Six Months Ago
That is, on August 22, 2006, I wrote this:
We're sitting around the campfire at the KOA in Manchester Beach, stuffed full of turkey meat-sauced pasta and beer. (I'm not stufed with beer, mind you, just pasta. Beer's for the other fellows.) Today's ride was only 26 miles, but it involved taking the trike up the steepest incline I've ever ridden. Route 1 skirts the coast, traveling up and down along the bluffs (seen here, looking north). At one point, outside of Elk, we gained 200 feet elevation in just under a quarter mile. One hairpin turn involved the aforementioned incline, and that required some serious effort and weightlifter-style grunting on my part.
I had been on the road for thirteen weeks at that point, had met up with The Boys, and was about a month away from pedaling into my mother's driveway in Santa Barbara, fully intent on heading back up to San Francisco, securing employment, and starting life there.
At the moment, I'm sitting on the porch in the cool of the post-rain Santa Barbara evening, with Royksopp on the iPod and the laptop on my lap, smoking a 1992 Rocky Patel Vintage Segundo. (If you must know: a couple of months ago I had a dream in which I was smoking a cigar, and on the theory that yes, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, I acquired some. I rarely indulge, but since I quit drinking, mainlining cheese, and sniffing glue, I needed something, and a cigar every couple of weeks won't kill me much.)
There is less of me about, now: when I left on my trip in May, I weighed 245 pounds. I weigh 205 now, trending downwards.The new pants I bought in January are already getting baggy at the waist. I am (mostly) gainfully employed at the local outpost of a national bookstore chain. My stuff and my cat remain in New York. Finding no writer's groups to join, I started one. I've met some good people. I bought a guitar. I'm still at mom's house.
Is this where I'd imagined I'd be when I left from Yorktown on May 25? No, it's not. But then, I really had no idea where I'd end up. My first night on the road, I wrote:
It’s crazy and wonderful and terrifying and stupid and lovely all at once, and I could explode into a soaring fireball or collapse to neutron density at any moment.
It was, and I did. Repeatedly. I don't have the dreams, now, that I thought I would have once I reached the end of my road. When I was a kid, and went skiing, I could feel the bumps of the moguls and the granular ice through my boots, long after I had quit the slopes and gone to bed. I thought that, once I stopped riding, I'd have pedaling dreams, tent dreams, outdoor dreams. But I haven't. (Just cigars, among other things). The reality of the months on the road remains with me, insofar as I am here, now, and not where I was. The means by which I reached this place are under a tarp alongside the house, and packed away in the shed. Very real. Concrete. Five months on, I'm still not entirely sure what the journey was about, or what I accomplished for myself. These are the facts: four months on the road, 5,000 miles traveled by trike and minivan.
My situation, though, has resolved into day-to-day immediacies. I miss my cat. I miss not having a place of my own to live in. I salved the missing of material things, for now, with the guitar purchase, which has given me a creative outlet in addition to the writing I'm doing with my inspiring group. In time, I will find the means to fully remedy those external lacks.
My internal milieu, though...that's still a mess. For the first time in a long while, the number of good days seems to be exceeding the number of bad, but it's not a situation I'd call stable. The good days feel fragile and diaphanous. I'm not sure, not sure at all, what it will take to change that.
But...the windy day voice is, I think, trying to break through: are you ready?
I think so. I think I am.
