The Lion's Den: Delicately Balanced: Two Wheels, Two Feet

8-28-05

When danger sings, and sirens call,
Thoroughfares bound through copious way,
Great heart take flight, you dance tonight,
Your freedoms purse is paid.

* * *

Liberated from the tiresome quiet interior of my streamlined car, all senses where heightened, amplified, delicate in their latest advance into irregularity. The drum and sway of the motor vibrated just beneath my legs, purring the song of a coup de tat perilously in my ear. Resting on hardened black rubber and metal, my toes trembled, my body pulsated, and I knew – with fingers clasping that throttle – that I had found a new lover, one that whispered of danger and thrill with all the seductive charm of an Odysseusian siren.

She wasn’t the sexiest of rides, rather clumsy actually—an old Yamaha 920 v-twin Euro built the very year I was born. With her large bulky frame and awkward appearance, she commanded few superlatives, dancing generations apart from the sleek and furious FZ1 crotch rocket that I had tested a week before at my uncle’s house. Despite these disparities, despite her age, she did however command one truth. She was my first.

Our destination that day was far from ambitious. My parents and I drove into Lawton, eager to rev up the bikes that languorously rested in my grandmother’s garage. Our plan was to set out early that day and use the summer sun to explore the local Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge. Home to the oldest mountain outcrop in North America, the refuge boasted rock strongholds, standing forests, and all of the aged appeal that a day adventurer could envision. Donning our rakish leathers, we readied our steeds—my parents smiling at the thought of riding their recently purchased insect like BMW’s.

Heading out on the road, into the frenzied mess of L-town, I was instantly struck by an unwelcome feeling of vulnerability, as cars, trucks, and all manner of metal edges moved past me. Motorcycle riding, I came to find, exposes your mortality. Physics tests the physical, road sweeps beneath, and calamity follows along side. It wouldn’t take much, I surmised, to end myself or for someone else to do it for me. And yet riding a bike is so attractive despite the death and the danger. Why is it, I continued to ponder, that people feel most alive – catching hold of life’s most vivid colors – when finality swaggers close by.

We took the highway out of town, charging through the great swaths of wind, on into backcountry dirt roads leading to the refuge. My dad took up the head, swerving past obstacles and pitfalls, surveying the best way for us to follow behind. I kept my helmet visor up for most of the trip, enjoying the wind and the occasional bug to the face, watching predatorial birds fly overhead.

Past various lakes, Jed Johnson tower, the Holy City, Mount Scott—we tired not exploring every navigable elevation and horizon, eventually finding our way to Medicine Park, an active little town east of the refuge. At the Riverside Café, we parked the bikes, opting to sit outside and enjoy a cold Shiner (superb Texas beer) despite the humidity. We took up a table at the far end of the courtyard deck with a fine view of the town’s river, and enjoyed through sips of our beer watching a kid pull tiny fish out of the water just below. The restaurant gained my momentary favor by introducing me to an older bearded gentlemen playing classic rock songs on his guitar, a redundantly titled menu item called Chicken Fried Chicken, and a waitress whose assets sparked my wholly neglected interest. As we ate, I thought on how fun it would be to take an indiscriminate motorcycle trip cross country, with no road plan or true destination in mind. How fun it would be to randomly meet new people and new places, a road warrior enjoying the fruits of unpredictability.

A few more cool runnings later, we pulled back into Lawton, narrowly escaping a torrential thunderstorm just to the west. Admittedly, the sexy appeal of the bike, the dangerous colors of the road, and the wonderful chance encounters of each local, inexorably hooked my interest, and I knew - as my feet stepped off the pedal - that I was in love with a machine.

Until next time—my hand awaits the curl of that throttle, the jive of motorized thunder, the cliché freedom of the open road.

* * *

Bad day, week, month, year…

I am getting seriously frustrated with life. Beautiful life—with all of its bumblebees and blue skies, its smiling happy people with smiling happy lives. Why not take your ice cream, and your baby showers, and your Santa Claus, and shove it, drain that happiness away, let it all swirl down into one great festering mass of excrement rotting beneath the earth. If I had a chance, life, I’d punch you right in the face. You speak of love, wistful romantic love, sweet endorphin deceptions that cloud and conquer the mind. Your love is a drug, a temporal high, a surge of hope that desecrates the vein feeding optimism to the disillusioned. You are a meaningless chaos of shallow desires, selling cheap tricks of purpose to the passerby. Let go savage garden, merciless master, stay the fuck away from me. Stop licking my wounds with fire, stop burning me houses to the ground. If emptiness is what you want, then I will feel no more.

…sours, darkens, disheartens.

* * *

[Enter man. Freudian couch sits stage right. Psychotherapist lies opposite, pen and paper ready.]

Man: “Wow, I sure am the warm little center that the life of this world crowds around. Please forgive my bitterness, my venting, my trite depression. Maybe I just need a swift kick in the ass, or perhaps a good ol’ fashion brain enema. Maybe I just need to flush all of the unmet expectations and desires fueling my negative rage.”

Therapist: “Tell me about it my son.” [cue fake Austrian accent] “Vwat seems to be da problem?”

“Well, Oklahoma has been my home for almost three months now. It has felt like a lifetime. My new world revolves around work at the Black Rocks, filler jobs when my parents are away, and personal excursions in and out of town. Overall I have kept myself busy, rarely having to fight off boredom or monotony. Most of the week, when my parents are actually around, I help with construction. The building that once was slated to be a shop/garage near the front of our property is now to be the main house and living quarters, and we spend the best part of our hours banging away on that. My labor here is unskilled, my actions mindless, and I end up with the worker bee jobs of ditch digging, wire laying, or cleaning up shop.

When my parents are off gallivanting somewhere else, I fill my neglected schedule with work at a small organic bakery just down the street. It is there, with the volume pumped up on my iPod and a beer or two in hand, that I readily assume the multi-tasking measured intensity of a baker, rolling out granola, cookies, and wheat grain on my assembly line and mill. With all manner of sweet chocolate-laced confections to taste, the job really isn’t all that bad, and is a welcome escape from the physical extremes of my ranch work.

These activities, while fruitful and productive, trap me in an isolated existence akin to social celibacy. After a few days work at the Black Rocks, my body becomes thin and emaciated, my mind languid, and I voraciously hunger for the human contact that will breathe life into me once again. My Tuesday-Thursday routine, developed to meet this need, involves a trip into Lawton from daybreak to well past sunset. In the morning I devote five volunteer internship hours to the Museum of the Great Plains (MGP), working for their archaeological institute, educational department, and as an unofficial member on their grant committee. Unlike my last museum stint, the MGP houses a crew of aged professionals lost to the vicarious whims of my generation (e.g. there is no one there my age). I thus remain, when I leave the museum, professionally fulfilled yet socially detached. To work out my frustrations, I do an eat-veggie-sub, tan-for-ten, work-out-for-hour-and-a-half routine, which will often leave me pumped up enough for a solo descent into the urban night scene.

Now, to my everlasting disappointment, I have come to realize two things about Lawton. It is a very difficult town to make friends in, and twice as difficult a place to meet single women (of any value or character or measure of beauty). Lawton, for the most part, contains three groups of people (of my approximate age). The first are the so-called “army brats”—shiny head Ft. Sill lost boys who I have a difficult time relating to. They often travel in packs, gobbling up any single women that cross their path. They tend to only make friends with those who have a similar haircut, or a vagina, so I’m pretty much out with them. The next group is the college commuter kids. Lawton is home to Cameron University, a small community college sized campus known for its science, business, and language departments. Most of Cameron’s students work or study in Lawton, but play elsewhere, so I have yet to meet any of them.

The last group is the Lawton returnees, or never-lefters—kids that never made it out of Lawton due to personal problems, lack of ambition, or who didn’t quite cut in the real world. I ran into one such girl, an absolute beauty, last week at a bar. I was totally taken aback by her good looks, and was floored by her interest in me; we decided to go out a couple of times. I got her flowers, bought her a few drinks, wrote her a little poetry, and invited her to an OU game. In return for these things she proceeded to flirt with her ex boyfriend in front of me, jump all over another guy when I visited her at the bar, and then kick me to the curb when I confronted her with her bullshit. I might have been a tad bit direct with the girl, but after my last relationship, I refuse to play games with people. Even the shallow ones.

So this where I’m left after almost three months. Lots of work, no real friends, dismally depressed on the love front. My family has been fantastic, housing me, entertaining me, getting my mind off of things. But some days I remain jaded Lion, introspective Lion, disillusioned with life and what it has to offer. I think for now, I’m just going to have to keep my head down, forget about making any “single serving friends” here, and focus instead on what’s to come in Brazil.

Keep expectations low, want not, feel not, and you won’t be let down. Desire no one, trust in nothing.

Good or bad, this is my latest philosophy. Maybe it will help me finish out the week.”

[Therapist raises head from paper looking completely befuddled. Patient smiles.]

[Exit man. Cue the curtain.]

East Oklahoma Ride and More Work