Journey to the HERENOW

I've posted an entry in Tour d'Afrique's essay contest "tales from the saddle" here. The winner of the contest is determined by visitors to the site voting. My essay is reprinted below with the typos removed:

There is a point in a long bike tour when you finally let go. For me it’s starts at about three weeks and the transformation is complete at about six weeks. Transformation from getting in a load of laundry between grocery shopping and cooking dinner, need to remember next week’s committee meeting, my boss pissed me off today, I wonder how my stocks are doing, I need to make a dentist appointment. To... it is raining. The road is bumpy. Or sandy, or smooth. Transformation from planning, from living in the just past and not yet present, to being HERENOW.

I will give you an example. About ten years ago I did a solo bike trip across Australia. Truthfully, the first 2 weeks sucked. If I hadn’t just quit my job, put my rag-tag belongings in storage and flown across the globe, I certainly would have just decided to go home. This wasn’t so fun after all. I was lonely. I missed the rhythmic familiar.

I planned the trip to be progressive. I started in the populated southeast, then entered the bush of the northeast, and eventually crossed the remote western deserts. So as time went on, the challenges before me got greater, even as the challenges in my head lessened. Or maybe that in fact is the mechanism. No room for idle chatter in the brain, I need to figure out how the hell to ride this road with patches of deep sand and my pedal is so full of the fine ochre silt my feet stay clipped in every time I fall over so that I keep landing on that ever expanding bruise on my left thigh. So it wasn’t always easy. But I was always there. Always present.

One time, in the West MacDonnell range (west of Alice Springs) I found a single track mountain bike trail. Oooo, that looks like fun, I think I’ll take that. I was carrying several day’s worth of water and bouncing along the rocky path with all that weight eventually sheared one of the bolts attaching my luggage rack. It wasn’t at all apparent to me how I would get that bit of bolt out of the braze-on of my frame, but I remember feeling completely calm. It was late afternoon and I was near a lovely spot to camp, and I sat down to enjoy my evening show of the desert sunset. And after that the full moon rising. It was so bright that night, I wrote in my journal without my flashlight.

The next day I calmly would think of an idea, try it, modify it, try something else, and eventually got the bit of bolt out of the frame. I rode a bit more gingerly from there on, and arranged my loads a bit better. But I remember only feelings of serenity when I think of the sheared bolt incident. I think of the moon that night and the lovely camp spot. That is how things are after you pass through that threshold. The point of letting go.

Here are a few photos from that trip, taken with a cheap point and shoot 35 mm:

A road in northeast Australia, somewhere between Townsville and Mt. Isa, Queensland

That's a termite mound on the left

I only saw a couple of cars a day so I felt pretty safe putting the camera in the middle of the road. That's how far I got before the timer went off.

This is the single track that did in my rack bolt