Yes, coming back is difficult: lamenting the rapidity of losing the sense of exploration, inner and of the world, the stability of displacement in the knowledge that I am with people, touching if only tentatively […]
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: Observation
Limitation
It can seem a limitation, an upper bound to the horizon, what with having to travel on roads, the shadows and exhaust clouds of the earth movers that paved the way, the technology and commerce […]
Rough touring myths
Think about the durable myths of adventure bike touring, namely those things that everyone assures you are absolutely true, the rules that, if you don’t follow them, you’re probably going to die hungry and miserable in some remote place. These myths turn out to be, at best, a mixture of harmless firm opinion without basis and well-meaning reasonable suggestion that you can take or leave. There is also a lot of what I think amounts to just foolish habit.
Why go?
Mostly I enjoy cultivating the suffering of traveling in speed and gritty, sweatfilth because soon enough it’s not, and then that mythical enclosed self is blown outward toward unconceptualized being in a place. I recognize […]
Tibet postcard
We’re mostly governed by the affective system, emotions unrestrained, unresponsive, and blessedly removed from the voice. Alas, the simple animals that we are, we identify that voice as reason. And a self.
Tibet postcard
[From October 2007.] Expansive companionable valley embrace after the self rending chill winds up. Tenting away from roadworks, feels as if I’m witnessing a metamorphosis, or it was twenty years ago, or will be complete […]