Information Blues.

Whistler is amazing. I’d never spent much time in bike parks, but it’s such a treat to put your bike on a lift, get a ride to the top and just descend. Descend descend descend descend, as much as you can handle.

Well, the fun trails are sort of like Excitebike: jump, jump jump, jump, etc etc etc etc! (A-Line, maybe the best trail on the mountain, has 37 tabletops! 37!!) Insert a 20 foot tall berm, then a head high tabletop. Repeat repeat repeat. There’s repetition involved, because there are only a finite number of trails down the mountain. But this is good, because it gives you the opportunity to build confidence, hone your skills.

My first day on the lifts I was stoked; I went all out. All of the berms were so exciting to lean into and carve, to carry speed down the hill on what were obviously well thought out lines. The stunts were fun too, and my first day I had so much literal and figurative momentum that I hit a bunch of things I wouldn’t have normally attempted: because I was in the flow of the trail. So if an eight foot high step up jump appeared, I hit it (well, once.) I didn’t die! I performed ladder drops like this (ladder not visible):

But hidden under the sheen of stoke were aches and pains: my hands were stiff from so much braking, rattling, and hanging on for dear life. When I went to bed that night I thought little of it, thought it was nothing a good night’s sleep wouldn’t cure. But when I woke up my hands were even creakier than the day before. My tendons were brittle, my knuckles felt like they’d been internally bruised. Just hanging onto the bars became a challenge.

So we had to recalculate. We’d gone in thinking we’d be able to survive on hummingbird nectar, get hyped up and take hundreds of descents down the mountain. But no way! This was a new type of biking, and it required new physical conditioning. On a normal up and down, out and back mountain bike ride you (purely) descend maybe 30 minutes if you’re lucky. But at Whistler you descend as long as you can physically stand, and what’s not obvious is that really starts to hurt.

But that’s enough about the pain; I’d like to focus more on the bliss. The bliss of following ladder mazes through the trees, of smooth jumps that make you and your bike feel briefly like a hovercraft. Of the best berm I’ve ever seen, a 30foot high smooth, manicured right hand turn on Heart of Darkness; you could lean into it as fast as you dared and it would slingshot you out the other side, right into a warp speed step up. Of riding and living and cooking with my friends for six days in Canada in a super-saturated, sensory mountain bike dream.

I just got back from four days outside Mount Shasta and a week in British Columbia.

Shasta was out of control in nearly every way. For example, the mountain biking involved deep, powdery volcanic Shasta dust. Everything was covered in dust; my front tire has never washed out so many times. We descended the mountain daily, from the highest parking lot at 8000 feet, creeping down black diamond trails. There were long rocky chutes (covered in dust), strings of kickers and stunts (with dust bowl landings), long fast straightaways with 90degree berms at the bottom (composed of dust.) My bike sometimes felt more like riding a fence or maybe a snowboard in parallel stance; I’d go out of control, start fishtailing, but then couldn’t use the front brake because the instant I touched it the front wheel would go wandering. So I leaned my butt off the back, gasped and slid, just tried to keep Corporal Clegg (my darn bike) upright.

The housing was out of control too, but in a more controlled way. See, there often wasn’t any place to be that didn’t involve several other people, because there were thirty 20-30somethings dwelling in the Pettersen family cabin. Every moment of every day was like playing social/spacial Tetris. I have poor skills at this game, but still managed to have fun. When we weren’t biking, we were swimming in volcanic lakes. When we weren’t swimming, we were at the hippie (aka natural grocery) in downtown Shasta. All other time was spent eating, drinking, and otherwise maneuvering for sanity.

One day a large group of us took a hike up the mountain. I hiked up there once before, and it was one of the most lonely things I’d ever done; Rob and Rex had left to ride bikes down, and I was supposed to pick them up at the bottom in two hours. So while I waited I hiked up through the high altitude rock slush. I got higher than the tree line, higher than the brush line; there were no signs of life. The sun was falling over the Trinity Alps and the wind was whipping as I reached drifts of summer snow. It was quiet and brutal, I was absolutely alone; it was so exciting!

But hiking up the mountain with twelve hipsters was something different entirely. There was more snow this time; we were crossing drifts in the trail after a half hour of walking. We had snowball fights in which I got to show off my good arm, honed by decades of stone throwing. Pretty soon the trail was totally snowed in, below the long moonscape prarie I’d reached previously. But people were psyched, and suddenly everyone was scrambling up the snowbank, super steep and slippery, like arctic monkeys. It was all fun and exciting until Jessica lost her footing halfway up and started sliding out of control on her butt in a miniskirt: her underwear filled with snow. After that half the party turned back. But the boys still wanted to go up, so we did (and Meredith went up too; she rocks.)

When we reached our incremental summit we paused to relieve ourselves shakily on lunar boulders with numb hands. It seemed like the right time to tear into my ration of Primal Spirit Food. Then we slid back down the incline on our behinds; I used a doormat sized rock as a kind of snow skiff.

There’s a photo set on flickr.

Later that night after a long session of swimming, cabin Tetris and associated drinking, we left for a spontaneous midnight walk. We were tracking a single lane road through a dark meadow, I was drunk enough to be boisterous and it felt like the perfect thing to do: walking through the calm dark in the middle of nowhere absolutely hit the spot.

But other people got bored, because we really were going nowhere. There was no destination but the present. Eventually Rob turned back to get a car, to drive the remaining of us out to the McCloud Reservoir.

The remaining nine of us converged on an aluminum floating pontoon dock on the res. I tried to get Mike to jump in; I figured if we each paid him $3 he’d probably do it. Then if Mike jumped in, I was pretty sure I would follow. We were shining flashlights into the water, which was clear down to the silty bottom and appeared to be full of seltzer bubbles. Then somebody realized that they weren’t bubbles at all, but clouds of tiny, swarming bugs. They followed the flashlight beam, forming a dense, pulsating cloud.

We all laid on the dock, some stoned, some drunk, all in awe, examining aquatic bugs past 2am.

Last night I was walking on a crooked street, kicking a bald tennis ball.

Hmm, I think this list will be either totally useless, or somewhat incriminating: here are my top five albums from elementary school.

1.) Willie Nelson, Stardust

I wrote about this before, but this album is probably responsible for making me such a cornball.

2.) Dire Straits, Dire Straits

Nice tone! Stratocaster. This album has an amazing groove that I’m not ashamed to claim.

3.) John Prine, Bruised Orange

That’s the way the world goes round,
You’re up one day
And the next you’re down;
It’s half an inch of water
And you think you’re gonna drown,
That’s the way that the world goes round.
[cue pan pipe solo]

Nice mustache, señor! That seems familiar.

4.) Steve Miller Band, Abracadabra

This one is really embarrassing. I called up the Mighty 690 (San Diego AM radio giant!!) to request the single in the second grade and they never played it. So then, 25 years later, I requested Sara play it on KALX, and she was great and she played it, but man, this song is acutely perverted and I’m sure she must have lost at least 25 hitpoints of street cred in bowing to the request.

5.) The Pointer Sisters, Break Out

It was later in the game, circa 5th grade, that I became addicted to the Pointer Sisters. Heh.

Take everyone out of work and place them at the Starry Plough Friday to see Ten Ton Chicken, the boss’s jam band. It feels sentimental; stories are merging and floating about the room.

The cast of extras is amazing. Some overtanned dude with a long goatee and embroidered shirt with cutoff sleeves is making contact with literally everyone, showing off his Sweet Home Alabama prison tattoo and trying to get us to come to a party at Prince and Telegraph. He makes laps around the room, campaigning with high fives, stops off at the dance floor to frolic with ageless Berkeley hippie women. They have long silver hair like statues and practice modern dance. The hippie women are dancing around a young man in a wheelchair; his arms are thin and angular like cold hotdogs. He presses the joystick on his chair back and forth, tilts his head like the beastie boys and flaps his wings to the spiralling, derivative, sunny jams. I think the young guy in the wheelchair has more guts and soul than I’ve seen in a long time.

The music is for sun worshippers, it’s music for meadows with butterflies. Imagined meadows in your head, rainbows and temples with UFOs landing. It’s not my thing, but my defenses are down because I know these people. This is my boss on guitar! I helped him shop for his amp; it’s a ‘65 Blackface Fender Super Reverb that’s lush and shimmery. I told him that if I came he had to insert a few bars from Interstellar Overdrive, and he does! My smile runs ear to ear, I can’t help it, the Ten Ton Chicken is loose, strutting the coop, pecking for seeds.

And then I notice the stories. Maybe it’s the Lagunitas, but everyone is open and our dramas are known. Our sales guy is buying me beers, reciting poetry, and unloading secrets. Our accountant is pure sunshine, she gives me a hug and dances with the boss’s wife. Doctor GTI is drunk and insistent: Scott, you’re a good guy, I like you, and you need to call me; we’ll drink greyhounds at the VanKleef. Dr GTI’s girlfriend liked the first band better than the ‘Chicken and we squabble a little about it like barnyard animals. Todd is smiling, he’s brought a suave posse, “So this is the secret, I need to be drunk at work!” Or at work but not working, like this, surrounded by the people you see every day but under a different context: the context of hulking pollos and flags of stars right on the Berkeley/Oakland border.