2024 – Ramble Out Yonder

Interim – Just a taste

December 29, 2024December 29, 2024E Sharp

Yaitmathang Country

9-12 December 2024

I miss it. It’s like one of my heart’s ventricles has been carved out and I’m expected to function on what remains. It’s a vital part of me, and its absence creates this enormous wound that makes life so much more difficult without its ever-present rhythm.

Oh, sure. I’ve gone for some 20km rides around town on flat roads and bike paths. I dangled my arm when the pain came and braked primarily with the front brake as much as I could. But that is not RIDING. That is just a teardrop in a bucket floating on a dam.

I MISS RIDING. It gnaws at me. It claws at me. I dream about it – my subconscious trying to fill in the blanks while I sleep.

Interim – Bob

December 23, 2024E Sharp

28-30 November 2024

Wurundjeri and Gadigal Lands

It was 1989. I was 13. See feature photo. My brother was in the high school band. He had to sell magazine subscriptions as a fundraiser. To help my brother reach his fundraising goal, my parents let me pick out a magazine subscription.

I was really into BMX bikes and a bit into hair metal bands – not exactly the topics covered by the magazines sold in high school fundraisers. So I settled on a subscription to Rolling Stone magazine. In May of that year, there was a review for an album called Workbook, by an artist called Bob Mould.

Interim – Sky-high

October 27, 2024E Sharp

21- 22 October 2024

You could always tell by the sound.

Long, long ago, in a state far, far away, my childhood home was located pretty close to a private airport where my grandfather was a member of the local Experimental Aircraft Association chapter. My grandfather and his son were both pilots, and my uncle’s son would eventually become a pilot, too. The entire extended family went to watch a lot of balloon launches, visiting war planes and air shows when I was kid.

**My brother and me standing next to our grandfather’s airplane in a hangar at the other airport in town in 1990.**

But my favourite airfield-related activity was watching the skydivers at the local airport. I never really gave a stuff about any of the planes!

The sound of the plane that dropped the skydivers was different to the other planes that we would hear flying near our house. So we’d often head out into the backyard to spot the skydiving plane when we heard it flying.

You could also tell by the sound of the engine cut when the skydivers were about to tumble out of the plane. If you had good eyesight, you could actually see the people as small dots coming out of the plane after that engine cut. Then you could watch as the chutes opened and they sailed back to earth below.

Interim – Another Supervolcano

October 19, 2024E Sharp

8-10 October 2024

Cathedral Ranges State Park and Mt Torbreck

Taungurung Country

The track is very steep and eroded. There are thigh-high step-ups onto rocks and exposed roots. At some points the trail ahead is almost head height, and you pull up with your hands in places that will become footholds on the way back down. It’s just a taste of what our hike tomorrow will be like. Rugged.

Interim – Aggro spring animals

October 16, 2024E Sharp

Hume and Hovell Track – Burra Creek, Tumbarumba – 26 September 2024

Wiradjuri Country

It’s the silence that compels me. It’s the time alone in the quiet, where the only sound is the crunch of my bike tyres on the gravel and the repeating click of the freewheel on a downhill, that I enjoy more than anything else.

Interim – Experiments in Physics – Part 3

September 30, 2024E Sharp

Rio Grande National Forest, Colorado – 20-21 August 2024

Somewhere in the distance, physics is getting a workout. A bunch of ice particles are colliding in a cloud. They rip off a bit of ice and grab a bit of an electric charge from one another during each collision. That electricity eventually discharges, heating the air around it to 30,000 C (almost 5 times the temp of the surface of the sun). The air expands explosively fast, creating a shock wave that I hear booming over the hills to the west.

I’m in my tent, curled up with my hip in a dip in the ground, my knees pointing uphill and my crap arm bent on top of my hip in one of the few positions it will abide. My rain jacket is draped over me, just enough to keep my hiking sweat from evaporating too quickly. I lie there, comfortably, and doze off to the sound of the thunderstorm making its way down an adjacent valley. It’s warm in the tent, here above 11,000 feet, with the sun creating a warm greenish glow through the tent fly.

Interim – Experiments in Physics – Part 2

September 22, 2024E Sharp

4-24 August – Salida, Colorado

Imagine you’ve been escorted into a wooden convertible and placed over the lip of a near vertical, polished concrete ramp that is 25 times taller than you. You are restrained with only a bungee cord across your lap. You are looking pretty much straight down and someone is about to release you. You’ve been assured that crash test dummies have already tested out your vehicle, but photos of this do not give you confidence.

You and your ride are full of stored, unused potential energy that is about to become kinetic energy. Gravity is about to take over and make you accelerate. What is going to keep you in the car? What forces of physics will ensure your safety… or not? You’ve got no rollercoaster style harness. You’ve got no rails to guide you or to keep you in a straight line.

Interim – Experiments in Physics – Part 1

September 16, 2024September 16, 2024E Sharp

I understood the basic concepts, but it was never my favourite subject in junior high and high school. It was too abstract and it involved too much math. I never looked forward to Physics.

I remember the high school experiments in class: rolling hot wheels cars down ramps and measuring things with different masses and moving the fulcrum on a lever to change the amount of force required to lift the lever.

Newton’s Laws of Motion made sense to me – e.g. if a book is sitting on a table, the book and table interact with forces of equal magnitude in the opposite direction. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Makes sense.

And I’ve always lived my life by Newton’s first law: an object in motion tends to stay in motion. I’ve never been one to want to sit still or dwell on the past. I’m always moving forward. The moment you get sedentary and comfortable is the moment you start to die. Always, always keep moving. You really cannot deny the laws of physics.

So the trip to America this year ended up being all about physics. I didn’t know this at the start of the trip – but I launched right into the theme unwittingly on the flight over.

Interim – Rugged

July 4, 2024July 4, 2024E Sharp

June 2024

The alarm goes off at 5.08am. It’s pitch black. It hasn’t been light at this time in a long while. The sun won’t rise until 7.23am.

I uncurl an arm from beneath the depths of the doona and reach up into the cold air to flick on the bedside lamp. Once the light is on, I can see my breath in the air.

Interim – Post-hiberation

April 18, 2024E Sharp

Emerging – April 2024

Last April, at this time, I was wrapping up Unscripted and moving into that ambiguous space between travel and work. Not yet employed, but finished with that spell of riding. But work came quickly and it was less than four weeks off the road before I was signing a one-year contract.