Fear, Hunger, Life.

Fear makes me hungry.

Halfway through my pound of pasta, ribs and pizza I was almost sated. Driven into the circus like atmosphere of Whole Foods (whole ‘lotta white folks’) by yet another storm – God bless the rain – my thoughts went back to my desperate search for shelter the night before – and the three students that were lost in the woods making the Blair Witch documentary. The gaping holes in the little wood hovel’s I was considering seeking shelter in were very Blair related – especially in the half light of dusk – with the light mist rising off of the rotting leaves on the forest floor. The sky was alive, almost literally seeking me out on damp ground. Flash back 16 hours….

The storm didn’t look so bad as I headed up the trail. In my ‘expert’ opinion it was going to pull south, and leave the whole of The Mountain alone. One of the many reasons I am not a weather person. I assumed that with good pace I could clear the east face of the mountain and get down to the south just as the storm crossed over. I only missed by about an hour. Heading up the trail I was a little wigged by the dark. Fear is an element in my life. Fear of failure, fear of sucking at everything I do, fear of the clown in Stephen King’s "IT" that lived in the sewers – and muttered "We all float down here…..". Having recently purchased ‘The Blair Witch Project’, to pick it apart – and really decide that it wasn’t that scary (those were his fucking teeth dude). That didn’t work. My wife made me listen to the movie in headphones as she is over 12 years of age and does not enjoy the ‘scary as shit’ genre. The movie got me again. I did sleep better that night than after the first night I watched it – but now – a week later, in the dark and getting darker – it was on my mind.

I was on a reconnaissance into the killing fields of Area 51. Area 51 never really made the consciousness of the bridge community, as some unknown person destroyed it in early May of 2000. Suffice to say it was the B.C. of the hills here. Larger, more technical, taller and generally a level of aerial stuntery that has only been seen in a few select locations since last winter. I have no hard facts on the brief life of A51, but clearly there was good dark coffee, good dark beer, and some seriously dark sense of humor to erect such frightening behemoths in the middle of the Colorado winter. I stumbled on it during a long run with my dogs in the early Spring, and only saw it ‘live’ for a few weeks before some angry, very motivated person happened upon it and turned it all into matchsticks. I visit it every now and then, kind of like a roadside gawker watching them chop the top off of some lavish sports car, purchased as a result of small genitals or other mid-life crisis types of situations – while they haul out something that looks like a cross between a mannequin and the hamburger helper your Mom used to make. The destruction in A51 reminds me of the temporary nature of everything from these dark wooded stunts, to our spines, to our bottom brackets, to our lives.

The storm intensified from sort of scary, to kind of terrifying – to the contemplated prayer crouched in a drainage ditch high on the side of Tennessee Mountain. I am not one to take prayer lightly, and I figured if I just resorted to prayer – to a God that I basically ignored in the ‘church’ sense of the word – he might just whack me for the sake of eliminating one other sniveling non - believer. The lighting was alive – it was searching out the knooks and crannies of the mountain, swirling what seemed like a few feet overhead. I hucked my bike down the ditch and ran downhill about 100 yards from – fully expecting the steel to draw a direct hit. The hail wasn’t too bad at first, but kneeling in it got a little tiring after about 10 minutes. The lightning moved overhead – and at some point surpassed the ‘that’s wicked’ to the ‘that’s really scary’ to the near prayer state mentioned above.

After the initial shock of realizing I had made a really poor decision I was resigned to hoping that the pain would be quick and absolute. The irony was that it was my wedding anniversary. I thought dying on that day would be a cruel trick to play on my wife – so fighting the flight reflex – I sat and thought about decapitated children in dark basements somewhere 100 years before.

As they all do – the storm passed. I made the open road and the storm rolled off to the east. The road was a viscous peanut butter mud that really eats up all motivation on a 1X1. I was cold, tited, it was only Monday and my psyche was feeling more like that Thursday afternoon dull. I saw the dented, mud – covered gold Subaru that has hauled my sorry ass off many a long ride round the corner, smiling wife in the driver’s seat, soggy, stinky dogs in the back.

There’s no place like home….there’s no place like home….