Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I wish I could claim defiance as an attribute, but I'm not an especially defiant fellow.
Stubborn occasionally, sure. Moody, okay. Brooding, maybe resentful from time to time.
But both overall and moment to moment I like things to go smoothly. I've got a conciliat-
ory streak that mitigates against real defiance.
Nonetheless, this afternoon, after I arrived in Wolf Point—a cowboy outpost and the
last significant town along U.S. 2 in Montana before the North Dakota line, eighty miles
or so from here—I reread what I've written in this journal so far and a thought similar to
my editor's seized me: that for me riding a bicycle isn't mere leisure or recreation but a re-
sponse to things, a proactive answer to events that unfold without my input or compre-
hension. That isn't quite the same thing as defiance, I know, but I do think that my im-
pulse to ride has its source in disaffection. Traveling by bicycle is, actually, my personal
antidote to a good deal of life's irreconcilable vexatiousness. It is, after all, a simple thing
to succeed at—not simple in the sense of easy (it's not) but simple in the sense of un-
complicated. However far you go, your achievement is measurable and unequivocal. You
make an enormous effort, you worry about all sorts of things, you strain and sweat, you
self-examine, self-aggrandize, and self-loathe, you exult, you despair, you exult again
and despair again, but at the end of the day, at the end of the journey, you've arrived at
a destination or you haven't. What a relief from life's more common challenges—family,
work, love—and their irreducible ambiguities. There's an hour or so at the end of each
day, when I swing my leg out of the saddle in front of a motel, check in, peel of my
gear, collapse naked on the bed, and begin envisioning pleasant things—a shower, clean
clothes, a beer, dinner, a ball game on TV, an uninterrupted, rejuvenating sleep—during
which I feel indisputably worthy as a human being, someone who has spent the day
profitably and deserves happiness. (Clearly, Mr. Scorpion would take issue with this, but
fuck him.)
Any minute I'm expecting the arrival of another
Times
photographer, who is supposed to
accompany me—in his car—for the next couple of days. It says something about where
I am on the map that he was the closest guy the photo editor could find and he's driving
ten hours to get here.
Fearful of the highway mayhem and the shortage of potential shelter amid the North
Dakota oil fields that other cyclists have been bruiting about, I've decided to turn south
here. The next town in that direction, a speck of civilization called Circle, is fifty miles
away, and according to my web search it has one motel. I just called the number there
and got a recording, so I phoned the photographer in his car and suggested he stop on
the way and reserve a couple of rooms for us for tomorrow night. After that, in a day
