Homegrown Locals was born out of a passion for whitewater and a desire to share my stories in hopes of creating a little inspiration and passing along a little soul. The blog was originally titled 'Kayak Harder'. This name never quite stuck. It evolved from the half marathon me and my buddy Jim used to run before putting on the Upper Yough. This was all it was for a brief time. A place to tell stories about kayaking. When I started teaching, the space began to merge with a passion for environmentalism, and of course the rest of my life. So began what I have come to consider the first real phase of a long journey. This phase included its share of dragon slaying, sleepless nights, broken hearts, wild white water, foreign lands, and finally a very magic bus. All things eventually come to an end. Endings are painful, but eventually we are born again in a new light.
Since my last post from a hammock in a tree in Nicaragua, I started a family and moved north. I left the banks of the Potomac, the Mather Gorge, beltway traffic, and our small white house on Halsey St. behind. There are many tales left untold, and of course there is no way I am going to attempt to recreate what has already passed. The river only flows one way.
So, here we are, almost two years later, and I am returning briefly to put a final stamp on this collection of tales that are largely representative of my own personal myth, my own call to adventure.
There were moments of lunacy and plenty of dirtbagging, but most importantly moments of authentic adventure, inspiration, and hearty souls.
Cheers to all of it, and one last ride on the magic bus.
The journey is long, and it is only the beginning.
'The Magic Bus'
We live in unromantic times.
Everything we do seems to be about efficiency. We are on an unending quest to make everything we do faster. We have no time to wait. There can be no dull moments. We are entitled to be entertained. We take spaces formally part of the public, formally part of the sacred and make them profane by allowing incessant intrusions of idiocy through, but certainly not limited to, cell phones, ear buds, and advertisements. They are symbols of a deranged sense of progress, an indication of a culture on the verge of collapse, and a dying of more soulful and humane forms of communication.
Communication is defined as something imparted or transmitted, an interchange of thoughts or opinions. If we examine the definition it may lead us to the assumption that there are qualitative concerns in regards to the nature of communication. What makes communication good? What makes communication bad? We might infer that the new styles in which we are imparting or transmitting may in fact actually change the definition of the communication because the effect is in fact pejorative.
Worry not children of the post 911 world, I am not about to begin a sermon on the wickedness of technological innovation and how it is causing our cultural worlds to unravel in bizarre and unsightly ways. No. I simply want to share a story. It is a story I tell myself so I can believe the things I want to about the world. It is a very human thing to do. We tell ourselves all kinds of stories to make congruencies out of the messy truths of reality. If reality may be nothing more than a notion of infinite possibility, it seems that in this day and age we sure do a great job of suppressing ourselves into an unseemly world of tight, constricting, and enslaving boxes. Square boxes of ideological dogma that so many of us are willing to carry unabashedly to the ends of our very flat planet.
So begins the story of the magic bus.
It was green. The paint was peeling in a variety of places. The taillights were cracked. There was a time when the roof was white, but the black mold, and light green lichen found a suitable niche under the towering oaks where the bus was parked on the banks of the river. There was a window missing in the very back left seat. The stereo was circa early nineties. It did not work. It currently served as a home for a small twig. I do not know why the twig was stuck in the cassette deck.
The floor was filthy. There existed years of grime from summers of rapturous campers having their way with nature. The logo on the side of the bus was peeling. The white letters dangled in the sunlit breeze. Most importantly, and above all else there was a large sombrero sitting on the cracked dashboard that said, Chevy’s Tex Mex. The emblem was sewed into the sombrero with red and green yarn. It was an oddity. I fell in love with it. I placed it on my head.
I grabbed the keys. The cold metal jangled in my hands. I stuck the key in the ignition and turned. The bus sputtered. It spit. It coughed. It belched. It breathed fire and smoke from its nostrils. It went back to sleep.
I turned the key again. The engine roared. It wrenched. It caught fire. It smoked. It popped, and then, it came to life. I woke the bus from its slumber. It greeted me, tired and bleary eyed, an addict on the verge of collapse and ready for one last rush. She squinted her eyes and looked me up and down as I walked around her boxy curves. It had been a while since she put on a nice dress on. These days it was all Bargain Barn shopping. Whatever it took to keep her going.
Curt and I stood proudly and just listened. Our minds raced with the possibilities. Where would go? What could we do? We could do anything. We could go anywhere. We dreamed of sleeping on the floor of the bus. We talked wildly about putting a couch in the back. We salivated over the thought of a cooler full of beer overflowing with Pabst, ready at a moments notice when the mood struck and the winds were right. We would fix the stereo. I knew just how to do it. We would get a trailer. I would weld the frame. We would fill it with kayaks. Old kayaks. Classic kayaks. Kayaks that no one wanted to paddle anymore, but we knew were still way cool. We would get some Dancers, Corsicas, and Mirages, maybe some Pirouettes, and a few swanky New Waves. We would chase the sun forever and float on a dream for infinity.
We got right to it. We hopped inside and did not waste a second. I sat in the seat. It was torn beneath my right buttock. The foam showed. It was exciting. I backed her up. She emerged from beneath the oak, into the sun, and beside the river. Oh yes, there was definitely life left in this old dragon.
We rumbled on down the road. My wallet was a grand lighter. I was utterly convinced that I had scored the deal of a lifetime, a ticket to the unexpected, with space for sixteen wild dreamers. The raindrops hit the windshield. The moment was exploding in pinks, purples, greens, reds, and oranges. It was an amalgamation of Christmas, Halloween, and a fourth of July make-out session on the sand dunes in Kill Devil Hills overlooking the Atlantic. It was ephemeral. The bus was communicating with us. It was imparting a message.
We could feel the blood of the Gods in our veins. The bus was transcendent. It was magic. We knew it. We could feel it. We had no idea what was going to happen.
That first night, we parked her out in front of my little white house in the suburbs out by Rock Creek in Kensington. She sat slanted on the hill. We crawled underneath her belly and began unbolting some old rusted seat bolts. We labored intensively. We sweated through four beers by the time the evening was through, but we accomplished the task. The seats were out.
The next day we had our first session on the river. It was day one with the boys. Eight young lads signed up to learn the lessons of the river, like it or not. It was thirty-five degrees outside. My balls were cold. They stuck to the seat.
We had no trailer yet. The boys drove to the river to meet us. Curt and I put all of the boats into the bus, on top of the seats. When we opened the back door it all spilled wildly into the gravel parking lot. If you were an innocent bystander you would have marveled at the sketchy and ridiculous scene. You also could not deny it. You could also not help but smile.
We lined up the boats. The boys gathered round. They dressed in an eclectic variety of old wetsuits that we put together on the cheap. It was their only protection against the cold water. We explained the parts of the kayak. We talked about the paddle, the pfd, the spray skirt. We let them get in and out of the boats.
We drug the boats to the edge of the canal. It started to sleet. The boys sat in the kayaks, and we instructed them to slide down into the flat water. Curt and I hopped in our boats, slid in first, and waited patiently for them. They managed with some trepidation, to accomplish the task. We sat in a circle. The wind blew hard. The ice froze to our skirts. The ten of us drifted in a slow circle. The point of the exercise was to get to know the boat. To feel the water beneath you, and begin to adjust to the initial awkwardness of becoming centaur like beings designed to roam rapids.
Blitzer flipped. Out of nowhere. He was upside down. Curt gave him a quick hand of god and pulled him back to the breathing world. The look on his face indicated he was stricken with fear. It was a perfect first teachable moment. The river always gives you what you do not expect. Stop paddling for the perfect line. Just become the line. Straight up ninja shit.
Lesson one concluded. The boys were stoked. We were stoked. We shoved the dirty boats into the back of the bus. The situation was immediately recognized as untenable. The trailer was essential. I called my father that night and asked if he knew of any for sale. He said he would take care of it. That night Curt and I worked on the bus a little more. We took an old dirty couch from my classroom and threw it in the back. It fit perfectly. Our dreams were coming true. We had a cozy nook.
We took the frame of the old steel trailer my father found and built a wooden frame around it. It was quite a site to behold. The old green dragon rumbling down the road, towing a giant stack of multi-colored boats packed so tightly the wooden boards were bulging outwards. We kept at it with the boys. Day after day bringing them to the river and sharing with them the power of the fluid world we inhabited. We spared nothing. We told wild tales of our undomesticated and uncivilized adventures in far-flung corners of West Virginia. We shared narratives of feral living in Colorado, and wove yarns of savage heroism and daring wagers when the stakes were high. We pushed their limits and they excited ours.
On a day that lives in my memory as ‘Huge Tuesday’ Curt and I decided to take the boys down the Mather Gorge for the first time. Traveling the Gorge for the first time is a mystical experience. On this particular day, it may have been the ethereal gateway on the River Styx. The plan was simple. Put in at Sandy Beach and take the left and most easily navigated channel out to the main stem of the river. The gauge showed the river at a good level. When we got to the river, conditions were different. Two to three feet higher than expected, but in the moment we were not entirely sure. Curt and I remembered the rapid as a simple wave train, which it is, mostly. We made a plan. We lined the boys up. Curt led the front. I pulled up the back of the pack. The instructions were simple. Round the bend and paddle right. The air was electric. It was day six. We were ambitious.
To taste the real wilderness on your tongue for the first time is an experience you will never forget. This is not the wilderness found in a national park, or your backyard, or even wandering through a true ‘wilderness’ area. No, I am talking about the wilderness of spirit, the wilderness of your soul. I am talking about the first time you wake up in the morning and understand what it truly means to look at your self in the mirror. The first time you discover what is inside your sinewy frame, bulging eyeballs, and matted hair. The first time you face even a tiny sense of the shock that is your own mortality. The fact that your existence is inherently wired to expire, and everything you are is nothing more than an illusion of time and borrowed electrons. Shedding some light on these matters is proper teaching.
The sun shone like a bronze statuette. The cliffs towered in the distance. The wind whistled through the leafless trees. We slipped into the water one by one. After a few brief moments we were all floating downstream together. This did not last long. The guy in the front flipped. The guy in the back flipped. This happened at exactly the same time. All hell broke less on the river. Terror reigned. The boys forget everything we said. The instruction ‘paddle right’ was now interpreted as a thought ‘oh shit, we are going to die’. Curt tried the hand of God. His attempts were unsuccessful. The enormous beast of a hole claimed its first victim. It was a melee. It was chaos. There was a moment where time slowed to the point that it was nearly frozen. The image of three kayaks in a giant hole, spray spewing toward the blue sky, boats violently strewn about as if in the jaws of the kraken, is permanently seared in my memory. At one point, I was not entirely certain that someone was going to perish. It was alarming.
The River Gods were kind that day. Curt and I managed to gather everyone’s gear, except for one lost paddle. We were split on opposite sides of the river. Blitzer was on my side. Being forced to look inside, perhaps for the first time, the tears began to flow down the sides of his cheeks. I stared him in the eye and told him to get back in his boat. ‘There’s one way down son’. He replied that he did not want to go, and we were well on our way to the second big teachable moment of the season. As the river roared loudly, and the rock was hard beneath our feet, and the grains of sand clung to our legs, I looked him in the eye and said, ‘it does not matter if you want to go. It eventually comes for all of us, so you may as well get on with it’.
In all honesty, I am not sure if this is exactly what I said to him, what I imagined saying to him, or if I said something that resembled this. I do know that either way, that however I said, that this is the hard truth of it all:
You go, live, and die, or
You die and stay behind.
In that first season on the river with the boys, there was life before ‘Huge Tuesday’ and life after it. None of us were ever the same. It was that huge.
Curt left my side at the end of the spring and made his way back west to work the White Salmon. He met a girl. They drank a snake bowl together. They got in a fist- fight in the streets of Fort Collins with a marauding pack of locals. Three years later he married her.
The first spring season eventually gave way to summer. We wrapped up our inaugural paddling season with a trip to the Maury River. A few of the boys stepped it up and tried their hand paddling their first class IV rapid. It was a beautiful day on the emerald green waters in a place that lives deep in my bones.
We made a trip to North Carolina. The bus was tired, but she always gave everything she had. She broke down. She would not start in the mornings. The battery died. The vacuum pump blew. The brakes stopped working. The windshield cracked. On we drove. We drove one thousand five hundred miles through the entire state of North Carolina, down the Appalachians, out to the coast, and up through the Outer Banks. We disappeared into the underworld, into the magic of the Aqua Cave, slept on sheepskins from the Switzerland of Virginia, made sausage burritos from Jenny’s farm, and rode the waves of the Graveyard of the Atlantic. We pulled a fake gun on some locals that shot bottle rockets at us at the top of a mountain in Tennessee. We kayaked the Nolichucky. We hitch hiked our shuttles. We drove five hours through the night to get to the oldest trees on the east coast, hidden in the Black River, the Methuselah of Old Bald Cypress. We crossed our fingers as we drove the bus onto a ferry to cross the ocean to get the Outer Banks. We crossed them again, silently praying that she would start. That she would take us home. We wobbled up the state. We made our way to Virginia, and at a gas station in New Kent County, she just needed some solid rest. We got a tow from a guy name Al. he pulled the bus onto a flat bed and the eight of us crammed into a six -person cab. Three hours later we were home.
My buddy Scott got married that Fall. Everyone flew in for the wedding. I drove us all to the Potomac for his bachelor party in the bus. We sat on the banks of the river and drank moonshine and listened to bluegrass. We admired the knife I forged from an old truck leaf spring on top of the tallest mountain in West Virginia in an October snowstorm.
The next day we threw on our suits. Everyone climbed into the bus and we headed out. She stalled at a traffic light and we could not get her going. We hopped out in our suits and pushed her to the nearest gas station. The dragon was just so tired. She did not have much left to give. It was the dream though, the vision. We could go anywhere. We could do anything. The magic bus would take us there.
My wife and I ran into the streets and hailed a cab. We got lucky and we made it to the ceremony with a minute to spare. I stood next to Scott, held the rings, and watched one of my best friends get married.
I poured more and more money into her. I did not want her to die. I spent thousands here, and thousands there. I was in deep. She had a hold of me. I could not shake her. So long as she was alive, the possibilities were endless. They were limitless.
Time started to take her. The inevitable toll of change, and the marching drum of the illusion of progress. My seasons on the Potomac were coming to a close. There were other adventures. There were other horizon lines. I wanted to see them. I wanted to visit them, and see what else was possible.
I traded it all in. My job. The bus. Teaching on the river. I did not want to let it go, but there was a bigger thing that I could not put my finger on. I was certain it was hiding out there somewhere.
I drove the bus down route 66 to the confluence of route 29. I met my mother and father. They would keep the bus in Virginia for me. ‘Don’t worry’ my father said. ‘Ill look after her for you’.
I knew he would. My father is great with all things mechanical. I was bereft. We went so far together. What about the dream? What about the vision? What about going anywhere? What about doing anything? I could still do it. I could still go anywhere. I could still do anything, right? The question sat in my gut. It was a pang of fear. It was a pang of dying and staying.
I moved north. My daughter was born. She is a beautiful, miraculous fiery little girl. She started walking when she was nine months old. She hangs on the pull up bar while I work out. She runs around our apartment saying ‘baby’ over and over again. She loves to be in the woods. She loves to sit in between my legs while I paddle out into still waters.
I am not sure I care too much for my place of employment. It is intense, but in all the wrong ways. It feels soulless, but I know that is not true. It is boring. It is soft butter. I find spaces that I consider sacred increasingly intruded upon. I find my time disappearing. It is scary. It is actually horrifying. The possibilities. The vision. I am fighting to hold on. I want to go anywhere. I want to do anything. I want my daughter to believe the same. These are the details I want to pay attention to. These are the details that are most important. I want to feel a little magic every day. I want to feel a cosmic consciousness.
Last night the phone rang. It was my father. ‘Well, I sold the bus,’ he said. My heart sank. I told him it was ok. I knew it is what I had to do, that I could not keep it. It was not reliable. It was going to cost too much money. It was not responsible. It was not feasible. The rationality was disgustingly efficient. She was gone and I was sad. I am sad, and this is my way of mourning her. I had to honor her with a story. My story. A story about a belief in what might be possible with a little bit of magic.
We are all floating down the river. Perhaps this brings me to teachable moment number three. The river flows one way. You cannot look back. We are floating forever onward and forever changed by all the waters that grace our bows. We must accept everything as it, impermanent and unending. The bus was magic. I have no doubt about it. There was a spirit inside. There was a special energy. You cannot create nor destroy energy. Energy can only change forms, and when it changes forms, some of that energy dissipates in the environment as a less usable form of heat.
The heat of an engine from an old magic bus, and the haunting echo of all the dreams the ever were and will ever be.
The magic bus and I have parted ways in the physical sense, but her message was clear. She imparted a richness of exalted resplendency. She offered lessons of humility. She offered moments of triumph. She offered rewards of happiness. She allowed a dream to come true.
Most importantly, and above all else she communicated. She communicated beautifully, and I am thankful.
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