dance yourself clean

My dad stopped mountain biking when they introduced suspension components, and he stopped going to punk shows when the hardcore kids started skanking. The suspension was too expensive and the skanking too macho for him. This didn’t keep him from his love of bikes or live music, just not those kinds of bikes and not that kind of music.

It was the sort of decision that any sane and reasonable person would make. Mountain biking can be prohibitively expensive, the trails aren’t always accessible, and you’ll probably get hurt at some point. If you can swallow all that, it’ll be heaps of fun. Hardcore punk is no better. The music is deafening and indecipherable, and you often run a fair risk of leaving the pit with a split lip or a choir of aches and bruises, but boy is it ever fun. To borrow from the great philosopher Ricky Bobby, these things are dangerous and inconvenient, but I do love them.

When I started going to hardcore shows, I noticed that people performed certain dances at certain points during songs. Sometimes they moshed, everyone jumping and slamming and pushing each other around. Sometimes they fell into rhythm and started two-stepping, or skanking, which is a shuffle and kick movement with violently thrown arms. This is my favourite move. Then there’s hardcore dancing, otherwise known as fighting invisible ninjas, which involves punching and flailing arms, as well as roundhouse kicking. There are circle pits and wall pits and all sorts of junk we borrowed from the metal scene. All of it is violent in some way, but all of it is dancing. The macho men might not like to admit that.

I learned to dance by waiting on the edge and watching, learning when to make the right moves, how to swing my elbows and kick my feet just right. When to two-step, when to mosh, when to step back and give space so others can dance. There are rules in the pit, upheld by a silent agreement to keep everyone safe. If someone falls down, we pick them back up. If someone takes a heavy hit, we get them out. There are good scenes and there are bad scenes, but the good ones take care of their own. Once I learned the dances and the rules that govern them, I threw myself in. First with caution, then with abandon.

There is freedom in this carefully restrained violence. The drums beat a mad frenzy, the guitar shrieks, and everything gets faster, louder. The pit roils as our bodies collide against one another. In these moments, I dance like there is nothing in the world but my flailing arms and trampled feet. I throw myself against the shoulders of strangers and they throw me back against another. When the music holds all of us in its brief and urgent embrace, I close my eyes, let the fury and anger and love and sorrow wash over me in waves, great breaking waves that leave me drenched in sweat, ears ringing, legs exhausted. The song ends, and I am filled with a silent, unassailable calm.

What I cherish most about my time spent at hardcore shows is the exhaustion that sets in after. Walking out into the cool night air, where the darkness is soft and the sounds of the city are gentle reminders of our collective living, I feel a deep sense of satisfaction. My shoes are filthy, my bones ache, my mouth is dry and tastes like iron, but I am happy. To have pushed yourself to such limits, given yourself fully and unthinking to something, just for a little while, is a wonderful feeling.

You know that feeling well. I’m sure you do. It’s the same after a good ride, while your heart’s still coming down from whatever you just put it through. When the trail you rode still feels like a dream, like something you lived but can’t find the words to describe. It’s the same at the top of a long and brutal climb, when your legs can’t seem to spin anymore and the sun beats down relentlessly. It’s the same after you clean a steep, chunky section of trail, or sail over a gap that has always terrified you, or make it across another endless arroyo. Exhaustion is one word for it, the feeling of having given all you’re able to give.

Nothing about this is life-changing, at least not in the short term. You go for a bike ride, come back a couple hours later, and you’re still the same person as when you left. You have the same problems and preoccupations, the same petty grievances, but somehow they seem less important. Somehow, the world is a friendlier place. This is one of the reasons I ride bikes in the first place. It has always been an outlet for me, a way to shut my brain off when things get to be too much, when my body cries to move.

I’ve developed a crick in my neck from too many hours spent staring down at a keyboard and leafing through books. My shoulders hunch up to my ears, and I slouch into a most horrible posture. When I’ve stared at the computer for too long, the small letters dig their serifs into my aching eyes. I feel dirty, like I’ve picked up a film of scum from all the to-do lists and overdue replies and bills and dishes and general worries of getting along.

But let me tell you about the times that I have felt clean: Standing in the Whistler parking lot, so thoroughly covered in mud that it grits between my teeth, my waterlogged clothing like cling wrap. Sitting on my back deck, nursing forearms covered in a paste of blood and dirt from a bout with the landing of a hip jump. Leaned against a chain-link fence in an alley off Main Street, smelling cigarette smoke and stale beer, recovering from the tumult of a loud, angry band. Walking back from the gig in filthy shoes, my feet tenderized, my voice a hoarse whisper, my heart full.

I am being a touch dramatic here – it doesn’t have to always be about suffering and soreness and getting dirty. Sometimes, most of the time, it’s about dancing. I haven’t the faintest idea how to dance like a normal, person, but I can two-step until my breath is ragged, and I can pogo along with the crowd. I can shake and jitter and feel what the music demands of me. You might not call it dancing, but I do. There’s a whole basement of us, and we paid fifteen dollars for the privilege of dancing here, and you’re damn right we’re going to look like fools.

If we’ve already done away with any sort of normal dancing, then I don’t think it’s too much to say that riding a bike is its own sort of dance. You can pedal a slow waltz around the park or you can get into the heavy stuff. There are rhythms our legs learn to keep, moves and sequences to memorize. Most importantly, we learn to move our bodies almost without thinking, and that is a remarkable freedom. There might not be music, but we are most certainly dancing like fools.

The thing is, dancing is fun. It’s fun when you’re a kid and it’s fun when you’re twenty-four. I don’t know much beyond that, but I saw an old dude grooving at the Portside Pub just a few months back, and I assure you he was having the time of his life. It doesn’t matter how you dance, or where or when you do it, just that you let your joints move a little bit. What a simple, unadulterated joy.

To my dad’s chagrin, I find myself drawn to the dances he left behind a long time ago. I love two-stepping. I love the rabid ferocity of hardcore, the incomprehensible wall of noise and the maelstrom of elbows and fists. I love the fear that settles in my stomach at the top of steep, rowdy terrain. I love manicured flow and big jumps, and I love the cushy suspension that gets me down safely. I love it all because I am young and angry, full of joy and hope and mostly fearless.

There may be a day when I step back from this tendency towards recklessness. On that day, the step-down might look a little too long and far away, the rocks too sharp. The pit might move too quick for me, all fists and knees too eager and bony. At some point, my body just won’t take it anymore, and it will protest with something more than a stiff neck. When that day comes, I’ll join the ranks of those sane and reasonable people who have other dances of their own, ones that are less dangerous and less inconvenient. I’ll probably start to sound like my dad, and that’s probably a good thing. After all, he’s the one who told me about punk rock and mountain biking.