Love of Movement

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Tonight, I got double fulls for the first time.

It’s one of the tricks I told myself that, once I got them, I would be able to rest easy and stop tricking.

That was a complete lie. I’m not about to stop tricking.

Perhaps it was related to getting a double full, but I had a thought about dance that I posted on Tim Tang’s Facebook Group, Insight. I said “All movement is dance.” I had immediate misgivings about the way I phrased it as I took a shower and added a comment to clarify. As it turns out, I had it backwards. All movement can be dance, but not all movement is dance.

Movement is everywhere. The arc of an arrow in flight, the vibrations of an atom, a ballerina’s elegant, pointed toes. I realized that there is nothing to differentiate the radiation signature of a red dwarf star from the ballerina – all just molecules. What really makes it different is that someone appreciates the ballerina. Not to say that no one appreciates the star. Actually, someone does appreciate the star and its radiation signature.

That’s what makes dance different. The human element. The human appreciation of movement. This appreciation is what makes sports entertaining. This appreciation is what makes the arc of a rocket as it escapes Earth’s orbit a beautiful, man-made gift to the heavens. This appreciation is what makes bboying, ballet, and tango irresistible and captivating to watch. As the music moves us through time, the dancers move through space. It’s why they call it a “movement” in music composition, is it not?

Maybe I am alone in this nearly universal appreciation of movement. After all, I am the only person I know who will stare at an iMac’s screensaver for over ten minutes, mesmerized. I played with Google’s bouncy bubble logo for 45 minutes. I have a witness to my weirdness.

But if anything, I think I’m just an extreme case. Everyone has some sort of appreciation of movement, unavoidably. Everything in our universe is in a state of change. So while you admire the football player’s charge toward the endzone, you may equally enjoy the wild stallion’s charge through a racing river, and the sure, rolling thunder of a bowling ball headed for a strike. A dancer may duck and dodge like a football player, charge like a stallion, or even roll like a bowling ball. Even if you don’t appreciate the similarity the dancer will. She will appreciate the movement that she is trying to bring to life for you.

Try. Please. For your own sake. The entire world, and every instant we spend in it, is full of opportunities for enjoyment and amazement. And it’s all in the appreciation of movement, whatever that movement may be called. I’ve been calling it dance, but I’m beginning to think that there might be a better term.

What would you call it?

The Worth of a Word

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Family comes first.

I carefully wrote down each thought, each idea, each quote. They were like little gems handed to me from ages past, from the greatest thinkers and the wisest sages.

Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.

The little shreds of paper were like oversized fortune cookies. It was somehow disappointing that these ideas would even deign to fit on them.

 Be yourself and I promise people will enjoy it. And if they don’t, forget them.

Each one fluttered to the bottom of the bin in a different manner, some twirling like helicopter blades, others tumbling, some dropping directly while others looped in circles.

Don’t be afraid to fail. Be afraid not to try.

My hand was beginning to cramp up. I hadn’t written anything in a long time. Nothing by hand, anyway.

There are three choices in life: Be good, get good or give up.

I swept my arm against my shirt to soak up the sweat. The sun arched overhead, hot and humid.

Seek to understand before you seek to be understood.

When the wind picked up, it was like a giant dog panting at my back. I could feel the air, heavy with its slobber, wetting my clothes against my body.

Love is wanting others to be happy.

I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. The metal bin was filling up.

What would you do if you knew you were going to die tomorrow? In a month? A year? Everyone dies. Only a few truly live.

Sometimes I didn’t realize where the thoughts had come from, or how they’d affected me.

People first.

Sometimes, I didn’t remember who had said it, where I’d read it, what it even meant. Just that it was important.

Courage, originally meaning to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.

Like tattered photographs of relatives I barely remembered, but photographs that made my lips turn upward in a smile nonetheless.

Who would you be, what would you do if you could not fail?

I took one final look at the words that provided guidelines for my life, words that have comforted me in times of sorrow and driven me to strive against my limits.

Ideas are worthless.

I took one final look into the bin and then lit the match.

Execution is everything.

The Path to Success

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Stick to the path, reap the rewards

I rested my hands on my navel, glancing briefly at the empty plate before looking up at my long-time friend. I had sworn off eating here years ago as a result of working there and ruining my taste for it, but the memory was beginning to fade. It really wasn’t bad.

“So what does success look like?” I asked.

He and I had been on separate tracks in life for a long time since we’d met as children, but I felt like our paths were, if not converging, then moving in parallel.

Needless to say, we left with a vivid picture of what success looked like, and the steps to get there. Much like on the Katy Trail, where we had trailheads to mark our progress. We could rest there and gear up for the next couple of miles.

The thought stuck with me. Sometimes we were forced to go off the trail, but we always returned. Success became a glowing golden line in my mind, a treasure map. Yes, there was a destination in mind, but it was impossible to get there without taking it step by step. Then it struck me.

Success was not a destination. Yes, that was part of it, but it was a very small part. Ninety nine percent of success was the path itself. To succeed was to be on that path, and though we could diverge from it, as long as we returned or charted a new path, then that was success.

Where are you headed? What steps do you need to take? Take just one…and taste success.

Be a winner. Start today.

The Things We Own

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Just as we considered moving the dresser, the lights went out. The entire house had gone black, devoid of its electrical pulse.

We carried the dresser into the kitchen and left it there. There would be no navigating the stairs with such a heavy load in the dark.

We fumbled our way around the house and found the matches, lit the candles and brought them to the far corners of the house, lines of light trailing out from the center like the explosion of a firework in slow motion. We lit up the crucial areas: the bathroom, the living room, the hallway. We settled in for a bit, expecting the lights to come back on at any minute. But they didn’t.

In the dark, it became obvious that the light of day had faded. A simple observation, but when was the last time you saw the world go from being lit with the fire of the sun at dusk to the soft black curtains of night and the gentle caress of the moon? Beyond our walls, lights, and computer monitors, we unconsciously slide into the shadow of the earth every day.

In the darkness, there was only the flickering of the candles to illuminate this or that thing, as if we’d never owned anything else beyond the small circle of light. The things we owned metamorphosed from inert possessions to ornery wildlife living in the darkness, eager to strike back at our shins and feet for years of callous, dispassionate ownership.

I was reminded of a short story I’d read years ago. With the invention of electricity and the incandescent light bulb, families everywhere had been forced to clean house in the austere illumination it provided. Perhaps we could do the opposite and just forget about the things that inhabited our home. Let them go free into the night.

My parents went to sleep. My sister and I stayed up and told stories.

We told stories about dreams, about family, about adventures. We traded – here, have this. This is what happened to me then. This is what I thought. These are my friends. These are the events that made me. This is what the future will look like. These are my stories. Take them.

We told real life stories – we were too old, too mature, our imaginations too prune-like to wring tales of pirates and skeletons and zombies from the fertile darkness. Instead, we merely took the ones we had and set them out, each one a little lightening of the spirit.

Maybe another day, during another blackout, we’ll recount the things we own.

New World Order

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I was just going to move the phone. Where it sat on the floor, in the middle of the piles of books, clothes, and other pieces of my life, just wasn’t very accessible. Ironic, because its enormous dial pad was adorned by inch by inch-and-a-quarter numbers. An elephant could use it to dial home. Somehow, I had more doubts as to the abilities of the aged demographic it was targeted toward than the elephant’s.

The problem wasn’t the phone. It was the trio of tennis balls right next to it. If I could just leap to the phone over the pile of belongings I had left on the floor my Sophomore year and not land on the tennis balls, I would be alright. Or maybe it was my Junior year, piles and piles of papers I would never look at again, stacked against the wall, that was the limiting factor. Or the two mattresses from the bunk bed I had disassembled when I was bored. They took up a good chunk of my room and they weren’t even particularly comfortable.

I had to move the phone.

So I had to move the tennis balls. And in order to clear a path to the tennis balls, I had to shift my Sophomore year out of the way, and to really clear a space, I had to get rid of Junior year, too. And while I was at it, I tossed Senior and Freshman year in the trash. My fifth year in college didn’t count – I had checked out by then. I had graduated on time, I was just bogged down by bureaucracy for a year after that.

I bumped into middle school and elementary school and found them a home with college and high school. They had swirled around, vagrant for decades, and only now could I usher all these scraps, like little puppies yipping for attention, into their respective cubby holes. I gave each a reassuring pat on the head before I bid it good night, to be cherished another day. What remained, I simply tossed out. I didn’t have time for memories that didn’t love me back. And I didn’t have time for objects that didn’t have memories associated with them.

I tore down the corkboard in a fit of pique and discovered a hole in the wall that my house uses to breathe. The picture I hung over it flaps idly with the house’s tidal exhalations.

I stood back and looked at the work I’d done. My room stood, empty and barren, like the first time I’d seen it at seven years old.

I lay down in the middle of the blank room and looked up at the ceiling. The tiles were scarred by a sabre blade. Some things, you couldn’t get rid of. You just had to clear your mind, mind your scars, and move on. After all, there was so much more left to do. So many more things, carefully chosen and carefully placed. It was the beginning. Another beginning.

It’s time to start again.

The phone would need a desk to rest on. It was a rather large phone, after all.

Trail Etiquette

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A day after our journey, some habits stuck. I found myself walking up to random strangers. I found myself wondering about who they were, where they were going. I found myself wondering if I could help somehow.

All along the trail, we’d found generous, kind people. Wells had joked early on that Missourians were either very nice, or very drunk, and we never encountered the latter kind. There was just a warmer kind of people than you encounter in your day to day life.

I asked a man on the bus in Champaign if he was alright and he said “Yes,” then asked, “Why?” suspiciously. But on the trail, there was only “Yes,” and “Thank you.” There was Bob the Brewer and Kansas City man. There were store owners who would leave their stands completely open and unmanned and trust on the goodhearted nature of the bikers to pay anyway. We stopped to ask for directions and a woman handed us ice cold water bottles from the rear seat of a truck, completely unasked for.

Wells and I got into the habit that most everyone on Katy Trail had been practicing the whole time we’d been biking. We got into the habit of kindness.

When I think back on it, there’s only a few other times where I’ve experienced such camaraderie, the most recent example being the 2011 Illinois Marathon. There’s something about doing difficult things that brings everyone together. We all fight our own demons on the trail, or on the track, or on the road, but the fight is easier knowing that someone else is there with you, that someone else has come before you, and that you pave the trail for those who come after you.

That’s why we smile when we see each other on the trail. “Fight the good fight,” we urge each other, “I’m rooting for you.” And if we can, we help each other out. We tell each other about fallen trees along the way, abandoned towns to avoid, and we tell each other about “bug hour.” We stop worrying just about ourselves and we worry about each other, because we’re all in it together. You and I becomes “we.” And that mentality is what is so strikingly missing from our day to day life.

Think about the last time you saw a stranger and you thought something negative. Maybe you thought they were a bad driver, or had an annoying voice, or that they had no sense of style. Maybe you thought that whatever it was, it just made them a bad person somehow, someone not as good as yourself.

It saddens me when I catch myself thinking this way, and I think that way plenty. But why? Why do we think like this? Because in reality, we are all toiling away at something difficult. We are all on some sort of path – a life path. We know the destination. We know how the story will end. It’s incredibly hard work to make what comes between worth it. We are in it together.

I have stopped feeling the urge to go up to strangers and ask them how they’re doing, what the weather is like, and inquire how I can help them. I have stopped practicing trail etiquette. I have stopped practicing the habit of kindness.

That’s something I’m working on.

By the way, the road ahead is rough, but the sky is bright and the people are kind.

Katy Trail Day 5 – The Final Sprint

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Wells didn’t see it, but my right eye twitched when he finished talking. We were 10 miles from Defiance and he had the cart, so we were going at our steady, predictable, maddeningly slow 5 miles per hour. We needed to get there. Now. If that wasn’t an option, then as soon as possible.

Wells chilling at a rock bluff near Defiance. We took it easy...for the most part.

Breakfast opened up at the motel at 7am, which was a surprise bonus – not only had we paid half the rate of a bed and breakfast for twice the number of beds, we got breakfast thrown in as well. The only downside was stepping into the pile of cicada carcasses just outside the door. They had been swarming and chorusing the entire trip, but they seemed to have conspired to die off in great numbers just outside our particular room.

We took our time and left at around 8am. We could afford to, since the last leg of our journey was only about 20 miles. I was on trailer duty for the first 10 miles, which flew by. Amazing what a good night’s sleep can do for you. We switched at about 1pm, and then after Wells had gone about 3 miles, that’s when he said it.

“If we make it there by 3pm, we can do all you can eat sushi.”

I managed not to knock Wells off the cart and let him do his thing for another couple of miles, but when it came time to switch, I was in the zone. There were 5 miles left and I was going to destroy it. I heard Wells say, “Oh ho, Mokane pace!” before I whizzed off.

No, Wells. This was much more urgent. This was the sushi sprint, and the last mad dash to the beginning of it all.

Back at Katy Bike Rentals in Defiance, MO.

Katy Trail – Etiquette

Katy Trail Day 4 – It’s a Zoo Out There

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“See you there!” he said, pointing at us and grinning.

“Yeah, maybe!” Wells offered. The boy ran off and we exchanged glances.

“I’m not going to that.”

“Yeah, me neither.”

We had just been invited to go to “get some bud, some beer, and light up,” by a highschool aged boy.We had actually been told earlier that marijuana and alcohol were the only things the natives did in this town, but now we had firsthand evidence. They were apparently a large enough party to warrant renting a bus.

But on a Wednesday night? Really?

It had been a strange day.

Welcome to Hermann...again.

I woke up at 5:30, eager to be off. We planned to do 60-70 miles that day, which would have been our longest day yet. Thankfully, shortly after I woke him up, Wells convinced me that it would be easier just to cut our distance in half and come in later on Thursday. It may have been a desperate ploy to get more sleep, but it was definitely a good idea.

We hung out and chatted with Bob a bit more then headed our separate ways, but not before I got his business card. We were once again headed toward Hermann, where we planned to stay.

At the Mokane trailhead, we ran into a man we know only as Kansas City, his city of origin. It was his 15th annual trip, and he was surprisingly large for a biker who moved so quickly, though he did travel significantly lighter than we did, staying at bed and breakfasts instead of camping along the way. He had a terribly bleak view of all the towns along the way: “Tebbetts kills me, I can’t stay there,” “Hartsburg is full of old people, I can’t stand it,” and the like. We would see him a few more times along the trail, one of which was at the Trailside bar and grill, which served delicious food, pie, and iced tea and lemonade on the house.

Blackberry Custard...but the Pecan Pie tasted even better than the custard looked.

Departing Rhineland, we also ran into, or rather, were followed very closely by, a man we call Creepy Jason. We had seen him briefly while leaving Rhineland, and then he caught up to us and refused to leave. He had a high pitched voice, which he used to complain about his first and second wives and recount stories that can only be described as terrifying. He came from Hermann, where we were headed, and I listened with growing concern as Wells gave away more details about who we were and where we were staying for the night. I attempted to lose him by saying we had to reseat the trailer hitch, which we did. ‘That’s good, I have to rest too,’ he said, and kept talking.

Don’t tell him anything! I mentally screamed at Wells.

Lie! Lie! Wells mentally screamed at himself. But for reasons neither of us truly understand, he resisted that voice and told Creepy Jason exactly where we would be that night and where we were going. We lost him at the McKittrick trailhead, where he headed into Hermann. After a short rest and a brief exploration of McKittrick, we followed him into Hermann, dropping the cart off at the campground we had stayed at previously.

It was a hot day. Wells gave Kansas City some Gatorade pouches to make it through his 80 miles.

Hermann is a traditionally German town, like many of the towns along the Katy Trail, but Hermann had the distinction of being an officially designated German traditional heritage town. “Can’t get more German than Hermann,” Bob had said. It even showed in the population – a noticeable percentage of the population was blond. That’s why it was shocking to find an Indian family managing a motel in the heart of town. We asked for directions to the bike shop after getting their rate for the night.

One of our bikes had been having problems with the front brake engaging too eagerly, and had nearly thrown us from the handlebars several times in the morning hours. We wrestled the thing across town, cursing it the whole way, and finally made it to the bike shop.

The owner ambled out to the bike, took a look at it, and then flipped the handlebars 360 degrees, proclaiming it fixed. Sure enough, that had been the problem – the twisting was engaging the brakes, and all we had had to do was flip the handlebars around. It had taken less than three seconds.

“So…how much do we owe you?” I asked, stupidly. He waved us off, saying it was no problem.

We decided to stay in the Indian-owned motel after learning that bed and breakfasts were twice the cost. We were foregoing the campground for running water and air-conditioning, only later realizing that we had inadvertently (and most fortunately) misinformed Creepy Jason as to our plans for the night.

We spent the rest of the day exploring Hermann, though we didn’t end up doing so with the aid of marijuana or alcohol. Thanks anyway, kid.

Wells hustling around Hermann

We finally settled on the same restaurant we had gone to just days before, Wings-A-Blazin’, which was chock full of WWII memorabilia and pro-USA, anti-Japanese sentiment. We realized that, as a German heritage town, Hermann residents must have been under pressure to be seen as patriotic and yet find a way not to refute their proud German heritage. Which explains why they had these posters proudly framed on the wall:

"JAPAN DECLARES WAR ON US" and "CONGRESS DECLARES WAR ON JAPAN, 1500 KILLED IN ATTACK ON HAWAII". I was the one with the bright idea of sitting directly underneath them.

Wells was sure it had led to strange stares, but I hadn’t noticed anything of the sort. We probably just smelled bad.

We headed back to the motel, booked a room, haggled a discount and an upgrade to two beds for free, and then went to sleep.

Tomorrow was the last leg of the journey.

Katy Trail Day 5 – The Final Sprint

Katy Trail Day 3 – Saint Turner

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I slammed the cart down underneath the gazebo, the storm outside hammering the small town of Hartsburg with unexpected ferocity. Wells opened the tent flap.

“Shit, the wheel!”

I scrambled over to look at it, and sure enough, it was completely flat. A pang of guilt hit me immediately. Perhaps I’d manhandled the contraption just a bit too hard.

“What do we do now?”

Missing a wheel

We waited out the storm and weighed our options, using the Big Muddy’s wifi to look into bike shops. The one in Hartsburg had moved to Jefferson City and did not repair leaks, in any case. But Jefferson City was our best shot, regardless. So we dragged the cart 7 miles to the North Jefferson trailhead through wet gravel. The trailhead was two miles outside of Jefferson City proper, so I volunteered to stay with the cart while Wells took the wheel into the city. It was hard and demanding (I slept on a bench) but I was up for it. Wells returned, and we were soon on our way again.

Thankfully, we had planned an easy day, so the detour didn’t affect our schedule at all. We made it to the Turner Katy Trail Shelter in Tebbetts, fully equipped with beds, air conditioning, showers, a bike shop, and a second level with a fully functional ping pong table.

Yes, we had finally found heaven.

The whole building had been owned by Mrs. Turner, who had donated it to the bikers of the Katy Trail. One of the guest book entries had her down as the patron Saint of Katy Trail, and I tended to agree.

The first order of business, of course, was to find dinner and since Jim’s Bar and Grill held unusual hours, we were forced to bike back to the grocery store in Mokane. With dinner at stake and me at the helm of the cart, it was the fastest we would go the entire trip until the very last leg of the journey. We pounded through the 6.2 miles in 30 minutes, averaging 12 miles per hour compared to the 5 or 6 we had averaged the rest of the time. We ate at Mokane and returned.

Jim's Bar and Grill in Tebbets, MO (5:27AM, Day 4)

We would later find out that we could have simply knocked on the door and gotten into Jim’s Bar and Grill, since the owner lives in the building. But that was later.

Lying on the table in front of the Katy Trail Shelter was a leathery man with long, surfer-dude sun-bleached hair and a bracelet around his ankle. We had run into him sleeping on a table before in Dutzow, but we hadn’t met him until now. We invited him into the shelter to avoid the scorching heat. When we returned from Mokane, he was inside. Bob was a brewer for Anheuser-Busch by trade, but retired and having adventures around the United States. This was his 4th time on the Katy Trail. We chatted until the sun went down.

Bob the Brewer, Me, and Wells

I passed out in the middle of updating my journal. We woke up to a fog looming over a beautiful sunrise.

Foggy morning (5:23AM Day 4)

We had planned for the next day to be the longest day yet. It would turn out to be the strangest.

By far.

Katy Trail Day 4 – It’s a Zoo Out There

Katy Trail Day 2 – Fasting

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I counted the remaining Nature Valley granola bars in my head. I could survive the day on them. But I wasn’t sure if I’d want to. After years of eating them, they’d begun to lose their appeal…after the first year.

“I feel bad for you,” Wells said.

“Why?”

“Because you’re hungry.”

I thanked him sarcastically in my mind for reminding me of my ever-present hunger and then turned back to the task on hand – getting to some food. It was Monday, May 30th, and nothing was open.

A slight problem when we had planned on living off of the local restaurants.

6:30AM, Day 2

We woke up at 6am. More accurately, we decided to start moving again at 6am, because we hadn’t really slept last night. The tent was a sauna the first half of the night and an ice box the second half of the night, 50-60 degree temperatures waking us at 3am.

“We didn’t plan for Memorial Day,” Wells said.

“Yeah. Fuck national holidays,” I grumped, “I want to eat.”

At the next stop, I pulled out a granola bar, took a long pull of  water from my Camelbak, and then ate it. Tasted just like it did five years ago. We’d stopped briefly and chatted with the proprietor of a trail side stand who informed us that our destination, Easley, was a barren wasteland. Thankfully, “hop and a skip” was never mentioned. She also mentioned a grocery store in Mokane, which we ended up eating at.

When we finally made it into Hartsburg, a town of 104 people, I had extremely low hopes of finding a place to eat. On the upside, we had finally found the gazebo that Wells had been talking about the entire trip. Hartsburg was an extremely well kept little town. There was a park for bikers to camp for free. The grill came pre-stocked with kindling and wood, and we would set up tent under the gazebo later that night. The park, nestled in the heart of town, would come to symbolize perhaps the greatest lesson that Wells and I took out of the trip. People all along the trail were always ready to help, always friendly, and always good hearted. given the chance, people are good to each other more than they are bad.

Speaking of which, the first thing we did after leaving our cart by the gazebo was to try to find some place to eat. Thankfully, the Big Muddy Tavern was open, and welcomed us with delicious food, a warm environment, and did I mention great food?

Definitely my favorite location along the trail.

Then we ran into trouble.

Katy Trail Day 3 – Saint Turner