Travel Reference
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don't—that cost a lot more than $8,000. And why does anyone care how I spend my
money?
And then there is a truly dyspeptic character from Arizona—he calls himself Thus
Spake the Dancing Scorpion—who just shat on the whole idea. “Nah, I wasn't one of
those readers who encouraged this aging
New York Times
obit writer to pedal across the
wide dangerous spaces of a nation busily devouring itself these days,” he wrote. “My
suggestion, Webber [sic], is that you stop acting out and return to work as soon as pos-
sible. Don't you have a girlfriend or OTB to keep you distracted? By the way, clinical
professionals don't have a lot of nice things to say about someone backing into a frenetic
past indulgence to find meaning. Learn to be calm and you will always be happy. Most
men pursue pleasure, like this stunt, with such breathless emotion that they hurry past
it.”
What a reaction to someone else's essentially harmless adventure! There's a lot to
pique my curiosity in that, not least Mr. Scorpion's apparent misanthropy. Why does he
care so much about what I'm doing that he took the time to craft such a crabby critique,
not just of my work, but me?
Anyway, he's probably right. If I could only learn to be calm I'd always be happy. Just
typing that makes me giggle.
I should clarify something. I'm hardly a person you'd describe as spiritual. God? Nah.
For one thing, there's been too much misery too close to home. (I'll no doubt get back to
that later.) I've never been a yoga devotee—a girlfriend once attempted to get me interes-
ted, but as much as I liked her, it didn't take. I haven't explored enlightenment through
Eastern philosophy or, for that matter, sought it through mind expansion. My one LSD
trip, in college? A disaster. It was sleeting outside and I ended up losing my hat, scarf,
and gloves. I whined through the whole thing, didn't sleep for three days, and got a ter-
rible cold.
That said, to my mind a long bike ride comes close to being transcendental. For one
thing, no matter how many people you're traveling with, cycling is a consuming enter-
prise, one in which you are communing all at once with your body and your bike and
the road and the weather and the traffic and the scenery—in other words, the whole
world as it pertains to you. The relentless pedaling is the cyclist's version of chanting or
prayer.
This isn't the same as being contemplative, by the way; to the contrary, cycling is not
especially conducive to brooding or pondering or weighing your options.
People often ask me what I think about on a long bike ride, as if all I have to do while
tootling along is to meditate on grand themes, and as if part of the challenge is filling
empty hours with fruitful cogitation. I tell them I think about the bike ride. I listen for
