America is a beautiful thing…
I’m in Gallipolis Ohio
John walked up to me in the Best Western parking lot to tell me that he liked the Revival. Small talk, he traded his Ford pickup for an Indian motorcycle, he liked state government but not the federal government and he shouldn’t have to pay federal taxes, soon we’re going to send troops to Ukraine and their deaths will depopulate the United States.
A year ago his wife found him unconscious on the bathroom floor covered with blood and feces, she turned him over and gave him CPR until the ambulance crew got there. He talked about his three daughters under six and his wife at home, about the intermittent pain, overwhelming and unpredictable, about not wanting to die. He’s 30 and delivers medical oxygen tanks for a job. He didn’t tell me his diagnosis.
I chanced upon the Everwild Music Festival at Legend Valley, an outdoor venue of rolling grassy hills surrounding a little valley, stages at the bottom facing an open area for audience and dancing and further back a crescent of food trucks and vendors hawking beer, swag and grease. The Grateful Dead (and pretty much everybody else from the seventies and eighties) played there. The hair, the tie dye, the dirt and dust, the incense and pot smoke, the tents and sleeping bags, the costumes and clothes (and lack of clothes), the music, the energy, the raw sensuality; it was 1973 and I was just seventeen.
The lineup included a dozen or so bands I’d never heard of; Madison Pruitt rocked the hell out of her guitar all by herself in an off-stage tent, wonderful, gravely voice and missing the high notes (she needs to lay off them and celebrate the grit). Gabe Reed fronting for Mooky rocked the main stage with a hip-hop alt-rock theme with no regard for costumery, making the crowd shimmy and stomp in baggy shorts and painfully north European skin tones. Artikal Sound System was a well oiled machine presented under a dazzling light show led by fuck-bomb spraying frontwoman and vocalist Logan Rex. I kept thinking that it would suck to have to follow her onto the stage….
Yesterday I rode past the Shawnee Mission Church, there were cars in the gravel lot. I yanked on the doors at the top of the steps, they wouldn’t open and I turned to leave and someone unlatched them from the inside. Helmet hair, riding jacket, jeans and boots, I walked in at the front of the congregation. The Reverend Clifford Burgess stopped his sermon, shook my hand and welcomed me. Before I could sit, I had to shake the hands of all ten parishioners.
After the sermon, Reverend Burgess and I chatted. He’s married and has a daughter, “the loud one in front,” he trained to be a car mechanic, worked as a carpenter and then spent four years in ministry school. For a while he owned a Gold Wing motorcycle (Honda’s big touring bike). He had the closest shave and best-trimmed mustache I’ve ever seen (except maybe in the movies). He described his religion as non-denominational, an intersection of Baptist and Nazarene. The church building before it was a church was a soda pop bottling factory, the handicap ramp is where the loading dock used to be.
I rode on wet roads all day and didn’t get rained on. Pays to go to church.
This is getting long but before I get on the motorcycle, I want to tell you about Taylor and her new husband Bonanza Marco Polo Napoleon Cummings. Married last week, they’re honeymooning in Logan Ohio. Bonanza is from Jamaica, accepted on an athletic scholarship to the University of Detroit (track and field, he’s a sprinter). He’s working on his MBA. Taylor is an architect, commercial and residential, she particularly likes the fact that their hotel is across the street from Hocking Hills Moonshine where shots are a buck apiece.
