I love riding the thing.  Here, there, nearly everywhere.  (but that’s another post)

The other day I was flying down Triumvarato, a big avenue.  it cuts out a long diagonal . . . → Read More: the physics of bus vs. bike]]> I have a bike here in buenos aires.  Beach bike.  Blue.  Big handlebars.  Bitchin’. (it’s time for the revival of that word, by the way.  Make it so)

I love riding the thing.  Here, there, nearly everywhere.  (but that’s another post)

The other day I was flying down Triumvarato, a big avenue.  it cuts out a long diagonal slash across a chunk of the city.  My bitchin’ blue beachbike was taking the cobbled thoroughfare with ease, like riding on a couch with handlebars, that thing.

Biking the major streets here is basically an exercise in picking your poison.  Stay in the right lane and be ready for an unending series of hairraisingly close calls with maniacal bus drivers and heartless, soulless taxi zombies, or scoot over to the far left lane and experience an endless series of hairraisingly close calls with wannabe evel knievels on their barely-street-legal motorcycles and wannabe fastandfuriousers with their tricked out fiats and renaults doing 80 in a 30 (and we’re talking mph here, not the wimpy kmh).

I usually opt for the bus/taxi wing of hell.  It’s like a video game (at least if carcinegenic particulates belched out of your playstation).

So, back to Triumvarato and me flying.  Everything’s great.  Beautiful day.  Blue sky.  On my way to percussion class.  Tire zoom, wind whoosh.  Shake rattle roll.

Suddenly (and I’m not using that as a device, i mean it literally: one second nothing the next second…) a HUGE green and white presence within inches of my left handlebar, roaring, grinding, creaking.

Imagine yourself floating on an air mattress in the calm water of a bay, sipping some sugary cocktail and having a blue whale suddenly breach within two feet of you.  Short of the obvious defects in such a comparison, the general idea is the same:  from tranquility to WTF?!?! in 0.0023 seconds.

Then the bus, Just a few feet after passing me, brakes hard and stops to drop off a passenger.  I swerve to the left to avoid a splat onto the vehicle’s ass end and almost get mowed over by a taxi.  As I pass the bus driver’s window I yell “Sos un gran hijo de puta!” (you’re a huge sonofabitch!) and crank on, quickly sliding back into an appreciation of sun, sky and movement.

But again the sudden apparition of green and white.  This time, though, the bus is keeping pace with me.  The driver opens the bus door (we’re doing a cool 18 mph at this point) and yells out “What the fuck’s your problem?”

I’m speechless.  Here’s a fucking city-employed bus driver, his passengers, for who’s wellbeing he’s directly responsible,  staring out through the streaky windows at me, agog with curiosity, as he pulls alongside me like he’s a goddamn riled up business guy in a poor man’s porsche.  He’s half out of his barcaloungeresque driver’s seat and hasn’t looked at the road in what seems to be several minutes.

I pull myself together quickly.  (I love a good road-rage argument just like the next guy) and shout back through the gaping entrance “Me cortaste…carajo!”  (you cut me off, fucker!)

He fires back “I cut you off?  You think I cut you off?  learn how to ride, faggot”

I’m warming up now, launch my own salvo, “la puta que te re parió, imbécil de mierda, cuánto tiempo ahorraste cortandome así?  medio segundo, concha de tu hermana!” (The whore that gave you birth you imbecile of shit, how much time did you save cutting me off like that?  half a second?  the cunt of your sister!)

(these are literal translations…and yes, a common oath here is to say “the cunt of your sister”, or mother or sister or…and my favorite variation on the theme… “la concha de la lora”…”the cunt of the parakeet”…such intimidating words, no?)

He doesn’t hesitate with his reply.  “andá a la mierda” (walk to the shit!”) and “I’ll show you what cutting you off looks like”.  He slams the door shut and proceeds to swerve toward me!  Not once.  Twice!  As if we’re in our own wacky version of mission impossible and he’s trying to run me off some cliffs in the south of france. (I’m ethan hunt/tom cruise in that metaphor, for the record…pre scientology)

I careen out of the way, my big ol’ chopper handlebars nicking the mirror of a parked car.

Now I’m really pissed, and just a wee bit taken aback.  I revert to english.  “You fucking cocksucker, get the fuck back here!”  But he’s gone, blowing through a red light while he’s at it.   And I’m a bit relieved.

Let’s face it.  I still have the sun.  and the sky.  And movement.  and about 400 grams of pure adreniline coursing through my veins.

Because, in the end, buses are just a hell of a lot bigger than bikes.  Frighteningly so.

Now daylight.   Open sea.  I know I won’t . . . → Read More: open sea. mar abierto]]> Esmeralda.  Emerald.  That’s the boat.  42 feet long, green.  Teak decks, two masts, a ketch.  I’m on it now in the haze of cartagena’s port.  the lights from highrises and container cranes give everything a slow glow.  The water is nearly still.  The measured hand claps of midnight-stained wavelets against the hull. 

Now daylight.   Open sea.  I know I won’t sleep this night.  Too much to feel.  Restless.  I’m at the bow, watching the shallow curve of the horizon tilt and tilt again.  I am the axis.  The fulcrum, the centerpoint.  Everything revolves, spins, tilts around and through me.  Now on the roof, on my back, lost in the metronomic rolling of the boat.  Now on the guarddrail near the cockpit, my hands wrapped around the cable stays, balanced on a thin strip of wood, the sea churning out behind and beneath.  I lean in counter rhythm to the swaying  mast, and I can almost stay still, then, in a world that’s anything but.  Surfing this emerald.  Or maybe I’m right here, lying in the back staring at the wrinkled surface of the water, at the subtle changes of its color as we move into deeper water; turquoise, green, blue, indigo.

And the nights. The tiny fingernail of moon rocking up there, its full round self barely visible, hidden  by earth-shadow.  And later, when she hisses into the deep, stars appear…all of the stars in the entire universe, every one of those timid crystal shinings that always flee from the artificial lights of cities, they’re present now, shattering the night where I lie.  I observe the finger of mast.  It,  inspired by the rolling sea,  draws mad arcs and figures amongst the constellations, mapping out it’s own delerious visions.

And the waves.  Muscular things.  And quick.  appearing out of darkness, one after another, indifferent, potent, lifting me to the sky, releasing me in wet sighs.  A numberless army marching.  Dying on invisible shores.  Their dumb and (until now) mute anger spent.  A shout of spray and mist.  Sudden, white deaths.  These waves seem alive to me. Immense animals.  it always surprises (and saddens) me to remember reality.  They are just waves of energy passing through inert water…nothing more.  (but is that any less miraculous, really?)

The boat, cutting the sea, leaves scars of foam that spark green.  Tiny, bioluminescent (what a word!)  plankton.  Microscopic echoes of the stars.

My favorite place is the bowsprit.  Seven feet of sitka spruce.  It always points to the future.  I spend most of my days, and nights, there.  Nothing impedes my view ahead, nothing but water below.  And when esmeralda bows, greeting yet another wave, my legs immerse for a second or two in the tepid water, and they tingle then.

And the best of the best?  When suddenly, as if manifested from water itself (and maybe it is so), appear dolphins, polished bullets…four, ten, up to twentyfour, playing in the bow wave.  They leap in unison, frenetically (yet with aching grace) crossing and darting amongst one another. 

What a tragedy to be human…such a clumsy, torpid creature.  We are anchored by gravity to the land, we move in two dimensions.  But dolphins.  No.  They fly. 

This close to the water I can hear their clicking sonar conversations, their humid breathing when they break the molecule-thick barrier between our worlds. 

Eventually they grow bored, or become distracted.  They disappear, almost instantly, absorbed back into their medium.  And I am left alone.  Again. 

And my chest constricts.  A strange sensation…I am all at once sad, hopeful, lonely, and thankful.  

A mixture of emotions unique, perhaps, to the open sea.