The pilot or the engineer?
The path I seem to take is as straight as a gravel road in the Rockies and as clear as driving it with the sun setting in your eyes.
I turned his offer down for the second time.
“Yeah, well…” he looked over his shoulder at the land behind him.
The sky started spitting snow over the pasture.
“Ya hungry?” he asked.
“Yeah.” I said
“Listo, vamos!” He said in Memphis tuned spanish.
The conversation meandered along the 12 mile stretch of gravel leading to the Oxen Yoke. We drifted between scenes with no boundaries, like the movie Waking Life — from working in some of the wildest, most remote locations on some of the oldest structures in the country, to building stone camps from raw materials on a piece of property along the Grand Canyon, or converting spanish galleons into horse stables and lodging on the coast of Mexico — this is what days could be if I stuck with the ranches.
I lucked out when he hired me for the winter caretaking gig a few months earlier. It was late November and I just returned to Saint Louis after 3 months of driving around the West, camping in my truck, riding skateparks and to my surprise, deciding not to take any of the opportunities I had to stay out there. I was out of money and figuring out what I was going to do about it when I came across an Instagram story.
The story was posted by the founder of a small brand I followed. Her dad was in need of a caretaker for a ranch in western Montana, and if anyone had any art/projects they wanted to work on over the winter, was handy, could handle a rough winter in isolation, this could be a cool opportunity.
“I’m your guy.” I responded right away.
After a couple phone calls to make sure I could do things like swap out a breaker, fix leaky plumbing, replace a water heater, patch a roof and handle being alone for a winter without turning into Jack Torrence I headed to the Little Belts.
Inside the Lewis and Clark National Forest
Chop wood, day 1.
Gas leak
Ignition
Nice try.
The farm up north
“You’re a pilot. I’m an engineer. I want to know how a plane works so I can make one. You want to fly the thing.” said Jaye.
“I want both.” I said, taking his point with a nod to the limits of the metaphor.
Winter went well and now the offer was ‘Head of Construction.’ He came up with a pretty sweet pitch, but I had already stayed longer than planned, and in spring, I was out.
“Won’t you just go check it out before you say no?” He asked.
I agreed and he flew Heather out so we could take a week or two to drive to the southern border visiting friends and skateparks on the way.
I would, eventually, say no, but not yet.
Lucky Us
In which we sleep in the forest, watch the sun rise, Heather skates her first feral full-pipe and we do an over under in the Tunnel of Love.
We plunged zombie-armed through the fabric of night—the homogeneous, untouchable, lightless velvet that cloaked the pines. We groped for a spot to pee, fingers extended, ready to touch God or be obliterated against blackjack trunks.
We felt our way back to bed with cautious steps until we jammed our digits into steel and slid them along the truck's body, feeling for the door.
A last look at the sky through the window revealed towering silhouettes, pine-shaped cut outs in the stars. So many stars. None of them ours.
The sun is a black pinhole.
Half that, actually.
Betelgeuse floats in the night sky. It’s Orion’s shoulder, and from where we’re standing the Sun looks 40,000 times larger. And compared to Sirius, the brightest star we can see, the Sun shines 10 billion times brighter. Both are illusions.
Betelgeuse is at least 700 times the size of the Sun, and Sirius is nearly twice as bright. And if the Sun eclipsed the biggest, brightest stars it would vanish in a solar system sized sea of blue LED light. Not even a low watt speck of amber incandescence would remain. Like the prick end of a sewing needle transiting a beach ball. And if that pin pricked the ball and let out a single red blood cell, that would be Earth. And that lost, pin prick, mote of orange would be a black hole that could swallow about a million Earths. That’s our star, and it was rising soon.
Meanwhile, 60 miles north, the Grand Canyon sprawled in the dark. A wonder of Earth, shelter, grave, ecosystem, a ditch carved by weather and time. But, it’s our ditch, over a mile deep and twice the height of any building we’ve ever built. And we weren’t going to miss the chance to watch the orange speck rise above it. We rolled out of the Coconino under twilight and headed north to catch the show properly from the South Rim.
After the solar rim ritual our pilgrimage took us to another ditch. Man made. An overlooked feat of civil engineering that quietly spares the city from snow melt and monsoon floods. A heroin den or wayward home for some. A bordello, prophet’s tablet or canvas for others. For us, the megalith beneath the street was a shrine to the carve, where we paid tribute in turns, offering sweat for joy until lunch.
Heather’s first feral full-pipe.
Head over heels in the Tunnel of Love.
(I originally published this on my gym’s blog on June 16th, 2023)
Meet Me in Colorado
It was the evening. My phone rang.
It was 2019, mid-September, the last steam bath days of St. Louis heat stretched on like slobber strands dangling from a hound’s jowls.
One night I was admiring the Moonish street lamp outside my window when the phone rang. It was Jackson. He pitched a rendezvous. In ten days meet FBM, Profile, and some of the extended ménage in Colorado to hitch along for a leg of the 6th Maiden America tour for roughly 48 hours of riding in the Rockies. It was short notice and a short trip—a blink.
Street Lamp, surrogate for the Moon.
I extended my right arm and my elbow creaked like a door in an abandoned Victorian, as it had for months. The tendonitis reduced gripping my bars to a symbolic gesture, but it wasn’t a deal breaker. I might get in a few airs before the rusty hinge pulled off the door like viscera velcro. And prospecting for transition gold in the mountains with friends was worth it even if I couldn’t ride. I decided to cut work and booked the flight to Denver.
Other than the brushes on Bohren’s Midnight Radio summer boiled off without a hiss, but Jackson’s call promised fall wouldn’t evaporate the same way. So, before dawn on the equinox I slipped on my backpack and tugged my bike bag 6 blocks to catch the 5am Red Line to Lambert.
A few hours later Jackson grabbed me from the Denver airport and we were off to meet the others west of the city. When we pulled into the motel parking lot the renegade BMX nobility we were joining were starting to gather around the vans. It was mostly familiars.
Jackson and I were close friends from when I lived in Santa Cruz. I watched Garrett grow up ripping Ramp Riders in Saint Louis with his brothers, Zach and Adam. Steve Crandall became a friend after years of crossing paths on the road. Others: Stew, Dolecki, Seamus, Holladay I knew from prior FBM meet-ups and the typical currents of BMX life. The Leeper Bros, Jay from QBP, Vic from Circuit, Matt from Profile, and the bizarrely skilled Declan Murray were new to me and—
”I’m so horny!”
Eric Holladay knew what he started and grinned behind black sunglasses as he strolled up to the van, un-buttoned short sleeve billowing, khaki shorts, slides, banana in hand.
”I’m horrnyyy,” replied a voice from the shadows of the van interior, Seamus I think.
”Man, I’m so horny. Is anybody else horny?” asked Garrett.
Pockets of voices around the asphalt returned,
“I’m horny,”
“Whooo’s horny?”
“Sooo horny.”
Then nothing.
This was a pack of coyotes.
The trip was two days, and that’s being generous, but it felt like a week in the best way.
On the first day, I did manage a few carves at The Hook and a few airs at the Milliken park on the qwedge. That earned me six more months of frayed cable friction in my arms. So, I was sidelined right away but happy and shot tons of photos.
Me at Milliken, by Jackson Allen
Garrett Guilliams at Frisco.
None of us had a clue leading up to it, but this trip marked the conclusion of FBM operating as a handmade in the USA BMX bike company. Steve made the announcement while everyone was taking a break at Frisco. But, he also made clear this wasn’t the end of the road for friendships or road trips.
FBM was always more people than product anyway.
The road—we met there, we meet there, and if we see each other again, that’s where it’ll be.
(Edit:July 18, 2026)
Check out Steve’s new ventures:
Radshare - A not-for-profit getting kids on bikes and in helmets.
Drop In Coffee - Coffee that supports the Radshare cause.
Steve’s Youtube - Where he’s sharing footage old and new.
Joy Machines
The good’s waiting, it doesn't care how you get there.
J O Y M A C H I N E S
Various vessels to find the good out there.
“There is always so much good out there for us, waiting.” my friend Joe wrote in response to some travel photos I shared in our intermittent, but years long email thread. I agree, but I would, and he helped shape my opinion nearly two decades earlier.
In 2004, Terrible One, the BMX company he co-founded, put out their one DVD. It was unlike anything I’d seen in BMX.
The riding in the video was powerful, and nice to look at, but the context of the riding was the belle of the ball.
It was a world tour seeking out ruined ramps in vast, desolate landscapes, immaculate architecture calling for a carve among esoteric sculptures in ancient cities, improbable skateparks lacquered in vibrant graffiti embedded in equally vivid cultures that were in stark contrast to our own. The video was a beacon and the places they traveled became pilgrimage sites for generations of riders afterward, acting as corridors to an way of life that is greater than the sum of its parts.
It was obvious that the bike was just a vessel, ferrying them, all of us through our experience.
How rad we get, or how much fun we have along the way is up to us. If we make the experience entirely about the bike, or how we're riding it, we risk making our vessel into a cardboard boat, permeable, soggy with time, and easily sunk by the waves and rain rolling in with the inevitable storm of entropy.
26 years into my own riding, I still wake up with this electrostatic feeling in my skin, excitement, a hunger for a carve on the edge of traction, the cresting arc of a good air, wall rides, and the buzz of discovering new shapes to ride.
But, I know the bike is just a vessel, an avatar, and it could easily look like a skateboard, a pair of shoes, a guitar, a pen, a camera, anything, any activity. It can take any form because the power isn't in the vessel, it's in the understanding that the good is out there waiting, and it doesn’t care how you get there.
When you know that, the vessel appears in a form just for you.
