Change of Pace

The first year we lived in the Travco we criss-crossed the country, covering almost 8,000 miles in just over eighteen months. That kind of pace is only possible when you are 100 percent traveling. Trying to work and move that fast is unsustainable. At least with my job.

I’ve been thinking about this lately because for over a year now we have covered exactly zero miles, which is also unsustainable. We’ve tried many points in between, which I’ve written about before, but to my mind, never quite found a pace that suited us.

As much as I loved traveling in the Travco, I was always haunted by a line from Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire: “You can’t see anything from a car; you’ve got to get out of the contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you’ll see something, maybe.”

I’ve found this to be more or less literally true. The speed at which you move through the world determines what you see in it. And that you must suffer to really understand.

However, I don’t think this means that you don’t see anything when you move fast. You see differently — snapshots, glimpses, like reflections in a passing window, a skimmer dipping its beak in the water. Moving slower you see more detail perhaps, but you lose those fleeting, half-caught moments of magic that are difficult to put in words. It is good to do both, though lately, being stuck in one place for the summer, I’ve been focused on the slower end of the spectrum. When you’re not moving at all, everything seems fast, even moving slowly.

It might be a disappointment to Edward Abbey, but I haven’t been walking. I’ve been riding a bike. The more I ride, the more I think, this is a really great speed to see the world. Perhaps the perfect speed if you’ve got the time.

It’s not so fast that everything rushes by, but it’s fast enough that you can cover, 40, 60, 80 miles a day, depending on terrain and elevation change, and physical capability. Perhaps not coincidentally, it’s often about the same speed as sailing, although alas you cannot ride you bike at night while sleeping. Sailing has its advantages. The best speed might be sailing with a bike when in port… but we’re not there yet.

In the mean time I’ve been exploring the dirt roads of the peninsula around us.

The more riding I’ve done with the kids, and we haven’t done much, just some exploratory afternoons, testing bikes, testing gear, testing ourselves, but the more we do it the more I think maybe I should never have stopped traveling by bike. I mean as a kid. I would never have phrased it that way, but when I think about my childhood, I realize that a lot of it revolved around going places on a bike.

From as early as I can remember, going anywhere meant riding my bike. When I was my son’s age I’d ride my bike down to the Castaways, a local tract of vacant land in my neck of suburbia. It had a cluster of Eucalyptus trees that offered shade in the summer, and from mid way up, a view of the sea. The surrounding field was full of gophers, lizards and snakes, and plenty of jumps for our BMX bikes. It’s all houses now. That’s how childhoods in California go.

I started going farther and farther afield as I got a little older, got a bigger bike. By the time I was my daughters’ age my friends and I would ride down to the beach and body surf, or surf if we could find someone with a board. When I was a little older I started going alone. I learned a lot from these journeys. I learned how to be comfortable alone, surrounded by strangers. I learned most people are helpful. I learned to bring snacks.

Then I got a car and stopped using the bike to explore.

Damn it Ed, you’re right. You’ve got to get out of the contraption. I don’t think I even thought of riding my bike anywhere after I had the car.

I don’t think I thought much about riding a bike again until my kids got bikes and I had to keep up somehow. A friend of mine gave me an old Diamond Back mountain bike from the 90s when we were out at the cabin in South Carolina and I started riding it with the kids when we hit the road again in 2021. It’s a heavy thing, the gears are rusted out. It’s slow. In the beginning that was good, it meant I wasn’t much faster than the kids. But now they’re faster than me, and certainly have better bikes.

When I had a chance to test a fancy Specialized hardtail mountain bike for work, I jumped on it. What a bike that was. Having 29+ wheels was a revelation. I understand how people ride these things all day. And while I only had 2.4 tires on it, it wasn’t hard to imagine how comfortable and nice it would be to have some 2.6 or even 3.0 tires. I was sold. Not really on the Specialized. It was too fancy for me, but on the idea of riding a bike again.

One day Elliott and I road out to a local lake where we stopped for a swim. I lay on the beach watching him out in the water thinking, this is really the perfect pace for travel, slow enough that you can stop and enjoy the land you’re moving through, fast enough to be able to cover large distances.

You’re also much closer to the reality of the world on a bike — the weather, nature, whatever you want to call it. When you’re on a bike, there’s nowhere to hide, no shelter, you’re much more in it. The heat, the sun, the rain, the dirt, the cold. You’re closer to the raw parts of life. Sometimes you suffer. Sometimes it is hard, but Ed is right, you have to crawl through the thornbush and cactus to really see anything. Life isn’t supposed to be easy.

These are the animal parts of life, the parts you can’t control, the parts that force you to endure, to adapt, to change your plans, the parts that remind you that you are a tiny thing in an immense universe. Tiny, but still a part of it. In it. Remembering that to exist at all is a miracle. These are the moments that remind you you are alive.

We came home and started looking into how to travel by bike. This is always how things start. Curiosity. How do you…. And then there are evenings spent staring at the edges of the map. That little dirt road, where does it go…? There’s only one way to find out.