Graham Watson has hung up his camera bag to enjoy the good life (which includes not lugging a metric shit-ton of camera gear all over the planet).
He turned 60 last March, and his final outing as a pro shooter was last month’s Tour Down Under.
When I was throwing pixels at the digital wall for that Boulder-based journal of competitive cycling GW was a mainstay of our photography, as was (and still is) Casey B. Gibson. Between the two of them we pretty much covered the globe like Sherwin-Williams.
It’s a tough hustle, pro shooting, The travel is unending, and the days run 48 hours apiece. The bag weighs a ton, the pay sucks, and wankers steal your images without so much as a by-your-leave.
But the old saw about a picture being worth a thousand words is a cliché because it’s true. One good shot will tell you more about bike racing than anyone’s prose, mine included.
So raise a glass to Graham Watson, who has gone to ground in New Zealand. I’ll honor him by not lifting an image for this post.
Jaysis. I keep hoping things will settle down in my little world so I can pay attention to the larger one and it keeps not happening.
We did enjoy a respite yesterday afternoon. I got out for a two-hour ride with a neighbor who is on the road to recovery after an injury, and afterward I aired out the cats for a bit. Then it was back to business.
I took a quick swivel at the news and it all looks worse than Kellyanne Goebbels after a couple-three meth julips. A follower on Twitter described the antics at the Orange House as “a shitshow,” and I agreed, noting that while I had expected to see some splattered on the walls, I had not planned on it being up to the knees heading into Week 2 of the Bannon administration.
Meanwhile, here’s some light reading for you:
• Kevin Drum at MoJo says the immigration order “is a pinprick, just something to test the waters” for a full-on war on Islam. “Think of it as market research,” he adds. “More will be coming.”
• The architects of the New World Ordure are set to start pushing their Supreme Court nominee. If you’re expecting the second coming of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., prepare to be disappointed.
• What’s old is new again: Everybody, from Henry Giroux to Michiko Kakutani, is revisiting “1984” for reasons that should be all too obvious.
And now it’s back to work. Phone your senators and representatives and urge them to oppose every little notion these dollar-store despots dredge from the shallow depths of their tiny minds. Do it now. Later looks very unpleasant from where I’m sitting.
“He’s done it again. It’s coming up. It’s coming up.”
The only thing I have in common with Ernest Hemingway* is that occasionally I find myself at a loss for words.
Then I remind myself, as he reminded himself in “A Moveable Feast”: “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now.”
And so I have: The Bicycle Retailer column is finally in the can. Next, the “Shop Talk” cartoon, also for BRAIN, followed by the Specialized Sequoia review for Adventure Cyclist.
Curtis Imrie (left) and Hal Walter in a photo lifted from one of Hal’s columns at Colorado Central magazine.
Just when the Republic needs every man jack it can muster, one of the true wild ones, Curtis Imrie, has left us.
Longtime readers of the DogS(h)ite are familiar with my old friend Hal Walter; we’ve known each other for the better part of quite some time. But Curtis is the guy who introduced Hal to the manly Western art of pack-burro racing, and they were friends, rivals and friendly rivals for more than three decades.
As soon as Hal posts a proper obit, I’ll provide a link. Meantime, the long and the short of it is that Curtis Imrie was (among many other things) an actor, and while he played other roles — including that of the murdered Mountain Bike Hall of Famer Mike Rust — the part he was born to play was that of Curtis Imrie.
A scion of privilege (among his forebears was Robert S. Brookings, founder of the Institute for Government Research, which would become the Brookings Institution), Curtis drove a Triumph motorcycle across Europe and the USS Enterprise across the galaxy, and nearly got killed by a wandering 18-wheeler near the National Western Stock Show complex (where he finally did die almost exactly a dozen years later, reportedly of a heart attack, at age 70).
He worked in front of the mic at Salida’s KHEN-FM on Tuesday evenings; worked both in front of the camera and behind it on a movie that seemed to have no ending (and now never will); won the World Championship Pack-Burro Race at Fairplay three times; and ran quixotic campaigns for Congress from his ranch in the Upper Arkansas watershed nearly as often as he ran for the top of Mosquito Pass. That race, he never won.
Curtis was an honest-to-God, sure-enough character in a world of ciphers, devoted to democracy, donkeys and drama, a spiritual cousin to Ed Abbey, Doug Peacock, Ken Kesey, Thomas McGuane and the Pilgrim from Kris Kristofferson’s “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33”:
He’s a walkin’ contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction
Taking ev’ry wrong direction on his lonely way back home.
He’s gone back home now. Peace and comfort to the friends and family he left behind.
• Update: KHEN will host a live memorial tribute to Curtis beginning at 5 p.m. Salida time on Tuesday, Jan. 24. You can stream it at their website if you’re so inclined.
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