Accidental Cactus Performance Art
My friend Brian Till says that if you’re gonna be dumb, you’ve gotta be tough. Separately, my friend Deb Arora says that if ever there were a guy who’d benefit from living with a doctor, I’m him.
It’s with my two wise friends’ observations in mind that I’m approaching writing about a comically painful desert mountain bike endo last week. I’m still pretty new to modern mountain biking, having not ridden one for 15 years and while I’ve learned that you can go twice as fast on a road bike, the sensation of speed at 14mph on a mountain bike is a whole different kind of thrilling. I’ve had a couple of good spills in my first month back on dirt, but I’m loving it. Happily for everyone in my community, I bought some non-spandex gear to wear on my bike too, including some rather dorky but entirely necessary elbow and knee/ shin pads; given that I’ve binned it an average of twice on every ride I’ve done thus far, I think my armor budget was well-spent. My skill and two-wheeled balance need development, and lots of it. I’m athletic and coordinated in most of life, but it seems that riding a fully-suspended 29er has me full of a false confidence — I earned some particularly great road rash on my second-ever ride on my new bike, but until last Thursday I hadn’t had anything truly tragic happen.
In New Mexico, we have some glorious single tracks, but the whole state is just a huge desert and deserts erode as their primary existential activity. Therefore, the trail surfaces are a mix of crumbled granite, loose rocks, boulders, chalk and dust. All of which makes for great scenery and some rippingly fast, fun riding, but the desert is full of perils. Sharp ones. Pointy ones. And a few that are poisonous.
Last Thursday, excited to end what had been a tough day with a mind-clearing solo ride into the sunset, I climbed and settled into my rhythm, planning a two-plus hour ride. As my heartrate slowed and I reached a fast and flowing section of trail, I took a look around and happily noticed just how particularly spectacular the day was: golden light filtering through the junipers, high clouds illuminated by the low angle of the sun, birds chirping merrily and me, just me, alone to sweat out my day’s stresses, transgressions and inconveniences.
I approached a section that I knew to be steep and loose, and with my burgeoning skill and typical overconfidence, I rolled down the first pitch of the descent, promptly locking my rear wheel. Having comprehensively misjudged just how loose and steep this section was, I eased off the rear brake and applied just slightly more of the front, but in so doing, my front wheel slid out from under me. Ass over teakettle I went. At a whopping one mile per hour.
Slowly and inevitably onto a prickly pear cactus.
I managed to land with equally-distributed force on both my love handle region and my right rear assleg. I knew immediately when I hit the ground what I’d landed on and laid there frozen for a second, trying to suss out how to extract myself from the cactus with a minimum of flailing. Cautiously I pushed myself up and took stock of my predicament. Sitrep: two dozen or so larger, longer needles and something like a hundred little fuzzy needles impaling most of my right, rear side. My dual-layer shorts were actually stuck to my glute, the combined resistance of a hundred stinging needles binding me and my shorts like the world’s least funny velcro.
Unhurt but pretty annoyed at myself, I had no choice but to drop trou and start picking as many needles out of myself as possible. Disrobing and half-hoping someone would come down the trail — just to see the look on their face at the sight of a distressed, pantless cyclist picking cactus needles out of his ass — I started finding needles poking out of me in every possible direction. For ten minutes I stood there, and like wet gremlins the needles seemed to multiply. With every ginger, tentative swipe across my skin, I found more and more and more. Very many of them ended up in my gloves, which led to an un-funny transfer of cactus needles from ass to fingertip.
Realizing the futility of trying de-gouge myself trailside, I carefully pulled my shorts back up and tried to walk further down the trail. It only took three steps before the presence of a whole other section of needles made themselves known — somehow I’d missed an entire prickly pear pad’s worth of needles sticking out of the back of my assleg, hidden out my view by the otherwise glorious horizontal sunlight.
Off again came the shorts, and this time my undershorts too. Picking yet more needles out of my hindquarters it became clear what I’d have to do: suck it up and ride with a hundred tiny needles working their way deeper into my tender skin with every pedal stroke.
An aside: One of the best aspects of riding a mountain bike versus a road bike is that you’re a lot more active, positioning your weight here and there, legs occasionally akimbo as you counterbalance around turns or lean out of the way of an oncoming tree limb. Conversely, one of the worst aspects of mountain biking, I’ve learned, is when you have to do that aerobic dance with the remnants of an angry prickly pear inside your shorts.
Back at my truck after a really tentative three miles of descent, I stowed my bike and managed to not fully think through how I’d drive — I just hucked myself into the driver’s seat, only to immediately yelp and jump like a scalded hedgehog when I put my full weight directly onto my cactus-impacted behind. My only option was to lean to one side, straining to keep the my entire right leg and buttcheek off of my seat, articulating the throttle with one airborne leg. I’ve done many, many things in life that someone could describe as half-assed, but in this case, I was literally driving in a half-assed fashion.
I managed to make it home and when fully naked the full extent of my low altitude cactus impact became clear; I was wearing an inverse cactus on myself, needles poking out of my reddening flesh every which-way. I did what any modern human would do: grabbed my iPhone and typed out “removing cactus needles from skin” into the Google. Happily, the first link was an informative one: http://www.wikihow.com/Remove-Cactus-Needles
Limping around our house, I came to realize that we lacked both white school glue and duct tape, but I did find both scotch packing tape and gorilla tape, the latter of which seemed more likely to actually remove my dermis itself than help with my needle predicament. I hung my head for a second, took a deep breath and remembered my friend Brian’s words. At this point, I decided that I needed to make video of my next step, if only to show my friends as a cautionary tale. I’m male and emotionally 14 years old sometimes, and sure enough everyone who’s seen this to date has laughed as hard as I thought they would:
RIIIIP! It didn’t fucking work. And it did a really patchy job of depilating my ass. Half-angry at myself but growing bemused with the drain-circling clusterfuck my evening had become, I moved on to my next option: tweezing.
A quick digression: I’m grateful for many things in life, among them a very nice set of gifted tweezers and also for the flexibility that regular yoga has earned me. Prior to Thursday I would never have associated “tweezers” and “yoga” but now I think they may have some deep, metaphysical connection. Tom Robbins wrote of the Indian swami who defined life as “the beautiful joke that is always happening,” and I’m proud to say that I was beginning to see the comedy in my self-imposed circumstance. Either that or I was becoming giddy from the histamine reaction the irritating needles were producing in me. Was it possible I’d fallen on a peyote cactus and not a prickly pear?
Standing one-legged with my right foot on a hip-high bathroom counter, I contorted myself into an increasingly pornographic series of poses, tweezing out every tiny fucking needle, one by one. Did a fair amount of simultaneous and inadvertent manscaping too, it must be said.
My gyrations called to mind the words of the warrior poet Shock G: “Then I go through all the fly positions / my head under her leg under my arm under her toe,” and I couldn’t help but laugh at myself standing there, red-assed and itchy, pulling my knee and opening my hip in ways that would have made Bikram Choudhury himself blush.
Forty minutes of precision tweezing later, I gave up and cranked the water temperature as high as it would go in the shower, then stood gluteus-backward in the shower hoping the heat would open my pores and flush out some of the remaining needles. And I loofahed my little heart out, scrubbing and scrubbing like an overcaffeinated meth addict. I got out and toweled off, and reveled in what the mirror revealed: my ass was redder than baboon in heat.
Knowing first-hand that beer has anti-inflammatory properties, I set about medicating myself and stood, waiting for my special lady friend to return home. My evening took a turn for the interesting when after a physically uncomfortable dinner Jenn, who quite luckily for me is a physician — and who by hilarious coincidence had yet to change out of her surgical scrubs — donned a camping headlamp and set about removing needles from some quite NSFW places.
Which resulted in this treasure of a photo:
I’d like to think that I have the maturity to not take myself too seriously, as well as a spirit that can recognize the hilarity in my own foibles. I do feel there are three lessons to learn from this whole misadventure of mine: First, don’t fall ass-first into a cactus. Second, when you do, remember that bit about the beautiful joke that life is and try to see the levity in the situation. Third, skip the school glue and duct tape and just to straight to the tweezers. If you do apply these three lessons, sure, you’ll look like you got shot in the assleg with rock salt at an Eastern European democracy protest, but you’ll have a great story to tell.
After all, pain is temporary, glory is forever and chicks dig scars. Whether they continue to dig dipshit men who require medical attention after cactus trauma is another question entirely.
