relaxation, blood, and a Harley

Blurred.

The landscape is a blur of browns, tans, and stubborn green.

I'm smiling irrepressibly while on the back of Jake's Harley Davidson. An orange, black and chrome piece of fury roars beneath us. So this is the freedom of the road, freedom to be force-fed air, freedom to be thrilled.

My arms are in a knot around Jake; I duck my head down behind his shoulders to breathe on my own terms. I laugh: he accelerates.

Red tailed hawks in their winter color phase reel above us in a sky fit for dreams.

We climb in the shade of a boulder that could hide a house. A massive crack runs through the center, splitting the rock, and its very existence challenges us to climb it. We hang upside down from our [taped] wrists, our [bare] fingers, our ankles, our toes. He moves with precision and power. I falter and chuckle as the rock rejects my efforts. He reaches for his water bottle and drinks. Two deep red smudges of blood remain on the sides of the bottle and dry there. We comment on the happy insanity of masochistic climbers. The athletic tape on my hands smells of sweat and chalk.

Cactus wrens call out in the yucca-studded distance.

"I live not in myself, but become portion of that around me; and to me high mountains are a feeling, but the hum of human cities torture."

-Lord Byron

I like the juxtaposition of riding a Harley and then climbing boulders in the middle of the desert. Both exude freedom and something uninhibited, yet one is natural and the other mechanical. Each is an expression of the human spirit. The spirit of ambition. Born to be unrestrained. Born to remain untamed. The bike; the climb. The biker; the climber.

I love that Jake exposed me to something new, something I did not expect. I will always crave the wilderness, but from now on I can say that riding on the back of a Harley is a different kind of release--a new way to feel wild.