Gifts from the Road

This year I spent my thirty-fifth birthday -- on the first anniversary of September 11 -- riding one of the most difficult days of a cross-country cycling trip, pedaling 135 miles and climbing 9,000 feet through the mountains of Arizona. After much anticipatory anxiety; spending most of the day fending off altitude-induced nap attacks; getting drenched by rain repeatedly; and repairing a flat tire, I was relieved to finally make it to the hotel that evening before dark. Beats spending another less memorable day in the office, I suppose.

In twenty-five days, a group of about forty of us rode nearly 3,000 miles through eleven states. We crossed numerous rivers, including the Colorado, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee. We were chased by dogs in every state east of Texas; nearly driven off the road by unsympathetic drivers in Georgia; and sunburned on our right sides while crossing the wide, open spaces of California, Arizona, and New Mexico.

We spent 130- and 160-mile days riding into ten- to thirty-mile-per-hour head and side winds, and now know what it feels like to cycle two days through a tropical storm (HINT: put your bike in a bathtub, turn the shower on full blast, set up a giant fan to blow a thirty-mile-per-hour wind in your face, and keep pedaling for 270 miles). I learned that it’s possible to experience thunderstorms and flash floods in the desert, and learned what "calf fries" are (testicles) and that people in Oklahoma eat them, or at least offer them to tourists.

I expected the trip to be long and hard, and I wasn’t disappointed. There were some moments when I felt certain that the ride was by far the most stupid-ass idea that I had ever followed through on in my life, and I had no idea how I was going to make it out the other side. Fortunately, those days made up the minority of my vacation.

Other moments were nearly transcendent. One day while riding in Tropical Storm Isadore, after having recovered from a particularly dark mood the day before, I felt a lightness while contemplating of the profundity of what I was accomplishing. After having cycled in the pouring rain for hours -- and facing hours more of the same -- at one point I saw a young woman running from the front door of her house to pick up the morning’s news paper at the edge of her lawn. She was dressed in a t-shirt and shorts with no shoes -- even though it was wet out it wasn’t particularly cold. Her house was set back far from the street, though, and it took her a while to reach the paper, so she was running to try and stay dry.

In that moment our divergent universes collided. She was engaged in just one pedestrian activity that made up what was likely for her another routine day, altered only slightly by a storm that was probably fairly common for that part of the country anyway. As I witnessed her in the midst of that mundane act, I wanted to tell her that -- although she might have thought she was just picking up the paper -- she was actually witnessing what felt to me to be a small miracle: I was riding my bike across the country.

Given my own trajectory for the day, the normalcy of her life seemed to me no less miraculous, however. In a few moments she would return to her house out of the rain and I would continue to pedal in the downpour for hours and miles through towns I’d never heard of before and would probably never see again. The comfort of a warm, dry house; the leisure to indulge in the morning’s news; the reliability of a series of repeated activities that make up a day: all seemed like small treasures, all the more precious for the invisibility of their value. How easy it is to take for granted something as inconspicuous as the stability of a daily routine.

On another day, I mused over my reaction to a stray dog I had encountered a few days earlier. I had experienced her as a bundle of pure love wrapped in burr-matted fur and set on four paws, starving and filthy. A precious treasure, but just one of many we passed during our 3,000 miles: another piece of human refuse carelessly discarded along the road with no more thought than given to a torn sofa or broken washing machine that were no longer useful.

If I could see value in her, I thought, then it was only reasonable that I should be able to feel my own worth: just one human among many, full of faults but unique nonetheless, with talents and strengths as well as flaws. As a gift from some random back road in rural Georgia that linked obscure, tiny towns, for a moment I truly felt my own preciousness.

Another time I saw an Amish man and child riding down the road past farms and fields one wet morning in Tennessee. Although I saw them for only a moment, for those few seconds their clothing, his beard, their horse, and the wooden cart that carried them, all represented a lifestyle that is presumably much simpler than my own. Seeing them, I realized that all of the modern conveniences in my life that I normally take for granted -- cell phone, credit card, ATM machines, high-tech job, gym membership, spending hours each week driving around in my car -- are actually choices. Seeing them, I wondered if all of the technology on which I usually never question depending really makes my life better, or makes me any happier.

Although I’ll always carry memories of these moments from my trip, when I returned back to "civilian" life, I found it to be annoyingly normal. At first, I was ecstatic to be home. I was grateful to be around friends and family again; grateful to be back in Santa Cruz; grateful to have a single residence to return to every evening rather than packing up my belongings to be carted to the next hotel night after night for nearly a month. Frankly, I felt lucky just to be alive: traffic was so bad at some points during the last third of the trip that some days I wasn’t sure that I’d make it to the hotel in the evenings.

After being back at home for just a few short days, however, I was so thoroughly caught back up the flow of my life (meaning spending eight- to twelve- hour days in front of a computer, indulging in weekend rentals at the video store, and enjoying walks along the ocean as frequently as I could sneak them in) that without my eight rolls of film and as proof, I almost felt as though the trip had never happened. For all of the hard work of the bike ride, I think I was hoping to come away from the experience with some lightening bolt insight into what the purpose of my life is, to come to some conclusion about why I’m here and what I want to do with myself given that I am here. I think I thought that challenging myself so dramatically and taking myself so far out of my normal routine would somehow change me, that I would somehow attain clarity about what I need to do to feel like I’m making the best use of my time here. Nirvana through ultra cycling.

At one point during the trip, I even began asking other riders what they thought the meaning of life is. One rider, Richard, who’s in his sixties and has had more time to come up with answers than I have, replied, “Enjoy it while it’s here.” That’s a pretty good response, I thought, but sometimes easier said than done. Other riders had answers, too, but they were all different. Although I knew this before I left home, none of us really know why we’re here.

So here I am, returned safely home -- after packing a lifetime’s worth of adventures into a single month -- with no insight, no conclusions, no answers, no certainty about anything. I found no hidden switch to flip that would finally make me feel perpetually happy and fulfilled.

Life. Just a series of moments, some gravely dark, others laughably light, and the vast majority entirely forgettable. With all of its fullness and sometimes seeming emptiness. With its loss, longing, and loneliness. With its passing moments of joy and laughter and connection. With its saddle sores, tropical storms, warm food, hot showers, and dry beds. Life. Enjoy it while it's here.