Travel Reference
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commodates bicycles, but it's a busy highway without a consistent shoulder. The bridge
across the river to Washington is rideable, I'm told, but terrifying—it certainly looks
terrifying from underneath—with minimal bike room, traffic that buzzes by at high
speed, and the possibility of buffeting winds high above the water. So I've decided to
go south, down U.S. 101, another heavily used road, though it is officially designated as
part of the Oregon Coast Bike Route.
It would be nice to get started without route anxiety, but oh well. Trying not to think
about that, I'm thinking about writing instead—at this hour anxiety looms wherever
your mind goes—which is why I'm concentrating on my fingers as the words seem to
squirt out of them onto the page. It's so weird, isn't it?
Anybody who has ever written anything has had that sensation, I think, the feel-
ing—whether you're writing with a pencil, a typewriter, or a computer—that between
the time thoughts are born in the brain and the time they escape from your fingertips
onto the page and take coherent form some kind of alchemy happens. How and where do
those thoughts gestate? Do they swim through the bloodstream and take their nourish-
ment? Are they fired to life as they are transferred from nerve ending to nerve ending?
Is an idea an idea, a thought a thought before there is language for it? And what is the
role of your hands, really, in shaping the language?
Writers know that in every mind there is a chamber, an awful, dark place where sen-
tences retreat in order not to be written, a safe house where the perfect verb, the clever
and poignant metaphor, the incontrovertibly brilliant coinage is always hiding, avoiding
revelation. Often, as I watch myself typing, I imagine my hands reaching into that cham-
ber and feeling around, straining, my fingers waving like tentacles, fishing desperately
for the absolute best way to say what I want to say.
Which brings me to my fingers, specifically: as it happens, I was born with two miss-
ing from my right hand.
Granted, it's the kind of handicap that is not a handicap so much as a conversation
starter. Fortunately, or maybe consequently, I'm left-handed. I can't play the piano or
the clarinet. I use a baseball glove that would be well-suited to a Little Leaguer, my right
arm is a little attenuated so my overall strength isn't quite what I'd like—pull-ups have
always been a misery—and on all of my bicycles (I own five at the moment, including
the new one) I've had the rear brake, the controlling brake, switched to the left-hand
side, where my grip is better. Almost every time I use a borrowed bike I forget about this
and during the ride squeeze the left brake, making the front wheel seize, threatening to
toss me over the handlebars.
All that said, my right hand is an okay hand, a little small but reasonably functional;
I'm a better-than-adequate typist, for instance, hunt-and-peck variety. The hand is
