Adventures happen in two main ways...

Sometimes you pick the adventure... sometimes the adventure picks you.  

Covid-19 picked us.  Hang on.

Bunnyhenge is a real place

 When I wandered through the Newport Beach art park taking photos, a couple of weeks ago, I called this "the bunny circle."  It was only when I wrote the last blog post, and I went to look up the actual address for the Newport Beach Civic Center, that I saw it was called Bunnyhenge. 

 That just made me laugh.  We live in a weird world, with all kinds of unusual places and mysteries to explore.  In this  weird world, you can simply search "bunnyhenge" on Google Maps, and this place comes up.  So I decided to give Bunnyhenge its own post on this new blog of mine, since this is a blog about adventures, large and small.  This circle of bunnies, made of concrete or something (I didn't really try to find out), are about three feet high.

 You can view, or photograph the whole circle, from the lookout point.  It's on the ocean side end of the foot bridge, over San Miguel street.  And you can walk around the bunnyhenge, and the big bunny, which is farther down the trail.  While it's hazy in this photo, that's the Pacific Ocean out there in the background.  The building below, in the center of the photo, is the Newport Beach Civic Center, which is at 100 Civic Center Drive. That address is basically the address for the driveway, it's not a real street.  Bunnyhenge is right by the corner of Avocado and San Miguel streets, about two blocks away from Fashion Island mall.  The Newport library, a GREAT library, is on the downhill side of this building complex. 

 Here's Bunnyhenge up close, looking towards Spyglass Hill, across MacArthur Boulevard.

Here's the Big Bunny, about 6 1/2 or 7 feet tall, farther down the walking trail from Bunnyhenge.  All photos by me (Steve Emig).

Newport Beach art park- 3/6/2020- Part 6

 Looking down from the lookout point, I saw this blue framed bridge, stretching across a wash above the various bushes.  I just thought, "That would make a cool picture."  So I pulled the old, hand-me-down, iPhone 5 out of my backpack.  It' s not activated, so it's basically a camera to me, a camera and a clock.  That's all I use it for, most of the time.  Anyhow, I snapped this photo, and the urge to take more photos caught me.  So I just took my time, meandering through the lower level of the art park, snapping photos of every scene that I found interesting.  I was alone,didn't have to be anywhere at a certain time, and just had fun with it.  This was by no means any great epic adventure.  But little "photo snapping adventures" are something anyone can do.  They tend to clear your head, get your mind off the troubles of the day, and get you in a better mood.  That's part of the idea behind this blog and my Pinterest page of the same name.  Life is stressful, and often frustrating.  Taking a little time to have a little adventure of some sort is good for the soul.  And you'll probably wind up with some cool photos for Instagram, or you other social media.  Maybe even to print and hang on the wall. 

I got interested in photography in the 9th grade, 1980, the year I lived in Carlsbad, New Mexico.  That was the first year I went to a school that had classes for "Gifted Kids."  I think that's what they called them.  Before AP college course classes in high school started, schools made some hard classes to keep the smart kids from getting so bored.  So, I somehow decided taking high school senior level physics as a 9th grader was a good idea.  I sucked at it.  I squeaked out a B-C average, I think, but it was hard.

On the bright side, a couple weeks of the class was dedicated to shooting photos, so we could learn about light, and how images are made on film and then transferred onto photo paper.  All of that is physics related.  Then we actually developed black & white photos.  That was cool. We had to go shoot some photos as homework.  Our teacher, whose name I forget, told us there were two main ways to learn to shoot better photos.  One was to pay $100 or so and take a photography course at the local community college or somewhere.  The other way was to learn some basics (Rule of thirds, using foreground, basic composition ideas), and then to spend $100 on film, and just try to make every photo a little bit better than the last one.  That idea stuck with me.  While I couldn't shoot tons of photos in those days of expensive film, I did get to work making the most of my Kodak 110 Instamatic.  I've been interested in shooting photos ever since, which is about 40 years now. 

While I never got good at the more technical aspects of photography, like actually using a light meter correctly back then, or studio lights and highly technical cameras, I have been looking through big photo books, and shooting photos on a regular basis, since.  I'm more about making a cool image out of what's around, or capturing a cool moment, like with BMX and skating. 

Now, with the internet and social media, everyone takes tons of photos, and most of them still suck.  But between my zines, magazines, and blogs, I've had a bunch published here and there, and have captured really cool shots now and then.  So here are the shots from my little photo snapping adventure through the lower part of the art park area, at the Newport Beach Civic Center.  It parallels Avocado street, and is located at 100 Civic Center Drive, Newport Beach, California.  It's about a block or two south of Fashion Island Mall. 

Straight rails along the crooked path of life...

I just looked this place up on Google Maps, to get the address for the Civic Center.  The rabbit circle in this photo is actually called "Bunnyhenge."  Seriously.  You can actually find it by searching "Bunnyhenge" on Google maps. 

Newport Beach art park- 3/6/2020- Part 5

 Framed, by walls that aren't walls, they are bars spaced several inches apart.

 The bunny circle, from above.

 The bunny circle, from the side.

 The lookout point, on the downhill side of the foot bridge.

Newport Beach art park- 3/6/2020- Part 4

 This is kind of like a bent metal surfboard, and some other stuff.  The two parts sticking out to the side of the left part, move with the wind. 

 Looking out towards the Pacific Ocean from above.

Newport Beach art park- 3/6/2020-Part 3

 It's a seven foot tall bunny. Maybe six and a half. Follow the white rabbit?  I'll leave that decision up to you.

 Got a match? 

Newport Beach art park- 3/6/2020- Part 2

Orange slices sculpture, which contrasts nicely to the blue sky, and the purple flowers. 

In the center of this photo, silhouetted against the street in the background, is a hummingbird.  Seeing hummingbirds is cool thing, trying to get them on film, is really hard.  Getting one in frame on an iPhone is even harder.  So while it is tiny, and I have to point it out, I'm stoked to even get this shot of a hummingbird. 

Just your average 7 foot tall bunny sculpture.

Not near as hard to get in frame as a hummingbird, fence lizards are still hard to get a good shot of as well.  I saw a few of these guys (or gals, and this is the best photo I got of one.  I also saw a couple of real rabbits on my walk, but couldn't get a good photo of one. 

Newport Beach art park- 3/6/2020- part 1

The other day, while I was "gone walkabout" for a couple of days, trying to figure out/clarify my direction in life, I headed from the Newport Transpo Center bustop, down Avocado, to the library.  The area between Avocado and Macarthur was overgrown land for years and years.  At some point, while I was back East, the city developed it into a park like area, with wandering trails, a big lookout thing, various sculptures, and a dog park.  I've walked along the edge of it many times.  I even slept in it a few nights while homeless in the area.  But I never walked through the lower part, right above the Newport Beach Civic Center.  It was a beautiful Spring day, so I decided to cross the footbridge from the top to lower section, and looked out from the raised lookout point a bit.

At that point, I decided to take some photos as I wandered around.  This is something I've been doing more and more of, since acquiring and old iPhone 5, a couple years ago.  With that as my camera, I took some time, and had a little photo shooting adventure.  These are the photos from that day.

 That silver thing going across the middle of the photo is the footbridge over San Miguel Drive, connecting the upper and lower park areas.  At the close end, it is all glass.  From there you can look out over this park, the Civic Center and library, parts of Newport and Corona Del Mar, and the ocean. 

The people who did tricks on bikes before BMX freestyle

You've probably seen videos or her, dressed in much more attractive clothes, doing tricks on You Tube, Instagram, or maybe on TV.  But here's Viola Brand in an actual artistic cycling competition, in a long, and flat out amazing, routine. 

One of the biggest, and longest, adventures in my life was the 20 years my world revolved around doing tricks on a BMX bike.  I got into BMX in a trailer park, outside of Boise, Idaho, in the summer of 1982, and entered my first race that fall.  BMX changed my life, pure and simple.  I learned my first trick from a magazine how-to, the Haro bar hop, in early 1983.  BMX freestyle became the main theme of my life up until 2003.  It only stopped then because I started working 7 days a week as a taxi driver, and there was no time for anything except work.  I've been trying to get my life back on track, so I can start riding again, in the last few years.

But before that, back in 1978 or 1979, I was a kid living by a lake in rural Ohio.  I didn't even know BMX existed then.  In those days of very little media, and almost no alternative media, word of BMX racing hadn't made it to me and my friends in Ohio.  I had a banana seat three speed bike, with a T-shifter on the top tube.  My friend Tom, who lived about half a mile away, had a similar bike.  One day I rode to his house, and he told me he made a little bike jump in the edge of a field.  We would ride down a small hill on the two lane country road, dodge the potholes, and swerve to the side, where the tractor entrance to a farmer's wheat field was.  Tom had built a little jump, maybe 8 inches high, at the edge of the field.  We took turns, riding down the hill, swerving off the road into the edge of the field, and hitting the little jump.  In 1978, that was a big jump to us.

As we were hitting the jump, a younger kid, Mark Cofer, came riding up.  That was pretty weird, because the kid was about 7 years old, and he lived a mile and a half away, on a farm.  We'd never seen him ride up our way before.  Mark was the youngest of 4 brothers, I think, all of whom road dirtbikes.  They had a sort of motocross track on their farm, a trail through their cow pasture with small jumps and whoop-dee-doos.  Anyhow, Mark had a beach cruiser-style bike, but it was a 20 inch.  It had a big triangle seat, like all cruiser bikes did then.  Mark saw what we were doing, and started hitting the jump as well.  Riding was in his blood, thanks to his older brothers, and he jumped as well as we did, on his weird bike.

Then one time he came back up to the top of the hill and said, "Watch this."  He pedaled a little bit, then he climbed one foot up onto his top tube, and then to his seat.  Much to our surprise, Mark stood up on the seat of his bike, then took his hands off the bars, riding down the hill, standing straight up on his seat.  He somehow swerved around the potholes, and leaned to swerve into the pasture.  He hit the jump in the seat stand, and flew away from his bike, landing in the grass, as his bike tumbled to stop.  Tom and my minds were blown.  We'd never seen anyone even try to stand up on his seat before.  But he not only rode down the hill on his seat, he managed to hit the jump, too.  We were 12-year-olds who just got shown up by a first grader.  He did the seat stand, and hit the jump three times, I think.

I think Tom's mom called him into the house at that point, and we all went home.  I watched Mark Cofer ride down the hill, standing on his seat, in 1978 or '79.  That was 3-4 years before I got into BMX.  That was about the same time that Bob Haro, way out in  California, was riding skateparks and learning his first flatland tricks, before he did the first BMX "trick riding" demo at a race.  BMX freestyle was just being invented.  That was about 15-16 years before Viola Brand was even born.

I got into BMX in 1982, and wound up in the industry in 1986, and watched the best riders in the world for the next couple of decades.  I did framestands, and short bar rides ( jumping off, never landing one) myself.  I saw riders do surfers, and really good bar rides.  Jeff Cotter, and a few others did Pop Tarts, jumping up into bar rides.  But for over 30 years, I never once saw, or even heard of, a rider standing up and riding while standing on their seat.  Not until I saw a video of  Viola Brand two or three years ago.  She does a seat stand at 2:23 in the video above, the first person I saw do that trick since little Mark Cofer.

BMX freestyle is its own thing, actually several things now.  It's split into dirt, park, vert, flatland, street, and mega ramp genre's.  BMX freestyle came along at just the right time, along with the other action sports, to grow exponentially into a worldwide sport and lifestyle thing.  Then it faded some, as mountain bikes took over much of what BMX riding once was.  But there were people doing tricks on bikes long before BMX bikes were even invented in 1970.

Artistic cycling, what Viola is competing in above, officially goes back to 1956 for men, and 1970 for women, in Europe.  But unofficially, there was an artistic cycling competition way back in 1888.  Pedal bicycles, as we know them today, were invented somewhere around 1875.  I've always thought that bicycle trick riding was probably invented about 15 minutes after the first bike was invented, when a hot girl walked by, and some guy tried to impress her.  But that's just an educated guess on my part.  We know bicycle trick riding goes back to at least 1899, because Thomas Edison shot movies of it.  Yeah, Edison, the guy who invented the light bulb and the movie camera, among other things.  Here's the movie.


To put that in perspective, the first airplane (invented by bike shop owners and riders, Orville and Wilbur Wright), was invented four years after this video above.  Here are a few other photos of bicycle trick riding 100 or more years ago.  Old School BMX freestylers in the 1980's created the BMX freestyle scene, that we now see around the world.  But we didn't invent bicycle trick riding itself.  We were lucky enough to get into it at a time when the world was ready for it to grow into a worldwide, pretty popular sport/lifestyle.

 Dennis McCoy may be middle aged now, but he didn't invent footwork.  He just rocked it.

 Grandma did trackstands.

 Ow.  Just ow.

 Mega Ramp, circa 1905.

 Circus people have always been crazy.  I worked on five Cirque du Soleil tours, trust me on this one.

It took about 100 years, and Morgan Wade, to repeat this trick.  Think about that one for a minute.  This guy  has no helmet, no emergency rooms.  Hell, they didn't even have chromoly frames back then.. 

The most popular of my bike memes.

Gone Walkabout

"I'm going for a walk, not the after dinner kind."  Classic Bad Religion, 1994.

I "live" in the San Fernando Valley these days, as a homeless guy.  I just went down to Orange County for a couple of a days.  For those of you who read my Facebook rant yesterday, I didn't go to O.C. to meet cops, though that always seems to happen in Orange County these days.  To be honest, I "went walkabout," in a Crocodile Dundee kind of way.  I needed some time to think, to walk around a bit, wander a little, and let some news ideas bubble up in my head.  Among the Australian Aborigines, there was a tradition of boys, on the edge of manhood, to go out and wander the desert for a year, on their own.  The idea was that these young guys figure out who they are, they would test their survival skills, and become a man in the year of living alone and wandering.  There's a crazy 1971 Australian movie called Walkabout, which features a young Aborigine guy on his walkabout, and he meets two white kids stranded in the desert.  I discovered that movie in the 1990's, when I was a clerk in a video store, and watched all kinds of little known movies.  This was one of the cool ones I discovered then.

Four years ago I was 49 years old, broke, living with my mom in a tiny town in North Carolina, and unable to get hired for any job there.  I decided to completely focus on trying to make a living with my weird Sharpie art.  I wasn't known as an artist.  It was a fucking stupid idea, by anyone's standards.  Guess what?  I never did make a decent living in the last four years.  But I managed to survive as a "working artist," for four years, most of that time while living homeless.  I'm now known as an Sharpie artist, as well as a Has Been BMX industry guy from the 1980's and 1990's.  I've sold over 80 original drawings, each of which took 35 to 45 hours to draw.  My drawings and prints are hanging on walls in 11 or 12 U.S. states, several countries in Europe, Russia, on 5 of the 7 continents.  I had no idea any of that would happen.  I went all in on something everyone thought was stupid.  I couldn't get a "real job," so I focused on art, and made... and sold... a whole bunch of pretty cool drawings.

This blog, and my related social media sites, is about adventures, at all levels, from the mellow adventure of taking a walk around a park snapping cool photos, like I did in Newport Beach yesterday, to the life threatening adventure that four years as a (mostly) homeless working artist has been, to the grand adventure of life itself.  Our lives are a series of adventures, whether we think about it that way, or not.

My simple decision four years ago, to become a working artist, led me to places I couldn't imagine then, like sleeping outside on a 25 degree night when it snowed ten inches in Richmond, Virginia.  But it also led me to sitting at the Huntington Beach pier watching Martin Aparijo sign prints of a drawing I made of him.  Martin was one of the guys I totally looked up to when I started focusing on this weird thing called BMX freestyle in 1983-84.  That turned into quite and adventure, as well.  It was really cool to have Martin (and John "Dizz Hicks, Dave Voelker, and China aka Krys Dauchy), let me draw pictures of them to sell.  But I'm at the place where artwork alone will not make me a living.  So I had to wander for a couple of days and think about where to go from here.  So I "went walkabout." 

Martin Aparijo, BMX freestyle pioneer, longtime pro rider, and huge influence on my riding BITD.  He's holding one of the limited edition prints of the drawing I did of him, right after signing a bunch of them.  Huge thanks for letting my do that, Martin!

This new blog will be my primary focus from now on.  I'll still write some old school BMX freestyle stories on Steve Emig: The White Bear, mostly because it has over 96,000 page views, and I just want to break 100,000 before I set it aside.  But this blog will let me share more photos, and tell the tales of some of my weird adventures I've had, and chronicle the new adventures I'm having now, large and small.  I'm not going to give up on my Sharpie scribble style artwork, I'm just going to dial it back, and work on other projects that give me a better chance of actually making a living again. 

So that's where I'm at now.  I have no idea where this blog and this "adventuring" idea will lead me.  But that's the whole point.  I've got some projects in mind to start with, and I wake up psyched to work on this series of ideas.  I'm not sure where the income will come from yet, but figuring that out is another part of the fun.  Stay tuned for lots of photos and more adventures...

Adventuring we will go...

Part of the point of having an adventure is that you don't know exactly what will happen, or how things turn will turn out.  This classic scene from the 1986 movie, Stand By Me, reminds me of all those weird little adventures I had, and we all had, as kids.  Most of them weren't anywhere near this dramatic, but once in a while things got kind of crazy.

I was always an explorer as a kid.  I liked to wander around and see what was across the next field, around the next curve, or over the next hill.  Like most kids in the 1970's, I spent a big chunk of my free time wandering one place or another, sometimes on my own, sometimes with friends, much like the kids above.  In my case, my family moved nearly every year, from one house to another, and from one town, or area, to another.  So I had a totally fresh world to discover on a regular basis.  Some of my first memories are wandering a patch of woods when I was 5 years old, outside of Massillon, Ohio.  I continued that exploration as we moved around Ohio.  Then we moved to New Mexico, when I was about 14, and I spent many weekends with my dad, and his friends, 4X4ing and wandering the wide open desert and hills there.  Another year, and we were in Boise, Idaho, where I wandered across miles of waist high sagebrush country, just to see what was out there.

I got into BMX, and began wandering the urban environment on my bike, looking for little jumps, and other things to ride.  As I grew up, across so many cities and towns, I also took a mild interest in history.  I began to learn parts of the history or each new area we moved to.  I just found this interesting, in my own geeky way.  Every region and town has its history, usually long forgotten by today's residents.  Digging into local history is another type of exploring.

Years later, trying to sort out my personal issues, I started reading a lot of self-help books, which focus on self-reflection, and our own thoughts and inner life.  So I dug into my daydreams, thinking patterns, thoughts, and ideas, another form of exploration.

Now I'm a middle aged guy, who's lived a pretty weird life, and I still like wandering new areas, exploring, and learning new things.  This blog, and my related posts elsewhere, will chronicle my adventures in checking out places I find interesting, whether it's a park or beach I've never been to, a historical site, an art gallery, or just a cool shop or restaurant I found.  I'm going to take a lot of photos, hopefully video as well before too long, and write about some of the things, and just chronicle some with photos, and a few captions.

I'm also going to write some more in depth posts on ideas about exploring, weird adventures I've had in my life, and about how our outer adventures usually seem to lead to some kind of inner adventure, or new ideas and thinking, as well.  I don't have the resources to go on any huge, grand adventures right now.  But there are a ton of places I'd like to check out here in Southern California to start with, and plenty of things I'd like to explore in a blog post.  So that's what this new blog, and series of online channels (like my new Pinterest page), is all about.  Like any adventure, I have no idea where this will lead.  I've been feeling the urge to spend more time exploring for a few years now, slowly building up.  My life, on a financial level, is a mess, making it as good a time as any for a change.  So what better time to start something new?

Like Scooby-Doo and the crew of the Mystery Machine, my favorite cartoon growing up, I'm off to a new little adventure.  I'll let you know what I find there...

Here I am carving lines in the Nude Bowl, in 1990.  This empty swimming pool is high on a hill, the ruins of a nudist colony from the 1970's,in the desert outside of Palm Springs and Desert Hot Springs.  Frequented by skateboarders, BMXers, and partiers since the 1980's, the Nude Bowl always offered a fun adventure when we made the trip.  Photo by Rob Lawrence