My people were most definitely not Texans, but we dug “¡Viva Terlingua!” all the same.
A story about Luckenbach, Texas, Hondo Crouch, and Jerry Jeff Walker in The Guardian sent me on a little spin down Memory Lane over coffee this morning.
Maybe it’s the Londonesque weather we’ve been enjoying:
Well, it’s cold over here, and I swear I wish they’d turn the heat on. — Gary P. Nunn, “London Homesick Blues”
October could get chilly in the college cowtown of Greeley, Colo., too, which is where The Mombo Club-El Rancho Delux crew mostly played the mortal shit out of Jerry Jeff’s “¡Viva Terlingua!” album and once saw “Scamp” Walker Hisself perform live, loud, and knee-walking drunk at the University of Northern Colorado:
Sure does like his Falstaff beer Likes to chase it down with that Wild Turkey liquor Drives a ’57 GMC pickup truck Got a gun rack “Goat ropers need love too” sticker. — Ray Wylie Hubbard, “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother”
Maybe it’s the sudden realization that it was 50 years ago when, after more than a few Falstaffs of my own, a 20-watt bulb blinked to sputtering life in my hairy head: “Holy hell, I think I’m gonna have enough credits to graduate come spring. …”
And before you could sing a verse of “Gettin’ By” I was off to the rat races. Cage-liners, bike mags, and blogs, O my!
Don’t matter how you do it They say, “Just do it like you know it,” And I’ve been down this road once or twice before. …— Jerry Jeff Walker, “Gettin’ By”
The weatherperson’s Magic 8-Ball must’ve been on the fritz yesterday.
Every time s/he shook the sumbitch a new alert popped up. Heat warning. Thunderstorm warning. Dust-storm warning.
Herself had things to do, people to see, and places to go, so she cast a critical eye at the sky and went out for a run. Almost immediately the rain began to fall.
Lacking any pressing engagements, I waited awhile, dithering. Run? Ride? Throw in the towel and spend the morning swapping SSDs in the 2014 MacBook Pro?
Then the rain took five, so I thought I’d try to squeeze in a short trail ride, just to get outdoors and mix things up a bit. Mostly I’ve been riding the road. But I was tired of that itchy feeling between the shoulder blades one gets riding the shoulder of Tramway Boulevard, where the 50-mph speed limit is considered the minimum rather than the max.
I didn’t plan to be out long, so I pulled down a bike that would make me work for it: the Voodoo Wazoo.
The Wazoo in cyclocross-bike mode.
When I snagged this frame with its Reynolds 853 main tubes back in 2005 I set it up pretty much in my typical cyclocross style, based on what was on hand and what I could scrounge: drop bar, XT double crank (48/36T), Shimano 600 derailleurs with bar-end shifters, 600 brake levers and some Avid cantis that had to date to 1995 or even earlier, and — just because I had ’em — a Rock Shox suspension post and Flite saddle, a True Temper Alpha Q carbon fork, and a set of Dura-Ace weirdo wheels, probably wearing Michelin Jets.
As I wrote back then:
Haven’t had it on a scale yet, but I suspect it’s the lightest bike in the bunch. The top tube is a centimeter shorter than my (Steelman) Eurocrosses, and the stem sits a tad higher, so I’ve a nice upright position on this rascal, which is nice when you’re riding something that says “Voodoo” in a town full of Bible-thumpers. You want to be able to see ’em coming.
Four years later what I didn’t see coming was a patch of ice hiding under a puddle on a Bibleburg bike path. Down I went, dislocating my left communications digit, leaving me wearing a splint and unable to handle a road bar and its various levers, STI or otherwise, with a multiday bike tour of southern Arizona coming up, my first gig for Mike Deme and Adventure Cyclist magazine.
Well. Shit.
I had to train, and I didn’t want to do it on a 26-inch-wheeled mountain bike, so I got the gang at Old Town Bike Shop to redo my Voodoo as a flat-bar, single-ring, thumb-shifting, seven-speed. The weirdo wheels went away, replaced by a mismatched set of Mavic hoops laced to Hügi Compact hubs cannibalized from an old set of MTB wheels. The cantis went unchanged, but got a pair of Real levers operable by two of the fingers that still functioned on that left hand.
Bingo.
And 17 years down the road that’s pretty much how the bike remains, with a few changes to accommodate failure and/or necessity.
The rear Avid brake finally croaked, so I swapped in a Dia-Compe 986. The Flite got moved to another bike and after a few candidates auditioned only to be found wanting the Wazoo now sports an Ergon SMC4-M atop an old Control Tech post. The tires are Continental CrossRides in 700×42. A Tange Infinity fork replaced the carbon model. When the Shimano 600 rear derailleur was needed elsewhere I plugged in a 105, with a tab extender that lets me run an 11-34T cassette with that 38T chainring.
I hadn’t ridden it since February. And that “short” ride I had planned turned into two hours of giggles on the trails, from El Rancho Pendejo south past Copper and then back north to the Elena Gallegos.
When it really started getting good to me I thought, “Maybe I should turn this back into a drop-bar cyclocross bike. I’ve got the parts. Who knows? I might spend more time riding it if it were a ’cross bike again.”
And then I thought again. The Wazoo is perfect just the way it is.
It’s 76° at 15 minutes after the big hour of 9 a.m. here in The Duck! City, with a high of 95° expected — three degrees above normal but well short of the record of 103°, set all the way back in 1981, when “Bette Davis Eyes” by Kim Carnes topped Billboard’s Hot 100 as Ronald Reagan shredded the social safety net while bulking up the Pentagon.
Well, there you go again. … Good times. Maybe not. Better than now? Your mileage may vary.
Where there’s heat, there’s often fire, and it should go without saying that we have a few: Deer Canyon, south of Mountainair; Osha Canyon, south of Placitas; Rio, at Mesa de la Gallina; and Elk, in the Pecos Wilderness.
Rather than add my little flame to this hot mess I whipped up cool smoothies for breakfast: Mango, strawberries, banana, yogurt, honey, rice milk, and a sprinkle of Vietnamese cinnamon.
Up north my man Hal Walter was putting the finishing touches on his Substack series, “The Blur Goes to College,” which over the past two years chronicled son Harrison’s adventures in higher education. And I do mean “higher” — The Blur attended college at 10,000 feet, in Leadville, after growing up at 8,800 feet outside Weirdcliffe.
Hal’s plan is to transform the Substack chronicle into a physical book, with a cover by noted Leadville artist and old pal Craig Schreiber. Mine is to go for a ride before it gets too bloody hot.
The DBR Prevail TT.
I can’t go all the way back to 1981 for a bike — that year I had just abandoned a Seventies Schwinn when I fled The Arizona Daily Star and Tucson for parts unknown, shortly after my father’s untimely death in Bibleburg.
But I can time-travel back to 1994, when I bought a DBR Prevail TT from John Crandall at Old Town Bike Shop in that very same town.
Flag on the play: unpresidential conduct, personally foul.
The last time I took in one of those shabby little traveling carnivals that prowl the nation’s strip malls and fairgrounds was back in the Nixon years, when Hunter S. Thompson and I were both spending a lot of time, arguably too much of it, completely out of our minds.
The more things change, etc.
Hunter was, of course, a pro, and getting good copy out of his trips, especially that long one spent covering the 1972 presidential campaign for Rolling Stone that turned into “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72.”
Me? I was strictly amateur hour, and as two hits of mescaline sent me reeling around that dime-store Disneyland across from the old Rustic Hills Mall in Bibleburg my only creation was an unbridgeable chasm between me and my horrified ex-girlfriend.
I think she was my ex-girlfriend. If she wasn’t, right at that particular moment, she soon would be.
A half-century later I have absolutely no recollection of what I saw that so enthralled me. But whatever it was, I doubt it could hold a candle to what’s happening at the White House today, Flag Day, in the Year of Our Lard 2026. Especially since I no longer indulge in the various brain erasers of my youth.
If only Hunter were still around to give us the 411 on this shit. We’ll have to settle for what he wrote way back when.
This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. … Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be president?
After a largely sleepless night that may or may not have been age-related I awakened to the idea of flipping the script on this whole birthday deal.
“Instead of 72 I will be 27,” I decided.
But after further illumination via coffee I concluded that it would be a losing proposition in the long term.
Sure, I’d be 27 this year, 37, the next, then 47 … you get the picture.
But by 2031 I’d be tied with myself at 77 and after that the numbers go sideways at high speed.
So I guess it makes sense to be 72 today.
Beats being a freshly hatched egghead like the one pictured above, in Harundale, Md., circa 1954. What might he turn out to be if he’d gotten his start on March 27, 2026?
No, don’t ask A.I. I don’t want to think about it.
