obligation.  But there were a few aggrieved voices in the crowd that afternoon, chiefly men close to my own age, who came prepared to speak against my nomination, for numerous reasons: my career spent in (and my abiding commitment to) public education, my rumored admission to having voted for John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election, the tattoo I have worn on my hand since 1997 as a wedding ring and indelible commitment to my spouse, and my failure to ascend to the position of elder without first occupying the subordinate positions of deacon and usher. One individual went so far as to testify before this assembly that he "could not focus on worship" whenever I was singing with the small acoustic church-music ensemble I was a part of one or two Sundays each month due to the "liberal political positions" he knew I held. 

Only one other person spoke against my nomination, a former elder's widow named Marilyn who stated, "John's little daughter is only two years old.  You should encourage him to focus on being a dad and a husband at this point in his life.  He doesn't need the contention of being an elder now. He needs to be at home when he's not at work, not here at the church managing and debating its affairs."  Turns out, she was the wisest voice in the room.

As I understand it, one of the most important qualifications for anyone serving as an elder in an evangelical church is to hold each member of the congregation in a place of empathy and compassion in one's heart and mind, to love them, in fact, as one would a member of one's own family.  And well, truth be told, I just could not pull this off.  In fact, I could not stand some of them, especially a few of the guys who spoke against me when I was joining the elder board.  Not because I resented them, or because I was embittered toward them for what they said or implied about me on the day of my nomination.  No.  I couldn't stand those guys, and likewise a number of other individuals in the congregation, because of what I learned about them as I served on the board for many years, most especially their perpetually angry, prideful attitudes and groundless ugly prejudices, in both word and deed, which they directed toward the "unsaved" members of our civic community.  Their hatred and disdain of these folks was palpable, their attitudes of superiority ever-present, and their slurs describing these enemies of their perceived freedoms seemed ever on their lips: the gays, the lesbians, the meth-heads, the drunk Indians, the unmarried cohabitors, the single moms, the queers, the panhandlers, the gun-control advocates, the ecumenicals, the dope-smokers, the cult members, the liberals, the unbelievers, the baby-killers, the illegals, the trannys, the welfare queens, the bums, the deniers of creationism. I could find little (indeed, often nothing) to love in any of those who felt and spoke of others so scornfully.

When the congregation, almost universally, and also quite vocally, hitched their presidential political fortunes to John McCain in 2008, a man who had cheated on his first wife with his second and operated deceitfully and deceptively as a member of the Keating 5 during the Savings & Loan Debacle in the late 1980s, and then later to Mitt Romney in 2012, a man who had been a lifelong faithful adherent of Mormonism, which was described as an accursed unbiblical sometimes-Satanic cult by many members of our evangelical congregation, I began to question their allegiance to their own belief system.  Likewise, my own questions regarding my allegiance to them as a congregation continued to grow as well.

I left the board in 2012, using the fact that I, for professional reasons, truthfully needed to continue my education past my master's degree as an excuse.  We left the congregation for good at some point thereafter when my wife, in tears one morning on our drive to church simply said, "I can't do this anymore.  I can't worship with people like this, who wouldn't welcome so many of the people we love into their church service because of who they are or ow they live. I don't want to go back there ever again." I thought her sentiment very well timed. I had been feeling the same way for quite a while.  Turns out neither of us wanted to associate with evangelicals any longer.  We did not want to become like them.

We went and got bagels that morning instead, and we never did go back.  

To this day, no one except the senior pastor has ever contacted us to ask why we left or to inquire about where we've been or how we're doing.  He and I went for a coffee together one afternoon many months later and, while I was not ready to fully disavow my faith to him at that point, I did make it clear that an eternity spent alongside the bullies and bigots I'd been trying to shepherd at his church for some five years was no longer a very enticing prospect.

We bumped around for a time, sporadically searching for another church to call home, a few Sundays each month, for the next several years, in fact. But we never really found another place to land. We were always feeling like something was amiss, like we were just going through the motions of worship and fellowship with an ever diminishing faith, a kind of slow entropy leading to nothing.

And then, in 2016, came Trump...


01 June 2022

Between every two pine trees

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

- John Muir


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

05 May 2022

Archival footage: Kind of New

In late January I finished up at the FUSD Transportation Department, where I had been asked in September 2021 to return to work temporarily as the interim Student Discipline Coordinator.  Became just kinda done-with-it for a number of reasons, mostly because of the grumpy drivers, recidivistic students, uncooperative parents, and even a few unsupportive building and district admins.  It felt really nice to have the luxury to be able to simply decide, "Nope. I don't want to fight about stuff anymore."  When I met with the director to discuss my decision to leave my interim role in his department he basically said the same thing, "Must be nice.  I'm actually a bit jealous. You did good work while you were here, thanks for your service."

Dove head-first into the whole patrol-volunteer gig after that.  Went up "to work" at Snowbowl four or five days a week, five to six hours a day, from February through the end of April.  Ended up having the best season of my life, despite the relatively meager winter. Skied almost 60 days in all, nearly 300 hours total, got to assist with any number of interesting/urgent calls-for-assistance, and loved every minute of it, doing what my ski-patroller supervisor calls, "skiing with a purpose."  


In anticipation of the end of the ski season at Snowbowl I've been mulling over for a while now other means for making a productive and satisfying use of my retired-guy time.  Lots of ideas, but the one that keeps rising to the surface is Flagstaff's lack of a legitimate new/used independent retail record store.  It vexes me that every time Record Store Day rolls around, all of us Flagstaffricans have to drive down to visit Puscifer in Jerome (a very cool store with an amazingly well-curated selection of new vinyl; you should definitely visit if you're ever there) to shop the Day's exclusive releases, simply because Flagstaff (the largest town in the region by far) doesn't actually have a store that qualifies as a dedicated, independent retailer of new music.  We have Bookmans.  Don't get me wrong, Bookmans is great!  I'm a former employee, former manager even, and a very loyal customer for the last 30 years. But it turns out, Bookmans doesn't qualify for Record Store Day because, I guess, they don't commit enough square footage of their large, mulitfacited operation to the sale of new music on vinyl.  Sure, they sell a lot of new music on vinyl. Definitely more than any other store in town.  But apparently not enough to satisfy whoever makes the decisions about which stores get to sell Record Store Day exclusives. 

So it's off to Jerome we go.

20 April 2022

Just about a bike: This old frame

My dad drove me way across town early one Saturday morning at some point in late 1975 or early 1976 so that, for the very first time, I could buy a bike with my own money. I was in the fourth grade and had saved up what was to me then a massive amount of cash doing odd jobs around the house, 40 bucks, so that I could get my very own BMX bike and shred with my buddies up and down the canal banks, and through the shady orchards, and across the vacant desert lots that lay between our Scottsdale neighborhood and the Circle K convenience store and the local Schwinn bicycle shop.

The bike that was to become mine had been advertised for a week in the classified ads in the Phoenix Gazette and fit perfectly into my adolescent price point. As soon as I laid eyes on it, leaning against the front steps of the west Phoenix house that had been its home, it looked really good to me: fully chrome with silver bars and a simple black fork, kitted out otherwise with what looked like cast-off Stingray parts as most BMX bikes were back then.

08 March 2022

Credo: This is my yellow jacket

ca. 2004-2005
This is my yellow jacket. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

My yellow jacket has been a good friend to me. Without it I am vulnerable.

My yellow jacket has faithfully guarded me from the ravages of weather.  It has protected my body from injury.

We are a part of 
one another, my yellow jacket and I. Together we have endeavored to master the mountain.






* the work of the Courtesy Patrol includes:
 lost family-member reunification,
detached ski reinstallation,
perplexed guest reorientation,
Ski Patrol incident notification,
uprooted signage restoration,
downhill-slope traffic mitigation,
& general ski-area explication
I have been volunteering as a member of the Courtesy Patrol at Arizona Snowbowl this season, skiing more days, and also longer days, than I've ever skied in any previous season, usually 3-5 days a week, 4-8 hours a day, weather and snow conditions notwithstanding.  Over the course of some 40+ days on the mountain thus far this season, and despite having one of the most amazingly fun and interesting ski seasons ever, I have nonetheless reluctantly been forced to conclude that my old yellow Marmot jacket is no longer able to keep up with the demands that my new work* has been placing upon it.  Lately, I've been getting increasingly colder, and wetter, and more wind-blown. And I've deduced that this is happening because my trusty old yellow shell is, quite simply, worn out.

Precise recollection fails me, but my best guess is that I probably bought my yellow jacket in 2004, nearly twenty ski seasons ago now.  I have worn it every winter, on practically every single day that I have skied since then (I did attempt to replace it back in 2011, with a newer, fancier jacket, but, well, that plan did not work out the way I had intended it to).

It has reliably sheltered me from the mountain's most brutal elements, and the weather's harshest conditions, during literally hundreds of great days, down many thousands of great runs, throughout what must have been the linking of at least a million great turns (How many Telemark skiers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? At least three, one to install it, and two more to say, "Dude, great turns!").

19 January 2022

Let's adopt a rescue cat!

“A human being with no dæmon was like someone without a face, or with their ribs laid open and their heart torn out; something unnatural and uncanny that belonged to the world of nightghasts, not the waking world of sense.”
— Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

Our cat, like our dogs, is a rescue. You can tell by her one docked ear. Our vet has told us that she was likely captured when she was young as a feral stray, spayed, and then released back into the world to fend for herself. Later on in her wild early life she must have been recaptured, probably by animal control or a rescue agency. 

Fortunately for her (and us), it seems she somehow fell into the care of our local no-kill shelter at that point. That's where my wife and daughter first encountered her. They brought her home soon afterward.

They named her Rosie.

I just call her Cat.

She is, of the many many good cats I have known in my lifetime, easily the best-of-cats, my Pantalaimon, a chatty, constant companion to me at all times (except, of course, when she is cat-napping) whenever I am at home. 

03 January 2022

Archival footage: 04 January 1997

I wrote the post reproduced below for our 20th wedding anniversary, 04 January 2017. A lot has happened in the five years that have transpired since then, too much to mention here for certain. Suffice to say, we're still together, still in love with one another, still trying to figure it all out, one day at a time.

I wanted to republish what I wrote back in 2017 today, on the eve of our 25th wedding anniversary, because this one seems to me to be an even more significant milestone than was our 20th, for lots of reasons, and not just because it's a bigger number.

26 November 2021

Let's ride a singlespeed!

"When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run."
- Henry David Thoreau

3.0:1 gain ratio, 41.6 gear inches

I recently converted my Surly Pugsley "fatbike" from an eight-speed to a singlespeed.  After a thousand or so very rode-hard miles in the past 8 years (and having been put away wet more often than not), the original drivetrain components had become seriously clapped-out.  Rather than replace them (at great expense), I decided to just remove them. Best part of this decision: stripping off the no-longer-necessary gears, shifters, cables, and derailleurs shed almost four pounds. Today, the Pugs, and her one 34x22 (3.0:1 gain ratio) gear, is revitalized as a bike that is (as it truthfully always has been) an unmitigated hoot to ride!  In a way, it feels as though this was how she was meant to have been set-up all along.

I've been riding singlepeed bikes in the forests of northern Arizona for almost 30 years. My newly reconfigured Pugs SS is the fourth legit singlespeed mountain bike in the garage. I really dig riding one-speed bikes. Always have.  Geared bikes are lots of fun, but only singlespeeds are truly enlightening (pun intended).

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. -- Ed Abbey