TALES: A pile of pleasure

There’s something about a dirt pile that makes a kid with a bike smile from ear to ear. It represents infinite possibilities, trails, jumps, twists and turns – just waiting to be molded into a new adventure. So, you can imagine what happens when the kid gets bigger, and the dirt pile’s about seven stories high!

I’d been eyeing a new construction site on the Camp Foster Marine Corps base for a few days, and was finally able to put knobblies to it yesterday at lunch: tiered, nearly-vertical grades, very soft dirt and large, sharp rocks. Did I mention that it was about seven stories high?

Luckily, the Okinawan workers shut down all of the heavy equipment for lunch at the site like clockwork. In fact, the one in the backhoe parked atop the hill merely waved back at me before falling asleep in the cab.

The site was great for practicing making the bike “light” over soft dirt while keeping the front wheel from sinking with full shock compression each time a tier leveled off. After four intense runs that really tested my mediocre bike handling skills, I gave it a final shot just to get a few pictures. Got a little too cocky in the process, and the resulting endo (feet still clipped in the whole way) spanned an entire tier before abruptly ending in a sandwich (me crammed between two huge rocks and the bike). The result: one big smile and skid marks on all major extremities – front and back!

Just like a kid, I walked into the locker room after lunch, covered in a strange combination of dust, mud and blood, trying to hide the satisfaction on my face and ignore the confused looks from the runners.

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TOBACCO FREE DAYS: 9
ZYBAN-LINKED PSYCHOTIC EPISODES: 5
CINNABONS: 1