January 11, 2012

A day off for a bike ride up A Mountain

Other than a few really fun days in Portland, an afternoon at a rustic spa in Ashland and a couple drunken nights in Atlanta and New York, I have pretty much been working nonstop, sometimes as much as 20 hours a day, for the past 42 days. During that time, I’ve visited 19 different Occupies, 21 cities, written just about 60 stories and traveled no less than 8,000 miles by bus, car, train, plain and – as of today – bicycle, too.

Needless to say, I am exhausted.

So it was a bit of a godsend when earlier today I bumped into Charles Jackson, an Occupy Tucson activist I had met the night before, at the Shot in the Dark Cafe and he – out of nowhere – offered to let me use his bike for the day.

Charles is an interesting guy. He seems to sort of look out for the homeless people here. As we sat at a table outside the cafe, he interacted with all the homeless people who walked by, and even bought a couple of them coffee, even though he isn’t working himself.

He’s quickly woven himself into the fabric of street life here in Tucson after only being here since October. That’s when he finished up a four-year prison stint for forgery. He was working at a Twelve Tribe-owned bakery there as the business manager and right before quitting he gave himself an unapproved $1200 severance package. The police found him in Maui not long after he absconded with the bakery’s money.

The Twelve Tribe group, for those of you who have never come in contact with them, are a very conservative Christian cult that often prey on young, impressionable hippie kids. If you’ve ever been to a Dead show, you’ve no doubt seen their bus in the lot. And if you didn’t pay it a visit, consider yourself lucky. I didn’t ask Charles how he came to be associated with the Yashewas, as they are sometimes known as, but he is still a strong believer in the notion that Jesus is our savior, if not any traditional Christian dogma.

Either way, he was nice and trusting enough to allow me to use his bike for the afternoon and I took it up A Mountain, where I got to see views like this one:

That view is from about 1500 feet above sea level, and about an hour earlier I was riding his bike on that long, flat section of road way down below this vantage point. The mountain is actually called Sentinel Peak, but it’s known as A Mountain because in 1915 a group of University of Arizona students painted a giant, white “A” not far from the top and pretty visible from the city down below. In the post 9/11 years, one Occupy Tucson activist told me, a group of right-wingers painted it red, white and blue as seen in this picture from right below it.

I never did get a picture of A Mountain from the city. But who cares the really good view is from the mountain of the city, as seen here:

It wasn’t exactly a relaxing way to to spend a much-needed day off and I’m certainly no better rested for it, but it was nice to get off the Occupy beat for almost the entire day and even nicer to finally get out of the urban environment for really the first time in about a month-and-a-half.

So thanks for your generosity, Charles. Tucson is lucky to have you.

— Bob Plain