The last 10 percent

To a detail-oriented person, eliminating the last 10% of the contents of a house is harder than the preceding 90%.

Once all the items with obvious destinations are moved, and all the items with an obvious value have been sold, the house remains cluttered with things that are complicated.

For example a scrapbook of old photos:  Should you store it somewhere, or should you scan it and then throw it away?  You need to get rid of your scanner too, so you have to decide now if you ever want it scanned.  Instead of throwing it away should you mail it to someone?  Perhaps you could take out a couple of the photos you really like, and then throw away the rest.  If you scan them, should you email copies to someone?  Upload them somewhere?  Or just leave them on a hard drive stuffed in a storage unit?  Until you make this decision, the house cannot be empty.

At some point you reach that weird stage of the process where you’re second-guessing your regular habits.  You open up the dishwasher full of clean dishes and ask yourself:  Should I really be stacking these back in the cabinet?  You notice that you’re down to one bar of soap and you ask:  Should I bother getting another?

And there is a stage even beyond this, where you realize you have done something for the last time and now a chore is looming before you that you never encountered before.  This is the last shower I’ll be taking here; it’s time to take down the shower curtain and trash it.  This is the last piece of toast I’ll make with this toaster; time to shake out the crumbs, wipe it off, and set it on the curb.  This is the last time I’ll be locking the back door.  Find the spare key that’s hidden under the flower pot, and stick it back on the ring.

Take all the hooks off the walls.  Unplug the fridge.  Roll up the old welcome mat and stuff it in the garbage.

There is never a time when these last few chores don’t feel sad, even if the place was the scene of suffering or discontent and we are happy to be done with it.  The good feelings come from our anticipation of a better time somewhere else.  For these final moments in the old place, we think about how it might have been different.  We never enjoy erasing ourselves, or confronting the fact that there are no more choices to make.  We did our best – or maybe not – but either way we are done.

It’s that last 10% that feels like forever.

An Intimate Connection

When I’m on a bicycle tour, I have a more intimate physical relationship with my bicycle than with any living person.

I know Valoria inside and out.  I am in physical contact with her for hours almost every day.  I look her over in detail for damage.  I get her grease all over my hands when I make repairs.  She gets my sweat on her when I ride.

Wherever I stop, she is right next to me.  I pedal for ten miles and stop, and there she is again. She’s been with me on mountaintops, deep inside canyons, halfway through deserts.  She’s been next to my table at street-side cafés in foreign lands. She’s been with me through lightning storms and torrential rain and stupefying heat.  She has lit my way in total darkness.  I’ve leaned on her for support, used her as a dining table, a work bench, a footstool, a windbreak, a drying rack, a shopping basket.

She carries the food, water, and gear I use to survive. She is incredibly high technology. She is simple enough that I can take her completely apart.  She is freedom.  She is health.  She will kill me if I don’t look after her.

My closest parallel is the rancher and their horse.  But even the rancher doesn’t know their horse like I know Valoria.

She was stolen from me once.  After weeks of anguish and frantic searching, I rebuilt her body from scratch, from a hundred parts, sandblasted and powder coated, recreating every cable and cog, from the headlight mount I formed with plastic epoxy down to the stickers on the rear fender.  It took months.  Then I arranged candles in a circle around myself and the bike, placed a hand on the frame, and willed the spirit of Valoria to return from wherever she had gone, into this new body. I am not a religious person, but this was a necessary ritual.

Then I cast the entire event out of my mind as though she had never been stolen.  Only rarely do I remember it, and as I see it, I’ve been riding the same bike for ten years and her spirit just moved.

Some people feel like a part of them is missing if they don’t have their smartphone.  That’s sort of how it is.  Even when Valoria isn’t with me, if she wasn’t somewhere, locked up securely or safe indoors, I would feel vulnerable and incomplete, like a beaver in a dried up stream.

Together we conquer the horizon!

Are you trying to prove something?

In conversation with myself.

This is one of my all-time favorite comics.  Credit to Nathan W Pyle

Do you think that a bike tour is the gateway to a more interesting life?

Do you think that the interesting things you can see from the seat of a bike make up for all the time you spent at your job, staring at screens, shut inside yourself? Staying up late because you felt unsatisfied at the end of another day spent working, saving up money so you can have an adventure?

Sure there is adventure, and good conversation. Stories to tell, fresh air, exercise, good food. Always a new thing rolling down from the horizon. There’s no denying that a bike tour could bring happiness. But why this particular choice? Any why persevere, through the hard parts — the inevitable rain and cold and hunger, the long empty patches of road where there is no one to talk to, nothing to chew on but your own curious thoughts — and the times when you’re deeply uncomfortable, when you wish for the chance to simply stop and put down roots somewhere, with an urgency that belies it as a human need like food and company… What compels you to spend your limited time on Earth doing this thing?

Is it ego? Are you trying to prove something to yourself?

Imagine you’ve already met your goal; made your journey, and you’re back home in your daily routine again. What have you proved except that you can exploit the available technology in a somewhat unconventional means, to go on what most everyone around you will see as a weird extended vacation? One that most people would not choose for themselves, and would not be able to relate to? Because really, people do not like riding their bikes as much as you do. They will not get it. You seem like a nut-job more than an adventurer, placing yourself in danger on the road, especially when everyone around you is “getting there” faster in a car.

People smile and say “that sounds cool,” and sincerely wish you luck. But make no mistake: They don’t relate. What you’re doing isn’t cool.

Likewise, you can’t be in it for the rebellion, for the “coolness points” of doing something different that sets you apart from others. There’s no happiness in competing for novelty — only a caustic version of pride. No matter how interesting your bike tour actually becomes, there are people all over the Earth who have spent their time doing far more interesting things, far more often, and being so dang humble about it that you don’t even know they exist unless you blunder into them and talk awhile. You will probably meet a bunch of them as you go.

No, if happiness does emerge from this journey, it comes from meeting your own personal expectations.

What do you expect?

What sets those expectations? You weren’t born with them, you learned them. Where did they come from? Consider your personal history.

You grew up playing adventure games, traveling far away in your imagination — and surrounded by the redwood forest, deep and quiet, blurring the line between your imagination and real places. You grew up riding a bicycle, and have come back to it in adulthood, integrating it with your daily life, working against the car-focused environment and economy surrounding you. Visions of far away lands have been brought to you by the internet, and a flood of practical information as well. This age of scientific wonders, and the accumulated toil of countless generations before it, has knit the world together with roads and airlines and shipping routes, and the gear to explore them is affordable. It’s all there, visible online.

You see a goal within reach, but not too close, like a mountaineer scheming to reach a summit “because it’s there.” Just how far could you ride? Just how far could your mind range? You calibrate your expectations and your happiness based on what’s available. You make it up as you go along, and perhaps you’re even conscious of how arbitrary that is.

It feels like these threads have been converging over years, over decades even. How much of your life, in retrospect, has been about this idea?

But then again, how much of this is just selective remembering — a story you’re making up about your distant past to justify your actions? A lot of it, probably. Why make up the story? Maybe it’s not your past but your present life that holds the answers.

Lately you’ve been spending way too much time immobilized behind a desk. That desk is the centerpiece of a routine you follow almost every day. It goes: Get up, ride to work, stare at screens, talk about programming and science with nice people, eat some food – hopefully something nourishing – spend a little time with loved ones, read a book or watch a film, run a few basic errands, and then go to bed for a night of unquiet dreams. Then start the routine again.

It’s not a bad routine. In fact, it’s a routine that most people on Earth would happily assemble and roll with for their entire lives. There are undeniably good things about it; things you cannot pack up and take with you on two wheels.

But it’s still a routine. And there’s no doubt you would break this routine if you started a long bicycle trip. If you picked yourself up out of your home, moved thousands of miles outside your comfort zone, dropped down in an unfamiliar land with some hardware and a map, and had to contend with the elements and interact with the locals to move yourself across the globe, your routine would be totally demolished. It’s impossible to stay in one place while riding a bike, so a desk is out of the question. (Same with computer screens. Only the tiniest of screens fits on a bike and if you stare at it for more than a few seconds you fly into a ditch.)

You would be forced to witness the world, rather than think about it abstractly like you have for too many years. And perhaps that’s exactly what you want. Maybe it isn’t happiness you’re seeking, or the execution of a grand plan; maybe it’s an intervention. Life in one place has gotten too easy, and you used to have expectations for how it would all arrange itself, but life outmaneuvered and outlasted your expectations, and now you’ve drifted into this weird place nobody warned you about, and been seized by this weird idea as a means of escape.

What do you want?

Is this a “midlife crisis?” What’s your crisis; being bored? If you did exactly what you’re doing now but you were 20 years old, even motivated by the same sense of boredom, would you doubt yourself? Would others?

“Go out there and explore!” they would say. “You’re young, you don’t need to think about anything permanent at your age.”

What about now? Instead they would say, “You’re old. You’re supposed to be settled into something and know what you want out of life.” And “settled in” means, among other things, staying in one place.

You’ve been settled before. More than once.

You’ve managed to work your way into plenty of situations that seemed ideal at the time – jobs, relationships, living spaces – and moved on from them eventually. Your only regret each time was not doing it before things got as bad or as boring as they did. Not everything requires escape of course; some things just require difficult adjustments, and then they continue in another way. But to pursue this particular crazy idea – a long-range bike trip – you are taking apart things in your life that are good as well as bad. That’s obsession. And probably stupidity as well.

People all over the world struggle mightily just to claim a fraction of the resources and connections you have acquired and kept during your life, let alone things that you have accidentally or deliberately wasted. If the extreme good fortune of your position is not apparent to you now, it will be apparent soon, because this journey will put you in close contact with many of those less fortunate. How will you feel then, about what you left behind? How stupid will you look to the people you meet, when you try to explain yourself?

But on the other hand…

What if you don’t have a choice?

Life is full of contradictions and it should not be surprising that something that seems like a really bad idea also seems like a really great one.

You’re well into your forties. By all accounts your life is more than half done. Way more, if you think of it in terms of the aging of your mind and memory. What kind of joke would the back half of your existence be if you spent years on the cusp of a journey that you could quite easily have taken, only to turn around and creep back into your house, close the door, and keep taking the paycheck and eating the fat meals?

Even if it’s a difficult journey to finish, it’s trivially easy to start. Just get on the bike and keep going. People have bicycled all around the world hundreds of years before you were born, and (you hope) thousands and thousands more will during your lifetime and long after. If they can do it, so can you. Do you really need a reason? Ego, identity, change, intervention, escape… Why are you so worried about it?

It doesn’t matter. Possible answers to the question of “why” erupt like weeds – fresh ones every day – and you pull them up, inspect them, and throw them in a pile. The only thing you are certain of is the obsession itself. Unprompted, irreducible, and stubbornly refusing to fade. You’ve spent so long thinking about it, outlining scenarios and testing hardware and saving money, that at this point if you didn’t do it, you might not have much of an identity to fall back on. You’d be some vague person with a job and a house and some good relationships who thought about something really hard for years to the point where it began to seriously interfere with and alter their life … and then dropped it.

Are you afraid of what you’ll learn?  Are you afraid in general?  For how much longer are you willing to put up with the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously preparing to go and planning to stay? The world is absolutely flooded with opportunities to miss. There is no shortage of them, only a shortage of time. Past a certain level of preparedness, the days you spend preparing turn into their own thing. Are you more comfortable with preparing than you are with actually doing? Are you comfortable in purgatory, and questioning your motives so you’ll stay?

Get on with it. Whatever happens – good or bad, or even just boring – it will be your choice. You’d better be okay with it.

Another long journey

It’s already obvious that I am pretty obsessed with bicycle touring.  As time and funds have permitted in my life, I’ve taken longer and more complicated trips, the longest being about two months. Occasionally I hear about other bike tourists who are so hardcore and obsessed that they have cycled across entire continents or even around the world. That idea has always felt bold and intimidating, but not for me. The last time it came up was seven years ago, and it dropped into the back of my head and percolated there until I forgot about it.

Fast-forward a bunch of time, to 2018. Last year, I was feeling stagnated in my job, tired of my living space, and bored with the geography of the Bay Area. I’d been obsessively playing the computer game Civilization V, and the art deco monuments and colorful pastel mountains and rivers had colonized my imagination. The world was full of light and conflict. I’d just finished a loopy sci-fi novel by Stephen Baxter about spacefaring Roman legions and moon-dwelling Incan tribes, and though the premise was absurd, the collision of remote culture and high technology was inspiring. It came up again in a surreal novel by Dan Simmons: Quantum technology and the siege of Troy, on Mars! My mind was an avalanche of sandstone and granite ruins knotted with ivy and wildflowers, teeming with people in exotic clothes, trading or fighting or building together.

I was seized with the urge to take a vacation, and go far out into the world and touch the artifacts of history. But while I was still working, it would have to be a typical Silicon Valley “get away from the desk” vacation, and I knew how those usually went. I’d be in a rush, moving between various modes of transport, skipping across thousands of miles to hit a packaged highlight reel of well-traveled attractions, trying to use the experience as a hammer to smash some dents into a brain shaped by months and months of software engineering. The vacation would not be for its own sake, it would be to prepare me for another six months back at work.

I knew that would not do. These ideas were calling for a bigger change. I spent several weekends biking around and sketching in the beautiful Mountain View cemetery at the end of Piedmont Avenue, enjoying the fresh air and the quiet, sun-warmed granite monoliths. I began browsing around in Google Earth, tracking down the cities I’d conquered and the wonders I’d built in Civilization, and reading about the history and geography of far off places. Samarkand… In the first edition of Civilization it’s the seat of power of the Mongolians. In Civilization V it’s a powerful, independent city-state usually located in desert. Where is it really? Here it is, in Uzbekistan. There’s a country named Uzbekistan? Wow, I didn’t even know that. How could there be a country that I do not know the name of, at my age?

I started thinking a lot about my picture of the world, and how much of it was based on unverified assumptions, convenient metaphors, current political fashions, and apocryphal stories. I felt intensely ignorant and confined. I needed to break out of my routine, and experience the world outside in a direct and personal way. I needed to crowbar myself out of an existence that was too comfortable. If I didn’t have the means now, when would I ever? Suddenly, the idea of a long-range bike tour popped up from the depths of my mind, threw confetti in my face, and said, “hey idiot, remember me?”

At first I didn’t know what to do. The idea was equal parts enthralling and terrifying, giving me a sense of ambivalence, but it was also sticking hard in my brain like a flyer glued to the windshield of a car. A real long-range bike tour means leaving the Bay Area for a long time. It means spending my savings, and it means I need to rent out my current place to help pay for the house, otherwise my savings would vanish immediately. It means quitting or renegotiating my job. It means being away from my friends and family. Most important of all, it means not having a significant other, because what girlfriend in her right mind would actually be interested in a crazy journey like this?

For a while I hoped the idea would diminish, as it had before, so I wouldn’t have to confront its practical details. But it just set up camp and grew larger and rowdier like a Greek army laying siege to the city of my mind. Eventually, during an intense discussion where I felt encouraged to take risks, I spoke out loud about the idea for the first time.  It was like opening the city gates.  As I heard myself describe it, trying to convey the intensity of it to another person, the Greek army rushed inside, and suddenly I no longer belonged to myself.  I belonged to this journey.

So. I intend to begin a long bicycle trip carrying all my gear, starting in Iceland, with a destination of England. Perhaps by then I will be sick of traveling. Perhaps I will settle in England, or return to California. Or perhaps I will continue on, through Spain and France. Perhaps I will circumnavigate the planet. Who knows?

The tentative departure date is 100 days from now.

This raises a lot of questions, like “Are you crazy?” and, “How long will this take?” and, “Are you aware of these things we have, called cars?”, and of course, “Do you know how dangerous this is?”

I’ll answer that last question up front by saying, yes, this is dangerous.  In the coming months I’m not going to talk about the danger much, because it’s not something I want to dwell on, but I should at least say that if I do end up frozen solid in a snowdrift, or dead at the bottom of a ravine with my equipment scattered around me, or – most likely – squashed flat by a truck like Wile E. Coyote in the desert, that this is something I accepted as a possibility when I started.  And I chose to do it anyway.

Yes, it’s a fatalistic attitude.  But in the time leading up to this journey I have become so obsessed with the idea of attempting it that it has started to feel like an inevitability.  Like a part of my identity.  If I was any less obsessed maybe I would choose to stay at home. Keep circling in that worn-down trench between house, workplace, and supermarkets; maybe take a series of smaller risks. But I honestly feel like I don’t have that choice any more. The Greek army has plundered the city, and is running it now.  If I am fated for the snowdrift, or the ravine, or the logging truck, then so be it!

There’s also the possibility that I will grow to hate this journey after I embark. After three or four months on the bicycle, toiling up hills in the middle of nowhere, I may suddenly snap, dump my equipment in a pawnshop, and buy a ticket back to the states.  That is an acceptable outcome.  But I’m also pretty stubborn, so — we’ll see!

The night sky on the river.

We must, most definitely, see.

Reasons NOT to go on a bike tour!

Map of semi-charted waters, courtesy of Ducktales.
It’s scary out there. Why not just stay home?

I like to think that compared to most other types of tourists, bicycle tourists are more concerned with the environmental and social costs of their travel. In other words, more likely to feel guilty. I’ve struggled with my own share of this guilt and tried to address the biggest reasons for it:

Bad or selfish things about bicycle touring:

Instead of spending money on bike parts and campsites, couldn’t I donate my money to a good charity, where it would benefit more people?

There’s no escaping the fact that it would be more charitable of me to stay indoors, with my nose to the grindstone, and pass every extra dollar on to those less fortunate. But I also need to attend to my own well-being. Time on my bicycle is “me time”, selfish by design, like any other grand adventure such as climbing a mountain, dancing in a musical, or struggling to beat a master at chess. It’s not something I do to survive, it’s something I do to live.

But being a tourist doesn’t produce anything!

When I’m on a bike tour I do not intend to stay permanently out of the workforce; in fact I know I would soon go crazy living that way. After basking in the warm glow of making a real contribution to important work, I’ve discovered that it feeds my adult soul in a way no perpetual indulgence ever could. I can’t be just a tourist.

But isn’t my desire for travel as entertainment an embarrassing example of western decadence?

Sensing the pattern here? Eco-conscious bike tourists are experts at the self-directed guilt trip! Yes, travel for reasons other than survival and work is decadent. But…

I’m reminded of a certain political figure from Alaska, who was big in the 2000’s. She stood in front of a convention and declared, with a self-satisfied smile, “When my kids graduated from high school, I didn’t send them on some backpacking trip around Europe for the summer. No, they got jobs.” The audience applauded her. Take that, you elite liberal snobs!

A few years later, after she became a multi-millionaire, she loaded her entire family onto a converted tour-bus and took them on a meandering joyride all over the country.

I fully admit that my own vacation time is decadent compared to the situation endured by millions of less fortunate people, but I can swear at least one thing to you: I will not be a stinking hypocrite about it.

It’s a bit weird living in a place where you get constant first-hand exposure to the extremes of poverty and wealth. In the same day, I’ve met with the CEO of a billion-dollar corporation in a glass-and-steel office, and then hours later talked to a ragged man standing barefoot in a homeless camp (and shared some of my food with him.) Sometimes it seems like taking any time or pleasure for yourself is a crime, in a world with such imbalance. Other times it seems like you’re guaranteed to go crazy unless you do.

But the constant motion of touring doesn’t provide in-depth exposure to any one place or people, does it?

I feel like my career as a computer programmer has given me tunnel-vision, and even though I am surrounded by a city full of people who know very little about computers and nevertheless make a respectable living, I have no concrete idea of what their work feels like.

Perhaps I used to as a teenager, when I would come home exhausted and sticky from working a fast-food grill, or when my hands began to corrode from constant washing between shelving groceries and serving customers at the ice cream counter. But now those days are far away, and I am cocooned in a quiet, cerebral career that pays the bills without struggle.

The kind of bike touring I like to do involves setting a start and a destination, and then taking however long it takes to get between them. Having the chance to pause wherever I am and dig deeper is important to me, and I think it will also help me get more of the perspective I feel I’m lacking.

Also, I know I’m too much of a homebody to do this perpetually. During the downtime, here and there, perhaps I can do other things to sustain the connections I make along the way. Follow up with conversations; circle back a bit.

A website about bike touring?

Me, blogging in the year 2060

As a kid, I kept a diary well before there was an internet to blog on. I’ve stuck with it because I’ve discovered that the habit of collecting my thoughts helps me squeeze more meaning and satisfaction out of life. I like riding around on my bike, and I’ve got a bit of an autobiographical streak, so naturally, I put up a blog about bicycling.

Putting this stuff online, where friends and family can see it, is a way of making myself more accountable for the process. I like the results and I like working on it. Plus I have some vague idea in the back of my mind that it might serve as a resource or inspiration for other people who want to try bike touring.

Of course, there are arguments against blogging, just as there are arguments against bike touring itself:

Won’t I feel compelled to maintain it instead of exploring “in the moment?”

This is a possibility. I like putting in the time to write but there does need to be balance. If I find myself turning down the chance to explore so I can catch up with a writing backlog, I should ease up on the writing and just take pictures or mutter into a voice memo instead. I’ve done some work with gadgets to make the process efficient — scripts to process photos and GPS logs, for example. There’s more I could be doing there.

If you make your journey public, people who want to harm you can find you!

In my previous trips I’ve discovered that the real threat is not premeditated actions from a distance. It’s opportunistic locals who see me passing on the road, or see me dining in a restaurant, and feel like messing with an outsider. Also, making my location available online might actually help my friends figure out what happened if I end up tied to a tree somewhere. (Presumably after being held at gunpoint and ordered to “squeal like a piggie!!” or whatever.)

Isn’t blogging about this stuff just a way to show off?

I know plenty of people who have better gear, better legs, and more distance traveled than I could ever hope for.

Everyone’s got adequate cause for humility.

But by putting up my own thing, I’m making yet another island of information which would be more useful if spread around elsewhere.

Now this is an interesting point. Ken Kifer’s Bike Pages and Sheldon Brown’s Technical Pages are wonderful resources that every cyclist should explore, and if I can make a meaningful edit or addition to those, why shouldn’t I just contact the creators directly? That way, more people could benefit from what I learn, instead of the relative few who might stumble across this site.

Perhaps I should look into that once I’ve got some decent content up here.