Of Fat Tires and Futility.

Yesterday we rode to Fruita for the Fat Tire Festival to watch the "Clunker Crit," a series of round-the-block races on aged and modified bicycles for all ages. Well, not races, exactly. More like self-propelled improvisational chaos on two or three wheels.

An uncharged battery — which I discovered only when trying to shoot the stars machined through the front sprocket of a Western Flyer — means no pics of the event, but photos wouldn't quite capture it anyway. The Crit takes the place of the parade that's part of any small town festival, except this parade changes direction at random intervals, participants may be required to exchange clothing, spectators may be spanked, and the races are handicapped on the fly so anyone trying too hard is guaranteed to lose.

In other words, the Fat Tire Festival is pretty much like any festival would be if it were run by stoners who love their community, drink copious amounts of beer and can ride trails that would cause arrhythmias in most Americans if they were walking.

When I grew up out here, Fruita was a tumbleweed farm and ranch town notable only for its wrestling team. It had so dominated the smaller high school class, it moved up to compete with the big boys, where it remained a force.

Today, the town is a work in progress, which is nevertheless a considerable advance over the old days. Suburban-style housing developments rise on alkali flats across from trailers and tin sheds. A new Walgreen's is going in downtown, but a refurbished brew pub shut down after a couple of tries. One storefront has been spruced up considerably from its days as an antique-cum-junk store, but the new occupant appears to be in the saving souls business, the second such establishment in that block.

Around the corner, the dry cleaners has closed for good, two outfits still bagged inside and all the fixtures left behind by a retiring owner who has no more illusions of a buyer coming along. The future for the sewing and alterations shop next door doesn't look much more hopeful; the proprietor was out having eye surgery.

Festival sponsor Over the Edge — about which I overheard one customer say, "This has got to be the coolest bike shop in the world" — is full of people today, but the cheapest bike with a price tag was on sale for $1899. Mountain biking has put Fruita on the map, but it is the map of Towns Where People Come to Look Without Spending Any Money.

Mingling in the friendly, tattooed and flat-bellied Fat Tire crowd, it was impossible not to harbor a little hope that we'll work our way out of this latest economic mess. How bad can it be if multi-generations can come together to eat ice cream, drink beer and watch renegade silliness on a Saturday afternoon? Perhaps the future does belong to smaller-scale life and counter-cultural, back-country boosterism.

But the ride back and the books awaiting reminded me of a larger landscape. It's the leading western edge of Obama's bitter midwest, a dry husk place where even the cheap suburban houses will never sprout, a place the kids with even half a mind will desert, not necessarily for anything better but for some place, any place, no so obviously on its last legs.

On the western slope, we're much better off than the High Plains towns on the other side of the state depicted in the recently published West of Last Chance, by Kent Haruf and Peter Brown. A week ago, the town of Ordway was nearly decimated by a wildfire that authorities said escalated because of high winds and dried-out farm fields fallowed because the owners could do better selling their water to flush city toilets than to irrigate their land.

Obama got in trouble for speaking a small truth about these places while trying to avoid the much larger one about the country. As Joe Bageant, author of Deer Hunting with Jesus, put it in a recent essay, "The Audacity of Depression":

And like whoever else wins the presidency, Obama can never acknowledge any significant truth, such as that the nation is waaaaay beyond being just broke, and is even a net debtor nation to Mexico, or that the greatest touch-me-not in the U.S. political flower garden, the "American lifestyle," is toast. But then, we really do not expect political truth, but rather entertainment in a system where, as Frank Zappa said, politics is merely "the entertainment branch of industry."

Still, millions of Americans do grasp at The Audacity of Hope, a meaningless marketing slogan of the publishing industry if ever there was one. At least it has the word Audacity in it, something millions of folks are having trouble conjuring up the least shred of these days. And there is good old fashioned "Hope" of course — that murky, undefined belief that some unknown force or magical unseen power will reverse the national condition — will deliver us from what every bit of evidence indicates is irreversible, if not politically, then economically and ecologically: Collapse.

[...]

Naturally, the bunny and cupcake set of Americans are still oblivious, or at least pretend to be, but even at the more inchoate and private level, there is a growing awareness that things are going very wrong, and doing so on an incomprehensively massive and complex scale. There is the feeling that even if what is happening could be made comprehensible to the majority of humanity, to all those people just trying to keep afloat on the planet, from Zimbabwe to Flint, Michigan, overall it is unstoppable. Unfixable except in the fleeting media/politics Band-Aid sense, and then only in locales rich enough to afford the illusionary Band-Aid fixes politicians dream up when they write their campaign "plans for change." 

All of which is horseshit, of course, since real change would entail undoing most of the machinery of planetary destruction and extreme pressure to standardize humanity that we have come to know as modern civilization and mass society — halting, then reversing the momentum this monolith has achieved.

Okay, now I'm depressed. So today, it's read first, then bike.