seattle, WA

it's a beautiful overcast evening here in seattle, and tom and i are staying with our friend keith in the capitol hill district. we just got home from a barbeque where we ate many turkey burgers and displayed our wicked tan lines to the delight and disgust of the other attendees.

the trip is over. we arrived in at the western edge of anacortes, WA one day early, around 6:00 pm local time on friday, and spent a half hour silently considering the sound before us, nursing a bottle of champagne produced in the columbia river region of eastern washington. we buy local when we can.

keith came up from seattle and the three of us caught the last ferry to san juan island, where we had a celebration fish fry and several pitchers of beer, played pool and gradually became best pals with a gregarious local named jimmy. jimmy is in a wheelchair; he rolled right up to our table and introduced himself as a wanted man. he said we could made a cool $100,000 if we brought him to the right people. he also said we were welcome to stay with him as long as we were comfortable with coke, hookers, and his "small arsenal."

after carefully weighing our options, we made for the county fairgrounds and slept in a tent that apparently was to serve as a makeshift barn for an upcoming 4-H convention. we just laid our sleeping bags out on the hay and, well, hit it.

after a leisurely breakfast in friday harbor, we rode about 10 miles to lime kiln state park, where we clambered over the rocks, whacked each other with big pieces of a pipe-like plant called bull kelp, and waited in vain for orcas to appear. but late in the afternoon, as we were riding out of the park and heading for the ferry, word went out that a pod was rounding the southern tip of the island. we pulled off about a mile up the road, stashed our bikes, and scrambled down to the water's edge. with no sign of the whales, we stripped down to the buff and jumped in the freezing surf. as a kayak tour suddenly came around the bend, we redressed and sought higher ground, eventually catching sight of dorsal fins slowly crowning above the waves and a curtain of spray thrown up by a blow.

i am having a hard time describing the feeling of arrival, even to myself. i don't feel triumph or relief. nor am i disappointed: i don't wish that the journey here were different than it was, nor do i wish my reaction now were somehow more extreme. in "travels with charley," john steinbeck wrote this:

"Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperment, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you can control it."

i'm not there; i haven't relinquished control yet, not by a long shot. but i hold this end to "policing and coercion" as my goal, and i am certainly aware of the myriad ways in which this trip "took us." at the barbeque earlier tonight, i found myself confiding in a total stranger that, while tom and i were probably in peak physical condition by the time we hit chicago, the mental and emotional work of life on the bike continued right up until i tasted the sour and vital water of puget sound. and that work sure as hell isn't done. i still have to wake up and figure out how to approach tomorrow: how to cultivate gratitude for the unexpected, how to keep up hope that i'll be better, how to treat other people, how to really taste. and what words to use. yes, i am proud that we rode our bikes here. but i am also aware that our arrival at the pacific solves nothing; these questions come back just as surely as the wind and the next climb: they can't be resolved by some grand symbolic act.

i will post more in the next day or two, perhaps addenda to previous posts that were constrained by time, and hopefully some pictures. until then.

day 49: omak, WA

i only have three minutes, so i will say only that, to my right, a bilingual storyteller is singing, signing, and making animal sounds. only half-listening, i am drawn in by such declarations as "YO QUIERO QUEEEEESSSSSSSOOOOOOO. I WANT SOME CHEESE," or "GERTRUDE IS A VERY STRANGE COW. COWS DON'T RIDE BICYCLES!"

on the other hand, we do. and we have about 250 miles to ride them to the pacific ocean. in other words, we'll be in anacortes on saturday. i am accepting your recommendations on champagne.

day 46: sandpoint, ID

early this morning we waved goodbye to montana. more accurately, i waved goodbye to a sign that said "leaving montana," and the back and forth motion of my hand was a simple gesture of my mixed feelings about the passage. on the one hand, montana is host to many of our trip's most arresting sights and memorable characters; i grieved a little for our passing on. on the other hand, the dead-flat middle is a desert of spiritual angst and ennui, and the westerly "breezes" are proof that my family and friends don't love me and that God regrets ever knitting together in my mother's womb. good riddance! at 667 miles across, montana's breadth exceeds that of all preceding (multi-state) stages and totals nearly one fifth of the tour's total mileage. as i was invited by another sign 50 yards down the road, i feel welcomed by idaho, but unsure how to conceptualize my relationship to a state whose panhandle we will cross in a half-day's ride.

yesterday's ride took two detours: we stopped about 12 miles north of libby to hike down to the kootenai falls and the swinging bridge that spans the rapids. after another hour or so on the bike, we climbed three switchbacking miles above the banks of bull lake to the ross creek giant cedars national park. after pb and j, we dawdled under the canopy of cedar and hemlock, playing in burned out trunks, posing for pictures and frequently exclaiming the awesomeness of the place. the persistence of nature's cycles was everywhere in view: the lightning-struck, termite-eaten trunk lay on the forest floor like a capsized mast, overgrown with mosses, fungi. a sign alerted us that even the rocks are being broken down by the conspiracy of lichen and dividing ice. life so intimate with death, and death in its own time. i thought of the first stanza of elizabeth bishop's poem "the shampoo."

The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.

in closing, perhaps it is appropriate to note that -- precious wonder -- our passage into idaho was also a successful journey back in time, exactly one hour into the past. we are now on pacific standard time. time can only move forward for us now, until we reach the coast.

day 44: whitefish, MT

i don't know exactly what to report: we've been up on the mountain. yesterday, tom and i have crossed the continental divide at logan's pass in glacier national park. in all, we spent 3 spectacular days in glacier: we have looked out over the crystal surface of st. mary's lake and seen rocks thrown up and worn down by time staring back. we have seen the clear teal tint of glacial silt in the cold rush of the melt, and we have dipped our hands in it, washed our faces in its purifying spray. we have seen a baby mountain goat not bigger than a toy poodle lunching on a shrub.

when the pioneers arrived, this must have seemed the promised land. and only 200 years after lewis and clark trod by, that promise is almost wasted: consequent to our global climate catastrophe, scientists predict that the slow, majestic, stone-crushing glaciers we saw yesterday will be gone by 2030, spilled out into the slush of memory.

day 40: chester, MT

after many trials and tribulations, we have again gained access to the miraculous interwebs. i imagine i will spend some of the afternoon's ride reflecting on my gmail inbox as a kind of "home in motion," which is to say, accessible anywhere. as we keep pedaling and the scenery keeps changing, i am feeling more and more connected to my bike as some sort of silent companion, and i'm surprised to find a similar sense of security in the digital world.

in an earlier post, i mentioned that the wind was at our backs through the entire state of south dakota, and i'm tempted to believe that thanks are due to the brothers of the blue cloud abbey and their prayers. with gratitude, i must however report that their spiritual jurisdiction does not extend into the northern territory. we have been facing a headwind since crossing the border.

in montana, the locals refer to this meteorological phenomenon as "the breezes" or, more impersonally, "it's supposed to blow all week." the latter is charming for its multiple levels of meaning, the former for its understatement. one local, after informing us that we were riding the wrong way, conspiratorially intoned that some weeks prior, the breezes had thrown 4 rail cars off the track. this was a valuable reorientation of perspective for us: riding 8 mph over 70 miles suddenly seemed less like an emotional thrashing and more like a tentative victory over the elements. it was also terrifying. three days ago i was riding too closely behind tom when the wind blew him into my front wheel; i went down and now have some nice scrapes on my left knee: the wind's wounds. lately i have been trying to deal with the wind's power by imagining its indifference towards us. it helps in develop my own indifference towards it. the wind doesn't care which way we're going, so we might as well go.

day 34: williston, ND

this will be extremely brief, as this library closes in 3 minutes. a few highlights since we last spoke:

1. having the wind at our backs throughout south dakota. thanks for your prayers, blue cloud brothers!

2. the 4th of july in mobridge, SD. we went to a RODEO.

3. riding through the "little missouri national grasslands" and the "theodore roosevelt national park" today. beautiful buttes and canyons, striped with every color. geology in motion.

day 29: groton, SD

this is another tiny public library: the bookshelves give way to the town offices. there are two friendly women--civil servants both--sitting at the semi-circular children's table stuffing envelopes. on the shelf above the computer here are the last two decades' legion baseball trophies, groton t-shirts and caps for sale, and a special shelf for the entire harry potter series.

tom and i have spent the last day and half at the Blue Cloud Abbey, a wonderful Benedictine community hidden in the rolling hills of eastern south dakota. the hospitality these men showed to us is hard to describe: all were very concerned that we had enough to eat, generously answered our questions, and even blessed our bikes and our journey. the much-needed day of rest was everything i had hoped for; we had ample time for quiet reflection, a swim in the lake with fr. michael the organist, and A NAP. br. sebastian, the guestmaster, took tom and i on a hike to the small camp that the abbey owns. 66 years old and approaching the 50th anniversary of his vows, sebastian led us across the prairie pointing out cowflops and local vegetation: buckbrush, creeping jenny. then he showed us how to hop a fence with grace.

it was difficult to leave after breakfast this morning. today is the abbot's feast day, so there was a celebratory atmosphere in the abbey: br. paul made special eggs over-easy and conversation was permitted; the refectory was quickly filled with good-natured barbs and bursts of laughter. these men are seeking God's peace, and they are doing a wonderful job of sharing that peace with their guests. talking with br. benet about his writing, watching br. paul close his eyes, incline his ear to something i couldn't hear and sing the psalms from memory, having more and more food pressed into our hands for today's lunch: i feel blessed to have had this opportunity to put our very very short journey in perspective. rolando, a brother at a guatemalan monastery visiting blue cloud for the year, sent us off by gently grasping our hands and stressing each syllable of beautifully broken english: "God.........with....you. God....with you." i almost cried. no verb was needed to complete that phrase: for these brothers, God is a verb.