Half clear rec path a road a snowmachine corridor cross country ski trails a riverside with warning slate grey cracks and exposed flux. The snow won’t crunch, sighing contented wet resculpted under fat tires. Then […]
Cycling adventurist, bikepacker, travel writer, photographer, speaker, professor of philosophy. Route designer of the VTXL, the Green Mountain Gravel Growler beer tour, the Silk Road Mountain Race course 1st edition, and many more.
Category: Just Words
Alaska postcard
Everything edged and shine glinting, the cold the impossibly transparent light the horizon and then the horizon of being that ahead seeing into something else that could be. Last here in the tenacious day hours […]
Carretera Austral Afterimages
Freeze thaw hissing breathe head down shielding body mood against hypothermic rain hours. Or searing piercing spike sunpunish heat sweat burn. Reflectance surface spectral anger froth ocean retreating to grey infinities. Men on horseback wearing […]
Meditation
A long climb at the end of a long day. You knew it was coming, thought about stopping just before it and tackling it fresh in the morning but there are more hours of daylight so you accept the slopes. You left at maybe nine, it’s eight forty five. A half hour for lunch, a few chats, 20 minutes sitting in the early evening just to listen to the sounds. If it was a race or an event with a name that you registered or saved up for, then you would have paid attention to your eating and drinking, but this is a bike tour, you let your jaw drop and your eyes rise at the scenery, you smiled and waved at gauchos, you rode hard when you felt like it, dallied in arcing lazy tracks such that riders behind will shake their heads at the wobbly inefficiency of it, not realizing that their own paths are similarly precariously sinuous.
After a steep loose wet switchback you stop, you’re trembling but it’s not cold, in fact you’re sweating arms slick. But it’s colder than you think, your piss is steaming. And your breath. You’re in no danger of falling down really but you’re unsteady on your feet straddling the bike, your legs, not now turning, ache and are slow, unwilling to tense. You’re curious about the phenomenology of it, present in your attention but that’s what’s compromised so you wonder about observation but wondering is effortful and ceases. Your sense of your body as having a location is a bit behind, spatially further back from where it normally is. Perhaps it is temporally, too, like a drag on reality but you’d need an independent fixed anchor to discern that, and there isn’t one in your consciousness, could there be? (cf., Refutation of Idealism).
Chile Postcard
Another day of flogging hissing pissing pelting sluice. We a spontaneous trio queue up at the ferry ramp for a few hours crossing, Andy and Francisco on a shorter jaunt from their homes in Santiago, […]
Chile Postcard
Yesterday stinking stinging sweat blind over an unrelenting sine wave of shoreline dirt, dense atmosphere hours: still, cloying, deaf. Left camp after 8am, pulled the plug at about 9pm with the sky plenty bright to […]
Argentina journal
High pass border, there’s a man in a shack that has rickety wooden double doors that let the whistling gale in, we chat, this solitary Bolivian functionary thumps the stamp and pats me on the back, thanks me for visiting his pais. Nearby a pole with a sign, another few K then over a small edge bump, suddenly Larry whrrr on pavement, asphalt, blacktop, I wasn’t necessarily longing for it, in fact I like it less, but it’s nice not to have washboards.
Transitions, boggling descents, hillfolds, soon riding in sunshine warmth headed to hot. The words are a little more articulated, but also snappier and with sh ch jjhuh sounds where I don’t expect, I have to focus and interpolate at pace, smartly trimmed roadblock police, calm friendly questions. I’m expectant for observing the source of gravity here, entering Argentina the back way, literally and metaphorically, Buenos Aires as distant from this landscape as Tokyo or Helsinki are. And for days it’s a swimming flotsam of impressions. Far greater wealth than Peru or Bolivia, of course, shiny pickups, zippy recent model cars, at one highway crossroad there is a gas station with an interior all of white and metal surfaces, could be at an off ramp in Missouri, panini sandwiches lined up waiting to be microwaved and the woman behind the counter in a smart polyester uniform. One day for breakfast I stop at the village corner shop and buy a wedge of divine cheese and a baguette and a square of chocolate, sit in the tree shaded plaza not particularly nostalgic for the empty tiendas of the last weeks. Soon I’ll be shuffling confusedly through a bonafide grocery store, frightened by the largesse. It all makes me feel more self conscious in my stinking riding clothes and permanently dirt infused shoes.
Bolivia postcard
This high country lakes area draws tourists in 4×4’s, first a dust geyser in the distance then the suspension screamingdancing through the chop. They bull charge alongside without slowing and I see the gringos looking […]
Bolivia postcard
Rattlebuzz hands numb, the tingle in my right ring finger will last through the night, been gasping eightnineten hour days, noon slicing heat and an hour before sunset all my clothes on. Patterns in the […]
Bolivia postcard
Meet a couple on bikes, these encounters almost always jolly, fellowship of the road and all. The first thing out of his mouth, before “hello” or “lovely day” is about how he read a careful […]
Bolivia Journal
The days between blend. Though that’s usually a plaint, here it’s a reassurance, not every event is a distinct bounded object, movement through the hill rises and basins achieving a blurred continuity that is more difficult at a footpace, where evolution has successfully calibrated vectors of attention. Pedaling compromises that field and conspires with fatigue to wear it to unnoticed, when I am fortunate there are no hours.
Markets
Here is not for the claustrophobic, bodies shuffling chaos very close at varying speeds according to age or browsing impulse or impatience. The streets are not closed to traffic, so taxi and bus horns punctuate […]