Molly's Journal: Week Twelve

"The Masked Man he was smart,
he got himself a Tonto
'cause Tonto did the dirty work for free.
But Tonto he was smarter -
one day he said, 'Kemosabe,
kiss my ass, I've bought a boat, and I'm goin' out to sea.' "
     --Lyle Lovett
 

I had every intention of writing a nice long entry for Day 71. I was going to write about the differences between highway riding and small back roads. It would have been interesting and fabulously witty, and it would have contained a "goodbye, I'm off to hitch a ride to Burning Man, see you all on the other side." But as it turns out, the ride hitched me and I was swept up in the glittering whirlwind before even entering the gates. At a gas station in Fernley I was approached by a woman who had apparently spied my funny hair and messy bike. "Are you going to Burning Man?" she asked. "Do you want a ride? I've got a big empty RV and I want to use it." Well, my options are staying in Fernley for the night and trying to figure out how to bike to Black Rock City in the morning, or catching a ride with a complete stranger and arriving on the playa a day early. I opted for the ride, and it was fabulous. We met a couple of other "burners" in the gas station (the fake-fur-coated bicycles were a dead giveaway) and we all went skinny-dipping in Pyramid Lake. Daisy and I had a great ride up to BRC - we shared jokes and swapped stories and she told me that the time I would spend at Burning Man would change everything. It did.

We were greeted with sincere choruses of "Welcome home!" and "We missed you!" from complete strangers. It was early, and the gates were not even officially opened yet - the city was barely a framework of what it would become in three or four days' time. The slow dedication of everyone who had arrived early to build camps was heady and contagious. Walking to the portajohns ("litter boxes") gave me the opportunity to not only meet unknown peoples' eyes, but to smile and chat with them. The sense of commitment to community was palpable and electric.  It was as if thousands of people were simultaneously anticipating Christmas morning and reuniting with long-lost friends. I arrived just in time for the great barn-raising at our camp. We were with TOTEM, "Temple of the Eternal Mysteries," about which you can read more in Cee's entry; suffice it to say that a bunch of people met online, unified around the idea of offering massage. People who offer free massage to visionaries and artists are bound to be good folks, right? Little did I know...

I deliberately entered Burning Man with few expectations. My goal this summer has always been the bike trip. Burning Man was supposed to be another adventure - number eight in a series of ten, collect them all! What I found there neatly defies description. Put aside for a moment the fabulous unreal-ness of what David described as a "hippie-rave Mardi Gras held in an enormous RV camp - on the moon".  Like religion or sex, it seems to me that what you get out of Burning Man is directly dependent on what you bring to it. I had holes healed there that I didn't even know existed. I formed deep bonds with people I hadn't so much as exchanged email with a week before. I gave massages to the weary life-dancers and watched a small, beautiful flash-paper hot-air balloon waft absurdly up into the sky like a surrogate moon before it burned down and consumed itself. The transience was the root of its beauty. Art that is destined to be burned is art purely for art's sake; not for recognition or ego-stroking, but rather for appreciation in its moment.

What did I get out of Burning Man? The mausoleum, a wooden filigree pagoda filled with thousands and thousands of messages of grief and love, which burned in a spectacular mass prayer; the stained-glass chapel made entirely from found plastic bits; the solemn parade of Lamplighters meeting the raucous and anarchic Pink Parade on the street in what should have been a West-Side-Story rumble; the fabulous vehicles and laser shows and dust storms, the giant human maze that instructed, "do something that makes you feel insecure". What did I get out of Burning Man? I did things that made me feel insecure. I trusted people I did not know to bring me enough water to keep me alive for a week and a half in the desert. I allowed myself to be taken care of - from the folks who helped me through a day of severe dehydration to those who listened to my stories or fixed my broken equipment or just sat with me while I was feeling alone, everyone I met there was beautiful. I felt profoundly cared for. I felt as if I had been blessed, and was lucky enough to be a part of creating something gorgeous and strong and intrinsically absurd. The city moved me. My campmates gave me the gift of seeing my life in positive space - rather than defining life by what is missing, I see it in terms of what I can create. I also saw a vision of an idyllic society where there is no age, no class struggle, no meaningless power hierarchy. Everyone was uniquely valuable, if only for a week.

Daisy was right. Everything is different. Burning Man really is an "eternal mystery" - you cannot possibly understand what it is until you experience it for yourself. I cannot tell you what it will mean to you. I can't explain why it was so moving to dance in a ring of fire around a flaming double-helix, surrounded by drummers and dancers and dusty lovers. I can only say - try it. Try it and see.

So here we are, after our first day away from what already feels like home. We had the worst headwind we've seen since upstate New York. The scenery was dull and uphill. We ended up getting a ride for the last 20 miles of the day to Carson City in order to ensure that we would arrive before dark. We noticed: time has passed. It's September. School is in session. People are getting into the swing of autumn. Strangers in grocery lines wear more somber expressions - are they stocking up for winter? Contemplating the change in season and scenery? Or does the world look slightly more staid to me because of where I've been?

The beginning of the end - like, again

Today was the last of the uphill. Oh, sure, tomorrow we'll have about five miles of up, but that's not much. The next three days will be 200 miles in which we will descend all 8000 feet of altitude we have gained. We've been hanging out around 4000 - 5000 feet since Denver, so I'm hoping the extra oxygen will make me feel strong and giddy. Today we climbed up about a million vertical feet to reach Carson Summit (8574'). Colleen was gracious enough to let me take the trailer most of the way (no, seriously); it felt good to do a climb almost as hard as Loveland Pass while fully loaded. Now, it's all downhill.

The best experience of the day, aside from stopping for the night, was a chance encounter in a general store in Woodfords. A ragtag gang of lunchers turned out to be another group of Burning Man folks. For a few minutes, we exchanged stories and hugs. It felt like being part of an incredibly large and diverse extended family. I don't know these people, but I feel a bond with them. We've got the same dust lodged in our shoes and clothes and the same spirit stuck in our psyches. Welcome home, indeed.

Now, it's late and my mind is addled, trying to sort out the events of the past two weeks. I'm a bit curious how I will fit into my old life - will it be like old jeans, loose and unfamiliar? What will I need to fulfil myself? I feel the need to be giving more than I am. I have gifts that need to be given. If nothing else, I have learned this summer that it is a shame to not be doing whatever you can for the world and for yourself.

like it or lump it

Today I pulled the trailer all day again. It's a fun test of will - I know that at any point, I can hand it over to Colleen with a completely clean conscience. Knowing that I can back out makes me perversely more determined to keep going. Hard work isn't as fun when you know you have to do it. As it is, I get to play at being Strong and Capable Chick. It also means that I have my own built-in support crew - the lovely and talented Cee. So, while I was huffing and puffing up the (rather large) uphills, she was crunching along beside me and singing songs to keep me happy and amused. This made the whole endeavor much more fun.

I had anticipated that today would be a piece of german chocolate cake. However, being off the bike for ten days certainly put a dent in my fitness. We did have several miles of serious climbs which were not made much easier by the fact that they were preceded by ridiculous downhills. Up is still up, and once you stop coasting, you still have to crank out a few more ergs to make it to the top. It's funny how today was probably 85% zoomy downhill, but what I remember is the 5% stinky uphill. Minds just work like that.

Though, that's not entirely true. The downhills were amazing. The road was smooth and straight(ish) and had almost no traffic. With each new downhill, I tucked my body a little tighter and gained a little more speed. First I hit 37, then 40, then finally a whopping 44 mph, my lifetime high speed record. I have always been confident of my bike-handling skills, but it's clear to me that I have gained even more confidence. I would not have been able to hit 44 mph at the beginning of this trip. In many ways, I felt as if this series of incredible adrenalinated descents was a cosmic apology for the horrible time we had on the down side of Loveland Pass. It was the most fun biking I think I've done all trip, above even Glenwood Canyon - we earned today, and we earned it good.

Sadly, the day was marred when a meat bee (isn't that a great phrase? "meat bee." say it to yourself. "get away from my sandwich, you stinking meat bee.") stung Colleen in mid-bike. It didn't just whap off her lower lip or fly down her cleavage, two things that happen to me with a somewhat alarming frequency. It actually attached to her leg and stung her. We stopped when she said, "OK, my vision is doubling and I can't see." I regarded this as a Bad Thing and flagged down a jeep which took her (and the trailer, ha-ha) into town to be Taken Care Of. I rode in, since there wasn't room for my bike in the jeep, and found her sitting in the fire station chatting with firemen. They'd put baking soda on her leg and given her some Gatorade. Since she professed to be feeling just fine about it all, we rode on another 15 miles or so and bedded down for the night. Two more days - how unreal...

foolish mortals we

It's kind of trippy now to have people ask us about our journey.

"Where you heading to?" they ask.
We answer, "San Francisco."
"Wow! All the way to San Francisco, on bikes?"
"Yup. We started in Maine."

*pause while listener absorbs this information and tries to figure out where Maine, California might be*

"Maine, New England Maine?"
"Yup."

There's really no way to properly convey how minuscule these few days of biking feel in comparison to our long journey. It's like a little reprise, a fiddly little coda. But the fact is that a five-day bike trip, even if most of it is downhill, is more than most people will ever do. I sometimes forget that. So when people are amazed that we're going "all the way to San Francisco," I'm always amused by the dissonance between what they're feeling ("whoa") and what I'm feeling ("no, you don't understand, we're almost DONE!")

At any rate, today it became clear that we were really in California. We passed palm trees and cactuses, '40s pickup trucks and hypnotherapists and vineyards and smoothie shops. We rode on 30 miles of bike path and another 10 or 15 of roadside bike lanes. It has to be said that the bike path alongside the highway was much more utilitarian in aspect than the highwayside path in Glenwood Canyon, CO; here, it was dirty and loud and right next to the cars, while there, the sound was magically baffled and the path was wrapped in a beautiful bucolic sleeve. Instead of seeing exhaust, we saw kayakers. Oh well, nobody's perfect. To cap the day, we ended up in Davis, which must be the bike capital of the whole darn known universe. Every street that does not have a large, separate bike lane has a bike path alongside it. There are "bike lights," stoplights intended specifically for bikes. Bikes bikes bikes, everywhere. It was almost unnerving, but it was definitely cool. We are spending the night with a fabulously neato friend of Cee's. We got to do laundry and go out for Vietnamese food. It felt almost like being in civilization - which, of course, we will irretrievably return to after tomorrow. Tomorrow, barring any horrible blimp accidents,  we end up in San Francisco, the end to our little trek.

The trek has an end? How... predictable.

  ~ FIN ~

How startlingly odd for this journey to be over.

Today wasn't all horns and glory. There was no fanfare, the weather didn't cooperate, and we got lost three times. We biked into unpleasant headwinds, and I had an inch-long metal spear lodged in my tire. We arrived at the Bay just after sunset - no great photo ops there. We were tired, and had forgotten to apply glitter. (Shouldn't one be glittering when finishing a trans-continental bike trek? It seemed logical to us.)  Luckily, we had two wonderful Burning Man folks from our camp waiting for us at the end of the line with love and hugs. It's interesting to see how people clean up once they leave the playa...

And then tonight, after leaving Denny's, after sharing silly drinks in our hotel room and talking about the aftermath of Burning Man, I found myself restless and wandering the hallways. I ended up in the stairwell, head in hands, hands on knees, listening to the ringing in my ears and trying to figure out - what next? Where does one possibly go from here? What, for the love of all that's holy, was the point of all this?

I sat there for a long time, until I heard voices speaking in tongues echoing through my head. I'm not sure how that particular stairwell in this particular hotel managed to empty itself so completely of sound and thought interference, but there really was nothing between myself, my musings, and my tinnitus. And I found: no answer. I have no grand plans, nothing to plot or chart or romanticize ahead of time. Colleen and I will spend the week in San Francisco, and then David and I will meet up with friends in Tokyo for a week. And then, life as usual.

It would be easy to write an entry about everything I've learned this summer. I could talk about how one finds intelligent life in the smallest crevices of rural America, and how it's simultaneously true that Americans are both much more and much less intelligent than you could possibly imagine. Or, I could write about the inherent goodness of people and what it feels like to trust strangers. I could even write about hitchhiking or bike maintenance or foot care. But what I find interesting is the scope of things that I haven't learned: my purpose in life; my driving force; my real reason for taking this trip. I just don't know. Although I like the idea of self-discovery through strange adversity, I don't seem to have done much of it. Perhaps it's just not what I need right now.

At any rate, here I am, just as adrift as I was three months ago. The difference is that I can now accept that I will be building something with my life, rather than just passing the time. And there's some comfort in that.