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legs to recover from a bout of dizziness. Not surprisingly, I was having gloomy thoughts
about this cross-country enterprise, namely: How the hell am I going to make it?
But I also thought, You can't stay here by the side of the road, deep-breathing with
your head between your legs. Now, or in five minutes or ten minutes or an hour, you're
going to have to get back on the bike and pedal the final miles into town. And I did, and
I recovered. (A couple of milk shakes helped. I'm not sure I ever drank two milk shakes
in a day before.) I'll be ready to ride again tomorrow morning.
This is a process—minus the milk shakes—I've gone through before, on this trip and
on previous ones, and it's instructive in the same way every time, drumming the basic
philosophy of long-distance cycling into my head: Moving forward is the cure for all ills.
Keep pedaling.
The more I think about that, the more powerful and human a message I find it to be.
Maybe because I'm on this trip I have to think of cycling as a metaphor. Or maybe I'm on
the trip because I think of cycling as a metaphor. Or maybe because I write obituaries for
a living and just buried my best friend I've been thinking about the inevitable direction
that all lives take and that it behooves us to get as far as we can before we can't go any
farther. In any case, it's clear to me that something existential, something darkly comic,
was coursing through me this afternoon. It shouldn't be a surprise—and it pleases me no
end—that Beckett was an avid cyclist.
“The bicycle is a great good,” he once wrote. “But it can turn nasty, if ill employed.”
And he certainly understood bonking. Remember this, from the end of
The Unname-
able
? “You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.”
Thursday, August 4, Cheney, Washington
It's pronounced CHEE-nee, apparently. The motel clerk was a little unpleasant when I
said “CHAY-nee.” Must be a pet peeve around here.
A difficult ride through the Palouse has left me leg-weary and sun-roasted, and re-
minded of how bicycle touring lets you experience the country in intensely felt geo-
graphical segments. I made it here, a college town (Eastern Washington University) just
south of Spokane, and it feels like a pivot; next I head east, toward Idaho, Montana, and
the Rockies.
Two hundred and fifty miles ago I left the Columbia River gorge behind me, and along
with it the sense that the world is verdant and damp. I've been in wheat country since
then—rolling hills spread with vast blankets of, um, amber waves of grain. Amber actu-
ally isn't the right word—the hills are a kind of blanched yellow—though it is harvest
time now, and with huge combines raking through the fields the fine grain dust that
