Return to Index

Epilogue (Part 1)

"Speaking until there's nothing left to say"

Hi, and welcome back to my bike blog.

The First Days Back

On my first day after my bike ride ended, I lost the keys to my room for a day, and misplaced my phone at least once an hour. On the ride, I knew where things were. They were on me! I knew exactly where to find things, from my headphones pouch (front of square black bag) to painkillers (small bag at the bottom of the right-side pannier). It was easy to never lose anything, since the spaces I occupied were so clean of clutter when I got to them. After leaving, I had to scan a finite number of places for things that either looked like they were mine, or smelled like they were mine.

Then I got to a college dorm, where I could settle, and my clutter could be confused with others' clutter. I had to navigate different rooms, and for the first time in two months, I had to watch for the things in my pockets. Even now, I still don't have a good spot to put things in this semi-permanent habitation.

Then there's my body, slowly losing the muscle mass and the tan I've gained throughout the journey. I'll regain full feeling in my fingers, and my knees will stop hurting. In a sense, I will miss these things, as they are the last faded tattoos I got from the trip. This blog is the last thing that will fade.

Carbon Dating

Time has passed, and the turbulent waters of recent memory have been calmed by the illusion of perspective. That's not to say that the last few weeks have been calm in any sense of the word, but that's a different blog. Today my muscles are sore again. We lost 16-14 in the camper-vs-staff Frisbee game, and strangely enough, with my legs hurting again, I finally feel like I can write something about the ride.

As camp wraps up, I clear out my room, and survey the hoarded trash from living on a day-to-day basis for the last three months. Extra handouts, with margins filled with 1:00am scribbles desparately trying to get one more cool computation squeezed into tomorrow, lay like sediment on the table. As I excavate back in time the weeks, I reach earlier and earlier lectures, until I reach the first things that touched my desk this summer. The remnants of the ride.

I pick through my chapstick, a jar of peanut butter, a pen. The mundane that has become essential on my daily life. I have no trouble tossing in the trash printed notes, but I stand over the garbage bin for a good minute, frozen in thought, at the idea of not seeing my broken headphones again. I try to remind myself time and time again that I'm crying over useless garbage, but I am so afraid of losing what I gained this summer. These items tether me to a time I wish to never forget. I think of this blog, and finally get the courage to throw away a wet receipt from a campsite. The one where I stayed in on my last night in a tent. That's pretty special, isn't it? Why would I throw that out?

Memories of The Road

There are songs, smells, and roads that will forever remind me of the ride. Sometimes they play in the background, and sometimes as soundtracks. I've been listening to them a lot myself, closing my eyes to take myself back to a different version of myself. Sometimes I find myself just staring into space, with an image of a desert hill or a big field, or a particular bike trail, etched into my head. I never remember where they are.

I sometimes drive the camp car on errands, and it feels nice to be on the road again. The highway itself is comforting to me, and brings back memories. On the second week, there was a hike to the Columbia River Gorge, to the Latourell Falls. These were the falls that I skipped on my way here, deciding to go along the I-84 instead of highway 30. On this hike, I was the driver, and I drove almost exactly the route I took on the last few hours of my bike ride.

Biking it was better.

In Toronto, I never drive, and when I bike, I sometimes practice vehicular driving, where the bicycle acts like a car in order to be better seen, and to passive aggressively piss off other drivers by doing something legal but annoying. In Portland, I did the opposite. My bike has not been used since July 19th, other than when I took off the back wheel to show some campers how to fix a flat tire. More alarmingly, I've started driving like a cyclist. No, I don't drive along the shoulders and run stop signs, but I have made some very unwholesome U-turns this month. Somehow, I can't get it out of my head that gas stations are these magical navigation rest-areas that have the amazing property that going through them makes any turn legal.

Encompassing The Large

As I would ride, I would often think to myself "this is it, I'm finally truly, honestly, experiencing the authentic United States." And yet, on the other hand, I'm a 0-dimensional object traveling along a 1-dimensional subset of a 2-dimensional country. And yet, I try to encapsulate just that into my head, and can't find a distillation of it all.

I want to see a bigger picture, but a bigger picture does not exist. Every thought I have or picture I've taken is just a shadow of reality - a reflection through the lens of me, which won't ever hear the full story. And when I zoom in, the rest falls out of focus. State boundaries help. They provide book-ends, and give a moment's pause to let the chips be cashed in before the next round. Yet there's no such boundary for things like deserts or accent or temperament of the bike and mood of the rider.

I hate that this reminds me so much of veterans returning from American wars, as small appendages in a huge military machine, and spend the rest of their lives asking what the hell it was for? What happened? How do I take something so big and understand it?

What's a good name for this feeling? I bet it comes up a lot.

Estimates

I'm sorry to say, but I did not keep any tallies of anything. I don't feel like they were necessary. Still, I can make some estimates, though, and I'll do that here. I'm guessing I went through about 15 flat tires. I stayed in a hotel about half of my nights, at friends about 5 nights, and the rest in a tent. The total kilometrage of the ride was about 6000km, which is counting all of the backtracks and other side-quests along the way. Just from basic arithmetic, I drank about 200L of water, which doesn't sound like a lot now that I think of it. I have no idea how much the trip cost me, but it was a lot more than Isaac's $20/day. $100/day is approximately correct, up to buying a new phone, spending money in cities, and buying bike-related things.

There is, however, one thing that I know fully without estimation, and that is the contents of my bags, which I will talk about in Epilogue 2.

Logistics

Bringing the bike back to Toronto is a much bigger pain than bringing it from Toronto to Miami. Camp ends on August 1, my flight leaves at 6:00am on August 3. The bike needs to be boxed, and brought to the airport somehow without the help of a camp car, or any locals (as all of my local friends are leaving on August 1 for uncorrelated reasons). I need to find a place to keep my bike, a bunch of bags, and myself for a few days.

After much thought and lots of stress, I decided on the following order of operations. I would get a box, put the bike in the box, and keep it in storage at the airport until August 2. I would then stay the night of August 1 at a friend's house in Eugine, OR, and pick up my bike on August 2 in the evening, sleep at the airport, and take my early morning flight. The only problem is that the storage place closes at 1:30am... Oof. Anyway, here's my bike boxed up again:



Part 2 of the eiplogue will be posted shortly. Return to Index