Have been cycling from the top of Alaska to the bottom of Argentina and finally made it to Southern California.
Henry Miller said that if we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored, that one’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things. I return to his writing often in life, but thought about him constantly while cycling the Pacific Coast again. His library in Big Sur was the destination for my first cross-country bike tour ten years ago, but again a precious checkpoint here and now after traveling thousands of miles from the Arctic Ocean to this journey’s dewy, doughy center.
The hardest days collected en route seem to linger with paralytic hypnosis. I lay awake in the tent at night waiting for sleep while reliving these visions of endless gravel lanes through abandoned territories, ice roads crossed over empty tundra, overgrown trail lines connecting nowhere with nothingness. In hindsight those days feel less like a haunting and more of a moveable feast, holy tokens petrified in wayfaring memoriam, voracious days and weeks wrought with depletion, each static horizon barbed by glacial blades and bergs. Cycling in California is much, much easier.
“There is nothing wrong with life itself,” Henry continued. “It is the ocean in which we swim and we either adapt to it or sink to the bottom. If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”
by donivanberube