Bulletproof

Remember when you were bulletproof? For me it was years ago--a much shorter version of myself. I commanded my bike every day after school, riding it in full standing position, letting the wheels spin unhindered down steep riverside hills. The soundtrack in my 10-year-old head, Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead or Alive," only helped to continue the myth. We lived just miles past Appleton's southernmost developments, where the road turned from concrete to gravel. Dirt that originated under future subdivisions floated in the air and turned the green grass fields just enough of a brown to fit the music--to fit the rider, the badass in bifocals and tube socks.

In these years before I began to analyze, I would sail around all the avenues of south Appleton--Telulah, Calumet, Taft, Carpenter, Roeland, Meadow Grove, Kernan, Gladys, Sylvan, Oneida, Lawe Street hill, College Avenue--solo or with a pack of others also fearless. Even when the necessary brain development began to take hold--thinking about what I should and shouldn't do, weighing consequences, wearing a watch--the urge of flight remained.

Perhaps your unstoppability began at the base of a mountain, playing basketball until the sun turned its top orange-pink. Perhaps you were king of your own mountain on the playground on a Saturday, when you held your own recess. Maybe you fled across a rocky ranch of dirt, building calluses on your feet, soaking them in mud puddles to cool them off.

Wherever you were, however the air smelled on those nights, however the fields felt on your outstretched hands, whatever shapes the clouds took up above, let yourself go back. Let yourself feel the power of fearlessness. It is this force that will create every moment of beauty in your life. Like the one you experience right now my friend....


LV Ray Peak, 04.04.09