Tattoos, Lonely Shoes, and New Homes for Grasshoppers

I wanted a tattoo.

Because now I can claim I’m a free spirit and will not be defined by conventional office jobs.  They hold no magic.

“You’re Not the Boss of Me!” I holler at no one in particular.

I know the fierceness of the wind and the desperation of the first stages of hypothermia and the fear of big rigs when I’m on my bicycle.  I am intimately aware that I could be caught at any moment welcoming myself into empty churches and pitching a tent on someone else’s property.  I know what it feels like to toss my life onto the hopeful generosity of a town. The satisfaction of beating the ice off my tent after a sleepless, cold night. To face bears and scorpions and wild bulls and rabid dogs. To ford icy creeks and curl up in the only shade of the only rock around when the microwave in the sky turns the sand into fire.

I know ice and snow and sleet and hail and when my hair freezes and my water has morphed from liquid to solid so I suck on my braid when I’m thirsty. I know campfires and forest fires and prescribed burns.

I know bicycles and sweat and shoes and blisters and sunburn and hats and umbrellas and the joy of going 53 miles per hour headed downhill in the Cascades. And then knowing I was crazy for doing it. I know the torture of riding a bicycle through Texas Hill Country and watching exotic animals feed at feed stations while they wait for tourists to pay to shoot them. I know being treated as the scourge of the Earth and a Celebrity of Great Status all in one day.  I know jumping from bridges into deep pools of cool water and staying at the homes of kind strangers who took me in. I know the deep love I hold in my heart for the open road and the big skies and the feel of the Earth turning when I lay on my back and spread my arms really-really wide.

I know being pulled off the road by a dude in a forest service truck because he feared the odds of grizzlies, wolves, and bison versus woman alone on a bicycle in the waning moments of dusk in Yellowstone.

I know the shlop-shlop-shlop of moose in the lake and the cantaloupe that grow on the side of the road because their parents fell off the cantaloupe truck years ago. And the utter insanity that comes from the biting flies that bite me only on the ass when I’m struggling to ride up a mountain pass at four miles an hour and I can’t use Deet because it ate through my last pair of spandex shorts and I know it will eat these too.

The piss bottles casually thrown out the window by the truckers, littering the road. The tools and clothes and the one shoe I periodically find and wonder how someone could lose just one shoe. The grasshoppers that jump onto the spokes of my tires and hang on for twenty miles before they hop off to find their new home.

I know thousands of miles of all of these things and more.

But how to turn this all into a tattoo?

I sketched my ideas all over myself with a permanent marker.  Arms, legs, ideas, patterns, all-encompassing-meaning-of-life kind of stuff. Trying to find something that wouldn’t embarrass me when I turn seventy-eight.  Or even forty-three. Admittedly I looked a little like I just got out of prison. But there were no face or neck tattoos, so that’s something.

adventure.

Just ‘adventure.’ With a period. That’s about as all-encompassing as it can get, I suppose. I’m going for it.

And I’ll put it on my forearm because fuck conventional desk jobs with bosses who are bossy and tell you what tattoos you can and can’t have and what shoes you can and can’t wear, and that it’s not appropriate to swear in public and you can’t pee behind the bush outside the office and no, you didn’t properly fill out your TPS report. And your timesheet is due by noon.

But You’re Not the Boss of Me.

So I’m off to get my tattoo to prove it.