Excerpt from Lucky in Adventure Cyclist!
“Mile 5000.” This story is the first time I’ve been published in print media since grad school. Feels good to be back!
forward
Every day is the same on a bike tour: You move forward. The scenery around you blends like watercolors until you realize you’re in New England, which is a quite different thing than Pennsylvania, or noble, tangled Virginia before that. And you’ll be surprised down the road to find yourself in the Midwest, in the desert, in the mountains, and, if you are tenacious and lucky enough, you will look around and blink and find that you have arrived at your destination.
Of course, you can’t think about that, not in the beginning, not even in the middle. You keep your eyes on the horizon and no further. The great constant of the horizon is this: It will never rise to meet you.
we shared the side of the road
When you live on the side of the road, you see all the shit people throw out of their cars. There are water bottles, soda bottles, piss bottles, empty cigarette packs, wadded-up napkins, plastic bags, tampon applicators, splintered plastic cups, pulverized Styrofoam, a hundred bajillion cigarette butts, beer cans, plastic liquor bottles for brands I’d never heard of (Sobieski? Rebel Yell?), and wrappers for every kind of processed food imaginable. The unofficial sponsor of roadside litter is indisputably fast food restaurants.
What truer advertisement than a greasy McDonald’s bag full of trash on the side of the road?
Sometimes there were mysteries: a single shoe, a vacuum cleaner, a white teddy bear with a red bow tie.
And then, of course, there was the roadkill. Nothing reminds you of the fragility of life — there on the side of the road, as you pedal your bicycle while two-ton death machines shoot past you at 45 miles per hour — than the corpses of those who weren’t so lucky.
The Cherokee would pray for forgiveness after killing an animal. Deer were a staple of their diet, and every part of the animal was a resource: hides for clothing and drum heads, bones for weapons, hooves for glue.
Today, we leave them on the side of the road to decay.
I saw a fawn that looked like it was sleeping. It must have been hit, I realized, by one of the cars that had just passed me.
Another time I heard a far-off buzz like radio static and smelled something like shit and garbage water and rotten food. As I got closer, the picture came into focus: a fog of flies settled over the bloated, putrid corpse of a deer. I retched and tried to hold my breath as I passed. Have you ever tried to hold your breath while pedaling a 70-pound touring bike?
There was a completely desiccated deer, leather stretched tight over bared teeth. And the one that had been cleaved clean in two. I saw the back half first; the front was easily 100 feet down the road. Her eyes were open.
There were raccoons and possums that died snarling, and frogs flat as chewing gum, and turkey vultures gathered around the rotting corpse of a cat; they floated indignantly into the air at my approach. I saw something pulverized beyond recognition, like vomit splattered across the road.
I saw fretful sparrow hopping around the motionless body of its partner, urgently chirping as if to say, “Wake up, please, oh please wake up.”
The saddest to me were turtles, their shells shattered like ceramic bowls of stew dropped on a stone floor. It’s not fair, I thought, glaring at a car that passed me with barely two feet of clearance. They can’t help that they’re small and slow.
leaving chicago
I cried openly on a boulder on the side of a crowded bike path while eating two cinnamon-chip scones.
As you can imagine, absolutely no one acknowledged me. People in the city are good at pretending they don’t see a giant woman with tears rolling out from her sunglasses eating two cinnamon-chip scones. Maybe they assumed I knew what I was doing, that I had this situation under control.
Or maybe I was a ghost!
I had absolutely nothing under control. My life was a swirling vortex. I had spent the last hour trying to leave the city, but I kept getting lost and ending up in the same place, a quarter-mile from Olive Oil’s house. It felt like a maddening dream.
I felt so lonely.
I had to say goodbye to a friend, and I wasn’t going to see another one until Montana. I met a person who felt connected to the same reality as me, and then I had to say goodbye to him too. I had checked my email and saw the name Ben Sagres, and I couldn’t bring myself to open the message, because the sight of his name made me feel like I’d chugged a pitcher of icewater. The worst part was how familiar it felt. This was how I felt all the time when we were still talking, I realized with shock. How had I managed to convince myself that this was okay?
I slumped and sighed and let the tears crawl down my cheeks. Gazed over at Lucky, my sole companion. I felt like an animal at the zoo. My every action was public, and no one knew my name.
But.
I eventually found my way out of the city. The skyscrapers shrunk to suburbs that sank into unburnished land. I rode past tall grass and chain-link fences, through soft drifts of cottonwood fluff, to a town called Zion. The bike path dwindled to dirt and finally led me to a lonely little scrap of beach with smooth stones the color of olive oil and Himalayan sea salt, beneath a sunset like weak herbal tea.
I locked my bike, set up my tent, and crawled inside. Sighed. I’m sad. I recognize and honor that. And I told myself the ups and downs are two sides of the same coin. Trust the setbacks, ride them out. Without loneliness, friendship wouldn’t mean a thing.
Is it hard to ride your bike across the country?
Nights like this one, little man. Nights like this one.
the greatest day
When I was a kid, my mom used to wake up hours before everyone else, to sketch at the dining room table, this great round slanted hunk of wood with legs that ended in lion paws. We’d find her hunched over the table, drinking coffee (2% milk and Sweet’n’Low), with the red-and-white deer blanket draped over her shoulders, working on some minute detail in a drawing of a house. A brick, a stone in the walkway, a windowpane: The manmade elements were always painstakingly detailed, but the plants were carefree smudges.
And my dad. Boots squeaking in the snow through the frozen darkness of a pre-dawn Vermont winter morn that swallows and dulls the edges of the roaring dragon that is his truck. Harmonicas and construction plans scattered across the dashboard, dry heat spilling from dusty vents, a jug of half-frozen spring water at my feet. Coffee hot off the percolator steaming like a genie from a plastic mug; the crackle of AM radio. My father wedges himself behind the wheel and puts the truck in gear. He lights a Camel cigarette.
As a kid, I didn’t understand why my parents liked the morning. It felt awful to be awake that early, like drowning in brownie batter. But now I understand. It is a sacred time of day. Pure potential. Anything could happen. Why, it could even be the greatest day of your life.
So I leave the hostel early, and follow my front wheel back down for one last look at Niagara. There’s no sound beyond the whirring of my bike tires and the silver notes of birdsong and the continual rumble of the falls. An occasional car passes, its taillights burning red holes in the dim. I give them a soft smile of recognition, maybe a little wave. This is an exclusive club we’re in, after all. Crepuscular. “Can ya believe how early I gotta get up?”
The falls were no less majestic in the light of the sunrise, with just a few scattered tourists, early birds like me. I stood and drank them in again. “Love Letters to God” was pleasantly stuck in my head.
Love letters to god / I wonder if she reads them / or if the get lost / in the stars / the stars / in the stars
Upriver, there were signs explicitly forbidding people from entering the water. On principle, I walked past them and dipped my feet in. My humble feet, which have touched so much earth and carried me so far. I felt connected to this river, this great mother.
And biked on to Buffalo in peace.
Morning’s sacred stillness lasts until it ends, and the world begins to stir and stretch and wiggle its fingers and toes. Heading west, the sunrise is behind me, so I read it secondhand: the sky gradually lightening to violet to baby blue to pallid white and eventually back again to blue. This is when the cars appear, the cavalry, the people going to work. I don’t smile and wave at these cars. I feel self-conscious around them. I’m a child playing a game, not taking life seriously. They’re irritated that have to go to work, choking on brownie batter, so I stay out of their way. Instead, I share a smile with the new infant day.
“It happens this way,” I think. “Don’t take it personally. They don’t know how special you are. They don’t know that today could be the greatest day of their life.”
*
And the award for worst drivers in America goes to… Buffalo! Congratulations, Buffalo. Do you have a few words? Perhaps you could share the secret to your success?
“What an unexpected honor! Well you know, the secret is that our drivers have an open animosity toward cyclists. Not the outta-my-way rudeness of Baltimore, not the distracted indifference of Bostonians. We simply view bikers as a nuisance, and we use intimidation to drive them out of our city — pun intended!”
The cars were hostile, but the people were kind. I rested on a bench on the side of a river, among the folks with fishing poles sitting on lawn chairs and coolers. Two guys eyed me from a distance. They had tattoos on their faces and piercings in their noses and lips and ears. I returned their gaze, gave a little smile, and they rose and swaggered up to me… and offered me a smallmouth bass.
“Do you want this fish?”
In the early morning, the day is pure potential. But as the sun rises and dries up the dew
and bakes the hills around you, it begins to take form. Often, it’s not the greatest day of your life. You might get lost, drivers might be rude, it might be cold, your ass might hurt. Ain’t that just the worst? It’s bad enough to be in pain without the indignity of it being your ass. Of course, your shoulders also hurt. Your spine is stiff, from your sacrum to your skull.
It’s okay if you have to sit somewhere and sigh or cry or curse. Phone a friend, someone you trust enough to complain. My friend Mr. Tamani always used to say, “A problem shared is half-solved.” But I hope you can remember that every gravel driveway has a few pretty stones.
You might see a nice view, or sunlight illuminating the leaves of a tree overhead (that always gets me, every time). You might have a funny interaction with another person. Some thuggy-looking guys might offer you a smallmouth bass. Your favorite song, a satisfying cup of coffee, a tacky statue of a dinosaur, the feeling of triumph of climbing a hill, the downhill slope, spotting a heron, taking a good picture, yelling out into the nothingness because you can, successfully peeing on the side of the road without being seen. If you look for the good, you’ll find it.
Midday never lasts forever. The sun slides downward, the light deepens to gold, the sky ceases to burn, the shadows lengthen. I like to see the cars coming home from work. I hope the people driving them have something nice to look forward to. Someone they love, or a good meal. Maybe a bike ride? It makes me happy to see the people, finally free.
That night, I camped on a little bluff in a park overlooking Lake Erie. Not the stealthiest spot, but no one bothered me. There were four little kids playing in the water below, and one of them yelled up at me, "You wanna come down and feel the water??"
"Is it warm?"
"No, it's COOOOOOOOLD!"
“I’ll pass,” I laughed.
The sky was a muted sapphire, the water was wrinkled silk, the waves were rhythmic as a heartbeat. I scrunched my bare toes in the dirt, allowing a few mosquitos to bite me, because mosquitoes gotta eat too. Did you know it’s only female mosquitoes that bite? They need blood to produce eggs. Thinking about mosquitoes as fellow ladies dealing with their pain-in-the-ass reproductive systems makes me like them a lot better.
So it wasn’t the greatest day of your life.
Or hell, maybe it was.
Because it was a day in your life. And that’s all our life is, is days. And just because one happened to have a little more happiness or a little more screaming curses in it than the others doesn’t make it better or worse. You were alive.
Maybe when you die, you miss the feeling of mosquito bites, and sunburn, and thirst. I bet you remember the hard times fondly, and fonder still the relief that follows. I bet you miss the feeling of air in your lungs.
How lucky we are, to breathe.
These were my thoughts as I gazed at the sunset smooth and pink as the inside of a conch shell until the shadow of night swallowed it up. Stars like Christmas lights, stars like mica, stars like trumpets, stars like swans. There’s nothing to be afraid of here in the dark, as you crawl into your tent. You’re just on the side of the earth that’s turned away from the sun. You’re safe in the world’s great shadow. And it’s time to sleep, because tomorrow is a new day. And as your dreams wrap long fingers around your mind, a tiny star comes to light inside you, burning with the excitement that you’re only one sleep away from the next morning,
and that sacred quiet,
that seed of potential,
that today could just be
the greatest day of your life.
niagara
After three days and 200 miles without a shower, I raced thunderstorms and a caffeine crash to Niagara Falls and won. The night before, I was a homeless vagrant facing off against a wild animal at 2 a.m. Today, I was just another tourist.
I almost didn’t make it. The bike path was a race outta hell, and I followed blind instinct along the surface streets of Niagara Falls. No time to dawdle and check the map — the hostel check-in closed at 7, and at the rate I was going, I was going to make it there at 6:58.
I careened around a corner and down a quiet, shady side street, and there it was. I leaned my bike against the railing and dashed up the steps and knocked on the door. 6:58 on the dot. The hostel owner greeted me with crossed arms and a scowl. He was one of those guys who would NOT have let me check in at 7:01. The type who looks at the world as if it were trying to impress him, and failing.
But it didn’t matter, because here I was at Niagara Falls. A place I had wanted to visit for… well, all of five hours. Just a funny way to motivate myself to do some miles. Even though I grew up in the Northeast, this was a tourist attraction that had managed to escape me. Turns out to see it, I had to bike all the way from south of the Mason-Dixon line.
I navigated the circus of tacky attractions and followed a path that deposited me upriver of the falls. The water rushed excitedly like a crowd flowing into a concert venue, pulled by the insistence of gravity, tumbling and crashing into rocks. The air vibrated with the sound of rushing water. The sheer kinetic energy was infectious; I walked fast like I was trying to catch a plane.
Oh, and the sky! One half was covered in a thick, dark cloudbank that ended in a smooth line, and the other half glowed incandescent orange. I walked amidst tourists speaking Hindi, Mandarin, English, Spanish, French, German, beneath this surrealist’s sky. In my excitement, I loved each and every one of them. We were all sharing this enchanted moment, creating it in our overlapping consciousness.
And then I saw it—
the precipitous drop.
Precipitous is really the only word to describe it. 635,000 gallons per second spilling down a chasm the height of the Arc de Triomphe. Did people really go over this in barrels? I loved them too. There in the air suffused with saffron, I loved the falls and everyone around me and the power and majesty of this moment. The flashing neon lights, the tacky tourist traps — they were endearing in their insignificance compared to this, the very presence of god.
Like a mosquito biting the Buddha.
How very human, I thought. How charmingly, quixotically human. Making money on the banks of creation. Imagine how this place must have looked before. “WE WERE HERE TOO!” those neon lights screamed. I pitied them, for missing the point, but I forgave them too.
My ego consumed in the crashing power of water.
“the computer dog”
read the cardboard lawn sign, and I laughed. What a weird concept for a small business! Like… maybe this guy has a dog, and it’s the mascot for his computer-fixing side hustle? Then I got a little closer and realized it actually said, “The Computer Doc.”
How funny, I thought. You switch one letter, and the entire meaning changes.
You might think that on a long solo pilgrimage, you experience profound thoughts about, like, god or human nature or something. Sometimes that’s true. But other times, you conduct a comprehensive exploration of all the alphabetic permutations of the phrase “The Computer Dog.”
Highlights:
the computer fog (it’s a virus)
the computer hog (he just keeps all the computers that come in)
the computer hug (for when your computer’s feeling down)
the computer dom (for when your computer’s feeling horny)
the computer dot (uh, I believe the term is “pixel”)
Computer dox, that’s malaria medicine for your computer. Computer doy, a holdover from the ’90s, like, computer doy, you don’t know what’s wrong with your computer? Computer doz… puts your computer right to sleep.
Then I glanced up and thought, Hey, a lake!
*
Freedom is skipping stones on a beach while everyone else is at work.
*
I leaned under a birch tree in someone’s front yard. I had no home, so the world was my home. And in that moment, my home was rolling farmland and beech forests, the glittering surface of Owasco Lake, and a cascade of spade-shaped leaves overhead, serrate edges rimmed in golden sunlight.
If gold is valuable because it’s rare, than what about this?
if you follow your dreams, they will lead you where you want to be
The bike trail is a featureless brown ribbon running through the tangle of gaunt springtime trees; it felt like I was following the path of an eraser dragged through a pencil sketch on a paper bag. At this time of year, the land looks at once old and young, like the wrinkled head of a baby bird.
The eraser smudge turns into a clean strip of concrete extending toward the vanishing point across the gray, matted grass of a marsh. Surrounding us, a graphite scribble of forest. All the world the color of a weathered old telephone pole. Beyond the scrim of clouds, the sun calls its warmth across a vast distance.
The path crosses a still silver river that hugs the brown curves of earth and reflects the sky like a mirror. A few reeds stick out of the water like pins in a silk dress. And then it ducks back into the woods, between great mossy rocks and beneath thorny branches adorned with white apple blossoms.
When I’m cold, I put on a jacket; when I’m hungry, I eat; when I have to pee, an outhouse materializes and I use it. My needs met, I get back on my bike and continue to ride, smiling at the beautiful world around me.
A dream doesn’t come true when it concludes. It comes true in moments like these, when it takes you without fanfare to the places you never knew about, but that you recognize immediately as where you’ve always wanted to go.
the reiserstown fire department
The sign on the door said Ladie’s Room. Bare walls, two narrow beds, a sand-colored dresser straight out of a freshman dorm, and me with a big confused smile on my face.
“It’s for female firefighters on duty, but we only have one and she’s not on tonight,” explained the chief. “So we figured you could just have the place to yourself. Showers are across the hall.”
When was the last time you were pleasantly surprised you got to sleep in a bed?
what do you wear when you're riding your bike across the country?
answer: the flyest threads imaginable.
This is the reality of my existence: I can decide to ride my bike across the country — no problem! how do we get this done? — but picking out a tank top to wear to the grocery store takes 45 minutes on a good day. It’s that mirror. Oh, the mirror! My arch-enemy[1]. Fixed and wriggling, I am helpless to look away from this cruel truth: No matter how carefully I cultivate my inner self, it will always be housed in a vessel I didn’t choose and that everyone can see but me.
So anyway, that’s my thought process on a normal day. Now imagine me trying to pick out the only outfit I will wear for the next five months. I am catatonic.
[1] When I was 17, I went 40 days without looking at my reflection. Around day 20, I forgot what I looked like, and in that void, I just assumed I was beautiful. Like Nicole Kidman.
Completely by coincidence, the last day of this experiment was my senior prom. The lady who did my hair was like, “Honey, don’t you wanna see how beautiful you look?” and I just said, “Noooope!”
(Just to paint a complete picture, I also wore a red dress with matching Converse. The fringe of my hair was the color of lime Jell-O, because, of course, that’s what I used to dye it. I made jewelry out of my leftover ID stickers from my AP tests and stuck a couple of pipettes I stole from the chemistry lab in my hair.)
At midnight, after 40 days, on my way home from senior prom, I looked in the rearview mirror. Damn if it wasn’t just like seeing an old friend.