My Favorite Frank Beamer Story....Which isn't Really About Frank Beamer at all, but Rather Begins with a Bunch of Rocks.

Even if the Hokies lose this weekend to UVA it may not be Super Franlkie Beamer's last football game; at 5-7 the well supported Hokies could still end up in the Diamond Walnut Weedeater Bowl or something like that.  However, in celebration of Frank Beamer's last regular season game and his final trip to Charlottesville in anger, I want to tell my favorite Frank Beamer story,  which is less about Frank and more about the Appalachian Trail.  And its long, and its dumb, but this my blog, so....yeah.

So, in the beginning....

When I thru-hiked the AT 10 years ago I had a small radio, equipped with AM/FM/TV and weather bands.  When I started the hike I thought that I wouldn't be listening to it too much, seeing as I would be communing with nature and getting down with the trees and birds and shit and didn't want anything to interfere with that.  I'd listen to it at night sometimes or in the mornings, to check the weather and get some news of the world, but as I made my way down the trail my heart and mind was full of the silent sublimity of nature. I really had no need to listen to the radio.  

Then I ran smack dab into Pennsylvania.  

Pennsylvania is just a terrible place to hike.  It's where the glaciers from the last ice age stopped, and that glacial boundary is marked with millions of small rocks poking up out of the ground.  For two days out of the Delaware Water Gap I walked on the points of these rocks jutting out of the ground for miles and miles and miles and at last, with my mind numb and my feet sore and my nerves going all a jingle-jangle, I finally pulled out the radio and clipped it to my pack, stuck in the earbuds, and never looked back.  For the rest of the hike if I was walking I was listening to the radio.  Nature be damned.

How'd you like to commune with this?

Saturdays became my favorite days.  I'd listen to weekend edition on NPR and then listen to the rest of their Saturday programming, which was usually things like "Wait wait don't tell me" and "This American Life". Then, in the evenings, I would listen to college football broadcasts.

If the Hokies were playing?  Double Bonus, because when I hiked the trail I loved the Virginia Tech Fighting Gobblers more than I ever had before or have since.

Two reasons for this, as best as I can figure.  First, when you hike, when you actually spend your day walking for miles and miles, something weird happens to your brain - I think its because you are getting so much exercise that you have excessive amounts of Dopamine and other hormones to contend with.

For me, this was manifested in being extremely emotional.  Listening to Country Music was the worst.  I'd hear one song about Mama and how after Dad died she flew his F-14 into Libya and the plane got hit and the dog had to eject over the desert sands and we never could find him and now she's sitting there in her rocking chair knitting a pair of Christmas shoes for when Aunt Deb goes to meet Jesus and wondering about what happened to the dog and I'll tell ya - I would cry. Tears streaming down the cheeks and sniffles sniffling up the nose, a few hushed sobs.

But then the next song would be about the farmer's daughter with a predisposition to tequila who likes to go skinny dipping after she is done milking the cows and she has a tattoo somewhere on her body of what doing something to who and then she walks off to Bible Study with a tray of biscuits winking at you because when she made them she was buck nekkid (okay, she was wearing an apron, because otherwise it would simply be unsanitary) and all these old Church ladies will be eating her buck nekkid biscuits and it gives her little subversive heart so much joy, and did I mention she has huuuuuge tires on her truck and her dog is just awesome, like a little Boswell to her Samuel Johnson, going where ever she does and making little notes on her life so that one day the dog can publish her story and it will be not quite a best seller but that's pretty good for a dog, and he'll get to New York City to see if those city slickers ever learned how to make a decent salsa. And I would cheer-up, like, immediately.

So I was in love with the Hokies because I was sort of messed up and pretty much in love with everything.

Second, the Hokies, they reminded me of home.  Walking the AT at the time represented both the farthest and the longest I had been away from Blacksburg, and I was maybe a little home-sick.  Just a little.  So when I heard news of the Hokies or listened to their games, I felt like a little piece of me had gone back home, was hanging out spiritually in the town I grew up in with the people I loved, and that was cool man.  I could dig it, you know?

Sure you do.

Anyways, the story.  Around Halloween of 2005 I had actually reached Pearisburg, and my family pulled me off the trail for a week to rest, relax, and do some slack packing, where they would drive me to point A, I'd walk for about 25 miles or so and get picked up at the end of the day at point B by my parents.  They'd drive me home, I'd get to eat a nice big meal and sleep in a regular bed.

After a week of this I was finally out of range, and it was finally time to start hiking again for reals.  I was driven out to somewhere near Marion in a truck and dropped off with a full load of food, some fresh socks, and a new pair of trekking poles, and there I was again, back in the woods.  Mixed emotions.  Mixed emotions.  Happy to be back on the road, sad to leave those I loved behind so I could go finish the hike.

But it was Saturday, and I had the Hokies to buoy my spirits, yeah?  It has been a great season for Tech, despite the fact that they were lead by Marcus Vick (Marcus Vick!).  They had begun the season ranked 8th in the nation and had steadily improved their standing as they destroyed all other opposition.  They beat big named teams.  Looking at the college football landscape today it is almost impossible to believe, but there was a time when #3 VT met #18 Boston College at Lane Stadium and Beamer's Boys put their adversaries to the sword in front of a sold out crowd.

My how times have changed.

Any ways, on November 5th, as a I sat huddled in a dark shelter not too far from Burke's Garden, the #3 Hokies hosted the #5 Hurricanes at Lane Stadium, and it grew dark, and I fell asleep listening to the game, and I woke up around 11:30 to the sound of Frank Beamer saying that we should give Miami all credit, they're a great football team, you know, and.....

They had lost, 7-27.  'Twas a schlacking.

The next morning I penned a hasty note in the trail register, a notebook left at the shelters that people write in, either to share news on trail conditions or just have a laugh, let people know that you were at this particular place.  I was feeling plucky, so I wrote a sarcastic note stating that upon hearing that the Hokies had lost my spirit was so mortally wounded, my heart was so broken, that it was not possible for me to continue, and I was getting off the trail.  Laughing to myself, I kept on a'chooglin down the line.

Fast forward about a month and about 500 miles later.  I'm at the Walayisi Outdoor Center in Neels Gap, GA, the last stop before the AT's southern terminus in Springer mountain.  There is an outfitter there, and the people who work it are used to seeing people going north who have just logged in their first 70 miles of the trail and maybe their first 70 miles of backpacking ever in their lives.  Many of them have no idea what they are doing and desperately need gear changes and advice.  It is a PERFECT place for an outfitters.

I was standing there, eyeing a pocket rocket stove, and one of the people working the outfitters saw me. "Those are sweet little stoves, man."

"Yeah, they look it."

"What are you carrying?"

"Oh, I have a whisperlite."

"Ha!  You mean a 'whisperheavy'?  You know, we got a sale going on right now, if you are looking to upgrade."

I gave him a sour look, or at least the sourest look I could manage, which wasn't very sour because like I said earlier I was pretty much in love with everything.  "That's okay.  I've managed to schlep it for 2,000 miles.  I think I can manage the last 77."

But hey, he wasn't all bad.  He gave me and Bad Cheese and Stale Crackers (the two people I finished the hike with) the number to Domino's pizza.

And as I sat there, eating a lovely medium pizza that was mine and only mine, these two hikers walked in who I had never seen before, but they knew someone I had gone to high school with and who is now a yoga princess or something like that (really.  It's actually pretty cool).  Bad Cheese and Stale Crackers introduced themselves, and when I told them who I was they were flabbergasted.

They had read my post after the Miami loss, and they thought I had actually, really, had gotten off the trail because of it.

And that's my story.

And yeah, it isn't that great, which is why any effort I've made to write about the Trail and my hike have met so often with frustration.  For me there was no great spiritual epiphany or insight.  I didn't meet any bears.  I didn't fall in love with nature or anything or anyone else.  When I got back my life followed the same arc that it was already on before I did my hike. The AT was a grind, a long day in and day out moderately dangerous adventure.  But it was beautiful, and I was happy, and it has molded my sensibilities, and I am ever so grateful to have done it.

But I think if this story tells anything, it shows what Frank Beamer had built at Virginia Tech, and what it meant to so many people.  These guys actually thought that a VT football loss had been the final straw that finally forced me to hang up the trekking poles and call it a walk; that they actually believed I would do such a thing shows what power the program had over us, how much a part of our lives it was.

Frank Beamer in happier times.  I'll leave it to the shirt and the hat to give away the year, but it was a very, very long ago.

So thanks, Frank, for giving so many people something they have held so dear, a decent college football team, and occasionally a great college football team.  There are more important things in this word, I suppose....but the Hokies gave so many of us something to project a bit of meaning onto, a reason to put one foot in front of the other towards the Fall season and towards Saturday and Thursday nights in Blacksburg, and a reason to eat Turkey Legs that are just way to large to be natural.      

And now, I am going to get me some of those buck-nekkid biscuits.
 

Defiance

For the past week I haven't really known how to respond to the terrorist attacks in France, though I suppose it is kind of ridiculous to think that I should have to respond to them in any way, aside from being upset. No one, I am sure, has been waiting by the computer to see what I think about it.

But you may have been surprised to see that I didn't superimpose the Tricolor over my Facebook profile picture or anything like that.  I mean, it is true that I have eaten the brie and have sometimes walked out of the house with a scarf to go see paintings made by the great French artist's, including Renoir.

But that makes me no more a Frenchman than eating with chopsticks makes me Chinese.  John McCain may get up and say something like "today, we are all French," but the truth of the matter is I am not.  But I also felt bad about suddenly having a huge public display of grief for France when there have been very few similar lamentations for Syria over the past four years during its cataclysmic civil war.  I understand we are closer to France nationally and culturally, but the time to cover oneself in sackcloth and ashes is long since past.  

Still, this morning I finally came down off my high horse and watched video of French and British singing La Marseillaise before a France/England friendly and I found myself near tears.

It is such a defiant song, written in 1792 after volunteers were called on to rally to France's defense during the War of the First Coalition, when France's despotic neighbors sought to end the Revolution or at least keep it from spreading.  The troops from Marseilles sang the song as they marched through Paris on their way to war, and it was soon adopted as the French anthem.

Defiance is at the core of Liberty, and it is a heroic virtue not only in France but here as well.  Our country is the one where our forefathers defied the world's greatest military power over principles and a few pennies tax.  It is the country of Rosa Parks and so many like her who sat down and sat in and marched through the streets singing "we shall overcome" in defiance of institutionalized hatred.  It is the country whose flag Brig. General McAuliffe fought under, who when asked to surrender Bastogne to German forces during the Battle of the Bulge simply replied "Nuts!!", and held out until reinforcements arrived four days later.  These are all celebrated events in our nation's history, all great examples of the American "can-do" spirit.

Which makes our nation's response to these attacks all the more damning.  We're cashing in our principles for national security when we talk about watching certain mosques and creating databases of Muslim individuals.  If we are too scared to help others in need and would rather shut our doors to people trying to flee war, oppression, and tyranny, then the terrorists have already won. 

We make a big deal in this country about the bravery of our men and women in uniform, stationed all over the world defending our freedom.  I've often heard people say that they do what the rest of us could never do.  

Well, with all due respect to our military personnel (who are indeed extremely brave), I think that's bullshit.  The rest of us do and should have the courage to defy those who seek to do us harm and destroy our way of life.  We should start by not letting them stop us from doing what is right and taking in the 10,000 Syrian refugees our country has already pledged to take,  and then go further and take in even more.  

It should be done safely, of course, and carefully.  But it must be done, and we must boldly be our best selves if we are to continue to play a part in this world with any leadership and dignity at all.

Defiance.  Defiance of tyranny, Defiance of terror, Defiance of the tendency to be our worst selves.  This is what America should be on the world stage.  We should be, to borrow the Navy's latest recruitment phrase, "a force for good".  That takes all of us.  Don't be surprised to see me without a tricolor over my Facebook photo....but don't be surprised if you see me whistling La Marseillaise as I march into sunlight on my way to the cheese shop.

In Which Nick Reads "Blood, Tin, Straw", By Sharon Olds

It's unusual for me to read a book of poetry cover to cover.  I tend to skim, read a few pages, pick it up again a few days later, read a few more.  Eventually it goes back to the library, half finished.

And, in all honesty, I kind of did that with Blood, Tin, Staw, a collection of poems by the celebrated Sharon Olds.  But I did actually make the effort to read most of this book, and I did read it more or less all at the same time.  It's the first time I have really done that with a poetry book.  It was a fascinating experience, one that I would compare to sort of wondering through an art expedition with unlimited time to take everything in.

The great poet Sharon Olds

It's fitting that it should be Ms. Olds, as she is one of the first poets I read during my single creative writing class in college and it was a relevation, not in terms of form or of thought but of boldness.  This is the woman, after all, who wrote a poem about the Pope's penis.  Her poems can be erotic, at times unsettlingly celebratory of utter decadence; but they are also bold, and raw, and I thought that if she could write with that freedom about such subjects, well, what does it matter if I drop an F-bomb here or there?  It gave me the freedom to start writing with my own voice, or at least what I thought was my own voice.

All that said, with this book I found myself skipping a few poems here and there.  That is because a great many of Sharon Olds' poems are about sex, or about childbirth, and at times it can be a bit much.  There are times when I feel that maybe Olds' (at least in her current incarnation) is at her best when she focuses on other things. There are poems about her family, poems about the end of life (or at least preparing for it), and one poem about the Challenger explosion written probably several years on, which is excellent.

But what I value now about Olds is the way that her words feel.  This is a poet who writes more with the heart than with the head, her poems are visceral.  She describes in one poem, called "The Remedy" opening a honey jar (what she is going to actually do with the honey I will leave to the interested reader), and she describes how grainy the honey gumming up the jar lid is, and how hard it is to finally get it moving, and you can feel that, you've experienced it, and it adds a sort of depth to her poems because they are so real, it puts you in the midst of whatever it is she is trying to convey.  It makes her poems very accessible, and that gives a sort of power.

And that is pretty cool.

Thank you, Sharon Olds.  You are pretty great.  And I like your hair.

Frank Beamer ist Kaput!

Ha ha!

My friends, it has been a horrible sports weekend.  Chelsea lost 3-1 to Liverpool, showing an utter lack of fighting spirit (it is almost as if Jose Mourinho pulled his players back and played with the 1-0 lead to try and prove to everyone that they can still do it...but a 1-0 lead is simply not a safe one for Chelsea, Special One or no).  Australia lost the Rugby World Cup to the entitled and favored All Blacks.  And yes, the Cleveland Browns did find another way to lose in a wonderfully awful way, but Pittsburgh did the same.

But then out of Blacskburg comes some fantastic news.  Not only do the Hokies walz into Boston and defeat Boston College, but Frank Beamer also announces his retirement.

Hasta La Vista, Frankie.

My friends, I welcome this news with open arms. Frank Beamer is a wonderful man and he really made Virginia Tech football something.  But I think the program has lost the plot over the last five years and I am glad that the man at the helm has finally realized he has lost the power to steer the ship to where it needs to go.  It's a shame that he can't leave at the top of the game, but the time has come and I applaud the decision.

Of course, I wonder what Frank will do next?  Hopefully he'll finally polish off the highly anticipated sequel to Turn Up the Wick! (many copies of which, I am sure, are still in the warehouse of the Tech Bookstore), which I understand is a three volume history of the French-Indochina War, in which he posits the theory that maybe the French would have been more successful if they had supplied their troops with Gatorade, because it's very hot in the jungle and hydration is a key to victory.

Of course gatorade was invented in 1965 and the French had left Vietnam long before.  Still, it is a cogent argument, and if the French had developed the sports drink first instead of spending so much time on wine and fucking bread maybe they would have won a few wars here and there.

Then I imagine the man will try and open a successful restaurant in the Tidewater region, which thus far he has failed to do. I know it bothers him, I know it does.  There is a space in his office reserved for the certificate he will get when he wins a Daily Press Choice Award for "Best Restaurant".  Beamer's, he thought, would really work.  But the unsettling juxtaposition of fanciness and football really doesn't work for the Hercules of the Hokies;  something far more down to earth is surely required.  I'm thinking breakfast, I'm thinking pancakes, I'm thinking grits, I'm thinking gravy, and most of all I am thinking ham.  Lots and lots of ham, with a nice pepper relish on the side.

Oddly, no Turkey legs.  I'm sure Frank has seen enough of them.

And what's next  for the Hokies?  Will Bud Foster finally get his chance to go ape-shit for reals for reals?  Or will Shane Beamer continue the Beamer dynasty?  Or will Tech look farther abroad for their next coach?

If it was me....I'd hire Sylvester Stallone to just kind of pretend to be a coach.  You know.  Head down to the field with his ball cap on, have the team chase some chickens around, mumble some mumbo-jumbo about fighting and victory and how he never stopped asking you to stop being a woman so please don't ask him to stop being a man and maybe how if I can change, and you can change, then maybe everyone can change.  The play calls?  Those can be left to the coordinators, the bench coaches.  A head's coaches job is to inspire, and nothing is more inspiring than old man hopped up on HGH who once pretended to be a boxer, a veteran, a mercenary, and now a football coach.

And, if Frank's recent performance is anything to judge from, a head coach is also supposed to look sort of bemused whenever his team totally and completely mess up, or a call goes against them, or what have you. You may be wondering if I think Stallone actually has the acting ability left to handle that.  Well, I do, and I think he would do a damn fine job of it too.  

Yes, it would be something to see!