Category: cycling

How the first week of my trip became infamously terrible.

Laura WildLeave a comment

I spent a significant part of last summer preparing myself to get knocked on my ass, because I knew that I was not going to become a cyclist overnight. When the reality of what I really wanted sunk in, and I accepted the fact that I secretly craved hardship, I suppose I started trying to seek it out. I always knew that in the end, my efforts would not be wasted; I didn’t have to go very far to find it.

As a teenager on the quest for enlightenment it has always been easy to elaborate on the dark side of life. It has always been easy to get lost in carefully chosen words, or lost in the pages of a seldom used moleskin journal. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I guess in many ways I still don’t. I hadn’t been cycling for long and I hadn’t been writing for much longer. All I knew was that I wanted something from a particular piece of time, something that I did not intend to return. And I thought the only way I could capture that was through writing.

Getting lost in the daily motion of constant pedaling was just another way for me to stay in the moment, something that I not only highly valued but also found to be really tricky. The loneliness that I had been striving for kicked in as soon as I realized that I was doing something that most people didn’t even want to do. I was doing something that was going to be a lot harder than I expected, and I was going to be doing it by myself. So began the most difficult part of my bike trip- the summer leading up to it.

I thoroughly hated every minute of my daily bike rides at first, mostly because they were so repetitive. There is something surreal about moving through space at a steady 14 miles an hour, but for some reason I spent most of my summer taking full advantage of the ability it gave me to zone out. I used this same trick a lot when I was on the Southern Tier; when I wasn’t looking out at the emptiness before me, or squinting my eyes to catch a glimpse of the Atlantic coast, I was staring down at my front wheel and day dreaming.

What I was dreaming about last summer was making my escape. How was riding my bike across the country going to be beneficial to me? Mostly I just didn’t want to go to college; it wasn’t even Autumn yet and I was already terrified of getting caught in the cycle of post-highschool normality.

I have felt this self created pressure to swim upstream more and more as I have gotten older. As long as I have been encouraged to blaze my own trail, I have assumed that I have been doing the right thing by purposely being an outlier. I don’t know where my generation got this ability to follow our dreams without having to acknowledge their inevitable repercussions, but we’re lucky we do. The only thing that makes me different from everybody else is only the degree to which I enjoy the eventual downfall of my elaborate plans, because it is dramatic and, in it’s own way, weirdly exciting. I have chosen not to avoid intensity, partly because I like to learn the hard way and partly because it gives me something to write about.

The first week of my trip was intense as hell. The prospect of a 4,000 foot climb in elevation coupled with the fact that it was almost always over 100 degrees seemed daunting enough. What made it shittier yet was the fact that I got food poisoning in the middle of nowhere with three guys that were, at the time, mere acquaintances. By day five my cheap bike was already starting to fall apart under all the weight of my gear, I had changed upwards of a dozen flat tires, I had gotten poison ivy all over my body and I was holding the rest of my group back. Just before we got into Phoenix we were sidetracked by flash flooding and when we finally did get into town, I was left in a McDonald’s parking lot while the rest of my group went on without me.

Looking back it was one of the unluckiest and most uncomfortable weeks of my life, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t love every minute of it. It was so humid that our bodies were constantly dripping with sweat, our eyes constantly stinging from the salt. We used umbrellas as shade at some point; I hid from the sun under a conservative campaign sign that I had felt no guilt in plucking from the parched ground. It was crazy; the desert swallowed the road, and the never-ending road swallowed our motivation. The fire ants taunted us when we thought about sitting on the ground, and when we were thirsty all we had to drink was the hot water we were hauling in our panniers. The smell of the baking earth swarmed in on us and took our minds on some tired, hallucinogenic trip. We were lost, but we were together. At least until I got abandoned.

I had essentially failed because I hadn’t given up on myself, and therefore my cycling companions had to give up on me. I can’t say that I enjoyed being tired, hot, or hungry, but for whatever reason I felt prepared for it in those days. Because it wasn’t about overcoming all of the physical limitations that came my way, it was about learning how to navigate through the emotional complications that I expected. For that one week of my trip I was blessed with blissful naivety, and I didn’t realize what I was truly up against. When I was left in Phoenix I felt like I must have been fooling myself, because I had no idea that I was slowing the group down so much. I stayed in the city for ten days before I found a new group to ride with, all of which I spent laying in bed feeling sorry for myself. My bike was falling apart, and I knew that I could fix it, but my determination was falling apart too, and hiding under the covers in an air-conditioned hotel room was not putting it back together.

Why I biked the Southern Tier and why I’m writing about it.

Laura WildLeave a comment

I dipped my tires in the Pacific ocean on September 2nd, a Tuesday, and headed for the Atlantic. I was on a really cheap bike that I had purchased only months before on a whim, after I skipped my high school graduation to climb Devil’s Tower and was inspired by my climbing guide to bike the Southern Tier. I was not a cyclist, was out of shape, had little money, and had no idea what I was doing. But I was with three acquaintances from Colorado that seemed to know a thing or two about self-supported touring, so I got in line behind them and headed east.

What began as a way to fulfill a case of severe wanderlust quickly turned into a way for me to write another story. I wanted to suffer, I wanted to do crazy things, and I wanted to write about it. But a few days into my bike trip I found that I only had the energy to do three things: eat, sleep, and ride my bike. I didn’t actually get around to writing about it until I got home again in early November.

I wanted to blog about it then, but for whatever reason I am choosing now, several months after the fact, to tell my story. While a bunch of really shitty things happened to me during those two months that I was gone, and I definitely think some of them are worth sharing, the most interesting part of my story happened before and after I left. I tend to be totally devoted to everything I do, at least until I lose interest in it, and I think that’s pretty much what writing has been for me throughout my adolescence, as well as rock climbing, bike riding, and going to school.

I took a gap year this past year, which turned out to be a really good call. I was all signed up for classes and housing at Black Hills State University last fall, but I pulled out at the end of summer when I finally convinced my parents that I was serious about biking the Southern Tier.

I wanted to do it all by myself at first; I was freshly off of my most recent rereading of Walden and I was fit to embark on my own quest for enlightenment. This was partly because I had a completely naive do-it-yourself philosophy that I was devoted to, but also because I wanted to be really, really lonely so I could write about it. I just loved drama so much, I couldn’t get enough of it, or at least I didn’t think I could at the time. Unfortunately though, my female anatomy prevented me from being able to go it alone, simply because it would be unsafe.

Even though there was a period of time that I thought a good can of pepper spray would be a good enough companion for me, the reality of my situation was that I didn’t live in a world where I could do everything a guy could do, at least not in the same way. My parents drew the line at me taking off through the desert all by myself, and I don’t blame them. I mean, even with the help of the more experienced cyclists that I ended up riding with, I still got into some pretty precarious situations (more than a couple of times).

It was a good thing that I saw any type of adversity as a way to spice up my story-telling game. I was all for getting knocked down a time or two, and doing things the hard way, and even having a couple of ultra intense break downs in 110 degree heat. Those were the perfect conditions for a melodramatic coming-of-age memoir to be born, and the best part was I wouldn’t even have to stretch the truth. That’s what my current nonfiction project Into the Wind is about; in one sense, it’s about an 18 year old girl who rides her bike across the country. In another sense, however, it’s about a quest for enlightenment that went horribly wrong.

I didn’t find the meaning of life out there in the eerie emptiness of the deep South; I didn’t find it under the all consuming night skies of the Texas hill country and I didn’t find it in the rich, culture-saturated lowlands of Louisiana. In fact I still haven’t found it, but I feel closer than ever. When life altering things happen to you, like losing a loved one, everything can start to look a little bit more clear. When you realize what really matters to you more than anything, everything else starts to seem small and unimportant. Especially cross country bike trips.

The death of my dog has brought a lot of this on, but I don’t mean to go off on some rant about the important things in life. I don’t want to say that I have gotten wiser since I have had my best friend taken away from me; she was so much more than a way to grow and learn something about life. She was, and is, an ongoing relationship that is just as profound as all of the other ones I share. It’s just that I didn’t feel like I had changed very much after I went on my soul searching bike trip, but now all of a sudden I feel like a different person in just the past couple of weeks.

I guess I really just want to write about things that people can relate to, whether that is loss, depression, wanderlust, societal prejudice and discrimination, or anything else that accompanies the onset of adulthood, being female, or choosing to live one’s life unconventionally. I keep telling myself that nonconformity is becoming the new normal, and if that’s true then I know my story is relatable to a lot of people. I guess I would also like to think that my life is interesting enough to enjoy reading about, especially if I pull off the dark, dramatic style that is my favorite form of expression. I kicked it Thoreau style for a couple of months and now I’m ready to kick it Poe style, which is so much more fun. I’m going to be starting at the beginning, long before my bike trip, with the events that lead up to me feeling like I needed to run away in order to get my shit together.