Day 45 - Leamington, ON (103.3 mi)

I realize the danger in being overly curmudgeonly, and I am about to indulge in some curmudgeon, so let’s review some things I really like about yesterday, and Canada:  the weather (apart from one short rain) has been amazing, and no time more so than yesterday.  I made the best time I’ve made this entire trip - a moving average of 15.4 MPH, which is pretty insane considering the pack I’m carrying.  I did 103 miles yesterday without even breaking a sweat.  If what you’re interested is the actual quality of the cycling, and if you like nice straight, flat roads, then you can’t do better than the north shore of Lake Erie.  I biked past a beautiful sunset, wind at my back, and the pedals turned as fast as they could in the highest gear I had.  And, generally, people are friendly - a lot of people have asked me about my trip.  And I’m still absolutely having a great time.  But, boy, am I ready to be done with Canada!

WHEREAS The nation of Canada did charge me $7 for a hamburger combo with a Medium Diet Pepsi, and notwithstanding the extremely hot high school girl behind the cash register, didst dispense to me a 12 oz. soda in a cup, and whereupon upon presenting it for refill I was informed that another 12 oz. soda would be full price, and

WHEREAS A goodly portion of the north shore of Lake Erie dost smell akin to the hindquarters of an animal, and

WHEREAS The nation of Canada did charge me $37 one night and $35 a subsequent night to pitch my tent, without water or electricity, given that their policy is that you cannot pitch a tent in city parks or on private land, and didst attempt to charge me $46 the third night, whereupon I said “F this” and got a motel [seriously - $46.  In Montana you could just bike up to a state park, put $8 in an envelope, and camp and fill your water bottle.  In a lot of cities you can just camp in their park for free], and

WHEREAS They just can’t let go of this British Empire thing, and didst name their roads things like Imperial Way and Queen St and Gentry Ave, and didst name their cities Chatham and Kent and Charing Cross, and put the Queen on their money, and

WHEREAS The price of a 6-inch sub and a diet coke at Subway was $11.50, and

WHEREAS They don’t sell a single sticker in the entire nation of Canada, making me sad that I couldn’t put any on my laptop, and 

WHEREAS It is 100% impossible to ride, or even carry or walk, your bike from Windsor to Detroit (OK this is half the U.S.’ fault), 

SO DO I DECLARE WAR on the infernal nation of Canada and all who she holds sway, forever and ever Amen.

Change of topic.  Because basically nothing happened yesterday, and it’s on my mind, I want to talk about a subject that I told myself I would leave off for the trip: online dating.  For various excellent reasons, I cancelled or stop using all of my online dating services before I left for the trip.  But one of them - Coffee Meets Bagel - just kind of kept ticking along; they have a model where they send one person each day, and they just kept doing it.  About a week ago, I got bored in a hotel room and clicked “Yes” on one of them - a moderately attractive 30-year-old blonde named Alissa who I liked because she was dressed to go to a Giants game.  We exchanged a few meaningless text messages, and then I offered to chat on the phone.  Late one night at the hostel in Buffalo, I walked to the Tim Hortons and we chatted on the phone for over a hour.  I say “chatted”, but in reality she did all the talking and I just listened.  She was some sort of professional working in the South Bay.  Honestly she spent almost the entire phone call complaining about dating in the Bay Area.  She talked about how she’d been doing it for years, and it was so shallow, and nobody wanted to make a commitment, and she really wanted to have kids, and men were just bad, and online dating was so fake, etc., etc.  I actually listened, because it’s a story I’ve heard before - from myself - and so I could commiserate.  I remember noting especially that she went on and on about men judging her for her appearance; she went so far as to tell me that she “wasn’t petite” and ask me if that was OK.  (She was not at all large, although I wouldn’t have said she was petite either).  It made me slightly more interested in her because I felt like we might share a common approach to dating and I could trust her to take this all seriously.  I rang off with her at midnight my time and we agreed we would talk again soon, and I gave her the address of my blog.

I didn’t hear from her for a few days - which is not unusual, and perfectly fine - but she popped in my head yesterday, so I sent her a quick text asking how things were going.  She responded - and I quote “Work has been crazy and have received some bad news from a friend.  Unfortunately, dating is tough for me right now, so taking a break.”  

I wish I could say I was surprised by this, but after years of online dating, I’m not surprised by anything anymore.  I wrote back briefly, asking if I should wait, or if she just wasn’t interested, period.  This time she wrote “Not sure that you’re physically my type.  Was hard to see in your pics on CMB [Coffee Meets Bagel] originally.  Sorry - but want to be honest.”

So there you go.

Again, I wish I could say that I was shocked, or abhorred at this behavior.  6 years ago, I would have been.  Now, it just makes me a bit sad - for myself, certainly, and also for the Alissas of the world.  The city of San Francisco is littered with people whose approach to dating is so fundamentally backwards that there is absolutely zero chance that they will ever positively affect anyone’s life, most especially their own (through dating, anyway; they may be awesome people to their friends, or professionally).  They are so lacking in self-awareness that they can’t help anyone.  But here’s the thing I want to emphasize - online dating makes this kind of behavior so, so much worse.  I do not believe this woman would have acted this way if we met in person.  There are a lot of things that bother me about this situation - it’s a waste of time, it’s demeaning (to me, certainly, but actually to her as well, even though she doesn’t realize it yet), and of course it’s a waste of money too.  But there’s two things that bother me the most.  The first is that it hardly ever seems to work.  Oh, sure, everyone has “that friend” who met someone online that they’ve had a great relationship with.  I know it happens.  But it seems like the odds would be better if I just sat on the front porch of this restaurant and threw rocks at reasonably attractive women until I happened to knock one of them out and drag them back to my cave.  There’s another thing that bothers me even more, though, and that is this: not only doesn’t it work, it also doesn’t work.  What I mean by this is, I have no idea - zero - whether Alissa would have been a good life partner for me, and - if she was being honest and had the self-awareness to realize it - she has no idea whether I would have been a good life partner for her.  And isn’t that supposed to be the entire point?  It’s like that restaurant I went to in Oregon, where the decor was nice, the service was good, but the food was lousy.  If online dating doesn’t actually tell you whether someone is a positive person for you to, you know, date, than what is the point?  What’s the point of all the questions, and profiles, and pictures, the meaningless texts back and forth?  Why not just throw everyone’s name in a giant bucket and pull randomly?  (I guess they do, that’s basically what speed dating is).  In 6 years of doing online dating - and almost every service out there - I have not detected any value in any of it, as far as the primary purpose of screening potential life partners goes.  Zero.  In fact, I could make a cogent argument that choosing randomly would actually be *better*, that the process *subtracts value* and *obscures valid emotions and ideas*.  It’s like trying to navigate the city of Chicago by using a map of Atlanta - not only is it of no value, it might actually be misleading, unless you immediately throw the map away.

Day 42 - Dunnville, ON (83.5 miles)

The Friendship Trail bike path from Fort Erie to Port Clebourne is a cycling paradise.  It is flat; as flat as the earth before Copernicus.  It is straight; so straight if human eyesight was good enough you could see along its 17 mile length.  It is smooth like a baby’s bottom.  It is surrounded on both sides by gorgeous verdant greenery.  It is solely for the use of cyclists and an occasional jogger.  It is rarely interrupted.  It is OH MY GOD IT HURTS TO STARE DIRECTLY INTO THE PERFECTION IT GLOWS LIKE THE SUN MAKE IT STOP TURN IT OFF

OK, OK I exaggerate.  But I’ve never done 17 miles faster on my bicycle, ever.  Were I try to design a bike path I could not do a better job.  And yet, somehow it left me dissatisfied.  What is it about us humans, and me in particular, that wants things to be a little bit dirty, a little bit crooked, a little bit…broken?  Why can’t we be happy with things that are just right?  I’m reminded of a sketch from Mystery Science Theater 3000, one of my favorite TV shows.  The “kids” in the show are complaining about how the encyclopedias they have are incredibly old and out of date, so “dad” goes and buys them brand spankin’ new ones.  And their comment is telling: when asked if things are better now, their response is “No…no, actually we really enjoyed complaining.  Yeah, complaining was more fun.”

I think there’s an answer to this.  In addition to the other purposes I have in life, like love, I feel like one of the main reasons I was put on this earth was to learn things.  There’s a Buddhist myth that I like which says that everyone of us is just an aspect of Shiva (God) which He/She/It takes on in order to learn something new about what it’s like to be human.  And I do feel that way sometimes, like I’m learning things…for what?  I’m not sure.  But for some reason.  Anyway, to learn things, I feel like I have to be challenged, have to have puzzles to solve.  I guess that’s an engineer thing (although there’s a chicken and egg thing in there somewhere).  A perfect bike path reveals nothing, except that Fort Erie sure knows how to build a hell of a bike path.  I learned, really, nothing about the area, about myself, about cycling, except maybe how fast I can go under near-perfect conditions.

Anyway.  Canada is really nice.  One thing that was surprising to me was the level of patriotism.  The place is practically drowning in Canadian flags.  I would not have guessed that.  People are happy to be here. 

Whatever this drive for puzzle-solving is, it’s the same thing that made me leave the warm comfort of my uncle’s place for pitching this tent in the dark while being eaten by mosquitos (when will I learn to pitch my tent before it’s dark out?).  I could be eating a home cooked meal instead of these Tim Horton’s donuts (although i do love Tim Horton’s donuts.  All other donuts are like shadows of the One True Donut).  But the fact is, the 36 hours I spent with my Uncle, I didn’t do anything.  I learned some things about my family, and it was awesome to see my Uncle, but I basically stuck myself in neutral for a little bit - which is fine, once in a while, but I like motion and challenge and accomplishment, and laying on my Uncle’s couch watching American Ninja Warrior doesn’t cut it for long.  So awaaaaay we go!

Day 44 - St. Thomas, ON (57.1 miles)

Today, it rained.  Not a little tiny sprinkle, but about 25-30 miles of consistent rain, punctuated by a heavy downpour about 5-10 miles after I got started.  It’s an interesting thing about certain things, like rain and getting wet - they crystallize thought.  Whatever else you may have been thinking about beforehand, suddenly all you can think about is A) how nice it would be if it stopped raining and B) how nice it would be to be dry again.  I have a philosophy about rain, which is this: if it’s going to bother, it may as well go for it.  C’mon, Mother Nature, let’s see what you’ve got, is my motto.  And Canada delivered.  I was 100% soaking wet.  Curiosity about my gear was sated; things seem to basically be OK.  I wouldn’t say I *enjoyed* getting wet, but it wasn’t so bad, in the end.  And the sun came out, and dried me off, and life is good!

It’s been really challenging to find places to stay at night.  The area I’ve been biking through is pretty touristy and also fairly rural, and as a result, there’s not much in the way of motels or warmshowers or couchsurfing.  It’s just bed and breakfasts and vacation homes, and they are way out of my price range.  So today I biked an extra 10 miles (sorry, 16 kilometers) to a town called St. Thomas that’s off route but is a “normal” place, with a Walmart and a bunch of Tim Hortons and a cheap motel.

At the motel, when I arrived, an Indian man came to see me at the front desk.  We conducted our transaction, and then, as I was leaving, I paused, and worked up the courage to ask the question I really wanted to know the answer to.  “I’ve been all across the U.S. and now Canada,” I said (a slight exaggeration), “and I’ve stayed in a lot of moderately priced motels.  And almost every single one has been run by an Indian or Pakistani family.  Why is that?”

“Indian family,” he said.  “They’re all Indian.  Indians own something about 99% of all the motels in this country.”  He proceeded to explain that it was part history, part culture.  For one thing, Indians own hotels because, well, Indians own hotels.  They know how to run one, it’s easy to get a loan from a bank - it’s become expected.  But that, of course, begs the question of how the whole thing got started.  And he had some thoughts about that; basically, what he said was that Indians like to invest in something solid, like property - and owning a hotel is a great way to invest in property.  Which makes sense; if you open, say, a restaurant or store, you typically lease, but when you open a small hotel, you usually own it.  Plus, he said, when you run a hotel, you get a house for free - and typically a big one that an extended family with multiple generations can all live in.  So there you go.  “Hotels, Motels and Patels”, he said.

After my delicious warm shower, I set out to find a hardware store in St. Thomas (and I did, and it was awesome).  Biking gently around the city, no pack, no place specific to go, the sun started to set over the horizon, and suddenly I just felt *really good* for a minute.  I don’t know if there’s any great metaphysical importance to that; I think a lot of it was the hot shower, being dry for a change, and the freedom to just doodle around for a minute.  Plus I find suburbs to be comfortable.  After a little while they get suffocating, but in the beginning they feel familiar.  But it was a nice, warm feeling, and I wrapped it around me like a blanket.

Day 43 - Port Rowan, ON (73.01 miles)

I don’t honestly have anything deeply spiritual or intellectual to talk about today.  I’m not sure if that’s because I’m tired (which is true, but was true before), or because I’m running out of philosophical things to say (possible but seems unlikely) or if it’s the grey weather that’s making my mind a bit slow (maybe) or the fact that I’ve been camping and thus haven’t really had a proper shower (could be), but for whatever reason my brain is running at a really prosaic and surface level.  Donuts are good.  Rain is bad.  Biking on the flats is fun.  I wish I could get going earlier in the morning.  Etc., etc.

Canadian waitresses wear black yoga pants and it’s really sexy.  I don’t know if that’s good or bad.

The area I’m biking through is incredibly remote, in a way.  Of course, in a certain sense it’s not remote at all - the roads are lined with vacation homes, farms, and beaches, and there’s people everywhere.  But there are no restaurants, very few places to stay (mostly small and very expensive bed and breakfasts), and no stores.  So, for a cyclist, the effect is the same - it’s like cycling through Idaho; pack your own water.  I haven’t seen a roof over my head available for less than $129.

In Canada, they never let their credit cards out of their sight.  When you eat at a fancy restaurant, at the end of the meal, they bring you a little wireless device and you do the transaction right there at the table.  I asked one of my waitresses what they used to do before wireless, and she said that you had to go up to the front and pay in person.  I intimated that, in the US, it was considered part of good service to take care of that little errand without making the customer get up.  She was alternately amused and slightly disgusted.

The northern coast of Lake Erie is basically an idyllic paradise.  In several stretches, beautiful - or at least quaint - homes line the side of the road, while across the road at the lake are tiny little “resting spots”; benches, or docks, chairs artfully placed to suggest relaxation, with clear views of the water.  There’s only one problem: it smells bad.  Sometimes, it smells really bad.  I tried to figure out where the smell came from and I couldn’t.  It was mostly a serious barnyard smell.  It may have come from the farmland; behind the houses would often stretch acres of planted fertile ground.  But often there were no animals, only corn or wheat.  I developed a sneaking suspicion that the Lake itself was the source of the smell, which really grossed me out and leads me to another realization:

In 37 years on this planet, I’ve only identified two things that I truly hate.  And by hate I mean hate in a very immediate way.  I suppose in some sense I hate Hitler and cancer and heart disease, but those seem so remote that it’s hard to get too worked up about them.  But there are two things that can absolutely drive me nuts, every time.  One is traffic, which is not too relevant for this trip.  The other one is mosquitoes.  I hate mosquitoes.  I hate their buzzy little noise.  I hate that they suck my blood.  I really hate the way they make me itch for a week.  If I could wave a magic wand and make them all disappear (without any even worse consequences), I completely and absolutely would, in a heartbeat.  Years ago, one of my friends (I can’t remember who) made the following analogy about something else he hated: he said “If Wolfgang Puck made you a 5-course meal, replete with delicious sauces, glistening with all of his culinary skill, and then at the last second, he dropped trousers and took a little bit of a dump on top of it and then served it to you, you would not say it was 99% good.  You would not brush off the poop and eat the rest.  In fact, you likely would not ever eat anything in that place, or prepared by him, ever again.  In fact, you probably wouldn’t eat anything that *reminded* you of what he prepared.  You may, in fact, burn down the restaurant it was served in.”  This is how I feel about mosquitoes, and I think it’s as good a definition of “hate” as any I can come up with: when I’m camping in the woods and get swarmed by mosquitoes, I want to not only kill every last one of them, I want to fumigate the whole woods, and then maybe firebomb it, just to make sure.  I sort of feel the same way about bees, but since there’s a chance they could legitimately kill me, that somehow feels more rational.

Day 41 - Strykersville, NY

Today was a rest day.  My only comment: my uncle is a great cook, and those people on Ninja Warrior are very inspiring.

Day 40 - Strykersville, NY (51.0 miles)

Today I want to talk about memory and perspective - those are topics that are on my mind, for obvious reasons.  I’ve been on a nostalgia tour of my (relatively distant) past, and it’s been fun, and I learned, or at least re-learned, some lessons.  I went today out to the house I was born in - 100 Deer Run, Glenwood, NY.  Biking up through the neighborhood, I couldn’t find the place - partly because it’s a confusing neighborhood, partly because it turns out the new owners painted the house blue.  I watched a cop sail past me twice, and had to remember that these little northeastern neighborhoods that cling to cliffs in upstate NY are not exactly, shall we say, stranger-friendly.  But I found the place.  Now, I have sketchy memories at best of the inside of the house, but I remember the yard really well.  I used to actually have this reoccurring nightmare where I would be walking up our long driveway to the house and to the left of me was the cliff that went up away from the driveway, so high you couldn’t see the top.  I would clamber up that hill (for some reason, in the dream) on pine needles under the tree, and crest the top to find a woods.  Walking through the woods, the ground would start to break up and become rocky and hot, and just then I would emerge into an open field.  Overhead I could hear helicopters chasing me, and I would get scared, and run to hide under a cardboard box that someone had placed out in the middle of an empty field.  Climbing under the box, I would suddenly realize that of course a helicopter could see me under this box, so I would frantically climb out from under the box and run across the field to a camper parked by the side of the field, throw open the door, run through the camper, throw open a door on the other side, and then…wake up.  Weird, huh?

Anyway, the point is - the driveway is there, but it’s only about 50 feet long.  And the hill?  It’s about 7 feet tall.  I can see over it.  Other things, too: I remember climbing over a stream to an island near our house.  Well, the stream is there - it’s about a foot wide - and so is the island - about 4 feet wide.  And I remember playing baseball in the back yard, and there was a tall cliff that led up to a busy road up at the top of the cliff.  Well, the cliff is 6 feet high, and the road is…very much not busy.

OK, OK, Adam - this is obvious, you say.  Of course, when you’re a little kid, things look bigger.  And yes, that makes sense.  But it’s amazing to be actually *confronted* with that.  I mean, these things from my childhood, they loom large.  They are, believe it or not, archetypes in my life.  When I confront a hard problem, it’s like that cliff up to the busy road.  When I have nightmares, I’m back walking that long driveway.  And I was thinking about what that meant, and realized that, as humans, we have this powerful need - a need to tell stories.  Anyone will tell you that I am more melodramatic than most.  To me, things have to have *meaning*.  I search for symbols in everything.  I want so desperately for life to have a purpose, and it leads me to create these metaphors, larger-than-life narratives.  We all do this, of course, and it isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  But it is interesting to suddenly realize that the things we hold most dear are often creations of our own mind.

Another story comes to mind along these lines.  I was hanging out with my uncle when the topic of his brother (my other uncle’s) death came up.  This is a story I’ve told and retold many times - to other people, of course, but mostly in my own head.  I read one time that there are really only 40 stories in the world, and this was one of my 40, and the story goes like this:  My uncle Emil was always a bit odd, the black sheep of the family.  He couldn’t get his act together.  Couldn’t hold down a job.  Well, when I was about 20, he started to get his life back together.  He had two kids with a woman named Cathy who I was begrudgingly told to call Aunt Cathy even though everyone in the family barely hid their contempt for her.  One day, the four of them were in their apartment, when a man broke in and had a gun.  He told Cathy and Emil to go and get their valuables and he herded the kids into the kitchen.  When they came back, he took the stuff, told the two of them to get down on their knees, and right in front of the two kids, shot both of them.  Then he went out to his pickup truck and shot himself.  Cathy lived, and took the kids, but my uncle died.  And the kids have been messed up ever since; rumor has it they ended up in juvie.  This story is - not exactly happy or heartwarming - but full of pathos.  My heart went out to my uncle, who was turning his life around.  My heart went out to the kids, forced to watch their parents get shot.  My heart even went out to Cathy, forced to raise two kids on her own surrounded by family that hated her.

Only, here’s the thing: almost none of that story is actually true.  Yes, my uncle was shot by a crazy man who also shot the woman he was with, then went out to his pickup and drove a few miles up the road and shot himself.  Cathy did end up raising the kids, and they did go to juvie (and it’s true that most of the family thought she was a bit slow and a terrible mom).  But the man who shot them was Emil’s crazy upstairs tenant that he had rented half his place to, with a known history of being not quite right.  And there was no robbery; the guy was mad because he thought Emil was poisoning him with “chlorine vapors”.  And, at the time, Emil had taken up with a new woman, Diane.  Diane - who none of us even know or met - was the one who got shot in the face and lived.  And there was no “execution style killing”; my uncle was shot in the basement at his computer, in the back.  The kids were not anywhere nearby; they had already been taken by Cathy.  

I have no idea how I got the story so wrong, but I’ve been telling it this way for 15+ years.

Now, the real story is still sad and dramatic, but obviously not nearly as dramatic (or melodramatic) as my version.  For some reason, my brain really wanted the story to play out the way a movie or an episode of CSI might; with good guys, bad guys, redemption, Act I, Act II, and so forth.  But life - real life - doesn’t play out so cleanly.

Besides just being an interesting phenomenon, it begs the question: what to do about this?  Is this good?  Is it good to construct these stories?  Buddhism would have us believe that what’s best is to see the world the way it really is; the pure unvarnished truth.  Part of me agrees with that.  The journey I’ve been on for the last 5 years could be seen as one of “decreasing drama”.  Because I’m so inclined towards theatrics and emotionality, that’s probably been a good journey to be on.  But where does it stop?  For example, I’m no longer inclined to believe in “terrible people”.  When you’ve seen as many different philosophies on life as I have, it’s hard to get too worked up about the life choices another person makes.  I only have two rules, now: make yourself happy, and don’t hurt anybody.  And sometimes I even relax those a little bit.  But - here’s the question: do I believe in *great* people?  *Can* you believe in great people without believing in terrible ones?  What would good look like if evil didn’t exist?  I don’t think you can feel warm without first feeling cold, feel happy without knowing what it’s like to feel sad.  Some may disagree with me about this, but there’s some hard science to support the notion that what we, as humans, are good at perceiving is *relative* data, not absolute.  We hear things as loud relative to the quiet that came before; smells are strong only for a while and then they fade.  So, if Hitler was simply confused and anxious, does that mean that Martin Luther King was just in the right place at the right time?  Can you have Gandhi without Stalin?  Obama without Putin?  If my parents were just doing the best they could, how heroic is it to be a parent?  If people who join the NRA (as my uncle has) are just doing what they think is best, then is gun control a cause worth marching for?  Who are we marching against?  Our own uncles?

Where does equanimity end and passion begin?

I have no answers - but these are my questions.

Day 39 - Buffalo, NY

I want to take a second and talk about how awesome hostels are.  I think they’re seriously under appreciated, and it’s time we fix that (or maybe not!  If they got too popular I guess the jig would be up).  I love meeting new people in a structured environment - check.  I love meeting people that are on the move, adventurous, travelers - check.  I love saving money - check.  Basically, a hostel is like a hotel except it costs a hell of a lot less and you instantly make a bunch of friends.  Also, they always are in the know - they have all the information you need about the local area.  And they often have awesome perks.  The hostel that I stayed in here in Buffalo has, for example, a room in the basement where you can sit on a comfy couch and watch old VHS tapes.  They also have laundry facilities, a place to store your bike, a full kitchen, a really nice reading room, free books, free clothing swap, and they are having an awesome sing-along tonight (which I can’t stay at).  It used to be that hostels were for young people only (do I still qualify?) but that’s started to change over the years.  And all that for $12.50 a night (the special bike rate, normally $25, still a hell of a deal).  Of course, if you’re a family, or if you just really want your privacy, then a hostel isn’t the right choice, but for people like me who are looking for an adventure, it’s honestly so amazingly awesome.

I read one time an item about the habits of highly successful people, and one of the things they said which resonated with me was that successful people make all their decisions in the morning, when they’re fresh and in the best mood.  They plan out most, if not all of their day and make the major choices that they know they’ll face - leaving room to correct course, of course.  I thought this was a great idea - still do - but I think I could go even further with it.  If it makes sense for a day, it makes sense for a lifetime.  That is, I can make most of the major decisions about how to approach life when I’m ready for them, relaxed and in a good mood, and then just stick to those.  So, that’s part of what this trip is about, is figuring out myself and making choices.  You see, I find decision making to be stressful.  Being out on the road, I could relax because my life was pretty well planned out - get up, ride the bike, find a place to rest, fall asleep.  Rinse, repeat.  Here in civilization, things get a little blobby, and there’s a ton of little choices - where to eat, when to work out and how much, how much money to spend.  It would be nice to have a game plan, but instead of using someone else’s, why not write my own?  So, here’s some things that I forthwith realize about myself:

1) The obvious - making decisions stresses me out.  I’m good at it, and capable of doing it; I’m not wishy-washy by any means.  But, I find it anxiety-producing.  I think when I’m older I’m going to enjoy those tours where they just point in a direction and tell you what to look at.

2) I love to exercise (cardio).  It physically puts me in a good mood.  It’s not even rational; it works at a deeper level than that.  I just love the feeling of motion.

3) I get bored easily.  I need new things all the time to keep me motivated.  As a corollary to that, I vastly prefer exercising outside because it holds my attention so much better.  I think this is one of the reasons I have trouble with lifting weights.  If somebody could invent a machine where, by lifting weights, I somehow moved around the country, I’d be incredibly buff by now.

4) I like group events.  They provide a nice balance between introversion and extroversion.  I love meeting new people, but I really enjoy structure around it, to take away some of the social anxiety.

Based on these 4 items, it would seem like an ideal activity for me would be group events where you exercise outside, and somebody takes care of the details.  And, indeed, I’ve done a few things like this and I always enjoy them.  So figure that to be a big part of my life from here on out - charity races, ski trips, running clubs, etc.

Related to the drive for new things is a love of learning, and of schools - like universities.  Also I tend to be attracted to youth, or people that think youthfully.  So I have often thought that some kind of teaching job - maybe at a university or community college - could be in my future.

5) Hydration is a big part of my mood.  It’s become clear that I need to drink a lot of water.  I don’t know if that’s just the way I’m built, or the fact that I exercise, or both.  I literally cannot out-drink my body.

6) I get way too sentimental about things.  I think the fact that I don’t have an obvious target for my emotions - a family, a relationship - makes me randomly just focus on weird stuff and ascribe way too much emotional content to it.  I tear up about old movies, mope about perceived slights, and generally act like a teenage girl.  I think to some extent I have to just accept that’s part of my psyche, but I also think that, with some changes to my life in this other categories, I could learn to get a grip.

Related to both of these things is a tendency to misidentify my moods, especially my bad moods.  Oftentimes I get existential about what amounts to just a lack of hydration or sleep, or just not getting enough exercise.  I’m reminded of Scrooge’s line about a ghost just being “a bad bit of beef…there’s more gravy than grave about you”.  

One theme of the last few weeks has been the juxtaposition of the new and the old.  Biking around Buffalo has been a sort of nostalgia tour for me, but interspersed with the “modern me”.  I spent a day bouncing around the area looking at old houses - the house I grew up in, the house my grandma lived in, the restaurant we always used to eat lunch in - but also doing things the new me loves - I went to a power yoga class, spent a good part of the day on a bike, went to an electronic music event at night.  And it was cool.  Weird, but cool.  Like a joining of a string.  Hard to describe.  It made my past - which at times felt a bit fuzzy and indistinct - really come into focus.

Day 38 - Buffalo, NY (29.81 miles)

It’s hard to know what to write about today.  I spent the last 24 hours in the company of both my friend Emily (yes, the Emily from Oregon, we happened to bump into each other again, how awesome is that) as well as some serious civilization.  A lot of cool things happened to me, like riding the boat under the falls, and going to some Shakespeare last night (A Comedy of Errors - one of my favorites just because it gives the actors such an opportunity to emote).  But somehow the thoughts don’t really resolve themselves into anything particularly profound.  And that, in and of itself, is interesting to me, and what I want to write about: the power of being alone, as a tool for understanding yourself.

One of the things I’ve struggled with in life is the definition of myself as an introvert or an extrovert.  When I take the Meyers-Briggs tests, I usually fall right down the middle of the I/E spectrum, often slightly to the E side, although it depends on when I take the test.  But any effort to put myself into one of those two bins just seems to lead to frustration and confusion.  It’s like the more I think about it, the less sure I am.  I certainly have a lot of introverted tendencies.  I like being alone, and when I rest by myself, that does seem to recharge my batteries.  But, on the other hand, I love people, love parties.  When I am by myself for too long I get kind of antsy.  When I was a kid, I was the life of the party, always the one telling stories.  I have video of myself at my own birthday party - I think I was 8 - and I look like the kid who might grow up to be President.  As I’ve gotten older, though, more introverted tendencies have sunk in.  In thinking about why that is, I realized that I’ve just gotten a bit wary of other people.  Part of that is getting a divorce, part of that is living in cities like NYC and SF, and part of it is just the result of some unfortunate interactions with friends and people that I’ve let get close to me.  I would not describe myself as jaded or cynical - in fact far from it, I’m very optimistic about people - but I would just say that I’ve rediscovered the joy of turning inwards.  

Day 37 - Niagara Falls, NY (30.4 miles)

Today I went up to Niagara Falls, NY to visit a friend and the Canadian side of the falls.  After the long bus ride it was nice to get on the bike and ride.  Going up the Canadian side was very pastoral.  Canada has almost a British countryside feel, which is hardly suprising - very genteel, very established, spread out and green and quiet.  The roads up through the countryside along the river are staggered - the houses and bikes ride alongside a separate, smaller road while cars whoosh (ok, slowly whoosh) on the main road.  I took the road with the cars because the bike lane was too windy and slow.  I'm on a *serious* bike ride, here, people.  

Once again I was amazed at my own resourcefulness - to get off the Greyhound, get the box, assemble the bike, ride to pick up my passport, and then get into Canada and get to the hostel, all before dinner - it's amazing what I'm able to accomplish when I set my mind to it.  Clifton Hill - the area we are staying in - is like a mini-Vegas, with neon lights flashing everywhere.  But perhaps more about that tomorrow.

Day 36 - On A Bus Someplace In Ohio

I want to talk a little bit about bus travel, since I’ve spent 30+ hours on them and I’m about to spend another 10 or so.  It’s become obvious to me through this whole little adventure that the *way* we experience travel will end up telling as much about what we see - and what we learn about ourselves - as where we go.  There’s a certain rhythm to what I experienced on the bike, and the bus is really different.  On the bike I found myself slowly relaxing, starting to trust myself more and more.  I felt almost comfortable there, by the end of it.  On the bus, I feel terribly terribly exposed.  The general goodwill towards man is still there, but I look a bit suspiciously at my fellow traveler.  It doesn’t help that they look suspiciously at me.  Part of it is my concern about the bike - my home, as I told one bus driver - trapped under the bus.  I feel it down there, much like if someone was flying with a dog that had to go into the luggage compartment.  I want to rescue it.  I keep worrying that it won’t make a connection.

That’s not to say that it’s all bad.  For some reason the bus has developed a bad rap in this country.  But the truth is that they’ve all run on time, they’re clean, they have outlets and wi-fi, and - unlike flying or the train - at least I have gotten to see some of the country I’m traveling through.  I got to witness the sparse regularity and almost bewildering niceness of Fargo, I walked through the rain and wind to get the only true deep dish pizza in the world in Chicago’s Giordano’s, and I - despite overwhelming odds to the contrary - ran a 6 minute mile to eat at Culver’s in Tomah, Wisconsin.  So not all bad.  But there’s a weird edge to my words and my thoughts that I very much look forward to shaking off them when I get to Buffalo.  The form of the traveller has changed from Missoula to here.  In the beginning it was all caucasians, of the sort you would expect in Montana, one with a shirt that said “Welcome To America.  Now Speak English.”  By this point, it’s mostly African-Americans.  But the essential *distrust* doesn’t seem to come from the color.  It’s something about actually being on the bus.  Or maybe it’s the fact that the bus is seen as the place of last resort.  There’s a defensiveness about it than I certainly didn’t experience on a bike or in a car, or even on the train.  Just like air travel seems to turn even good people into dour-faced stodges, the bus seems to turn everyone a bit paranoid.  Maybe it’s the fact that, on a bike, you’re your own man, but on the bus - much like air travel or the train - you’re at the mercy of this complex and uncaring system.  I was in a convenience store in Montana, near the border, opening some nachos, when the bus driver called for everyone to get back on.  I panicked and threw money at the attendant and ran back to the bus.  A block down the road I realized I’d left my ticket on the counter at the shop.  I went up and told the driver, and she let me go back and get it.  I’d never run so fast in my life.  I had a vision of being stranded, alone, in rural Montana.  I’m starting to understand the American fascination with controlling your own method of transport.

I’ve been quoting from it for a while, but the book Blue Highways, which I’ve been reading for a week or so now, does a good job of highlighting what it would be like to travel the small towns of america with motorized transport.  I have this romantic notion that it would be fun to ride the same track he took, either with a van like he had, or on a motorcycle or other small individual transport.  He’s an excellent writer, although he’s definitely bleak and sad.  I sympathize, but I think I’ve escaped the worst of my depression.  I have no idea what will come next, but the bike made me optimistic.  Maybe he should have tried that.

With a bit of perspective from being off the bike, I think it’s a good time to look at what I might have learned about myself.  I remember before the trip I was very aware not to have high expectations - or any - about what I would learn, or change, about myself while out on the road.  I told everyone who would listen that I was aware I might wind up being exactly the same person I was when I left, just with a long ride under my belt.  So I was pleasantly surprised to learn - or re-learn, or cement - a few things about myself.  In no particular order:

1)  If forced to pick, I’ll take being too hot over being too cold.  I think this is one of those things that every man should figure out about himself at some point, and I’ve often wondered what my answer was.  It’s hard because when you’re hot you wish for cold, and when you’re cold you wish for hot.  But on this trip two things happened: I got to experience being too hot and being too cold back-to-back, and I had a lot of time alone to think about it.  And what I realized is: I don’t *like* being too hot, but it doesn’t bug me that much.  Being cold hurts.  It physically hurts, deep in the bones.  I can’t think, can’t act, can’t experience joy when I’m too cold.  So there it is.

2)  I love rivers.  Even more than oceans.  My favorite rides were through rural parts of Oregon and Montana with a river by my side.  More than anything, the flow of a cool, clear stream over rocks, and the promise of whitewater, make me happy.  Similarly, but less so, I prefer forests to deserts or swamps or any others.  So my favorite is forested river banks.

3)  I like the new.  I love motion, and change - of scenery, of ideas.  Of course I always knew this, but I think it’s really coming home to me that I’m seriously just happier when different things are happening to perplex and confound me.

4)  Food defines me.  It runs under everything I do.  I love food, I love its cultural aspects, preparing food, eating food, socializing over food, talking about food.  I just love food.

5)  I do genuinely like people.  When I give myself space to go about it at my own speed, and I’m given enough time on my own, I like to talk to strangers, and I find them interesting.  I just need time and space to come at them in my own way.

6)  I love being physically exhausted.  It makes me feel happy, outgoing, optimistic.  It has way more of a positive effect than I’d ever really considered before.  Like getting out of a pool of cold water, I get suffused through with this positive glow.

I’m about to pull in to my “ancestral home” (to use some overblown language) of Buffalo, NY.  But more about that next time.

Day 35 - On A Bus Someplace in North Dakota

Remember that “different direction” I hinted about a while back?  Well, here it is: I’m currently riding Greyhound Bus Lines from Missoula, MT to Buffalo, NY.  How’s that for a plot twist??  I spoke to a number of people who told me that, this late in the season, what I was about to ride into would be hot, dry, and most importantly, lonely because everyone has gone through already.  So I’m gonna Take It Easy, Take The Bus.  Believe it or not, this greyhound bus actually has A/C outlets and Wi-Fi!  I’m about to drive through Turah, MT, whatever the heck that is.  Some folks with matching jerseys are riding their bikes up a side road.  Part of me wishes I was with them, but I know my legs need a break.  It will take 47 hours to get to Buffalo, so I get at least 2 days off the bike.  I’m going to keep the blog going, though, because I will be getting back on the bike when I get to Buffalo.  I’ll be taking the ACA routes around Lake Erie, and then heading down to Allegheny State Park, where I used to vacation when I was a kid.  So the trip continues, just in a different form.  The only thing constant is change.

It’s weird to watch the sun set and know what it’s like to be down there on the road.   I keep looking at the spot that I would have been and imagining myself like a ghost, pedaling along.  I was starting to feel a weird sense of home being on the bike all day, like the trail had me covered.  It was in its way a bit of a dependable life, something you could count on.

Missoula was a pretty interesting place.  I’m not as big of a fan of the physical geography as, say, Bend.  It’s a little stark for me.  But I did like the people.  I met up with friends of friends that I’d never met who are in their early twenties and went to a party full of people even younger - some undoubtedly too old to drink.  I still felt like I fit in, but because I was so exhausted, I couldn’t really fully participate, and I ended up with 4 hours sleep that night.  I really admired Corwin - that was the boyfriend’s - attitude; both of them really.  They were so happy and eager to play hosts and be helpful; I appreciated it because I needed that, but also it reminded me of the importance of being good to guests.

As far as the “original trip” goes, I’m keeping the full original map up on Google Maps Engine as a reminder of how having a plan is awesome, and even better is having a plan and having the freedom to leave that plan in the dust.  My current line of thought is that I’d like to take next summer and do the rest of the trail from east to west; start in Virginia and go to Missoula, and do it during the “high season” so that I share the road with other people.  Perhaps even join up with a small tour group.  I definitely enjoyed this trip, but the best part was the people, and I’d like to meet even more of them next time.

One awesome thought, being out here “among the people”: now, I feel like If I choose the San Francisco high-powered life, I now know that I’m making a choice, and I can bail out whenever I like.  I’m not locked in.  I have seen the other side, and I can pick, and not feel like I’m missing out.

Day 34 - Missoula, MT (63.7 miles)

The thing I will take away from this trip is the feeling I had biking the last 20 miles downhill into Lolo, MT, trees on both sides, river on one side, and wind at my back.  Suddenly, I felt *alive*.  I felt eager to see what would happen next.  I’ll quote from Blue Highways:

“I had been a man who walks into a strange dark room, turns on the light, sees himself in an unexpected mirror, and jumps back. Now it was time to get on, time to see WHAT THE HELL IS NEXT.”

I realized that the universe was unfolding into a myriad of possibilities, and that I had been circling the drain of my disappointments.  I just got suddenly really excited to do everything, all number of things.  I swear as God and Montana is my witness I will never be bored again, and I am going to do whatever the hell I want (that doesn’t hurt other people), and if you don’t like it, well, tough.  I wish I had known before how genuinely excited I could be about life; I think I’ve felt this way when I was younger, but it’s been a long time and it’s hard to remember.  I want to do this, and that, and everything all at once.  Here’s a partial list:

Go back and get my Ph.D.  I’m not sure exactly in what, maybe in Cognitive Science or some sort of UX/Visual Design.  I want it to do something with computers or art or entertainment, but mostly with how people think. I had this idea bout exploring how using different programming languages changes the way people express themselves and the workplaces they construct, but that’s just one idea

Learn to surf

Take a self safari through Africa

Ride a motorcycle through New Zealand doing extreme sports

Go to the World Cup - maybe the one in Moscow?

Get my exercise certification and teach in a gym

Get a Golden Retriever (or maybe a Lab)

Whitewater rafting

Food cleanse

Ride a double century in a single day

Clean out my storage shed in Austin finally

Move to Iceland or Estonia or someplace and work

Live in Missoula or Bend or Madison or someplace like that - explore college towns

Hang gliding

Turning on to Highway 93 was a jarring affront of civilization after the 66 miles in the forest.  As I sit in this Pizza Hut, in Lolo, I know that I could turn my phone back on, but I haven’t.  I’m savoring the last few moments of it being just me.  Not exactly being alone, but being just me.  I know that soon I will have to wonder who’s reading my blog, or who likes my Facebook, I’ll have to find the Warmshowers host and check out the ACA office and generally be nice to people and care what they think of me, and I’m savoring this moment of it really just being me, and it being up to me what I want and where I go.  It’s not that I don’t care what other people think, it’s that I care way more what I think, and I’m going to be my own best friend, and make sure that I get what I want out of life.

Day 33 - Powell, ID (68.7 miles)

For the first day in my whole trip I find myself without much of anything to say.  Having made that decision about how to end this phase of the bike trip, I think a sort of quiet has settled over me.  I’m so ready to be done; I’m curious what the next stage will bring, and I’m really eager to get there.  Today was the most remote part of my trip; 66 miles through forest.  I met a few folks yesterday who were out riding on Highway 12, and they had either just started or were only out for a week or so.  I felt a certain sort of kinship with them, but I also felt a bit defensive, as if I wanted to say “you’re not *really* going on a bike ride”.  Last night I met a guy named Tom who used to be an intern for Google.  We were both inside the little lodge and he came over and just said “Touring cyclist?”  We had a wide-ranging conversation about computer science and philosophy - the kind people used to have in wooden lodges in the woods, and I guess they still do.  I recognized some of myself in him; we both talked about how CS and such were just so spiritually unfulfilling, and how we didn’t know what we wanted to do with our time.  I was a bit older than him and I think he was looking for me to tell him that everything was going to be OK, and I couldn’t do that.  At one point he said “Man, I was hoping for better news.”  But better to know now!  What struck me about our conversation, though, was at the very end, just as we were about to get up, I asked him where his companions were (he said he had traveled here with 1 friend and 2 other guys me’d met along the way).  He said “Well, they’re out in the camping area over there, but it’s my birthday, so I thought I’d get myself some cobbler”.  Suddenly I got really sad for him.  He didn’t look sad at all, but then with his type (stoic), it’s hard to know; maybe he really wasn’t sad, maybe he didn’t care about birthdays.  But I was sad for him.  I wished him a happy birthday, and I wondered at the sort of people that travel together through hardships like the ones you see on the road, but then don’t bother to celebrate birthdays together.  I guess that’s OK if it’s OK with him, but that’s not how I want to spend *my* birthdays, or how I want to related to people

I also ran into a military couple out at the lodge fire last night (which none of the other cyclists came to either).  They had grown up in Missoula, but then the military moved them around and they had spent most of the last 11 years in Germany, of all places.  I think I said something dismissive about the military and insulted them a bit - when the husband got up for a minute the wife gave me a bit of stink eye.  I need to watch what I say to people.  My Dad was in the Navy for a while and really didn’t have a good experience, so I grew up thinking the military was not a great life choice.  Anyway, they said Missoula was an awesome place, you just had to stick it out, and try to find work.

Today I woke up wet and very very cold.  My tent stinks.  I waited for the lodge to open, and now I’m warming up over a firm wooden table, before I start in on my last 50-60 miles.  I can’t wait for Missoula.

Day 32 - Lowell, ID (76.8 miles)

1200 feet.  1400 feet.  2000 feet.  After a while, the numbers just start to blend together.  It’s hard to convey the sense of starting out a day at 1800 feet and climbing up to 5300.  At 9am, the town of White Bird was closed up tight as a drum (despite the cafe saying they would open at 8).  The sun had started to climb in the sky.  There was nothing left to do but patch the gimpy tube on the back of my bike, eat the last of the Clif Bars that Emily had given me, fill my two water bottles with lukewarm water from the hotel tap, and start pedaling.  On the way out of town, I passed a couple on an ATV who waved at me, as if to say “it’s your funeral, buddy”.

Old Highway 95 is an angry road.  Relentless, tortuous, torturous, unrelenting.  It is a road that says “I do not want you.  Please leave me alone”.  It winds its way up from White Bird to the summit of White Bird Hill, joining back up with the new, modern US-95.  There is - quite literally - nothing there, and no reason to take the road anymore.  It’s not clear to me why they even keep it open.  The land is open and brown and dry, which has the undesirable “benefit” that you could see almost all the way to the top from the bottom - so you knew just how screwed you truly were.  Deer scampered up and down along the rocky cliffs.  There was an historical site for an old Indian battle, and I could imagine in my head rampaging groups of Native Americans on horseback, parading over the hills.  I saw no cars the entire time; I think they were afraid.  At one point a farmer got on the road with a tractor carrying some bales of hay, but he got off as quickly as he could.  Even the two horses I passed turned around and went back the other way.  500 feet up the mountain I was completely, devastatingly alone.  900 feet up the mountain, the rear tire fell off the wheel of my bike.  It had been giving me trouble for days, and now it was completely, unavoidably broken.  Buddhism preaches this idea of relativism; that things are what we make of them.  In that moment, I was quite certain that they were wrong.  It was hot.  My back tire was broken.  I was alone, and I had 1800 feet left to climb.  These were facts, as real as things could be.  I could almost reach out and touch the heat, and I could damn sure reach out and touch the broken back wheel.  So I changed that wheel, got back on that bike, and made it to the top.  

I don’t know if I will ever ride that road again.  I think it would be fun someday to ride my car or motorcycle back along that road, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be on a bike there again.  But I will never forget it.

Today, I met my friend Jessica.  She’s also riding across the country, but from the opposite direction.  She was one of my inspirations for starting this trip, and you should definitely check out her blog at http://bikingacrossthe.us.  When I realized that there was a chance we might pass like ships in the night, we concocted a plan to do a high five, and today was High Five Day.  We ended up meeting at a wheat field outside of Stites, ID.  Random, but entirely appropriate somehow, that the two of us, both from the Bay Area, should now have a picture of each other in a wheat field in rural Idaho.  I have no idea how I’m going to explain that picture to my grandkids.  She was with a couple of guys, Alex and Jeremiah; they were definitely cool.  Everyone I meet out on the trail is cool.  They’re my people.

Jessica said something interesting as we were staring at this immense field of wheat: “This is something I’ve never seen before”.  And it’s true.  I hadn’t.  And I realized; that’s one of the awesome things about this trip.  I will definitely admit to being a New-o-phile; I like something new all the time.  And this trip provides that in spades.  Every day I see something or experience something I had never seen.  I think that’s what I love about being on the bike; it’s fast enough (compared to hiking) that I get to a new place every day, but it’s slow enough (compared to driving) that I actually *see* the things I roll past.  I could also see a motorcycle working out that way, which is why Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance works.  I’ve seen arid deserts, lush deciduous forests, I’ve thrown my bike over a barbed wire fence, seen ninjas, made friends with a New Yorker, and ate a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches.  I rode 122 miles in one day, climbed 3000 feet over a mountain pass, got chased by bees, stand up paddle boarded, sand boarded, and camped in the rain  (last night it rained on me for only the second time the whole trip - and I was fine!).  Some experiences just wash off me, others will linger.  But that attitude - of seeking something new all the time - is definitely going to stick with me.

Day 31 - Whitebird, ID (89.76 miles)

Today, I disappointed a friend.  Actually, I suppose it would be more accurate to say that I disappointed him a while back, and today was the reckoning.

But a pause, first, to get the actual bike trip stuff out of the way.  Long story short, I woke up in Idaho, biked a bunch, then fell asleep in Idaho.  In between, I hung out with Stu, biked 12 miles up 1500 feet to get my rear tire changed, rode through the sun, had a flat on my rear tire again, freaked out a little about heading into the wilderness without a working rear tire, ended up in White Bird, ID, met a couple from Michigan, shared two pitchers of beer and 3 bags of chips and a smoked egg for dinner (being a vegetarian in a small town is tough) for a grand total of $16, and now I’m typing this sitting in a motel owned by a very large woman with a very small dog.  Good?  Good.

So, back to disappointing my friend.  Good news is, this is just a professional disappointment, not like some kind of personal attack.  Bad news is, it’s one of my best friends.  Anyway, I really hate when this happens, and although this may be a bad thing to admit publicly, when it comes to my professional life, it happens more often than I would care to admit.  It sucks when I disappoint someone.  It’s this terrible feeling, deep in the pit of my stomach, that stays with me for a long time.  I rode all day with it just rumbling around in my stomach, and I just really hated it.  I felt so bad.  But, like all bad things, it’s an opportunity, a learning opportunity.  One of the worst things about most of the times that I disappoint people - and that’s certainly true this time - is that I can identify a specific moment when I had a chance to do the right thing and I didn’t do it.  In this case, he had given me a job opportunity working for a company that did things that were honestly outside my professional goals and competencies.  The first couple of assignments I received were in line with what I enjoy and am good at, and that went reasonably well.  But then came something that they needed me to do which was more in line with their normal work, but that I knew was not a good fit for myself.  The right thing to do at that point would have been to be open about the fact that it wasn’t a good fit.  But I wanted to be a team player.  I was afraid of letting him down, afraid that maybe they would be mad at me and not pay me for the work I already did - basically I was just a coward, and I told him, and their company, what they wanted to hear.  And, of course, the irony is that in the end, I let them down way more, because I acted like I was going to get it done, and then I just didn’t.

When I think about incidents like this, it occurs to me that, as much as I don’t like to admit it, I basically have People Pleaser syndrome.  This is a known psychological condition, where people want so bad for other people to like or approve of them that they lie, or overextend themselves, to try to make that happen.  The bald truth is that I definitely feel that I’m not all that well-liked.  I feel lonely a lot, to be honest, and I don’t have as many friends as I would prefer, and most of the friends I do have are not as close as I would like.  My family - sorry, guys - has never quite given me the sort of intense and obvious love that I would have preferred, and I think sometimes I wind up being needy in my other personal relationships as a result.  Whatever the reason, I’m afraid of people, afraid of telling them the truth.  

Or, at least, I used to be.  But I’m not going to do that anymore.  At 37 years of age, I’ve seen what lies down that path.  Much like an athlete who goes into a sports game trying not to get injured and actually increases their odds of injuring themselves, the tentativeness that comes from being afraid of being myself and telling others my truth - even though it’s ostensibly in the service of trying to avoid them pain - makes me more likely to cause others pain.  I’ve seen it professionally, and in my personal and family life.  If I had gone to my friend weeks ago and said “hey, this project is just not a good fit for me, plus I’m on this big trip and I’m probably not going to get a lot of work done”, he would have been sad for a minute, and I would have let him down in a minor way, but we would have gotten over it; now it’s a big deal, and a big letdown, that hopefully won’t - but could - affect our friendship.  He was counting on me, and I blew it.

So, anyway, I have a new set of rules for myself:

1) The Only Person I Have To Worry About Letting Down Is Myself - In this case, the person I’m letting down is a good friend, so it’s natural to assume that I would be more upset as a result.  But, really, the person that I’m most upset at disappointing is myself.  What makes me sad about my friend’s disappointment of me is that I genuinely feel that he has a very valid right to be disappointed.  And this is important; people will often be disappointed in me, for their own personal reasons.  No matter how good (or casual) of a friend or contact they are, the first and most important thing is to check in with myself to see if *I* feel that they have a valid reason to be disappointed.  If I don’t think they do, that’s not cause for openly denigrating their feelings or denying them - they have a right to feel that way - but it doesn’t mean that I have to necessarily agree.  I think this is really important, because internalizing someone else’s disappointment, when you don’t really feel it, is a recipe for eventually resenting that person.

2) Be My Own Best Friend - basically, act in a way that won’t cause me to be disappointed in myself, always.  Every Single Time.  It’s not too much to ask to always act in a way that won’t cause my future self to be disappointed in myself.  And that’s what I intend to do.

3) Underpromise and Overdeliver - especially professionally.

4) Embrace Fear - those moments when you feel afraid talking to someone else - those are the times to shine.

3) Chill The Fuck Out - we talked about this one already, but basically, when in doubt, don’t get all disappointed.  Just smile and roll with it.

4) Don’t Be Disappointed In Others - Having someone feel disappointed in you is the worst feeling.  I think the reason it feels so bad is because it’s kind of a negation of who you are as a person.  It’s almost always a statement about the past, which is something you can’t change.  And generally speaking, it doesn’t have any positive outcome or results.  It just makes for a lot of bad feeling.  It’s a natural human response, of course, and I’m not saying it’s always a bad thing - but when in doubt, I’m going to remember what it feels like when someone is disappointed in me, and try not to make other people feel that way if I can help it.  If I can truly accept them for who they are and for what they do, I think I’ll make more friends, and feel better about myself in the end.

I’ll be honest - I’m over Idaho.  :)  I’m looking forward to Montana!

Day 30 - New Meadows, ID (69.57 miles)

Today was awesome!

Actually, let me clarify: in almost every physical/logistical way, today sucked.  Riding up US-95 in Idaho is kind of a hellscape for cyclists: it’s a two-lane country road with no shoulder and the speed limit hits 65 in spots, used by semis, one of which came within 18 inches of my head.  It was under construction for a good bit of its length, making the road surface incredibly choppy and even turning into a one-lane road at one stretch.  To make matters more interesting, my rear tire has gone flat in a way that I can’t fix; it’s bald down to the red tread, and can only hold about 85% of the air it should hold.  So every mile or so I had to pull over and use my frame pump to top it back up.  I’m going to have to detour next morning 12 miles each way on that bald tire to hit a bike shop.  And the new sleeping bag I bought won’t stay on the bag, so I can’t stand up on the pedals or hammer too hard without worrying about it falling off right onto the road.  Last night I ended up camping without a shower because I got into New Meadows so late I couldn’t find a room.  And for no particularly good reason, I was just grumpy all day.  Today is the first day on the whole trip when I can genuinely say I was *annoyed*.  I’ve had days where I felt tired, lonely, sad even, but today I just felt irritated, like this was a stupid chore and I couldn’t really remember why I was doing it.  I wanted to pull over and hop in my car so bad.  Maybe it was the 122 miles yesterday, or all the problems I had today, but I just wanted to kick things.

But, you know what?  I’m still smiling.  It used to be that, when I was in a bad mood, like I was today, I would search for reasons.  Immediately I would try to “fix” it.  Why am I in a bad mood? I would ask.  Should I not have come cycling?  Should I stop and quit?  Was this a stupid idea?  Am I doomed to be in a bad mood forever?  Does nothing ever change?  Now, what I realized is - I’m just in a bad mood.  Nothing more, nothing less.  It doesn’t really *mean* anything.  And it will most likely pass (which it did).  The sun is shining, I met a really cool guy named Stu in the park who worked as a chef in Alberta and had never left Canada before in his life, the bike will get fixed, I’ll try to get a shower tonight - everything is fine in the most perfect of all possible universes.  Really.  Things could be so, so much worse.

By the way, I have come to a momentous decision about my trip, dear reader - but we’ll leave that for tomorrow.

Day 29 - Gateway, OR (122.0 miles)

Ooh!  Ooh!  Today’s post is gonna be a good one, I can feel it.  So much to talk about.

I had an interesting incident happen to me today.  I’d like to relay the entire incident without comment.  And then, you know, comment.  :)

So I’m about 70 or so miles into my day - a long, hard day, which I’ll talk about in a minute - and I pull into the diner in Richland, OR, an oasis in the desert.  Never has a garden burger looked so good.  As I pulled up, I saw the unmistakable signs of 2 other folks doing the same thing I was - touring bikes loaded down with multicolored Gottlieb panniers, sitting out front.  I walked inside and immediately could spot them by the bike helmets on the table.  I got a bit of an attack of social anxiety because I couldn’t tell if the other person was the guy’s wife or his son, so I passed on saying hello the first time past their table, but when I got up to get something from my bike and got a better look (wife), I noticed the guy’s San Francisco shirt.  I pointed at it and said “hey!  I like the shirt”.  He grunted in that way that says “please do not ever speak to me again”.  Everything about these two folks just screamed unhappiness and social anxiety.  And I was bummed, because here was a chance to really bond with some cyclists, and of course they have to be grumpy.  A few minutes went by, they paid - silently - and left.  I could tell there was some consternation outside, and then the guy came back in and started looking all around the cafe, a bit frantic.  He finally walked right over to me, and in an accusatory tone, he pointed at my map and said “Are you sure that’s your map?”  (Like, what do you think, I stole your map?)  I smiled politely and said “Yep!  Pretty sure.”  He stomped off.

Anyway, they left first, and I noticed they headed east as well.  A few minutes later, I took off.  Now, right east of Richland is a climb, about 1000 feet.  I saw it on the map, but the reality turned out to be higher, steeper, and hotter than I had imagined, and it was definitely a rough climb.  As I’ll get into, I was trying to make this a record day, and I was deep in the middle of Hell’s Canyon, which is pretty much what it sounds like - the surface of Mars.  Way up ahead on the cliff, I saw the two from the diner.  Slowly, steadily I caught up to them until I was within sight of the woman, who was about 25 feet behind.  Despite the incident in the diner, as I passed by her I gave a cheerful “hello!”  She stared at the ground and said “hi”, quietly.  The two of them began to pull over and get off their bikes in the gravel by the side of the road.  As I caught up to the guy, I said 

“Where are you guys riding from?”

“San Francisco.”  He looked away.  I felt weird getting off my bike, so I didn't, but I was going really slowly up the hill, so there was time to chat.

“Cool!  Me too!”  There was a bit of awkward silence. “Are you having a good time?”

He stared right at me.  “No”.  My enthusiasm flagged, but with my newfound social extroversion, I plowed right through it.

“Well, where are you guys camping tonight?”

“Oxbow.”  (Oxbow was about 25 miles away; they were going to have a long afternoon, but they would definitely make it).  “That’s a good plan!” I said.

I started to pull away from them, up the hill.  As I passed, I said the first thing that came into my mind back over my shoulder: “Remember, it’s the journey, not the destination!”  Then I laughed, maybe a bit too cheerily.  I guess I couldn’t think of what else to say.

Just around the next bend, just out of sight of the couple, the hill finally crested, and I started to coast down the other side.  And I realized, in that moment - much like the moment in the river a few weeks ago - I was having a *fantastic time*.  I was just having a *fantastic damn time*.  The sun was out, it wasn’t really that hot, there were no bugs and almost no cars, I was well on my way to setting a personal record day, and I was on my bike, for god’s sake, in god’s country, gazing out over hills and dales and pulling my own weight across the world.  It was an amazing moment, I was so happy.  The contrast with the couple was so stark.  I knew, instinctively, that it was a moment I would remember forever.  I’ll quote from the book I’m reading, Blue Highways:

"It was one of those moments that you know at the time will stay with you to the grave: the sweet pie, the gaunt man playing the old music, the coals in the stove glowing orange, the scent of kerosene and hot bread…I thought: It is for this I have come."

A few miles up the road, I pulled off for a bit at a rest stop, and watched them bike past me.  I gave them some space and rode behind them to the junction at a small town called Halfway.  They passed the junction by, and I went towards town.  But I saw them pull over about 500 feet up the road (still about 15 miles from Oxbow).  They were obviously consulting something, or maybe arguing, I couldn’t tell.  Anyway, I wasn’t in Halfway very long, and I never saw them again, which means either they suddenly sped up quite a bit, or they ended up stopping in Halfway for the night.  I hope they have a happy life.  I also sorta hope I don’t see them again.

Now begins the commentary part.  :)

This story, this incident, hit me pretty hard, for a number of reasons.  I think in some ways it kind of sums up what the trip has meant to me so far.  First of all: the obvious.  I know I spend a lot of time complaining about the attitudes of people in San Francisco. I am aware of the dangers of finding what you’re looking for; it’s easy to reinforce your own conclusions.  I also am very much aware that every place has happy people, and every place has grumpy people.  But I can’t help feel like it’s quite a coincidence that after 1200+ miles of biking - and 1200+ miles from home - the first grumpy people I meet on my *entire trip* are from San Francisco!  I almost feel like the universe is trying to tell me something.

I realized, too, in that moment, that life really is what you make of it.  Here we were, both in the same place, but we could not have been having different experiences.  I craved the physical challenge, I welcomed the sun (it had been freezing that morning when I left), I cherished my freedom, meeting new people, getting out of the city.  They saw sun, and heat.  Maybe they were having an argument with each other, who knows.  Either way, we saw the same things, but we saw different things in them.  (I also thought to myself: Why are you here?  Nobody is ever forced to ride their bike 1200 miles across the country.  If this sucks so much for you, stop!  Give up!  Do something you like doing!)

So, today’s topic is: Fun.  As in, I am having a metric ton of fun.  It occurs to me that, re-reading some of this blog, I focus too much on problem-solving, on the negative.  I haven’t given enough of a sense of how awesome this trip really is.  So, let’s fix that: this is awesome.  I am having a great time.  The joy of hitting the bed after a long day of riding, the erotic pleasure of fresh, cold water on the tongue when you’re parched, the feel of the linoleum counter at a diner, discovering new people in new places, moving from $20 hostel to $30 motel in the middle of nowhere, the satisfaction of relying on my own two feet - you can’t buy happiness and love like this, and it’s fantastic, everything I dreamed and more.  I don’t think this trip is going to suddenly fix everything about my life, but it’s already put me in a better spot in so many ways.  And it makes me happy.

On that note, I decided to set out to make today a record day - and I did!!  My goal was to get to Cambridge, ID, but that turned out to be a bit optimistic, so I ended up here in Gateway, with some awesome folks who run a very, very cheap motel in the middle of nowhere (with A/C and wifi!).  But I did 122 miles, with at least 4000 feet change in elevation.  It was about 10 and a half hours on the bike, and another 2 and a half off it.  I rode through barren desert, along the Snake River, stopped off in the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center, and generally rocked it.  In honor of this moment, here is a list of

Top Five Things Adam Theoretically Could Not Possibly Do And Then, In Fact, Did:

1) Ride 120+ miles in a single day.  I was repeatedly told that was so unlikely as to be impossible.  Not only did I do it, I did it on a hilly, hot day.  I think on a cool, flat day I could rip out 150+.

2) Take a carbon fiber frame across the country.  Well, I’m 1200+ miles in, and it’s totally fine.  Including those 20 miles on washboard gravel, throwing it over 2 barbed wire fences, straight up inclines, straight down declines.  Dear guy at the Sports Basement: you were wrong, and I was right.

3) Ride with most of my stuff on my back.  You wouldn’t believe how many other touring cyclists look incredulous when they see me pull up.  It must say in some book someplace not to take a backpack, because they all, universally, can’t believe it.  Most common comment: “Doesn’t your back hurt?”  Answer: No.

4) Ride without either camping outdoors, or spending a fortune on motels.  It turns out that, if you just plan ahead a little bit, and ask the right questions, there are places all over the rural parts of this country where you can stay - with a roof over your head, a shower, and usually wifi - for $20-$30/night.  The only times I’ve really had trouble are when I’ve been in slightly larger cities, like Bend or Ft. Bragg.  But rural folks always seem to save a bed for travelers, especially here along the TransAmerica.

5) Ride “this late in the season”.  Apparently if you ride this late in the year, it’s too hot, and there’s an awful headwind up the coast.  Well, I never really noticed the headwind, and yeah, it’s kinda hot, but it’s not *that* bad; it was worse in Texas, honestly.

People are just pessimistic!  Don’t let them tell you what you can’t do!

Day 28 - Sumpter, OR (45.1 miles)

I like diners.  I like the flow of them.  I like ordering food and then having it show up.  I like opening the menu and scanning over the usual - comforting in its repetition - to see if anything odd jumps out at me.  Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.  What’s a huckleberry? (It’s like a blueberry but smaller)  Why does this diner serve Elk? (Because it’s elk country)  Is there a grilled cheese sandwich?  Would they make one anyway?  Can I guess the ethnicity of the person behind the counter?  Are there enchiladas on the menu?  Souvlaki?  Whitefish?  How’s the pie?  I like ordering a diet coke and having the waitress say “Is Diet Pepsi OK?”  (Yeah, it’s totally fine).  I like watching the staff clean up and close around me.  I’ve been in more diners than I can count, and I still look forward to each one.

Right now I’m in the Scoop-n-Steamer in Sumpter, OR, which is an old logging town that is desperately clinging to its logging roots.  Every building is made of logs, and the bench I’m sitting in is made of solid wood.  The motel owner warned me about some “motorcycle punks” that are roaming the town, and the diner closes at 6, or earlier if nobody shows up.  The tater tots are amazing (hey, America: tots are better than fries.  Seriously.  Move on over) but the pie came out of a cold case (it’s OK, I forgive them).  Some guy in fatigues just came in asking where he could buy an American flag, and a guy on a motorcycle wanted to rent the log cabin (he can’t, there’s a family staying there).  Oh, and here comes the family from the cabin, wanting to eat.  There’s a calendar next to me under the cash register turned to a picture of the arch in St. Louis.

This is apropos of nothing, but a few days back I signed up for a 10-day meditation course, and just yesterday I found out I was accepted.  It runs in mid-October.  They warned people in the welcome docs to practice being alone.  I think I’ve got it covered.

You’ll notice I didn’t cover too many miles the last 2 days.  I’m trying out something new tomorrow.  I went over three peaks today, did over 3000 feet elevation gain.  Sumpter is about 20 miles short of where I really wanted to stop for the day, but they had $20 beds, and Baker City just had motels.  So I’m going to wake up at 5, get out by 6, and get to Baker City by 8, have breakfast, then get to the Oregon Trail interpretive center by 9 (trying not to die of dysentery as I ford the river with my oxen), and try to eventually set a record day for myself, at least 100 miles.  I know I have it in me athletically, we’ll just see if I have the mental stamina to make it happen.  I have to unroll my paper maps (remember those?) tonight and see what I’m likely to face east/north-east of Baker City.  It looks like, if I hustle, I can get out of Oregon tomorrow, which would be pretty awesome.  Oregon has been great but I feel like I’ve been here long enough to establish residency.

Are you ready for one more tortured biking-philosophy analogy?  (Imagine me saying that in Hank Williams Jr.’s voice: ARE YOU READY FOR ONE MORE TORTURED BIKING-PHILOSOPHY ANALOGY??!?)  One thing I’ve been struggling with is tracking change in elevation.  You would think that you could just *look at the road*.  But the surprising thing that I’ve learned is that that doesn’t really work.  I’ve often looked at the road ahead of me and been convinced that I’m about to conquer a huge hill, only to sail right through it.  At first I thought that was just a trick of the mind, but after 1100 miles what I’ve learned is that the eye doesn’t do a good job at all of detecting the change in elevation, rather only the *change in the change* in elevation.  That is, when you see a hill ahead, it really means that you’re about to encounter a stretch of road that is more uphill than what you’re currently on.  But if you’re plowing down a hill, that could mean that it’s just flat ahead, or even downhill, just less so.  And same with going up: more than a few times I’ve been excited to get to what seemed like the top of a hill, only to discover that it’s just a little less steep.  Which is demoralizing.  Here’s the thing, though: life is like this, too.  We’d like to think that we like things we like, and hate things we hate.  But really, if you think about it, what we like is having more to like than what we had before, and what we hate is having new things to hate.  If I made $100k last year, then making $100k this year is practically invisible.  But if I made $20k, there’s a big ol’ downhill right ahead of me and I’m about to coast in the drops.  I even went so far as to buy some fancy altimeters to try to tell what kind of progress I was making, and they work OK, but they only tell me the overall trend; they’re not so good at the minute-by-minute.  In the end, the only reliable way I have of knowing whether I’m going uphill or down is to feel the push on every pedal stroke.  The feet never lie; when it’s hard to pedal, it’s hard to pedal, and that’s that.  And, again, life is like that.  The only way to know what’s really going on *right now* is to check in with *right now*.  Scanning the road ahead - on the bike or in life - doesn’t tell you as much as you might think it would.  There’s now, and then there’s more now, and then there is nothing else.

Wrong state?

Day 27 - Prairie City, OR (31.33 miles)

Hello out there!  Question: who’s reading this thing?  I’m interested in who might be out there, curious about my trip.  Can you do me a favor, gentle reader?  If you’re reading these words right now, would you let me know?  You can leave a comment here, or in the Facebook thread for today, or you can email me at adam@adamhunter.net.  I’d love to feel more connected back to the people I know who care about me.

Today was a bit of a rest day.  The cycling has become pretty easy, and civilization still has its outposts here, so I’m trying to take advantage of that while I can.  I met a nice woman named Johanna at the local ranger station who, it turns out, was on Warmshowers, and she offered to put me up.  I ended up playing volleyball with her and her friends from the Fish and Wildlife job she has for the summer, and then we had a barbecue.  It was really interesting to go from being on the road to suddenly immersed in this social circle, and it sparked a lot of feelings inside me that I wanted to blog about while they’re still fresh.

I am exceptionally grateful for the generosity that Johanna showed me by taking her into my house, introducing me to her friends.  It was fun to pretend to be normal for a few hours and do things like play volleyball.  Her friends are really nice people, obviously folks that care about the environment.  One guy was an amazing wildlife photographer.  One guy had been in the peace corps.  I enjoyed hanging out with them.  I hope we keep in touch.

At the same time, I can’t deny that I felt kind of uncomfortable, and I was excited to get back on the road and be alone again.  And I want to dive inside that feeling, that discomfort, because I feel like some truths about myself lie inside there.  It’s too fresh to be clear on why I felt uncomfortable, but I want to capture that feeling.  I felt a bit trapped, and maybe a bit frustrated, but I’m not exactly sure why.  Johanna and her friends were definitely guarded - in a very healthy, normal way that you would be with a stranger.  But after my experiences with the Oregon Country Fair, and with Emily - who is amazingly open - and some of the other folks I’ve met on the road, I feel like I’m in a deeply open and vulnerable spiritual place that these folks just weren’t in tune with, at that moment (through no fault of their own of course).

Vulnerable.  That’s the right word.  I feel very vulnerable right now, and I think I’m drawn to others who feel similarly vulnerable.  Vulnerability, openness, spirituality.  I feel ready to change, confident with who I am, willing to reveal that to the world.  I feel like I could meet someone at this coffee shop right now and 5 minutes later be telling them my darkest fears and listening to them discuss their own.  I’m done with trying to hide from things, and people, and put up walls, and pretend.  Even the sort of normal socially acceptable amount of hiding and guardedness that comes from just a normal circle of friends trying to meet a stranger struck the wrong chord with me energetically.   Most of their morning conversation was a fun, light, interesting if somewhat prosaic conversation about how gross bugs are, and I think on a different day, at a different time, I would definitely have been 100% into it, but I felt like I had to force it a bit.  Johanna was a bit guarded about having me stay with her - at least at first - because her roommates were gone.  And I can totally understand that, she didn’t feel comfortable right away with having a strange guy in her house.  That’s perfectly normal.  The fact is that I definitely was attracted to her, and even though I certainly wasn’t going to act on those feelings, I think the tension in the air made her guarded.  Which - I want to emphasize - is perfectly normal and natural and fine.  But, because of where I’m at in life, I am definitely paying special attention to, or attracted to, people who are just feeling exceptionally open and vulnerable.  Obviously I’m here, opening up some pretty deep and uncomfortable feelings for the world to read.  I’ve already irritated at least one person, and I’m sure I’ll annoy a few more before I’m done.  In some ways this is a particularly selfish act, but I don’t see that as so much of a bad thing.  I want deeply to love others, but first I have to love myself.

I’m so excited to get back on the road!  Montana here I come!

Day 26 - Mt Vernon, OR (75.94 miles)

Hot.  The word of the day is Hot.  Hot as in fire, which - although I never saw - seemed to be chasing me, like a mountain lion, unseen but waiting to pounce.  Hot as in the sun, which beat down mercilessly the whole way.  I would have thought that by now my skin would be tan enough to deal, but apparently yesterday the sun was worse for some reason.  The state of Oregon, by the way, is on fire.  Now, I realize that, safe in your homes in San Francisco or New York or whatever, that statement may have limited impact.  It may be hard to conceptualize what it means for Oregon to be burning.  But here, in the middle of it, there is nothing theoretical about it.  The smoke is choking the air all the way out here in Mt. Vernon, 70 miles away.  I rode yesterday near the Painted Hills, but I didn’t even bother to detour up to see them because there’s nothing to see except thick gray smoke.  You can smell it in the air, like somebody decided to roast marshmallows.  It burns the eyes and the throat.

In some ways, a good bit of yesterday’s ride wa one of the more pleasant I’ve had.  Because of the conditions, Highway 26 had an eerie post-apocalyptic feel.  I rode brazenly right down the center of the highway on smooth paved road, and after an intiai climb it was mostly downhill.  I played games with taking my feet out of the clips and just riding spreadeagled down the road, swinging wide S arcs from side to side.  Kinda fun.  (Then it got hot and sapped my will to live).

I stopped off at the John Day Fossil Beds, which were cool, and did a mile hike into a gorge with blue-green rocks.  At the paleontology welcome center - perhaps the only paleontology welcome center I will ever go to - there was a really nice woman that I struck up a conversation with.  Turns out that she’s home for a summer internship, there are 4 of them working there, 2 in the back doing actual paleontology, and 2 out front doing customer relations and museum stuff.  The four of them live together on site and she said it was basically the best summer ever.  This prompted two thoughts: first, I really wish I was still young enough to get an internship.  Second, for most of my life, if you had asked me which of these internships I would rather have, I would have said the science one, of course.  But now, as an adult, I really think I would like - and learn more from - the role that she had, meeting folks and working on social skills and just learning more about people.  So that’s kind of a shift in my life.

By the way - 1000 miles!!1!!111!!!!!

Today I met my first real “Transamerica buddy”.  A guy named Mike heading the opposite way was also staying at the Bike Inn in Mt Vernon.  Super nice guy, works in film in NYC.  Had a really interesting conversation with him about what I’m about to face coming up.  He’s pretty screwed because of the fires, so he has to do about 80 miles today through the middle of nowhere just to camp in the dirt and do it again tomorrow, to get around everything.  I know he’ll be fine but grumpy.  :)  One of the worst parts is he has to ride back about 8 miles along road he already covered, which just sucks.

Mike and I had a conversation last night which actually made me want to brooch a topic that’s been on my mind since I finished reading Wild.  It’s a bit of a controversial topic, but hey, that’s what this blog is about.  Two of my good friends back in San Francisco - Alex and Brent, my Australian running and yoga buddies - gave me Wild as a Kindle book before I left.  As a piece of writing I give it a B, but as a work of non-fiction it gets a C-.  For those of you who don’t know, it’s a book about a woman named Cheryl who hikes the Pacific Crest Trail.  Cheryl is a pretty young blonde thing, and a terrible, terrible hiker.  She spends most of the first part of the book surviving on the generosity of others, getting rides over bad parts of terrain, and generally whining to anyone who will listen about how hard her life is.  Near the end of the book, there’s a remarkably self-aware story.  She meets up with three young attractive guys who have hiked even a few more miles than she did, and then loses them, and then a month later meets up with them again, near the end of her trip.  I’ll quote from the book here:

“So we came up with a trail name for you,” said Josh. “What is it?” I asked reluctantly from behind the scrim of my drenched blue sleeping bag, as if it could protect me from whatever they might say. “The Queen of the PCT,” said Richie. 

“Because people always want to give you things and do things for you,” added Rick. “They never give us anything. They don’t do a damn thing for us, in fact.” 

I lowered my sleeping bag and looked at them, and we all laughed. All the time that I’d been fielding questions about whether I was afraid to be a woman alone— the assumption that a woman alone would be preyed upon— I’d been the recipient of one kindness after another. Aside from the creepy experience with the sandy-haired guy who’d jammed my water purifier and the couple who’d booted me from the campground in California, I had nothing but generosity to report. The world and its people had opened their arms to me at every turn. 

As if on cue, the old man leaned over the cash register. “Young lady, I wanted to tell you that if you want to stay another night and dry out, we’d let you have one of these cabins for next to nothing.”

Mike was telling me about his trip last night.  He’s been over 3000 miles on his bike, and I think he’s enjoyed his trip, but he told me flat out that people have not really been terribly nice to him.  Now, I liked Mike.  I thought he was a really great guy.  But there’s no question he’s a New Yorker.  He talks fast, move fast, bikes fast.  He’s in incredibly good shape.  He’s half Hispanic, and really tan, with a goatee.  He told me that from time to time people took him for one thing or another - Hispanic, usually - and they were just a little bit frosty.  Nobody was offering him free cabins.  Which is a shame, because he’s a great guy, and totally a good dude.  He regaled me with a story about protecting his friends on the NY subway from a bunch of teenagers with guns.  Mike is the kind of guy you would want on your side in a bar fight.  But he’s not a pretty young blonde thing, and in this world, that makes all the difference.  Now, I have to admit that on this trip people have been very nice to me.  I’ve been trying to smile a lot, and I think that helps.  But in life in general, I’ve definitely bemoaned the fact that women - and especially cute women - go to the front of the line, every time.  And if *I* feel that way, I can only *imagine* what genuine minorities feel - African-Americans, or short people, fat people, poor people.  

I don’t know what the right answer is here.  I’m not suggesting that people with privilege should turn that privilege down.  If you’re hiking the PCT and you’re tired and someone offers you a free room, and you suspect it’s because you’re attractive, I am not going to tell you to turn that free room down.  What I might suggest - and this advice is as much for me as anyone - is being self-aware about how lucky you are, and maybe paying it forward, maybe even to someone who doesn’t seem at first to be the obvious choice; someone who looks scruffy or homeless or just doesn’t fit the mold of polished attractiveness.  And maybe, once in a while, I would turn that room down - to build character, as my Dad would say.  That’s a goal of mine for this trip - to be nice to everyone, no matter what they look like or who they seem to be at first, until their behavior proves me right or wrong.  I won’t succeed 100% of the time, but I’m going to make an effort.