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.