Colleen's Journal: Week Twelve

Well, sort of.  Fernley to the middle of nowhere, from whence we hitched a ride to Carson City.  But I'm glad we did so.

Today was improbable on several fronts, the most obvious of which would be the physical task of biking into a headwind of about 25-30 mph and the least describable of which would be the monumental emotions still pinballing around in me after Burning Man.

I promised y'all some highlights.  I'm writing this several days later, and I don't know if that might make me less incomprehensible, by shaving off the topmost layers of glory and pain, or remove the patina of glory and pain and leave me just as incomprehensible but more boring and mundane.  Either way, I know in advance that it's a preposterous task, trying to communicate any of this.  In a way, that's fitting.  My camp was called "TOTEM," the acronym for "Temple of the Eternal Mysteries," a phrase handed to me on a platter by our founder, workhorse, and demigod, Chuck Nichols.  Eternal mysteries are those things which cannot be described or explained, merely experienced for oneself - such as sex, childbirth, death.  Among those mysteries is Burning Man itself, a phoenix of a city that contains within itself both infinity and the essence of ephemerality, gifts of the self that outweigh anything that can be purchased in the so-called real world, the yang of an incredibly harsh and unforgiving environment and a yin composed of the best of humanity, of tens of thousands of people fused together and bringing out the most creative and lunatic and inexplicable and heart-breakingly beautiful in each other.  I was there for thirteen days, from helping to build our camp, to giving some of the most amazing massages I've ever had the privilege to participate in, to dancing-cuddling-talking-weeping all night with friends whom I did not know a few days previously and now cannot imagine my life without, and finally to helping to dismantle the physical remains of an ineffably gorgeous experience.  I saw beauty beyond anything I've known before, both of people and of what they've wrought and of what that inspires in others.  I saw a group of almost-complete-strangers come together to create a tremendous gift to the city, of providing massage much of the day and night, pouring themselves into their work and then unable to tear themselves away from that kind of connection and holding each other through the nights.  I heard music that moved within me like an unborn child, spontaneous and completely unself-conscious.  I received gifts as simple as necklaces and glitter and cookies to things that cannot be given a price or a description.

For the duration of my time there, I became the girl I always, always want to be.  I was beautiful, strong, joyous, giddy with the pleasure of being alive and connecting so deeply with so many people.  I gave a four-hour long massage, something which I would not be capable of in my normal life and which most people could not ask from me and would not have the capacity to receive.  I found myself so enriched and magnified by what people asked, and the more they asked, the more I became, the more I was capable of giving, and the more wondrous our interchange became.  I ran around in a sarong and a piece of silk, or just sunscreen, or the beautiful braids and glowsticks that my campmates concocted for me.  I ate from the stores that people had brought and prepared, received massages that lulled me into trances, showered (only twice) in a couple of gallons of water, limped around the playa on my bad foot with people who were infinitely patient with me, danced ecstatically to fabulous rave music, watched the progression of the stars and the moon's waxing to the full, helped to burn art projects, endured dust storms that left me blind to anything more than three feet in front of me, and was filled to bursting with gratitude, love, timelessness, and peace.  Eventually it became too much, and the overflow of emotion left me weeping for the last three days I was there.

Every single person from TOTEM that I asked said that they would absolutely have to be back next summer, doing the same thing.  Every one.  I already know exactly what I'm doing then, and who with, and it's going to be a long fifty weeks until I'm back on the playa again.  I have never known such an ephemeral home or family, and I doubt I will ever experience a more immediate or complete one.

We were given a ride back to Fernley yesterday by two of our campmates.  We spent the evening trying to clean some of the dust off ourselves, our clothes, and every piece of equipment we brought with us - except, of course, the computer, safely ensconced in a drybag inside a car.

We set off from Fernley, and I felt paradoxically enervated and glorified.  I was glad to get back on the road, do something physical, remove myself entirely from the sphere of my time at Burning Man.  The end result was that I felt uncharacteristically serene all day - and it was not a day for feeling serene in.  It was a pretty sucky day, actually.  We got a late start, dealing with directions, dust choking our bikes, and postal pickup.  From Fernley to Silver Springs, the road was clearly not intended for bikers, being graced with a rumble strip across the entire shoulder.  The wind picked up in the late morning, coming like a vengeance from the southwest - and we were heading first south and then west.  Oh, and Molly's trailer was stolen our last day at Burning Man (yes, yes, there are maggots even in paradise), so we had to ship home all our camping gear and consolidate the rest into one trailer.  She carried the trailer first, I tried to block the wind the best I could (staying on the rumble strip), and we inched forward in the dry and unpopulated Nevada hills.  Since we didn't have camping gear, our options were somewhat limited, and since the wind became more and more fierce, we kept having to revise our expectations as to how far we'd get.  Woodfords!  No, Genoa.  No, Carson City...?

We turned directly into the wind, the dust in which would have astonished me had I not just spent my last day and a half in enormous white-out storms on the playa.  And it became clear that we would not make it to Carson City.  I had taken on the trailer, and I'm not the butch goddess Molly is; we were making between 5 and 7 mph, pedalling as hard as we could, stopping every couple of miles, barely able to converse when side by side.  We hadn't had a day of wind like that since New York.  It was brutal.  And yet, even with all that, I felt this unconquerable peace.  I was still on the cusp of crying all the time for wanting to be with TOTEM, wanting Burning Man not to be over, but dealing with the situation itself?  My response to every hurdle seemed to be "whatever."  In the best possible way, "Whatever."  Normally there's a little bitchy voice-over about everything annoying me - my butt hurts, my knee hurts, my water is warm, ow there goes my shoulder, yadda yadda - but now, I just didn't care.  I just pedalled.  And when I did the math and said, we aren't going to make it all the way to Carson City today and there's nothing before it, we stopped and flagged down a pickup and got a ride in.  We biked about 33 and loafed about 20, but I didn't care.  It gave us more time to do laundry, catch up a bit on email, and rest.

Tomorrow, something more akin to normalcy.  Whatever normalcy is going to be, from here on out...

The least auspicious state crossing we've had, kids.  Not even a sign to alert us to the fact that we're now in the Late Great State of gold, hippies, entertainment moguls, road rage, insta-billionaires, and plastic surgery.  Not a huzzah, not a fanfare, not even a blip on the radar.  We finally realized that we must have already passed in and looked around, bemused.  "This looks oddly familiar," I said, of the brown hills and sagebrush ringing us.  "Kind of just like Nevada."

But it didn't stay that way, because today we ascended over 3500 feet, to Carson Summit, 8574 feet.  Hence, changes in flora, along with everything else.  This was the second-largest gain in altitude we've had on this trip, the largest of course being Loveland Pass (5000 feet up, to 12,000).  We'd only been back on the road for a day, but we'd tried to keep our muscles in shape with some minor biking and squats at Burning Man, so we weren't worried about being able to do it.  In fact, we were about as sanguine as one could get.  Also in our favor was that we have only the one trailer (and a bit lighter than before) between the two of us, so we could pass it back and forth as necessary, and that we started at a significantly lower altitude, hence it wasn't going to be quite as bad a strain on the body.  So yeah, we were fairly blase about the concept of crossing the Sierra Nevadas.  The day was kinda crammed with comments that shrugged at the magnitude of the task, something that to me would have seemed intimidating, if not impossible, at previous points in the trip.

We tried for a fairly early start, because we were concerned about the winds coming up again in the afternoon, but that proved to be a groundless worry - for most of the day, the air was extremely still, and when the wind did come up, it was a tailwind pushing us up the mountains.  And a good thing, because we didn't get quite the start we wanted, as I came up with a flat tire first thing in the morning.  <sigh>  Not what one hopes for, to start off the day.  It was easy to tell the problem, or so I thought - a rock had wedged itself through the tire and was scraping the tube.  So I patched the tube and taped a dollar bill over the rock point and off we went, with me feeling handily butch.

The first twenty-four miles were fairly easy going, pretty flat.  We weren't biking strongly; in fact, I felt fairly light-headed and woozy, to my surprise.  But we did them in decent time, resting as necessary.  The resting part was what sticks in my mind, actually, because it occasioned some really good conversations.  Obvious stuff, recapping the trip, evaluating what we'd learned, gained, what surprised us, what we would have done differently.  The best days, the worst days.  I found, in talking of it, that I wouldn't have changed much about the trip.  Not even the breathing problem, which so endangered my ability to do this at all; no, I valued even that, because it made it so much more clear to me how important this was, and didn't let me take it for granted that I could do it.  Why wouldn't I be able to?  I was a strong enough biker, I had enough money and time and know-how and a traveling companion, what was to stop me?  And here I was, being grateful for each day that I could keep going, each day that Albuterol and Protonix hacked together a solution for me.

We talked about hacks a lot, too.  Molly had said to me, early on, that by the end of this, something would be tied together with string.  That observation now sponsored a roll call of everything we'd done to leverage ourselves this far, and it was a pretty extensive list.  Some we don't take credit for, like Billy's re-engineering of our drive trains, without which act of generosity I would simply not have been able to do this trip.  Some of it was integral to the trip but mundane, like knotting bandanas around my foot and deltoid to stave off (or damp down) the pain, or rolling up a second Thermarest under my knees to help me sleep at night.  Some was funny, like using a paperclip or a bungee cord to hold on our trailers.  Some was ingenious, like Molly's use of electrical tape and rubber cement to fix her tube, her use of Neoprene knee braces to insulate our water bottles through the heat wave in Kansas, and my idea of duct tape to hold a flat tire evenly around the rim so we could walk the bikes a couple of miles out from Last Chance to catch a ride to Denver.  Sometimes I felt the trip was held together by pain meds, knee braces, duct tape, and willpower.  It feels a bit scary but good to know that those were what stood between us and stopping, and that we didn't stop.

We stopped for lunch, six miles into the ascent, at a delightful little place called Woodfords Station.  It's often a surprise, as to where you'll find good food, and we take it where we can get it.  What made the place especially dear to me was the group of people strung along the counter as we walked in - wearing a telling "Gathering of the Tribes" shirt, with neon green dredlocked hair, crowned with a jester's cap, and the like.  Clearly not locals.  One of them admired my tattoo, and that started up a converation about our bike trip, which quickly included mention of the recently-departed Burning Man.  It surprised me to find that they were all Burners only in that it seemed an unlikely route for them to be leaving, rather late in the week, but yes, we all chatted energetically about the City and our camps and our experiences, then more generally about Cool Stuff, and of course the conversation ended with hugs and the almost-automatic leavetaking, "See you next year!"  Ah, only Burning Man.

Sadly, upon leaving from lunch, I discovered that my front tire was flat again.  Frustrating.  I couldn't find anything in the tire, but the tube was punctured in a new place - which bodes ill.  I fixed both that tube and the spare, while I was at it, with admittedly ill grace.  Worse than that, after a short break another five miles later, I walked out and found the tube flat for the third time.  I'm guessing that I patched it badly the second time, but it was really worrisome, that I couldn't find the problem.  I changed it in record time, partly because we had very little leeway time left and partly because I was really irate - flung the bike upside down, ripped off the tire, shoved in the spare tube (being pissily glad I'd patched it before), and peeled that bastard back together with my fingers, no tire levers.  Hmph.  Take that.

Once we hit the "up" portion of the day, most of it was just concentrating on getting another half mile forward, with little profound chatting along the way.  It was really hard, no doubt about it.  What was cool was that it just didn't phase us.  We chugged along, knowing we'd have just enough time at the pace we could maintain.  We had a significant amount of five- and six-percent grade, then a lull of two-percent or so, and then another muscle-your-way-through it portion.  Molly carried the trailer for the majority of it.  I took it for a good bit of the first really-hard portion, and yes, it made a huge, huge difference.  Without it, it was reasonably easy; with it, I had to time my breathing very carefully to be able to edge in drinks of water.  We sometimes had a small shoulder, sometimes had none, occasionally had passing lanes, but rarely could we bike safely side-by-side.  And we had no flag for the trailer, which made me a little more nervous, especially as sunset came on and we were less visible.  But the climb was beautiful, the birches and lakes and jagged rock formations were a feast for the eyes, and there was an unending pride that this was it, the last challenge of the entire trip.  From here to the coast, it's 8500 feet down.  We've got 190 miles to go in three days, which would be no great challenge on flat land, but with the elevation drop, it's nothing.  I wonder if it's going to make us heady, in more than one sense.

Molly was a workhorse; if there were any doubt as to which of us was the stronger biker, this would have resolved it.  She dragged forty pounds up for the majority of the ascent, never asking me to relieve her - I had to convince her to let me take on the trailer for the few miles that I did.  I have to admit, I'm glad I didn't have to haul it for my full share of the time.  It meant I could just ride, grateful and competent, instead of gasping and struggling, pushing my limits all the time.  Then again, much of my trip has been about being grateful and just-competent, thanks to Molly and her willingness to take this trip at my pace and my levels.  In case it hasn't been ludicrously obvious in enough previous entries, I want to make it so here: this has been an amazing trip, I've loved sharing it with her, I couldn't have done it without her and I wouldn't have wanted to.  And of course, the fact that we could do this trip, up to and including today, also brought up memories of all the people who've made it possible and more enjoyable for us along the way.  A fond and lasting thank you to all of you who've encouraged, heartened, and sustained us, with food, technical expertise, hosting, praise, and the gifts of yourself.  We could not have done this without you.

It was almost sunset when we reached the peak, which meant that it was getting damn cold already.  There was no fanfare; we cheered ourselves briefly, I sang a little song, my chain fell off and I grungied my fingers putting it back on, and we rapidly coasted down four miles, yeeping against the cold, to our lodging.  Stiff-fingered and -kneed, tired, but over the crest.  And that's it, guys.  That's our journey.  It's essentially over.  We have three more days of biking and five days in San Fransisco, but as far as I'm concerned, it's all play from here on out.  I'm looking forward to the home-coming, to resuming the rhythm of my normal life, to seeing many of you again in Boston.  To returning to familiar things.  And of course, to seeing how I fit in with those familiar things, now that part of me is unfamiliar to myself.

I thought it was going to be an uneventful day.  Silly intrepidheroine me.

We got a very, very late start, lounging around, catching up on email and journals and sleep, and coasted down a mile to lunch, being rather self-congratulatory that we didn't have to do anything difficult today.  And then we exited from lunch to find that my front tire was flat.

When your tire is flat for the fourth time in the span of a day, there's something very, very wrong.  It's just a matter of figuring out what, exactly, so you can make it stop being wrong.  I took both that tube and the spare (still punctured from the day before) and examined them with the proverbial fine-toothed comb, and with four puncture marks, I was able to find the pattern.  Luckily for me, I'd been putting the tubes back into the tires at the exact same spot, with the valve stem up against the dollar-bill-cum-electrical-tape over the tire hole; hence, I could deduce that there was indeed another problem with the tire, not just with my patching jobs.  I dashed out to Molly and said, "Look here, on the opposite side of the tire from the valve."  We'd checked the inside of the tire over about ten times, between the two of us, at that point, but this time she found it: a sand burr, damn them to everlasting torment, may they come back as, as, as...well, whatever's lower than a sand burr...  It was imperceptible from the inside, but clear enough from the outside to pull it out and to teach us this lesson.  If you're a touring cyclist and you learn nothing else from this webpage, take this advice away with you: always check the inside and outside of your tire very carefully, after a flat.  (It also wrapped up the mystery of why the tire was consistently flat right when we'd start again: the sand burr poked down through the tube when my weight was on the bike, and when I got off, it allowed the tip of the burr to come up out of the hole and let the air out.)

Problem solved, we finally got on the road, and soon found that we had more uphill left to do than we'd thought.  Five miles of up, within the first ten.  Yelchh.  It wasn't terrible, and I really don't have room to complain, since Molly took the trailer again.  I just played admiring support crew, preparing Gatorade, singing to her when my breath would allow, and telling her as often as it occurred to me to say that she's really splendiferous.  We had finished ten miles by 2:30, a new low for us, but from there on, well, we had fuuuuuun.

Because then we lost 6000 feet of elevation.

There is nothing in the world like the reward of coasting down over a mile in altitude, on a good paved road, with a fat shoulder, no traffic, and amazing views.  I had previously thought I wouldn't feel safe at anything much over 35 mph.  I was wrong.  I hit 44 and would have kept accelerating, had Molly not been so close ahead.  It made me feel like Lance Armstrong again, made me glad that there are people who get to experience that kind of joy regularly.  Yes, we worked our butts off to get up there.  Yes, it was hard, grunt work.  But ohhh, it was so worth it.

The setting changed drastically during those miles.  It went from rippling bald rocks to mist-shrouded vistas to geometric vineyards, moss-draped pines to apple orchards, solitude to civilization.  There were times it reminded me of Tolkien's world, glorious and gloomy all at once.  There were moments I could not have told whether a car was coming up on me, with the wind bansheeing in my ears, and didn't give a damn.  There were mini-slaloms through spills of rocks across the shoulder.  There was the constant breath of a prayer of gratitude that we were not slogging up this side of the hill, starting at sea level and going up to 8500 feet within a few days.  And there was the charge of wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! through my body, over and over.

Sadly, though, wheeeeee became supplanted by ow.  "Ow," compliments of what turned out to be the most vicious bee I've ever encountered.  It stung me while I was whipping along at about 30 mph.  At first I thought it was a rock, then the pain kept getting worse, until I yelped for a stop and tore through our bag looking for Sting-Eze, which helped not at all.  Since there seemed to be nothing more to do, I got back on the bike and we headed onward, only to screech to a stop again a few minutes later when my vision started blurring and doubling.

Molly flagged down a truck and they took me the seven miles into town, me and bike and trailer - a good piece of luck, in a way, as the ride included the only other ascent of the day, another doozy, which meant Molly did it sans trailer.  They dropped me off at the fire station, where they asked me some basic questions, tested my blood pressure, breathing, and heart rate, and concluded I was okay, no allergic reaction.  My attacker was apparently a "meat bee," a particularly ferocious and insistent local specimen which injects bacteria into the sting wound.  The firemen cautioned me against infection, gave me baking soda and Gatorade, and let me lounge about until Molly arrived.  I felt woozy but well-entertained.

Molly and I coasted together for the last fifteen miles, through beautiful country.  Almost too picturesque, and yet still dominated by rugged pines.  I was also somewhat grounded by the throbbing band of pain through my leg.  (Eight hours after being stung and doped on Aleve, it still hurts like someone's shoving a dull knife in me and using it to carve out the dance steps of the macarena.)

We're down to 2000 feet now, and down to 130 miles until the end of the trip.  It feels unreal.  We're smug, now, and giddy, when people ask us where we're biking to and from.  It's hard not to be, so close to the end.  Though perhaps it's also just a good coverup, so as not to be mournful...

Bike capital of the universe.  That's where we are.

There are more bikes here per capita than anywhere else in America.  Every single street - and I do mean every - has a bike lane with it.  There are push-buttons situated for bikers to cross intersections.  There are probably bike car washes and valets; they probably breed bike messengers here for San Fransisco.  Okay, whatever; it's late and I'm tired and it's hard to think of anything that can really capture today.

Today was long.  Longer than we needed or wanted it to be.  Partly that was because the bike path we were on was under construction and hence there were several detours; partly because we went a little out of our way at the end.  So we ended up doing 72 miles when I'd been gearing up for 60.  That can be tiring, especially when you were off the road for a couple of weeks and aren't yet built back up to that kind of rigorous schedule.  Not that we'll get the chance to be, now.  Tomorrow is, as I'm sure you're all aware, our last day on the road.

Today was tiring.  It was pleasant, swooping around on bike paths for much of the day - bike paths replete with water fountains, bathrooms, and stations where people would feed us peeled grapes and rub us down slavishly with chamomile body lotion.  Okay, nix on that last one, but yes, really nice paths for the most part.  (Sucky detours, but whatever.)  We rarely had to share the road with cars.  Heck, we didn't even have to share the road with many other bikers.  Though we did overhear a few conversing about the Death Ride, which goes through the Sierra Nevadas, ascending five peaks in one day for a total of 16,000 feet elevation gain.  You think we're butch, you should try for that.  But we didn't eat enough today, Molly got a bit dehydrated, and we biked further than I had budgeted for, in my muscles.  So it wasn't the crazy elated second-to-last-day that one might imagine.

It's hard to imagine much of anything right now, truth to be told.  It's hard to wrap my brain around the fact that tomorrow we finish this journey.  That this thing which dominated my winter and spring, in planning, and was my summer, will suddenly cease to exist tomorrow.  It'll all be memories, muscles slowly atrophying, pictures coming back from the shop, life settling back into patterns and rhythms and familiar paces.  I know now that I'll have to keep doing things like this, perhaps biking through Europe, certainly driving around America to see more of it, maybe hiking in the Rockies with my little sister - keep seeing and doing and being.  But for now, this one is drawing to a close.  That's not quite as hard for me as the end of Burning Man, but it's ineffable in its own way, and there's very little I can say about today that captures the multitude of feelings surrounding it all.

Here we are again, back at the eternal mysteries; the incommunicable, the impossible, the things that make mere words whimper and run, tail-between-legs, from trying to convey.  I could possibly touch a person and let that stand in for the experience, or sit and laugh and cry all night.  But talk of it?  Type out a few words?  Peh.

It was a hard last day, pretty damn inglorious.  Sixty-three miles (including a bit of getting lost and backtracking), which isn't that much all told, but it was almost all into the wind.  We started off well, with our wonderful hostess Nicole biking with us through Davis to take us to our route out, pointing out various features of the town.  She showed us the "bike lights," traffic signals that are literally for nothing but bikes turning left; she showed us some of the U of C Davis campus, the bike rotaries, etc.  Or rather, led us through them - what's fascinating about Davis is that the bike paths, lanes, and other accommodations aren't for the showing, but utilitarian to the point that they're almost taken for granted.  Amazing to someone who comes from a city with streets as  bike-unfriendly as Boston's, but blithely used or even disregarded here by the bikers.

We got lost trying to find our way out, detoured through the Arboretum, eventually realized how lost we were, and approached a local biker.  He took us to the edge of town, then decided to accompany us on out, just for the hell of it.  Biked with us to Dixon, where we stopped for some lunch.  We possibly should have anticipated this problem and gotten an earlier start, having encountered it previously, but once we set out again after lunch, we hit the living, breathing hell that is a fierce afternoon-mounting headwind.  This one wasn't the insanity that four days ago was, but it was still pretty persistent, and a bit more depressing in that we didn't know exactly how far we were going, but we did know that we had to get there on our own recognizance.  Today, there would be no cheating, no ride in.

So we battled a fifteen-to-twenty mph headwind for most of the day.  It was coming from the southwest, and we were biking alternatively south and west.  A little variety in whether the wind was shoving us out into the road or in off the shoulder, but either way, it was unpleasant.  Grit-teeth-and-go.  Sometimes it let up enough to let us achieve fifteen mph, but most of the time we were fighting for nine or ten, and sometimes it dropped down to five or six.  And that was most of what I could think about, all day.  How many more hours we'd be biking against that wind, given how fast we were going at that moment.

Once again, we ditched the Adventure Cycling route.  They just don't seem to value the things that we do, in biking.  They don't look for a route over the easiest terrain; don't go for good roads or wide shouders (or any at all, sometimes); don't try to take us past the best services available, food and lodging and whatnot.  As far as we can tell, the determining factor for a route for them is the lightness of traffic, and while it's nice not to have too many cars to deal with, it certainly isn't my first priority.  So we looked for the shortest route with the best possible shoulders, in evaluating our options, and  struck out on our own again.  Brought us through a surprising number of corn fields and cow pastures, actually - I'd have thought that all of California would be heavily populated, but it seems not to be so, even ten miles out from the coast.  There are plenty of hills when you get in close to the coast - within fifteen or twenty miles, I'd guess - which makes me wonder about the geology of the region.

That made for very pretty biking for the last few miles.  We got to use a service road closed to cars, cracked wide with crevasses about a foot deep, with trees growing rakishly out of the pavement and massive undulations in the asphalt.  My guess was, hapless survivor of an earthquake, now abandoned.  Then we coasted into Napa County - the only easy three miles of the entire day.  The hills are all powerfully rolling, like giant molars, and bespeckled with trees that look like giant bonsai (live oaks, we're told).  Finally, we hit Vallejo itself.

We were originally going to bike into SF itself and dip our front tires into the Pacific, but as it became more and more apparent that it was going to be a very long day just getting to Vallejo, without taking a ferry across the water, we opted for a shortened trip.  That and the fact that we were warned that there was a big bike race in SF today, including Lance Armstrong, who seems determined to dog our steps (wheels?) this summer.

So instead we grunted our way into Vallejo and blundered to the ferry.  It was quite late by then, about 8 p.m., sun down - hey, it's September, the sun sets earlier now! - and there were no cheering crowds, no tickertape and confetti, no sense of "hey, look at us, look what we've just done!"  No, there was a single friend there, a Burner campmate, who was terrific to us, took our pictures, told us we were cool, loaded up our stuff and took us to a hotel.

Anti-climactic?  Well, what would you have for a climax to this?  Whizzing down several thousand feet?  Did that.  Learn more than I could express in a lifetime, have my life reworked by the powerful connections between me and other people as I put myself at the mercy of a hostile climate?  Yep.  Come to believe that the American soul and spirit are not as impoverished as we make them out to be, to ourselves?  Rely on the goodness and generosity of strangers?  Refuse to succomb to a health problem and thereby learn something about my own strength, something of what matters to me?  Really, how could I end this, that there would be more meaning inherent in it than is already there?  We biked into the ferry, cheered ourselves briefly, showed off for ourselves by hoisting the bikes for a photo shoot, and then there was nothing more to do.  It wasn't amazingly glorious or valorous or rewarding.  It was a quiet, unprepossessing denouement, after the climax of a few days ago of ascending and then swooping down the Sierra Nevadas.

We've done it.  Something I've wanted to do for twelve years or so and thought I would never get to.  Something that, for weeks on end, I had to question whether my body would permit me to do.  Something that took my whole summer, removed a lot of other choices and possibilities from me, and yet gave back years' worth of experience to make up for the time.  Something beautiful and powerful, exhausting and exhilarating, strange and painful, challenging to my last muscle cell and rewarding to every hope and fantasy I had for this summer.

Next.

When I left Burning Man, a song occurred to me that encapsulated it as well as anything else could.  I savored it to myself but didn't think to pass it on here.  It seems to fit the occasion now as well.  It's from Rankin/Bass's animated production of Return of the King, a melancholy little piece at the end of the movie:

Roads go ever, ever on
To the lands beyond the sea
On a while ship will I sail
Watching shadows part for me

Leaving havens gray with rain
Now that years have slipped away
Leaving friends with gentle pain
As they start another day

Roads I've travelled I must leave
For I've turned the final bend
Weep not empty tears but grieve
As the road comes to an end

It's so easy not to try
Let the world go drifting by
If you never say hello
You won't have to say goodbye.