Fasting on Fumes
Food Dreams and Frozen Valves
The afternoon hit crisp and clean, the kind of Montana sky that makes you feel like you actually have your life together. Bill rolled out from Duncan Drive, red POC sunglasses cutting the glare, grey puffy doing its job, boots crunching the dry hillside dirt. He knelt down next to a stubborn little patch of yellow blooms that had no business being that cheerful in March. Tiny flowers. Big attitude. He respected that.
That was the good part of the week.
Day seven of fasting, and the body is... negotiating. Some mornings arrive with this weird, almost pharmaceutical clarity, thoughts sharp and clean. Other hours are just fog and low-grade misery, dreams stuffed full of cheeseburgers and pasta and elaborate meals that vanish the second the alarm goes off. Getting to the trailhead on the bike felt harder than it should have. The hike started well enough, then somewhere in the middle it turned into a quiet, private negotiation with his own legs about whether home was still a realistic option.
That’s when he found the old valve. Rusted, red-wheeled, bolted to some forgotten piece of infrastructure out there in the trees. It looked turnable. It was not. He grabbed it anyway, leaned in, gave it everything. Nothing. The thing was purely decorative at this point, a monument to the idea of flow with zero actual flow.
That’s fasting in one rusty metaphor. Food looks edible. It is not. Not yet. Not today.
He stood back, smiled at the valve, and headed home anyway. Made it. Sometimes that’s the whole win. No drama, no announcement. It just eventually opens.
March 6th Keeps Showing Up
Twenty years of March 6th adventures reveal an unexpected pattern, from early internet chaos and tele-turns to fat bike racing and AI comparisons. The date keeps teaching the same lesson about being present wherever the trail leads.
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