(Excerpt: Releasing the Churn: A Journey Rounding Second Base)
It was 5:55AM on May 5, 2005.
That’s 5:55AM on 5-5-05. I am 45 years old—all alone in the piney woods of east Texas. I am fasting—as in not eating food—having driven to Camp Allen last night—an Episcopal campground near the small town of Navasota, Texas.
I am wearing my hiking shoes, blue jeans, and baseball cap turned backward. Five is my favorite number—Johnny Bench, Paul Horning, Bart Star plus ten. Five are in my family—if we don’t count our two dogs. Sabrina, the collie of sorts we picked up at the pound the day after 9/11 and Bailey, the quintessential Santa Claus lost-his-mind, Christmas morning Jack Russell terrier. Seventeen fives and one lucky four gets you under 90. I had a couple of 89s and an 88 last summer. Pete Dye saw to it that I have yet to break 90 on my home course—the Austin Country Club, home of the legendary golf instructor Harvey Penick.
I drove east the prior evening in my white 1983 Mercedes Coup. It cost $8500 in 1997. It has at least 175,000 miles on it, best we can tell. The odometer tells a lie from when a previous owner turned back the hands of time. Navy blue sheep-skinned seat covers shroud the front seats. Cathy does not like the seat covers, but loves the car. The Celine Deon CD is still in the glove compartment—the stereo system perhaps worth more than the car. It plays a mean Because You Loved Me. The Harley-Davidson sticker on the back-left window makes me feel adventurous. Those who know me well, know I would never actually own a motorcycle—too dangerous—not to mention impractical. The Harley sticker, like the CD and the stereo system, came with the car.
My friend Josh Kight is from the resort city of Virginia Beach—near where I grew up in the small farming towns of Wakefield, VA and Ahoskie, NC. We are soul mates. He is a renaissance man, an artist and a poet. Josh would have made the two-hour trip from Austin on his motorcycle, which he describes as follows.
It is a 2000 Kawasaki ZRX-1100, known as Z-REX to his friends. It has 1100 cc's of attitude. It's known as a naked bike, meaning it has little to no wind protection. It has an in-line four-cylinder engine that produces roughly 98 horses and about 72-foot pounds of torque (that's a lot for a four cylinder). It has a redline of 10,500 rpm's and is going 100 mph at 6,000 rpm’s. It gets 40 mpg in town and 53 mpg on the road. It's hooligan black and beautiful.Josh tells me he is not a Harley man—he rides a real motorcycle. For me, it was plenty adventurous just to lay open the sunroof, put all the windows down, and putter over in the old diesel—the car my daughter Sally nicknamed Matilda. I wondered if I would run out of fuel. Would there be diesel fuel in east Texas? What a risk-taker I had become!
. . . a goatee, which says, “I’m kind of dangerous,” and a baseball hat turned backward, which says, “But really I’m a little boy; don’t require anything of me.” Which is it? – John Eldredge, Wild at Heart
