Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
time and distance. I've measured my progress with both of them: closing in on four thou-
sand miles and thirteen weeks.
It interests me that both time and distance are concepts in the abstract, but that both
are more often used in specific terms—a particular span of one or the other—and can be
described similarly as long or short. On a tiring afternoon I'll habitually monitor my odo-
meter and do the math—twenty-three miles to go, two hours if the wind doesn't turn;
I'll be in my motel by five fifteen. This suggests that time and distance are inextricably
related, but that isn't so. If I stood still on the shoulder of the road, five fifteen would
come and go on the shoulder of the road. I said twenty-three miles in two hours—11.5
miles an hour. For a cyclist that's not especially speedy—it's pretty much a crawl, in fact.
Thirteen weeks might describe a lot more than four thousand miles for someone stronger
or more zealous, but I'm the cyclist I am.
In sum, for time to be meaningful, it needs to be filled by distance; for me, 11.5 miles
generally fills up an hour pretty full. For distance to be meaningful, it needs to fill an
appropriate measure of time. A long trip like mine—timewise, I mean—requires a lot of
distance, even at a slow roll, to make the whole experience rise above standing on the
roadside. You have to pedal and keep pedaling.
Perhaps you sense my favorite metaphor looming ahead. Good for you, because here
it comes again. I decided to make this trip in the first place because I felt my résumé
for adventure wasn't keeping pace with my advancing age. Unlike my last trip, which I
viewed, somewhat contradictorily, as both a young man's errand and a farewell to youth,
this one, at age fifty-seven, has been about my encroaching mortality, no doubt about it,
and when I compare the two journeys I recognize in the current one the frailty of age.
I'm slower. I'm less eager to ride long days and long hours or to ride with the sun going
down. I'm much more concerned about finding a place to stay and knowing early in the
day where I'll be spending the night. Never an especially intrepid downhiller, I now ride
the brakes on a steep incline like a grandfather. And though I've been thinking all across
the country that there is simply more auto traffic than there used to be, and that roads
that felt safe eighteen years ago are now riddled with hazard, it occurred to me recently
that I'm simply more attuned to cars on the road and no longer blithely unconcerned
about them. To put it bluntly, I'm more of a chicken.
All that acknowledged, my decision to ride cross-country again was a great one. Not
because I've staved off anything grim, but because I've found a new way to think about
my life—as a self-powered ride. What is distance, after all, but experience?
