Another story has me walking in, uninvited, wearing only a pair of Larry Bird-length gym shorts and carrying a pencil. That’s untrue as well. That happened in high school, not here.

The story most often told involves me magically appearing one day with a bunch of boxes. In this version, I just started working without ever having been hired. Again, not true. That was Fred.

On the occasion of Big River’s tenth anniversary, I have been asked to tell a story I have never told in over 900 blog posts. I’ve been saving it for this moment. Here is the story of how I became the third person at Big River.

In the beginning, there was Fred. Then he talked Jan into being Big River person number two. She and Fred sat down in the first Big River office just in time for two planes to hit the World Trade Center and another to hit the Pentagon. By the time he called me a few weeks later, there were two desks, a couple of chairs and a round, lazy Susan table that Fred’s wife was going to throw away.

While describing the vision he had for his new company, Fred started talking about tributaries and streams and I think he may have mentioned three men in a canoe. For the first twenty minutes of the conversation, I thought Big River was a fishing company. The early décor did little to dissuade that misconception. We had a lamp made from oars, pictures of bigmouth bass jumping in mountain lakes and maps of rivers from all over the country. I think I remember a reel and rod somewhere in a conference room. Our Christmas ornaments that first year were from a tackle box. No joke.

Margaret came next. Someone had to figure out what the hell was going on. She was about 16 years old at the time. Okay, maybe 19. I cannot remember exactly, but I have shirts older than she was back then. I’m wearing one as I type this.

Big River sort of started from there. In the wake of 9/11, we pitched some new business and got it. We pitched some more and got it. Ten years later, we have 27 people and clients all over the country. This story is pretty dull compared to the six-pack, strippers and boxes tale.

There is one small bit of truth to at least one of those stories up there. The boxes. I still have several of those boxes I brought in ten years ago. They’re sitting over in the corner of my office right now, pictures of beaches taped to the sides. I think about opening them now and then, just to see what is inside. Old books or maybe a coffee cup with the stains of 2001; could be anything in there. I don’t open them, though. The idea of a piece of the original Big River still perfectly intact and untouched like a time capsule from 2001 stops me. Then again, it could be the thought of old gym shorts and a six pack tucked in there.

Beaches do to me what chocolate does to some people. Months can pass before I need chocolate. I went a year once. I cannot, however, do without a beach for that long. The smell of coconut oil and spawning fish in the distance; the quick burn of sun on your skin; the taste of salt, the wedgie of sand lodged in the seat of your swimsuit; this is how humans were meant to live. Not in snow. Not on ice. Not in an urban rectangle, but right up there just to the right of that pier, feet snuggled in the sand, face on fire, waiting for absolutely nothing to happen. The beach is a temple to nothing important happening. And nothing happens all the time on the beach.

Some people sit under umbrellas and read. I tried that. Did not work. I have to be in the water, body-surfing the waves, slicing my feet on the shells, feeling the sting of jellyfish and the nibble of some other kind of fish I would rather not know about. That is the whole point. When there is this much water, you have to be in it.

When I go to the beach I cannot even remember what I do for a living. The advertising banner hanging off the tail of a plane is invisible to me. I do not care that “Hot Tuna has the best crab cakes on the beach.” I say the word “dude” even more often when I am around water.

Feeling tired, pissed, stressed, burned out, freaked out, anxious, worried, hurried, sober? Come on in, the water’s fine, dude. While it may rust your car, salt water heals all human wounds, both physical and mental. Maybe it is because there are no enemies in the water. Republicans become liberals. Liberals become conservatives. Almost everyone gets along when they are half naked and working on a good case of melanoma. It is even possible to get a good night’s sleep on the dunes, the sound of waves calling Mr. Sandman.

Okay, ahhh, I am trying to remember what I was going to type here. I think there was a point to this post. Hell, who cares, dude. There’s a killer wave over there and I still have a couple of layers of skin left.

Listen, dude, no matter where you are right now, no matter what you are doing, go find a big chunk of water, preferably a beach, turn off your phone and stop reading drivel like this.

Pic Above: Sunday, 7 AM, 57th Street, Virginia Beach. Your beach may vary.

The dirt track hugs wooden bleachers angling up about 25 feet into the damp Shenandoah wind. A man in a camo gimme cap with a belly big enough to have swallowed a small child chugs by wearing a painted-on-tight t-shirt, confederate tats embroidering his hairy forearms. Gasoline fumes laced with cigarette smoke and the aroma of deep-fried grease float in the muddy breeze between the trucks parked in the grass lot. A pretty woman walks by with a Bible verse on her shirt while another woman, less pretty, curses at a man on her cell phone. Two-toned blondes in skin-tight jeans snuggle wiry thin boys next to a concession stand that is big enough for a decent wrestling match. I could tell this was going to be fun from county fair smell and the sound of rubber churning mud on the far side of the weathered grandstands.

Walking into the crowd, I look around at Jim, my doctor and friend long before that. “I’ll give you $20 to yell, ‘I love Barack Obama?’”

“I’m not taking that bet. Besides, I don’t have my medical kit with me,” he says with a straight face. He is not kidding.

Rain pounds the red clay track into a reflective ooze slicker than owl manure squishing under the tires of warped, colorful cars built by hand from pipes and fiberglass and a desire to win some spending money.

Nothing says Saturday night like wet bleachers plastering your ass to the seat of your pants while people around you yell at flimsy, dirt-plastered cars barreling around a slippery oval. The rain stops. Racecars rumble onto the slush single file. Everyone secretly waits for the wreck that eventually comes.

It takes 15 minutes. A Navy blue Mustang switches ends, grinding and sandwiching between two other Mustangs. It seems that every car on the track is a Mustang. I grin. Jim grins. The first wreck, albeit small, has occurred. Everyone feels like they got some of what they came for.

Above us, frantic bugs boil in hypnotic patterns around the lights causing Jim and me to divert our gaze from the speckled brown racing.

“Try to follow one,” says Jim, watching the bugs arc and loop in big, goofy circles.

I do for a while, before looking over at a grizzly gentleman spitting a slurry of Red Man and corn chips over the rail. It barely misses a pregnant woman eating a hotdog. You cannot purchase this kind of entertainment in New York City or Los Angeles. But it happens every Saturday night in small towns across the South.

“That guy looks just like…” A crunching sound to our left pinches off my sentence. What I see pushes the spitter from importance.

People stand and scream and point left. A bulbous man burps and yells, “Brrlook!” all in one raucous motion. Up in the tight curve of slanting earth a purple and white car collides with a lime green car spilling curled sheets of what was once purple and lime green cars onto the track. A red and blue racer swerves to miss the chunks and hits the guardrail like a paper airplane unfolding, sending wobbly slices of thin fuselage across the ground in a manner resembling tossed potato chips. The orange light glows from the tower, pissed-off drivers get out of their wrecks, and a hurried cleanup commences. The surviving cars roam and jerk back and forth around the track, anxious for the green light.

I inhale a haze of rusty air thrown up by spinning tires. Puffs from a cigarette brush my face, burning my eyes. Beside me, smoke plumes between the puckered lips of a woman chomping a mound of chili cheese nachos loaded with raw onions. Uncorking my earplugs, I look over at Jim. He looks like a man visiting either a zoo or a strip joint for the first time.

“I’m liking this,” he says.

“It’s the most fun I’ve had since I was a kid in Montgomery, Alabama,” I say. “Wish my dad was here to see this.” He loved to watch cars drive in circles.

Jim and I stand frozen between city and country, lost in a time warp that feels like 1966. For me, the aroma of blue collar summer nights mix with fading memories of Red Farmer trading paint with one of the Allison’s while two men beat each other with cowboy boots not 5 feet away. This was my youth revisiting for just a moment. I cannot speak of what Jim’s thoughts held. But he looked hypnotized by the proceedings.

“Worth every one of those ten dollars,” says Jim. He turns, looks up at the crowd and leans in nervously. “Let’s get the hell out of here before these boys get all raced up out there in the parking lot.”

We walk away and into the misty night, our ears ringing, our noses filled with wet dirt, our inner rednecks smiling. Well, at least mine.

(to be continued somewhere down the road)

I’ll get this out of the way right up front: I grew up in LA (meaning Lower Alabama). So when I speak of rednecks, it is not with disdain, but affection. I have changed a lot over the years since I used to try to out-redneck the next redneck, but right under the surface, my neck is still a little red. So it was with great anticipation that I accepted Jim’s offer to go to a dirt track Saturday night.

Jim is my doctor. He was a friend of mind long before I knew he was a physician. I picked up on his profession when our boys were playing little league baseball 15 years ago. People kept calling him “Doc.” After several games of me bitching about the lousy coaching I finally asked him if “Doc” was a nickname.

“No,” he said in his dry smiling manner. “I’m really a doctor.”

“I’ll be damned,” I said. “I could probably use one.” And so our long friendship began, even though it is a little tough to go eat with a man who has to check your prostate every year. I suppose it comes with the territory when one of your best friends is also your doctor.

Jim used to be the team doctor for the Florida Gators football team. Being an Alabama alumnus, I long ago forgave him this athletic indiscretion. He is also a bit of an adventurer as he loves to camp out in thunderstorms, ride 90 miles a day on his bike and swim in arctic waters. To say he may be more eccentric than me is saying a lot. But that’s what I’m saying.

Human anthropology is one of Jim’s many offbeat hobbies. Studying people and their behavior feeds his endless curiosity and he goes far and wide to feed his affliction. Dirt track racing, naturally, is something he enjoys. Under a threatening cloud, we drove the hour and a half west on I-64 from Richmond past Charlottesville and over Afton Mountain into the Shenandoah Valley. We had thirty minutes to kill before the race so we went looking for some food. We found BBQ instead.

One of our shared pastimes is eating at out of the way dive joints that serve food neither of us, at our age, should be eating. But hell, he’s a doctor, so if I go down he can either help me or pronounce me dead. I’d as soon die in a BBQ joint with Jim than alone in my office writing a script. With my medical training, however, if he goes down while choking on a chicken wing, he’s screwed. For me CPR consists of calling 911 to report the location of the victim.

Before even getting to his pork sandwich, Jim got stuck in the restroom – literally. He was yelling, twisting the flopping, rusty knob and pounding on the malfunctioning door. I thought the commotion was a fight in the kitchen over a rib or some baked beans. A woman at the cash register finally had to rescue him. After my pork sandwich, the same thing happened to me. The adventure had begun.

While we drove towards the track and flossed chunks of pork from our teeth, tablespoon-sized drops of rain fell from the pewter clouds slowly roaming in from the west. In the distance the sound of grinding gears and screaming pistons bounced off the bottom of the roiling sky.

(to be continued)

Squirrels ate our tomatoes, yanking them from the vine, taking one bite and tossing them across the yard like a redneck throwing beer bottles and candy wrappers out of a truck window. Squirrels ate everything in our neighbor’s garden this year. They have eaten Christmas lights strung across the eaves. Last week, they started on our house. They are going at it like a senior citizens’ bus unloading in front of a Cracker Barrel.

It started as a few little nicks here and there. Soon the scurrilous little bastards developed a full-on taste for the whole structure. I caught one last week gnawing the corner as if it was corn-on-the-cob. The squirrel was so focused on his meal that I got close enough to almost field goal his ass into the neighbor’s yard. Instead all I managed to do was kick the wall hard enough to cause cursing.

“Cayenne pepper is what you need,” said an old man at the store.

Sorry, pop, the squirrels looked at it as seasoning. So I upped the game and rubbed a Habanero on the wall. Not a good idea. Habanero juice tends to find its way into your pants with a little itch here, an adjustment there. I walked like John Wayne for two days.

I Googled “squirrels eating houses” and found a lot of advice. One site said to feed them. Feed them? Are you freaking kidding me? I am feeding them – my damned mortgage.

BB guns just piss them off enough to recruit other house-eaters as payback.

One post said to “Catch them in a Havahart trap, put the prisoner in a garbage bag and use your car exhaust to put them to sleep – permanently.”

Damn. A squirrel gas chamber? Several comments on quite a few sites said this trap/gas thing was the humane way to go. Others say trap them and drown them. A few people eat them. Now we’re getting into Hannibal Lecter territory.

But still, I wonder, how many squirrels will I have to gas or drown or eat to stop the chewing? Will it be three or thirty? We have a hell of a lot of squirrels. Some days it looks like Squirrel de Soleil out there. Tail-piping that many miscreants could be a full time job for months and I can only imagine the little kids in our neighborhood watching me force-feed a never-ending plume of carbon monoxide down the throats of their furry friends. I don’t want squirrels eating my house, but I don’t want to feel like Percy in “The Green Mile,” either. I am not even going to comment on drowning or eating them. I won’t do the first and I ate my last squirrel in the 1970’s.

“Trap and relocate” is another option. Let me see; I trap a couple hundred of them and have to quit my job because all I have time to do is ferry squirrels to some other poor bastard’s neighborhood so he can trap them and send them back. Hell, I’d rather eat them.

There are pro-squirrel groups who are working to save them from homeowners, exterminators, drowning and gas chambers. If you belong to one of these groups, I have a vast supply of your friends. They are outside right now, eating my equity.

I wrote that horrible, long-ass sentence while sitting dead still in traffic on I-95 just now. I had time to type it on the tiny screen of my Droid. The sentence could have been four times as long as Faulkner’s and twice as thick as a Cormac McCarthy length of words; that is how much time you have to waste when you are technically supposed to be going somewhere on I-95. It is just getting harder and harder to do that.

You do not need an odometer on this road; a pedometer will do just fine. You could almost walk faster. I think the guy beside me just read an entire Washington Post spread out on his steering wheel. He is starting a novel now. A woman in front of me appears to be asleep. In my rearview mirror I am staring at a woman on a cell phone staring at me. Her mouth is going faster than her car.

A person stuck in traffic between Washington, D.C. and Fredericksburg, Virginia on a Friday evening in the summer probably invented texting. You are not supposed to text and drive, I’m not sure that rule applies to this part of I-95. Not only can you text, you can pull out your laptop and write a post like this as you sit with the red glow of tail lights. I know; I am about to hit the send right here in the middle lane somewhere near Woodbridge, Virginia. In my head I hear James Taylor singing the song from the video up there.

The car-carrier hauling four sports cars to the tiny airport takes all afternoon. When he finally reaches the top, the driver’s shirt is off, sweat drizzling down his ample belly like a pork shoulder slow roasting at Extra Billy’s Barbecue. Curses spill from his snarl.

As the 300-pound man angrily unloads the cars, a 300-pound black bear roams one end of the runway, watching us warily. Planes landing here often buzz the runway first to scare of deer, bears or coyotes. In the opposite direction, a coyote tests the system, avoiding the bear and us. Deer sneak along the tall grass at the drop off into the valley towards Hot Springs.

We are here to put cars on HD for the Virginia Lottery’s Muscle Car Money. Later we will slice the images into 45-second, 30-second, 15-second and 5-second commercials riding on top of grinding, thumping drums and guitars.

The next morning, a yellow Camaro SS, charcoal Mustang GT, screaming red Challenger RT Hemi and a deep gray Charger RT Hemi line up facing the ceramic blue sky punctuated by clouds shaped like buttermilk drop-biscuits. Cameras aim at an S-curve in front of them.

These cars don’t just look fast. They are fast. Hundreds of horses hide under Detroit steel carved into retro sheet metal bringing back retro memories for anyone who lived in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.  The Camaro and Challenger turn heads. The Mustang turns wicked lap times. The Charger sits alone in this bunch, like a pimply boy at an eighth grade dance, it’s sporty pedigree diminished by four doors and a police car reputation. But even as the 4^th wheel at a three-wheel roundup, it growls like an angry colon after bean dip and beer.

Tattooed crew – some wearing headbands, all carrying grip tools – mount high-def Canon 5D cameras with expensive lenses to hot, metal roofs and shiny fenders. One by one, the cars peel across the tarmac toward the runway looking for the perfect shot. Inside, some of the cams point at tachs, some at shifters, some at steering wheels. A large cinema camera called a Red is bolted to the rear of a Ford F-250. In its lens, muscle cars blow past, dropping back, then blow past again, over and over until it is exactly the way the director wants it. This dance goes on for two days.

The Challenger chases the camera truck over a slight arch in the runway that ripples the horizon. Out of sight, we hear tires screaming and gears shifting and V-8’s oiling cams and cylinders. Next the Mustang gets its turn in the barrel followed by the Camaro and Charger. It is a thing to behold.

This is a guy’s shoot. It is car porn, starring wicked RPM’s, sucking every guy’s metal dream into its exhaust-flavored vortex. These cars are designed to touch that reptilian part of a male’s brainstem housing the internal combustion engine. The rest of a guy is not much else but worthless decoration. That little spot between a man’s ears, however, is the driver’s seat. Muscle cars live here, not on the road. And today, our inner reptiles are smiling.

Virginia Lottery Muscle Car Money Behind the Scenes

They were goose stepping and bobbing their heads like people wearing iPod earbuds. There was a grand pattern to the goose dance, a wave of feathery motion. This was a lot more than a gaggle of geese. This was a hoard of geese.

“Why aren’t they flying?” I wondered. Not even one tried to lift off. They just jerked and weaved across the landscape. It was freaky.

Have you ever seen a big flock of birds descend on a grove of trees and cover the branches in avian darkness? It is otherworldly. This was much stranger. These geese could have filled the mall in DC. I have never seen this much of anything, except fire ants.

The goose gauntlet went on for half a mile like long-necked cattle.

“But they can fly,” I kept saying. They didn’t.

I have seen turkey and chicken farms, but I never thought about geese farms until I Googled it. People like to cook their goose. I figured geese were independent like most birds. They come and go as they please. Not these. They roamed by the thousands with no inclination to leave. We slowed down and I looked into their faces. It is hard to discern a bird’s intentions since their facial expression pretty much consists of wide eyes and a beak. The look could have been joy or horror or pain or nothing. Birds would be great poker players.

Upon entering Leesburg, we pulled up to “Mom’s Apple Pie,” a bakery rumored to have the best apple pie available on any given day pretty much everywhere. Turns out Mom sells a lot more than apple pies. She had all kinds of pies. I stared at the loaded racks and countertops and wanted to ask, “You don’t happen to have goose pie do you?” I just figured, a big wad of geese, then a few miles later, a big pile of pies. It seemed like a viable connection to make at the time.

Nothing looked like goose pie (not that I have ever seen a goose pie), but the apple pie did look wickedly good. So did the sour cherry pie and the chocolate pie and the Boston cream pie and the pecan pie and, well, as I said, there were a lot of pies. I will be making another trip up to Leesburg to purchase a pie, probably apple, maybe key lime when it warms up outside. I will, however, stay away from the goose farm farther west. I am not really sure what is up with that.

(NOTE: Since I wrote this, I returned to Mom’s and devoured a sour cherry pie. They are not paying me to say this (although I will take a few free pies if Mom is so inclined), but it was damned fine pie (to steal language from David Lynch in Twin Peaks. Go to Leesburg and check it out.)

It’s been falling seriously here since the week before Christmas. We had dustings before that, but when it turned into Calgary-type accumulations, it has not stopped. Last week all you could see was the top six inches of the roof of your car. 28 inches the week before Christmas. 34 inches since. 65 inches reported at Dulles Airport since late December. That is about three years worth of frosty pudding in the worst case scenario. Another 10 inches are expected today on top of a layer of black ice. All of that said, the snow is not the worse part of the weather – not by a shovel-full.

I-95 is a gauntlet of potholes. These are not irritating ripple-your-coffee potholes, but miles of VW Bug-sized gutting of the asphalt. These craters are like shrapnel wounds in the pavement. Did you see The Hurt Locker? I am talking IED-worthy holes that are violent at 65 mph.

Bridge seams are gouged into trenches by the expanding and contracting ice. Pocks big enough for a spelunker to explore are every fifty yards. Tires are being bursted, rims are getting bent, and headlines about Virginia not taking stimulus money to fix the highways are floating around newspapers. As I look out my window right now, it’s a whiteout, which means new and interesting crevasses to explore tomorrow on the way to work.

When you think about how advanced we are as humans, with all of our technology and science and achievements, just remember, the lowly pothole has us exactly where it wants us and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.

Last night, we invited a couple of old friends to recreate the light ride in Richmond. For years Richmond has had a Tacky Light Tour, so we were hardly alone as we slowed in front of yards filled with more things than the entire holiday section of Lowe’s. The Tacky Light Tour lives up to its name in this town and it is tragically awesome. 

My wife says it is ironic that I love to ogle lavish holiday displays when all I have erected in our own yard is a red, snake-ish light draped over a pole. My daughter calls it the most pathetic display of holiday spirit she has ever seen. It is kind of lonely, I’ll admit, but no worse than Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree in my estimation.

My pitiful effort aside, we drove around enjoying the electric equivalent of a cruise ship buffet. I loved it. Then we drove over to West Broad and saw the most lovely light of all: the Krispy Kreme “Hot” light. 

If you are unfamiliar with Krispy Kreme donuts, my words will not do them justice. They melt in your hand and in your mouth and on your shirt and leave crispy residue on your pants that will cause dogs to follow you. Hot Krispy Kremes will jump out of the box and down your throat before you realize what has happened. People plan weekends around a trip to Krispy Kreme and will cross state lines to get them.

This is not health food and I don’t recommend it as a habit. I’m not suppose to eat such things. But it is the holiday and my diet is like a Tibetan Monk, so I splurged for two donuts. Everything in moderation.

There was a crowd; a traffic jam, really. Inside the Krispy Kreme, the conveyor belt was running dozens and dozens of fresh donuts through the gushing waterfall of soupy sugar frosting. Hundreds of people stood, hypnotized by the site of orbed dough inching down the assembly line, headed to their waistline. An army of people worked behind the glass wall protecting the donuts from the rest of us. The people in paper hats worked like a Bill Belichick football team. It was impressive. Then one of the workers pulled a long metal rod from behind the Rube Goldberg contraption and began doing something that made everyone gasp in disbelief. He scanned the hundreds of donuts and began to thread imperfectly shaped donuts from the process and toss them in a trash can. 

People stood in shock. A man in flannel began to weep. Childrens’ smiles dipped to snarls. An old woman held her chest and moaned like her grandchild had gotten a tongue ring and used it on the cat. Whispers passed. Eyes darted. Damn.

If you think you have a tough job, at least you are not in charge of standing in front of hundreds of people at Krispy Kreme and throwing away perfectly good, imperfectly shaped donuts. I just don’t think I could do it.