4/20 — Jack Sovelove

On 4/20 I woke up late and fried eggs and sausage. I called my brother. We caught up. My brother and I have always operated on the same frequency. We’ll go months without talking and reconnect and find we’ve been reading the same books, circling the same ideas from opposite coasts. This time it was Palahniuk. Last time it was Kafka. He had a lead on a house in Philly where rent would only be $475 a person.

I got off the phone and walked my bike down the street to my neighbor Adam’s garage.

There’s something about the pace of a bike that lets you take in the world in snapshots. An old man spitting sunflower seeds on his porch. Kids yelling from the rooftop. A dog tearing across its yard to chase you. Coasting through these framed moments that stitch the world together. And realizing you can travel a hundred miles in a day with nothing but your own legs makes the world feel smaller and more reachable.

Bike has been my main mode of transportation since my car died. Over a year ago now, on a drive up north my Subaru sputtered at the Custer exit and spewed coolant all over the road. The radiator split, the head gasket blew. The engine drank its own blood and called it water. I have a habit of buying cars with a birthday just shy of my own and ditching them when the fix costs more than they’re worth.

Adam and I had plans to go for a long bike ride and I needed to borrow some tools to fix the cranks on my bike. When I showed up he was halfway through a mural on the wall of his garage. He wanted to make a stop at the art store to pick up some more colors.

A man mid-mural in a garage, holding a brush and a small tin, in a paint-spattered teal jacket and socks. Behind him the wall is covered in black and white swirls with two silhouetted figures standing in them, painted around a small framed landscape. Foil-wrapped ductwork crosses the ceiling, string lights are strung along the wall, and a folding table of paint cans and spray bottles stands beside a grey couch and a red stool.

So Adam and I sparked a joint and hopped on our bikes. We made it to town and blew right past the art store and kept heading north. The joint had something to do with that. This mission had become to make it up to the Nooksack river, with a secondary mission of planning a piece of performance art.

We knew it would be a musical piece of sorts. But we were trying to iron out the details. Adam had been taking a class on systems thinking. He explained it using the bike he was riding. The handlebar by itself is just a handlebar, doesn’t mean much. But once it’s part of the bike it becomes part of something. It only makes sense in relation to everything else. We knew we had to build a system.

Somehow we ended up on math. Specifically functions. I was describing a function as a black box. It takes in something, an argument, and then something happens to that argument in the black box and the box spits something out on the other side.

A textbook diagram of a function as a black box. Three arrows labelled x1, x2 and xd point into a black cube with a white question mark on its face, and one arrow labelled y comes out the other side.

I was pretty caught up on the idea of painting a big cardboard box black, cutting holes on two sides of it and then placing one of our friends inside. People could feed things into the box as input and there would be some kind of output on the other side. I liked the idea of people feeding in items of sentimental value and the black box throwing eggs out the other end.

The terminology of an “argument” as the input to the box was intriguing too. We both agreed the piece being built around a literal argument could be interesting.

We made it to the river. The conversation paused.

A man stands astride a pale green bike at the edge of a mown field, looking off toward a snow-covered peak on the horizon. Bare alder and cottonwood along both sides, a brown field beyond, blue sky.

We continued down the path and spotted a dog up ahead running our direction. It was more of a hobbled gallop. It got closer and we realized it only had three legs. A tripod. It seemed lost and confused. No owner in sight. Frantic. Adam and I considered the possibility of a Lassie situation. Was this dog going to lead us to someone dying by the river?

We followed the tripod a long way down the path before we heard someone yelling from the woods. The dog had just run off. Its owner was looking for it. No one was dying by the river.

A white dog with a brown head trots away up a gravel path between wide mown verges, seen from a bike. A line of cottonwoods runs along the right, water shows through the trees at the left.

We stopped at a rocky bank on the river. Adam took a photo for a family. There was a boat on the water pulling in baby salmon for examination. They’d bring them up to a trailer on the bank, check them over, send them back. Adam thought it seemed like a routine checkup at the doctor’s office. Please take a seat the doctor will be with you shortly. Open wide. Any pain here. Have you been eating well. How’s your mother. Are you keeping your grades up. Any trouble with school lately. Everything looks good, we’ll see you next year.

The trailer was essentially a black box. Baby salmon fed in one side. We couldn’t see what happened inside. On the other side they came out having been told to eat their vegetables and apply themselves.

We went swimming and spent a long time figuring out how to put our socks back on without our feet getting sandy.

We left the river and rode up to Ferndale for overpriced wings and beer. Then we made our way back. Thirty miles by the time we got home. My legs knew it. I thought about the handlebar on Adam’s bike. How it didn’t mean much on its own. How nothing did. I thought about what we’d fed into the day. A joint. A three legged dog. Baby salmon getting their checkup. Sandy socks. Thirty miles. I couldn’t tell you what the box did with any of it. But something came out the other side.

We never made it to the art store. Adam still needs more colors.

A man coasting a pale green bike down a road with both feet up on the handlebars, sunglasses on, open checked shirt, hands off the bars. The asphalt and the brush along the shoulder are blurred with the speed.