Selected
Excerpt's from the Metal Cowboy's Vault
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excerpt from Joe's second book.
"Riding Outside the Lines" (Nominated for an Oregon Book Award)
On
Yere Bike
By Joe "Metal
Cowboy" Kurmaskie
I
took a place in one of the booths near the door, intent on ordering
something warm. A traditional pub; darts, fireplace and a long bar
already crowded with Irishmen pouring that dark mother's milk down
their throats. It might have been ten in the morning, if that. Rowdy
enough by anyone's standards, on a weekday no less, that I wanted to
hang around and see how it ended. But this was only meant as a brief
pitstop before pedaling back into the breach.
The rain
hadn't really stopped lashing since before breakfast, and the
wind, like higher math I so loathed back in school, was a constant.
Seeing as I'd volunteered to bicycle around my ancestral homeland, I
felt duty bound to offer casual disregard in the face of the harshest
weather. Given my pitiful state after less than a week of sloshing
about country roads, my relatives, were they still above ground, would
certainly have shunned me. Or, at the very least, called me cruel names
like plonker and wank before letting me buy them a pint.
I was too
cold to shed my blue Gortex shell and pants. When I glanced
in the mirror behind the bar the image staring back resembled a bulky
blueberry as painted by Keith Haring; practically glowing. Had my
rainsuit always been so loud or was it the sea of muted jackets I was
surrounded by which raised it's reflective properties to clown-like
proportions? One of the patrons, about my age, noticed me noticing
myself and leaned over.
"What do
ya call an Irishman in one of them spiffy rainsuits?"
I shrugged.
"You call
him a tourist. We wouldn't be caught dead wearing that shite."
He
smiled, a good-natured grin. The rest of the pub must have been
listening because the place broke into hearty laughter.
I joined
in.
What the
hell... it was a good joke even if I happened to be the punchline.
This
reaction must have suited them because an open stool appeared and
handshakes were exchanged. The comedian's name was Brian and his
friends were damn near everyone in the place. When the second round
arrived I realized a sip too late that I was participating in my first
genuine "session". To leave would have been beyond rude. Having heard
that these things could last indefinitely, I ordered a substantial
amount of grub, hoping it might absorb some of that potent beer as we
went.
"Ease up, Lad," Brian
said as I inhaled a thick bowl of soup and tore
at something called a doorstep sandwich. "The potato famine ended years
ago."
This
brought on another round of laughter and more drinks. At least I'd
peeled off my blue raingear by then. If I passed out and hit the deck,
I'd seem less like rotting fruit outside of the blueberry suit.
At some
point, between stowing my bike and losing much of the feeling
in my cheeks, I reviewed the blind spots in my life. Everyone has them.
Not obvious shortcomings, but the hidden flaws and conspiring
circumstances that duck under the radar until it's usually too late.
Growing up in
suburbia;
the land of Wonderbread, Campbell's Soup and cul de sacs, I
harbored a nagging suspicion that my blind spot was somehow tied to a
vague feeling of rootlessness. Can anyone really claim a genuine sense
of place when said locale is a series of strip malls, golf courses and
7-11s?
A
childhood of summer evenings spent floating weightless and womb-like
in a backyard pool regulated to the temperature of blood, for a time I
cherished my little mono-cultured world, taking stock, and something
close to pleasure in its... sameness. The way the automatic sprinklers
popped up from hidden turfbuilder bunkers each day of each month of
each year smacked of utter permanence. A manufactured history, but the
only one I'd ever occupied. Mine was a community of Tupperware pioneers
making damn certain no one would want for anything they couldn't order
from a catalog. I was parochial, insulated and... restless.
The
writings of a bunch of wayward comrades: London, Conrad, Steinbeck,
Twain and Kerouac broke my hermetically sealed (for freshness) world,
and all the kings men couldn't put me back together again. For the
record, I would have fought them to the death if they'd tried. My
outward appearance remained unchanged. I continued to float the pool,
swing in the hammock, pedal the streets and skate the rails and curbs
after class, but a virus had enter my bloodstream. Go get your MBA's
and fast tracks, I'll take the road.
Brian
asked if I'd buy the gang a stout and I nodded. God help me, this
session was in full swing now.
Those
first long distance bicycle adventures were taken out of
something close to fear... of growing old before my time, of not seeing
and feeling and tasting enough of the world around me before I left it,
or worse, grew too jaded to care. A middleclass white boy on the road
to find out. Sure, I was a cliche. I wanted to say I'd
left my zip code and then some. Still, long after the other guys turned
in their Eurorail Passes, stopped writing that Dutch girl they'd met in
France and knocked off the slight British accent, I pedaled on in
search of nothing more than moments like this one: a booth full of
Irishmen telling lies and teaching me how to pour a proper pint of
Guinness.
Act as if you have
faith and faith might just find you.
The road
showed me that your place in this world is where you happen to be
standing at the moment. Or in my case, teetering.
Someone
stepped into the pub and I noticed that it was dark outside.
When had that happened? I eased back in the booth and tried to focus on
the poor sod asleep at the end of the bar. In Ireland the joke goes
that Alcoholic's Anonymous means a guy who happens to be drinking alone.
"On Yere
Bike," the bartender hollered in the direction of this
seemingly comatose fellow. To which the scuttered gent stirred, found
his footing and wandered for the door.
"That
guy's not really going to try to ride a bicycle home, is he?"
This
brought such a roar of laughter from my gang in our booth that
you'd have thought I'd just goosed each and every one of them.
The expression had
caught my attention several times already, but
alcohol and other lively conversation had distracted further
investigation. I was certainly thrown by it since none of them appeared
to be avid cyclists.
"It's a
clever way of telling someone to get off their arse and on with
their life," Brian explained. "Out the yard, Up your socks, On yere
bike. Ours is a country where language is as dear as hard currency."
On Yere
Bike... it was the very battle cry I'd been reaching for these
many miles in the saddle. My eyes practically filled with grateful
tears as I hoisted my glass.
"Gentlemen,
On Yere Bike!" I toasted.
While not moved to my
level of emotion, these new found friends looked
plenty amused as our glasses touched. Clearly, I was the only one at
the table for which the phrase carried untold depth and weight. And in
the sober, and thankfully gray light of an Irish morning after, it had
only grown more valid as an evocation, a rite, fight song and prayer.
Not the sort of thing you'd expect a Tibetan monk to offer up as a
mantra, but who would argue with the clarity and simple wisdom of, "get
off your arse and on with your life."
Some
days I have to coax it from me as a whisper. Other times, I belt
it out so loud and strong along lonely stretches of road that quail are
flushed from the bush. Long as it rings true, I'm sticking by it as my
operating instructions.