I arrived in New York on the hottest week of the hottest year. My third day here was a hellish, sweltering sauna of humidity and high temps. Rolling over in bed is enough activity to baste oneself in thick, sticky stew. Eventually the sweat and the humidity converges into the same juice: a sticky, swampy tug of the tight nooks that unerringly wards off movement. The great outdoors resembles a convection oven, with steamy hot winds rolling over dirty pavement that smells like sewage, burnt to a cast-iron black. For my fourth day, I just decided to stay inside.

I came from the longitudinally hotter and more humid Atlanta, but don’t remember it being this bad down South. That’s partly because air conditioning is far less popular in New York, where it only gets this hot for just one week or so out of the whole year. As it so happens, I landed on that one week, so expectations were shattered. Before leaving, my Facebook said something cheery and optimistic like: “I’m going to beat this heat and head for New York. Who’s with me?” A day later, I responded: “Welp, that didn’t work.”

The differences between experiencing this city as a child and an adult are night and day. My previous encounters with this beast snugly lay inside the “family vacation” category of travel: romantic and lively tours of only the ritziest parts of what seemed to be the most dynamic and glamorous city on Earth. When I first came here at the impressionable age of 12, I was toured to some ritzy food stops that sparked a brief cooking phase where I wanted to be a chef when I grew up.

One quick trip two years ago featured my first-ever city bike ride, a speedy two-hour circumnavigation around middle Manhattan. It seemed so fast and easy, I was suddenly able to nimbly slide between traffic in these infamous congested streets. I found out how easy it is to park a bike curbside. It was so easy, in fact, that it almost felt like cheating. That was a turning point. It sparked an interest that escalated into a bike ride across the United States.

Those trips, they were all just euphoric and tantalizing teases. If a lifestyle of such utter luxury and ease was what New Yorkers were used to, then it felt downright unfair to be born anywhere else. I wanted more New York. I wanted it bad.

This time I came as an underemployed 22-year old writer. Now, the city hardly seems like the glamorous fashion bastion of my youth. Instead it’s turned into an imposing gauntlet. Fabulous opportunities and riches lie within, but only to those who can survive the dungeon. The price floor is sky high. Transportation is always an issue. So too is the utter callousness of others. High salaries and unbelievable convenience are the awards.

The whole world comes to New York, and much of it doesn’t leave. It’s a blister of population density that’s left everyone fragmented. Streetwalkers never say hi. Need directions? Though luck, because everyone can hardly be bothered to help. Conversation with strangers never lasted more than ten minutes. I can hardly blame them, though. There’s something about these streets that breeds impatience and anxiety. No matter how hard you try, there’s never nothing to do in New York. Food, entertainment and even a bit of temp employment are always right down the block. But warmth and friendliness is a daytrip away.

After bringing my bike with me, I now understand why New Yorkers scream and honk at each other in traffic. Under the right conditions, you can give yourself an entire hour of your life to travel five miles away in a straight line here– it turns travel into a screeching, mind-numbing chore. There’s no amount of bike lanes that will fix this problem– every other bicycle I saw (and there were a lot of them) was breaking the rules, running stop signs and red lights with uncaring familiarity. Traffic lights will always be red when you arrive, and waiting in line with the rest of this gridlock leads to a three-hour commute.

It is true that New York has a world-class bicycle infrastructure, but you’ll only find in places where it would be inconvenient to funnel bike traffic into the roads. The greenbelt that covers the Western half of Manhattan that is an absolute delight to ride, it’s like a highway for bicycles. Riding on that thing was so smooth and fast that it got me to destinations on the other side of Manhattan faster, even though the route was geometrically longer.

The bridges made for some wonderful biking, too. Four of Manhattan’s borough-crossing suspension bridges have been outfitted with exciting bikeways: you climb up one hundred feet or so to be suspended above the open sea, then come zooming down the slope on the other side. On the Brooklyn Bridge, the massive tourist crowd turns the ride into a white-knuckle obstacle course.

In New York, convenience is your God. The rent is too damn high, but the food– that is, the real food, the working-class calorie packages– is so damn cheap! The average price for a slice of pizza seemed to hover around $1, and two slices make a hearty meal. There was even one sit-down spot in Queens where I found a $4 burger and fries, chairs and wifi included. Want a sandwich at 3 a.m.? They have mini-marts with 24-hour deli counters on every block! Being able to eat this nice at any hour of the night is a spectacular concept, and there’s no way it would work in any city with less late-night foot traffic. The guys making these sandwiches don’t even give you any crap about about it.

I love this convenience-obsessed, deli-placated food culture. I really, really do. Knowing that you can cheaply eat this good at any hour of the night– that’s pure love, man. It almost makes me want to cry!

I came with one vaguely-defined mission: learn about media and stuff. A lunch date with Joseph Riley Land, the entertainment blogger behind kitchensofa, was arranged. According to him, the trick to successfully freelancing in New York City lies, as always, in the elusive and unflattering realm of social networking. Whore out one’s Facebook page, merge your professional and personal lives. Exist to work, work to exist. These are the ways of my people. I aught to get started on that soon.

I despise Midtown. Where do all these people come from? Infinite crowds pour out of holes in the ground, they flow into torrential streams like a chattering people river. It’s all a bit terrifying, especially since pretty much everyone has a better fashion sense than me. So many of these people look too perfect to be real: the dolled-up girls dressed in glossy magazine ad attire, wearing see-through tops and fragile lacy dresses for their street vendor lunch on the slimy streets. Also look for the chattering business suits who are too busy to smile, and the short-tempered mustached foreigners who staff the food carts. Am I walking through the world’s biggest casting call? Everyone is dressed like a movie extra, no one’s ugly, and there’s product placement everywhere!

I wish I could’ve really experienced this city, to have seen what it’s actually like to work a regular job to pay overpriced rent while getting yelled at in traffic on a daily basis. Instead, I was an observer. I have a theory that these mythical born-and-raised New Yorkers share an unspoken degree of camaraderie towards one another, even though they’re characterized as such hardasses. I saw too many mini-mart owners who knew their regular customers on a first-name basis, too much of a social security network for the foreign-language immigrants who have their own employment offices and law firms. I even saw a few of these angry drivers impatiently wave other stressed-out commuters through the city’s always-busy intersections. They’re in this mess together, and have to cooperate to make the best of it. As for the rest of us, we’re just putting crap in their way.

It’s a long haul from the solitude of the West, where the dusted-over mobile homes are standard housing, where too many people live in apparatuses explicitly made for being alone in the desert. Come to New York alone, and you’re unlikely to make friends while there. Bring a friend, and you may just lose them in the crowd.

Day after day of saddled wandering was spent trying to occupy myself with cheap thrills (thank God for the skint.) After five days of this, I eventually realized that even under these disparate conditions, I will never run out of things to do in this city. You can run away from it in one direction all day, but the city will never end. It’s impossible to see it all. There’s always some hidden gem just beyond the next brownstone alleyway– some wonderful little hovel of food, theatre, or music. I’m in awe when I realize that there are people in the world who consider this normal.

New York is a numbing feeling. It’s a psychological battle between soul-crushing loneliness and that urban mix of anxiety and excitement that you feel in any great city. I felt it when ordering a Cuban sandwich at a lonely, artificially-lit deli counter at 3 a.m. I felt it when I walked out of a midnight showing of Taxi Driver, drunkenly stumbling by myself into sticky Brooklyn streets. I felt it when wandering into the weird phosphorescent void of Times Square, completely alone in a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd of fellow travelers. It’s a New York feeling. A classy and cultured way to bask in urban stench.

The next big adventure is a simple train ride home. The spirit journey is over, and the rest of my time abroad will be concerning an utterly more concrete and practical goal: get me and my stuff home.

The whole process will take seven days. The first three were spent in San Diego, where I stayed with a husband and wife who were friends of a relative. They both had a background in journalism and academia, so I felt right at home. Their house was a corner lot in the midst of a gentrified yuppie neighborhood, next door to a well-stocked grocery store and bike shop, two blocks away from an Internet-equipped coffeehouse and gastropub. Perfect!

Every morning I would head to a neighbor’s house for a shower, then sit around to drink coffee and chit-chat with the family. Every day would be spent taking care of one hour-long odd job (checking baggage, patching tubes, mailing off paperwork,) then I would explore the rest of the day away on bicycle, discovering some of the best Mexican food in the country and checking items off of the world’s shortest to-do list. A vacation at the end of my vacation.

Apparently rail lines are actually quite fickle things, and Amtrak doesn’t run a train directly across the country. I had to hop from one connection to another, doing a bit of a zig-zag maneuver in the beginning to Los Angeles. I spent my ten-hour LA layover eating Asian food and bicycling past countless showbiz landmarks. Even Hollywood isn’t out of my reach.

The next train ride was to New Orleans, and it took two days. I lived in the lounge car, reading, writing and studying.

The Sunset Limited somewhat mirrors the Southern Tier. I felt a painful sting of guilt as I rode past familiar landmarks. On a train, you still feel the miles pass away underneath your feet. You still notice the scenery gradually change from one environmental theme to the next, and you still feel the outside temperatures rise and fall and the sun revolves around Earth. You still have to test your patience and energy against hours of doldrums and repetition, and you still get to see the epic wastes, lush forests, and massive fields that comprise North America.

But it felt wrong. It was so effortless, so easy and smooth and ultimately unsatisfying. The train zoomed past El Paso and Marfa– past their colorful and intricate interiors and compelling characters, past an entire cast of new friends and cohorts without making even a second of a stop. I was so close to the crazy street musician in Marathon who builds papercrete igloos for fun, I was within walking distance from the Army wife in El Paso whose trusty old dog was my temporary best friend. I once again laid eyes on the Chinati museum in Marfa and the Plaine coffeehouse in Alpine, with clerks inside who probably still remember my face and story. However, the prospect of me stopping by to say “hi” was a painful and scathing impossibility. I was too far.

I’m typing this out of a smoky apartment in the French Quarter, the second time I’ve been two New Orleans in two months. It’s an overnight layover, but I learned long ago that it’s wiser to just party all night in this city. My definition of “partying” will be telling stories to half-interested bar flies before reading books under lamplight at Cafe du Monde. Except now I somehow made it inside someone’s apartment and everyone thinks I’m weird for pulling out a laptop and typing this up.

If there’s any time for sleep, it will be during the train ride home to Atlanta. I’d rather not see more countryside scenery automatically scroll past, see me disengaged from the journey in this air-conditioned box. If I’m going to cheat my way back to Atlanta, I want to at least get some sleep while I’m at it. But while I’m on foot and on the ground, I want to be living, to be immersed in the myriad emotions of waking life, wafting in this city’s sad, wonderful stench. The people in here are heading out for wine, telling me to come along. I guess I can go home to Atlanta when I’m done when that.

Even when I finally saw the ocean,  I still didn’t stop. I had no traction in the sand, so I pulled the bike by its handlebars to a rocky outcropping at the land’s brink. I hoisted the bike up over my shoulder and climbed from rock-to-rock as far as I could go, skirting the edge of that ancient and crashing blue abyss. My human-powered trans-American odyssey was complete. At this beach, where the ground ends, I had no more continent left to travel.

I left comfort and security at home, and traveled 3,000 miles to a place where I had to be hardy and vigilant. A place where I had to be completely in touch with myself, both mentally and physically. A place of cowboys and Indians, inseparable biking brothers and lone wanderers. It was the ultimate test: a two-month gauntlet of physical exertion and mind-numbing repetition. Before the end of it, I had to confront death in the face of my own survival. I had to follow the ghosts of the past and the crimes of the present. Amidst a rural America that is shriveling up and dying, I found warm courage and hospitality. After all this, I have no regrets.

I found a better place, and traveled there by bicycle. I left comfort and security at home, and re-discovered it on the road. My new lifestyle of travel and adventure won’t stop here. It can’t. I found things I need to do, places I need to go and people I need to meet. Things I need to do and things I need to be.

Readers: run away! If you are the slightest bit unsatisfied with your life, leave it. I urge you to. I didn’t know how badly I needed to get away from the humdrums of routine until I reached the halfway point in Texas.

For some reason, society expects people to obsessively cling to fabricated social constructions that exist to make life worse. Things like fear, egotism, cynicism, guilt and regret. Even passion and attachment, or race and gender. After spending 30 days alone focusing on one goal, you learn to let go of all of that and find out which parts of your head are truly the important ones. Unconditional love for others and a healthy respect for life are all one needs to be happy, really. That, and a project to keep you busy.

I laughed, I cried and I lost 15 pounds. I bicycled 3,000 miles across an entire continent, against the wind and through the desert. I had my bike stolen and spent days lying in bed sick. My finger turned black and I couldn’t feel it for three days. I peeled away the sunburn. I faced off with alligators, coyotes, javelinas and pitbulls. After all this, I finally found my better place.

“If it’s not today, it’s tomorrow.”

I kept repeating this phrase to myself to keep me going. It’s all uphill from here– there’s no telling how fast I’ll descend the other side, or how high and how far I’ll finally be done climbing. San Diego sits at the other side of the tail end of the Santa Ana mountains– just 100 miles of mountain lay between me and nirvana.

One-hundred and six degrees, no wind, 13% humidity. It’s so hot. I’ve never experienced such an oppressive, overbearing and heavy heat in my life. It’s humid and dry at the same time, with a sticky layer of sweat and sunblock soup insulating my body temperature ever higher. The sunlight stings on top of my leathery red skin. A reassuring cool breeze that would regularly chime in on other days wasn’t here– today was the transition day between Spring and Summer, the day that marks the beginning of the no-bicycling season. I’m sure to be one of the last Westbound arrivals in San Diego.

I have never sweat so much in my life. I’d look down and see a stream sweat drops fall from my cheek, leaving a trail of my own bodily fluid up these final mountains. Flies and crows crowded around the only source of water in sight: sun-bleached barrels of dirty radiator water meant to cure an overheating car. Bicyclists don’t have such luxury.

At this point, I’m willing to do anything to get to the other side of these mountains. At this point, I’m also realizing that all I have left to invest is time, and this realization is overshadowing all other concerns. I don’t feel fatigue, exhaustion, hunger or thirst. Water, food and rest: all these concerns are accessories to time, the only thing that I can’t refill at a roadside gas station.

I’m biking sunup to sundown now, and I still don’t have enough time to bike as much as I want to. There’s a fire burning in me to finish this, and nothing is going to stop me. I’m putting my body through the workout of a lifetime and abusing this bike far beyond its intended limits of use, but I don’t feel a thing. I have to keep going.

Even after another flat tire and a wheel knocked out of true, I kept pumping upwards. Up and up and up, 3,800 feet above the ocean on the other side, slowly squirming my way into a mountain range and finally penetrating into its peaks.

I dribbled out the back of the other side sometime when the sun cracked underneath the horizon, flying downhill at the speed of gravity. The route put me on the interstate. I broke speed records and won a thousand imaginary races in my head, carefully jiggling and skipping over small rocks that were deadly obstacles at such a high velocity.

Right at this crest of the climax, at the very begenning of the end when my rollercoaster just started to fall down the rails, I had to put it to bed. An RV park on native land nestled just off the next exit– perfectly suited to stop my uncontrollable descent dead in its tracks.

How does one sleep on a night like this? At the cusp of a 24 hour climax? I’m set to explode into an unimaginable mental orgasm in just a few hours. My whole social and physical essence is a ticking time bomb, waiting to feel this monumental release of my fully-realized true human potential. I biked uphill for nearly 11 hours straight without wanting to stop for a rest. Now, I don’t want to sleep.

]]> http://geosaga.net/2012/05/15/day-55-the-24-hour-climax/feed/ 3 georgeweidman DSCN4954 DSCN4956 DSCN4953 http://geosaga.net/2012/05/14/day-53-machine-guns-and-lasers/ http://geosaga.net/2012/05/14/day-53-machine-guns-and-lasers/#comments Mon, 14 May 2012 17:48:53 +0000 georgeweidman http://geosaga.net/?p=626 Continue reading »

The kid’s eyes bulged wide with excitement. It was impossible for him to hide such enthusiasm.

“All the way, huh? How many flats have you had?”

“About nine.”

The kid was about nine, the son of the bike shop owner. He watched with fascination as I struggled to squeeze a quick-release lever closed. With my wind-swept mad scientist hair and sand-coated face, I must’ve looked anything but misanthropic to the two bike-savvy kids watching me in the shop.

“Look at those bags, he’s got the tools and everything he needs.”

“If he had machine guns and lasers, he’d be set.” A similarly-aged boy with the kid was less impressed, and a bit more sarcastic.

“Here– let me hold that for you!” said the first kid as I began to put my bags on the bike. He was eager to help in any way possible, and it wasn’t unwelcome. When I kick-stand the bike, it messes up the cable routing. That’s one problem I don’t have to worry about with this little guy buzzing around.

The good thing about a water shortage is that you’re carrying less water. Well, that’s relative.

I zipped back into civilization at high speeds today, thanks to my lower weight load and a tail wind that sent the bike into warp drive. I had time to catch up on chores like replacing that broken spoke, refilling my food and water supply, and catching up on writing and photos.

Maybe I took too long basking in civilization. When it came time to leave the city of El Centro and head out to the next town, I got caught in the sunset. I don’t want to stop anymore– I’m so close to the finish line that there’s literally not enough time left in the day for me to keep bicycling. I don’t even get worn out anymore, I just want to keep going and going until I’m there.

The deserts of California look absolutely unreal just after sundown. A cyan and turquoise haze shades over the distant mountains so thickly and solidly that it almost looks like a cartoon backdrop superimposed on top of real life. Then, black.

The dangers of riding at night are multifaceted. For one, there’s the stunted visibility. Bumps and potholes in the road are that much harder to spot under the cover of darkness. As am I to other drivers.

Someone turned on the wind right at sunset, too. Torrential, sandy wind. Then I heard a hiss, and I froze.

Humans aren’t the only ones using this road. The grounded wildlife of the desert is nowhere to be found during daylight, but nighttime is a whole different picture: a venomous safari of snakes, scorpions and rats. Tiny monsters.

I had my headlamp pointed directly at the ground for the night, the dim cone of light jiggling uncontrollably for my six-or-so feet of visibility. Every squiggling line of road paint or scrap of debris looked like a new threat. I pedaled hard to Ocotillo, where I found a lit-up country dive bar poking out of the darkness, its awnings flapping in the black wind. Inside, I asked for directions to the nearest motel. I didn’t want to stay outside any longer.

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Consciousness.

So I just went through one of the longest days ever in one of the hottest deserts ever. The fly is the mosquito of the desert. Back in East Texas, there were clouds of mosquitoes so thick that I couldn’t stop the bike for fear of getting eaten. When the light shined through the trees at the right angle, you’d see ‘em. Clouds of them hovering above the ground like a buzzing, vibrating mist. It’s the same deal here, except the dots are black and the forests are beige. Flies also don’t leave bumps after biting.

I broke a spoke today. Can you tell which one is the replacement job? I don’t have the tools to remove the rear casette hub and smoothly slide the new spoke through. Instead, I had to twist and bend it around the hub by hand. I like it, actually. Looks kind of artsy and still works like a spoke. It’s super-dangerous and needs to be replaced ASAP.

Other technical difficulties included wind and water. I’m still running out of water as I write this. Always running out of water. Will need to sip until I’m 21 miles West of my current location in the morning. A kind-of-dangerous situation. Must keep self-control.

Wind and hills are to blame for making today one of my slowest days ever. I think it officially was, but I’ll do the math later. I left Blythe at 8 a.m. hoping to get to Brawley, 90 miles away. So let’s do the math. At 7:15 p.m. I dialed Jim telling him I wouldn’t make it, so after 11 hours and 15 minutes I travelled 70 miles for a daily average speed of 9.3 miles per hour. Actually, I don’t think that’s my slowest. It’s pretty slow, but not my slowest. When I was slower out of Del Rio, I stopped earlier. There was still civilization to take advantage of.

Now I’m in the American Sahara, the Sonora. I’m shocked by two revelations: the sheer awe of experiencing that thing really exists, and also that there really is nothing here. It’s the desertiest desert of them all, the natural landscape is as alien and lifeless as possible. The built environment is haunting– there was one store in-between my starting point and my ending point. It was closed. The vending machine out front wouldn’t take my wrinkled-up $5 bills.

I am as you are, wandering through the dunes and staring into a glowing black matrix of multicolored dots, pondering the meaning of words thought up hours ago. Question: do I think in AP style? Did I pass under two layers of editing and revision that slowly got messier towards the bottom of the page before transforming this part of me into bits? My headlamp is scanning across paper pages, its reflections dancing about my polyester canvas coffin like skittering insects.

Let’s see where this ontological stream of thought leads us. To Brawley? To food and water and chairs for buttrest? To lush mountains and the well-populated suburbs outside of Diego? Either way it goes, it will lead to my last day out here in the desert. It will lead to the end of a weeks-long gauntlet of survival in America’s harshest environment. This is the end, my only friend, the end.

Question: when is one’s stream of consciousness mutually excluded from one’s stream of basic physiological needs?

I am as you are, cowering and lounging behind the glow of an always-on dual-serving entertainment and surveillance machine. Will the rangers find me out here in the dunes? Will they make me move, or will they bring me water and food and gee whiz that would just be swell? I’m camped next to their station– empty though. No water spigots on the building, either. I got caught out in darkness. Biked all the way from sunup to sundown to make it less far than I wanted to go. I think I saw a sign by the side of the road that said I could camp here, but now that I’m here I’m seeing “no camping” signs everywhere. My bike is locked on one, actually. I feel like such a rebel sometimes– like a real rebel, a stealth-camping guerilla revolutionary. I’m really not, and when I think of that, I don’t feel like a rebel anymore.

I am instead on a journey on you, fueling myself and my machine through a place neither of us should be. Both of us will wake up covered in sand, but we’ll just have to deal with it. The bike has it easy, what with its lack of a gastrointestinal system. I’ll be parched. Sip only. Must practice self control. I think I have just enough to make it there, but no more. If you’re reading this, then that means I made it.

The question of the day: what did I do with the day?
Honestly, there are some days out here that defeat the purpose of a bike-touring journal. Days like today, in which no bike touring happens and almost no real events of circumstance happen.

Scratch that. I would actually be touring is something of circumstance hadn’t happened. I woke up around 12:30 a.m. last night vomiting up a little pile of water. Unwelcome but not unexpected after having a monumental vomit 48 hours earlier. I wasn’t too discouraged until my body began shedding fluids out of, well, other orifices.

Diarrhea, vomiting, headache and muscle ache. I could have anything from swine flu to food poisoning. Maybe dehydration or heat prostration? I wouldn’t like to think so, as I have to make a 90-mile jump tomorrow through some of the hottest and lowest desert in America to get to the next pocket of civilization.

I was rushing in and out of the bathroom constantly until 1 p.m., which instantly killed my chances of making that jump by sunset today. My warmshowers host convinced me to stay another night, so I made use of the time by napping and sipping on water.

Towards the end of the day, the diarrhea finally passed and a downright ravenous hunger jumped up at me from nowhere. I unhooked every last bit of extra weight from the bicycle, and mounted it into town. With a cacophonous whoosh of wind yelling in my ears and my closed sinuses broadcasting a Darth Vader pant throughout my head, I squinted underneath the fire-red sunset and ached my way into town. An hour later I was napping face-down on a gas station table, filled with Quiznos and broccoli soup. A half-hour after that I was curled up in the fetal position on top of a poofy Starbucks chair, biding the time while my stomach painfully threw a fit about having to digest food.

What did I do today? I spent most of it doubled-over and hurting on a naked mattress, feeling like Martin Sheen in the intro of Apocalypse Now. For hours upon hours, I was riding a cascading spiral of hope and doubt as the pain either got worse and better.

I biked zero miles– eighty-five miles less than yesterday and ninety miles less than I plan to bike tomorrow. I took Ibuprofen and couple of Mexican Amoxicillins. I drank water with Emergen-C powder and refrained from dairy products and fatty solids. This stuff will probably be hell on my system today, but hopefully will go into effect tonight and kill off the sickness tomorrow. Then I’ll be able to do stuff again.

Smile for the camera!

The drowzy strikes again. The 85 mile trip into Blythe, California still didn’t feel as energetic or spirited as 80+ days used to. I don’t know if its the heat or if I’m still sick, but there’s no comparison between the lethargic, slow and sleepy feeling I get out here with the just-plain-winded feeling that I’d get after long days elsewhere. It’s an entirely different beast.

Another symptom: I lost my appetite. A mediocre Mexican restaurant provided copious amounts of cheap eats, and I grudgingly forced myself to consume it all. It was the only real meal I’d eaten in two days, and I could tell that my body needed it. However, I wasn’t feeling hungry before or satisfied afterwards.

I cycled past the border inspection stations on the California State Line and rolled into the town of Blythe, where I’m staying with one of the coolest warmshowers hosts yet: a former educator trained in the social sciences who now runs a backcountry bait shop. Between getting off the phone for directions and making it there though, I punctured through two flat tubes and spent my evening tweezing little wires of tire shrapnel out of my rear wheel.

WhenI get out of this, I’m going to make two big lists of things people did and didn’t warn me about. Things people warned me about: tire shrapnel, goatheads, glass shards, dehydration and desert emptiness. Things people didn’t warn me about: sand storms, javelinas, food poisoning and desert-induced sleepiness.

Yesterday’s panacea took a toll on my body today, weakening my legs and filling me with drowsiness. There’s something alarmingly lethargic about bicycling through a desert, especially into a headwind in this time of year. The ambient temperature isn’t too hot and the wind chill is just barely 10 degrees lower, blowing at cuddly blanket temperatures.

This blanketing warmth blowing all over your body is terrifyingly soothing– so much so that I was fighting the urge to doze off and daydream even while pedaling. This problem was worse today, and I suspect that the vomiting and lack of food from yesterday is the cause. A random encounter with friendly Lutherans who offered me cold water and macaroni salad improved my spirits though.

With less than a week left, I have begun to answer a question that has followed me since Day 1: why am I doing this? Even before leaving, this question would routinely come up in conversation. The easy answer: I’ve always wanted to go on a crazy road trip and can’t afford a car. A more hokey answer: I just graduated from college and wanted to have some alone time to think about what to do with myself.

In reality, the reasons are infinite and its never hard to explain myself. Believe it or not, I don’t see how bicycle touring is that different from my dorky game-centric other hobbies. After all, the grandiose athletic feat of bicycling across the country demands a lot of the same stuff that any Bethesda role-playing game would. It’s a long, slow hike through the great outdoors that requires some extreme patience and technical know-how. You need to persistently focus on a single goal for weeks at a time, and constantly micro-manage a seemingly never-ending inventory of doodads, all of which degrade with use and affect the overall performance of your body.

Honestly, I’m a glutton for a good adventure story and gaming is a medium that is chock full of them. It’s time I had one of my own.

It’s time to whisper “lydighet” and unlock something locked.

What inspired me to bicycle coast-to-coast? The post-apocalyptic American desert in Fallout. The kitschy and corrupt not-California of San Andreas. A certain moment with a certain song in Red Dead Redemption. Growing up to watch one of the world’s newest storytelling mediums constantly improve, mature and grow despite controversies and stereotyping is, in a word, inspiring.

I biked clear across the rest of Phoenix today, and all of my route looked like the posh suburbs I had seen outside of town.

Remember that grungy old Soundgarden video from the 90′s with all of the elongated smiling? For more than a few reasons, I was reminded of that video while touring this massive suburban metro. For a city as large as Phoenix (it’s actually the most populous city I’ve biked through so far,) it certainly don’t look like it. The skyscraper part of town covers only a scant few blocks, and the roadside scenery consisted almost entirely of residential zone. But zoom out a bit and look at Phoenix from a distance, and its size becomes apparent. So many of its houses look exactly the same, and they’re all arranged on a grid of streets that stretch tens of miles. When I would pass one block and glance down the adjacent street, all I would see were countless more of these low-rising single-family homes stretching all the way into the horizon. 

Phoenix is a bit off-putting. It’s too perfect, white and American to be true. I have a theory: this sterile and artificially domestic limbo is actually a bit insane underneath all of its expensive cars and cheap houses. It’s a vision of the American dream that can be reproduced with factory efficiency, and its not exactly what I would call “wholesome.”

Somewhere between Phoenix and Peroria, a lawn sprinklers was fruitlessly clicking away at a grassless gravel yard. Amidst the 90+ temperatures and drought conditions, I felt something in my stomach turn. I rode past an elementary school, eerily silent and motionless. Not a soul in sight. The loudspeaker was mumbling an announcement, and the only thing I was able to make out was “… and resume your normal schedule… after the Phoenix PD…”

Two white helicopters hovered hundreds of feet above the palm trees and sandy roofs, and I spotted a police car seemingly waiting on me at the next intersection.

“Can I turn right here?” I asked.

“Not now, maybe in 20 minutes or so” was the officer’s reply.

I inched forward enough to look down the street, and saw a huge blockcade of emergency vehicles parked a hundred yards down the street. At least eight cars strong– police vans, fire trucks and ambulances crowded the streets next to this school, sirens blaring.

“Whoa! I’ll, uhh, just go that way now then…” I said as I bicycled in the opposite direction.

Someone had phoned in to the police claiming bloody murder. They now suspect it to be a hoax, but at the time the police rushed to lock down the entire area.

Did I mention that I was sick throughout this whole ordeal? Something caused some extreme nausea and vomiting this morning. About two hours into the ride, I pulled over into a Jack in the Box and gastronomically ejected out all of my morning’s breakfast, plus all the water I had been drinking while riding. Mike would’ve been impressed.

My chest was on fire, it felt like my entire torso would be the next thing to come out. My legs were weak and cycling was slow, and I had a powerful headache as well. An hour later, an unquenchable thirst and hunger overwhelmed me as my now-empty stomach was helplessly grasping for nutrition. However, the slimy warm water in my bottles only made me feel worse. I’ve always been afraid this would happen while on the road. Last time this happened, I had the good fortune of being near a bathroom and bed.

This time, I at least had the good fortune of being across the street from a fast food joint. I was also only a few miles from a cheap motel. I checked myself in for the night after only bicycling 30 miles over the course of seven arduous hours.

After sleeping for nearly 14 hours straight, my heath has seemingly returned. I hope my body isn’t lying to me– with me being so close to my destination, I wouldn’t be able to stand sicking another day out.