Ruminations 2: BIKEPACKING

Travel of any sort is revelatory and we never understand how much will be revealed to us until we hit the road. We can anticipate that there will be revelations but we can’t enumerate what they will be exactly. In the moments of traveling all becomes clear: Sights, sounds, climate, people, food, etc.  We remember why we do this.  

Bikepacking ratchets the experience up a few notches. In a country whose transportation mode is based overwhelmingly on gas-powered vehicles, being on a bike immediately puts you a bit on the outside of the culture. From this perspective the world is experienced at the speed it was meant to be experienced (in my humble opinion): not as slow as walking but certainly not at 75 mph where the passing landscape is literally blurred. The earth’s contours (up and down but also its horizontal displacements and curves) are felt to the point of exhaustion at times and pure pleasure at other times. Kind of hard to explain but I think it taps into our childhood joy of learning to ride a bike which most of us forget when we get our driver’s license.

From the perspective of a bike the people we encounter is unique to our mode of travel: there are others on bikes that share a common purpose and a natural affinity. 

There are the curious, and those who have done something similar (a 75+ year old woman in a grocery store parking lot in Columbia Falls, MT stopped me and mentioned that she and her husband used to bike from CA to UT back in the day and felt the need to tell me that!  I’m glad she did.) 

There are those who move by quickly. 

There are those that worry about you, those that show kindness and hospitality as mentioned throughout the blog. 

And there are those who yell something unintelligible out the window at you, or downshift their diesel and cover you with black smoke, or refuse to give you much room on a narrow bridge in a crosswind.  But these are a minority.

It's a terrific way to travel.

As a way of “paying forward” the kindnesses I received on this trip I would like to ask that if you are traveling in the late afternoon, or even coming home from work and see someone on a loaded bike, you can expect that he or she is coming to the end of their day, is probably pretty tired, and may need a kind word, or a bottle of water, or some other form of assistance. If you can muster the confidence, ask them how they are doing and if they need anything. Offer water or an apple. At the very least, you are likely giving them a little energy boost to make the last five or ten miles of the day, or in my case in the Great Basin, could be saving their health and their trip. It’s not much for us to do this; it can mean a world of difference to the bike packer.