Telegraph Street in Washington, Utah is one of the most trafficked roads in the county. Both sides are completely polluted with shopping centers. There are sidewalks, but you always feel sorry for anyone you see walking on them. I was heading out for a bike ride with Travis and Sir Prattipus. It’s tax time. So Liberty Tax has their dude dressed up like the Statue of Liberty and waving a sign. Nothing odd about any of this really, except as I passed the sign waver, he had this immense grin on his face. His body was not just waving the sign but he moved to a beat that only he could hear.
Here was a guy doing a job that I’m sure he had no desire to do. He was completely surrounded by modern life, but you couldn’t tell any of that by the way he moved. He was alone and the band was only playing for him.
Just outside of Panguitch, Utah. September, 2006. It’s the third day of my trip meaning I have more or less been alone on the road for three days. The night before I had a miserable evening sleeping underneath an overpass off of I-70 due to a missed turn. With no success, I had tried to talk to someone via phone. The dull drum of the tires rolling across the broken asphalt was the only sound that interrupted the thoughts rattling around in my thick skull. I was bored to death. Every chance I got, I would try to engage humans. I caught myself talking to the cars as they passed not giving a shit about me and my thoughts and my loneliness.
It was just outside of Panguitch, Utah that I started to sing. At first I was just reciting words from songs that I knew that would be stuck in my head for hours at a time, until I was able to latch onto a different melody and push one out and replace it. No one was around and I was singing at the top of my lungs. I could tell when I was starting to go uphill because my breathing would impede me from keeping the tempo of the song. And then I started singing songs that I was making up. Most of them were in Spanish and had to do with my traveling and my destination that was so fucking far away. But I sang to myself at the top of my lungs on the side of the road while I pedaled.
We are in the minority. The party is for a friend. It’s their birthday and they happen to be Latin. There is a group of people dancing in the middle of the floor. KB and I are trying to eat the amazing food that was dished in heaps onto paper plates and pushed in front of us. The music is loud and the beat is strong and its got that Latin rhythm. My foot is instinctively tapping. If this was a movie it would have shown the top half of my body, semi-still and the plate of food that I was enjoying. The camera would then pan so you could see the under the table and my feet would be going to town, playing the meanest air drums you had ever seen.
Alvin’s a big guy. He’s tall, well over six feet. And he has a big gut. He’s obviously also in the minority. His wife is from Columbia and we have spent time together. This birthday happens every year and every year there is a party of some sort. I don’t think I had ever seen Alvin dance. I don’t know the song that was playing. It was apparently a masculine song because all the ladies had filed off the dance floor leaving three or four dudes jamming out to the rythms exuding from the speakers.
Out of nowhere, Alvin comes flying across the dance floor and begins a jolting motion that is clearly his dance. He repeats the motion quickly and in time with the beat. He only stops to change to a different motion. His eyes are closed and he is moved by the music in ways I would have never thought possible. I don’t know what moved him and I don’t know why he danced the way he did. He just did.
It’s cold. I’m geared up and ready to head home. It’s 7:18 PM. It’s dark. I turn some music on and plug the ear buds into my phone. The ear buds go into my ears and a beany is pulled tightly over them to keep them in place and then my helmet goes on over this. The ear buds, the beany and the air rushing past my head make me feel isolated from the world around me. The darkness is broken only by the street lights and the beam coming off of my handlebars. Ramshackle Glory is blaring in my ears and without thinking I begin to scream the song out into the winter night.
I go flying by the Tabernacle and there are folks out front enjoying the historical place. Their heads turn as I go by making a ruckus to a song that only I can hear.
P. L. and R. 