The Time Machine

Tucson. The night of July 3rd, riding into the 4th.

Remember all those decisions you made that took you where you are now? Now imagine being handed one evening with the friend group you would have had if…

That's where I was headed.

Eastbound, my twelve-year-old riding shotgun, bike in tow, rocketing toward the center of the sun — Tucson in the summer. Every few minutes a text from Baby Noodles interrupted whatever ballad was playing over Bluetooth, and every few minutes I got to watch the smirk it put on my kid's face. The fifth annual Ride into the Fourth. My first.

I spent my childhood summers here, at camp. Horses, BB guns, arrows, popsicle-stick boats racing the creek in Sabino Canyon. Every June I would have traded my school friends for my summer friends straight across. It wasn't a vacation. It was an entire persona. The persona has taken on layers since — less like a patina, more like a Gobstopper. Suck on it and you pass through breakups, divorces, stubbed toes and nicknames, all-nighters and bike rides. Lots of bike rides. The center of the candy is softer and sweeter, and that's where the timeless stuff is kept. Baby Noodles lives in the center.

Nobody out here uses the name on your license. Mine was always Critter.

We got our shit together at Transit and rolled out into a sunset people would kill to see once in their life. Baby had shown up in a button-up covered in butterflies and I got a big hug from the one and only, and I was giddy — a warm energy starting in my abdomen and rising into my chest. My body's way of preparing me, it turned out, for the whole stretch of darkness ahead.

It started the way every ride starts: negotiating a pace and proximities, who to stay close to and who to stay away from. Then a couple of Black Cats got tossed from a bike into the group behind, and I knew this wasn't going to be an ordinary event. James, Frank, and Doug were also, somehow, a band. Our own personal band.

Forty-five minutes in, a pit stop set the tone. A special group of adventurers opted for a double dose of exploration.

The sprint to Fantasy started when Gerad jumped on an incline. It's in my DNA to reel a jump back in. You have to snap hard enough to close it — and still save a couple more pops in case he goes again. I got him. But Gerad had committed to the double adventure, and between the incline and everything else, the floodgates opened him up. For the next hour, maybe more, the only thing he wanted on this earth was a bed. Nobody gave up on him.

Some rides get committed to with a specific intention. Some are to lose yourself in the melodic rhythm of circles stomped out through the pedals. Some are to find something — and that something is all too often just the sight of your car waiting where you left it the night before. Sometimes it's an answer. Or better, a question.

It didn't take long before, I dare say, all of us were searching. I was searching for a way to ride a bike in sandals the way Raindog was doing it — in bright yellow, like it was nothing. And I was searching for words, and the closest I got was no: I could not find this in San Diego. That was the cost of chasing the opportunities Tucson didn't have for me in my twenties.

I had met Raindog that day.

At the water treatment plant, Baby braced himself into a lunge and raised his hands, and I leaned into them, and grinding up the backside of Gates Pass with him twenty years ago sparked back through my memory field. "Is this getting weird?" he asked. "Not at all," I reassured him.

Remember pushing the fingertips of one hand into the fingertips of the other, flexing them just so? Remember imagining a mirror between the two, and the charge that almost ran through you? Am I alone here. That night I could feel that same warm current through both hands into someone else's body, and we surfed it like it was ordinary and extraordinary at the same time.

Later there was a solar calendar in the dark — a sundial big enough to ride inside — and I started calling it the Time Machine. We rode concentric circles in it, laughing and circling. Dan climbed it. Dan does not remember climbing it. Raindog circled one direction while I circled the other, so we kept passing each other, over and over, and on one pass she squirted a stream of water straight into my face. She didn't laugh. She kept circling.

It was the last time we were all together.

Dan and Raindog turned off at the JCC, and I didn't see them again. Days later Dan tried to reconstruct it for the group: he'd been waiting near Swan. Not sure what happened. He may have laid down beside the trail; we may have rolled right past him in the dark. He ended up at a QuikTrip on Craycroft drinking the best Gatorade of his life while the overnight crew looked at him kind of funny.

The rest of the night comes back in pieces. A moonrise two hours behind the sunset and every bit its equal. Somewhere in there, Toby got found. A stranger handing out free donuts at three in the morning. A train edging slowly past what must have been the last picnic bench by a ball field. For long stretches it was nothing at all — just riding along — and just riding along was so beautiful. I landed on some answers out there. None survived. They moved like the train.

At one in the morning at Fort Lowell Park, Ira served turkey. Stuffing. Mashed potatoes. Thanksgiving dinner on the Fourth of July, then naps in the dirt.

Somewhere past the turkey a rider slipped ahead of me and flashed a peace sign back through the darkness. Gerad. Two hours earlier the only thing he'd wanted was a bed. "Good to see you poking through from the other side," I yelled.

Daylight showed up and just like that it was Saturday. Almost sixty miles. Some of us still had pop in our legs to charge the gravel through the paloverde groves; one of us kept overlapping wheels, falling asleep mid-pedal-stroke and catching himself. The morning ended at Maga and Gerad's — the second home along the route with rooms full of bicycles. No flats. No crashes. All night.

Two days later somebody asked the group for their top three memories. Quick, before they fade. Not giving up on Gerad — fuck yeah, Gerad. Ira's turkey and napping in the dirt. Dan asking, honestly, whether that was when he climbed the solar calendar. And the rider whose birthday this lands on every year — each one of which, he wrote, shocks him to have — figured that for most people this would be the strangest night of their life if you dropped it into their timeline, and for us it's just the fifth annual whatever-the-hell-this-is. He hoped he'd never take the magic of knowing these people for granted.

Then he wrote: "I hope Dan never finishes the ride."

I missed Raindog.

Two days later she read this back and told me there was one crash. Hers. A mile in, a dropped squirt gun, no blood, no bruises — a very out-of-character soft landing. I told her I'd fix the record.

She told me not to bother. Those are your memories.

So the record stands as written. Out-of-character soft landings, it turns out, aren't limited to bike crashes. Somewhere past Fantasy Island, in the dark, a squirt gun is still waiting for nobody to come back for it.