Nico – Page 32 – Steel Wheels

Won’t Back Down

It doesn’t register until you hit the road: every man-made thing you can see, touch, smell, eat, or ride spent time in a truck…

On Interstate 10 between Houston and LA gigantic well-behaved containers line up and lumber slowly along in both directions. Easy prey for the Pterodactyl Overlords of the Southwest all trucks run at 55 mph. You’ll see cars but not trucks pulled-over for speeding. The loss of time being ticketed is too costly so truckers are religious—until nightfall. At night drones are called home. At night truckers make up for lost time. At night interstates become a Wild Wild West of blitzing Transformers streaking across dotted lanes ’til dawn. At night truckers are The Midnight Rambler and they Won’t. Back. Down.

Truck on CA1 — *Stayin’ alive at 55 on the Pacific Coast Highway – September 7th 2013*

big red truck gaining — *Dodging a Midnight Rambler at dawn just west of Fort Stockton*

The Ride To Forever – September 2013

Hallowed Ground

In 1974 The Candyman poisoned his young son on Halloween with a cyanide-laced Pixie Stick in Galena Park, Texas in a diabolical scheme to collect on a life insurance policy and along with his boy killed our strangest and funnest tradition…

13 years after the death of Halloween a pint-size little girl was posed standing in a freshly-carved jack-o-lantern on a front porch along Harvard Street and with one-click Halloween began to rise from the dead. Neighbors came by with their kids to get in on the show which soon transmogrified into spontaneous trick-or-treating as a joke. The next year brought scarecrow-stuffing parties complete with hay bales…then pumpkin-carving totems…and within a few years hundreds of trick-or-treaters were coming by for “Harvard Of The Living Dead.” And we all thought that was really something…

But every year now whether pouring rain or darkest night thousands trick or treat on Harvard Street in The Heights—one of the few places left in the Galaxy where people of all ages celebrate Halloween con mucho gusto. There’s nothing like it. Long may it run.

Harvard Street Halloween in The Heights – 2013

Tango For Solo

There’s a beach-break between Davenport and Santa Cruz where you can suit-up, hook yourself to a kite, and dance the Tango on the water all by yourself

From the seat of the Harley, the kites appeared first off in the distance. Up the road a ways, I saw the surfers dancing across the water. Dressed in wet suits head-to-toe, they looked like Dolphins jumping in the surf. My first thought was, “Wow.” But as I photographed them, they began to seem like compadres. Kite-surfing is like motorcycling in a way — sometimes you share the the wave but solo is the Tao of it. Smash into a freezing wave hooked to a kite in a 30 mile an hour wind or fight a 900 pound motorcycle against the terrible gravity in the steep diabolical switchbacks of Big Sur…nothing is a match for the force of nature.

Wind surfer taking off