Steady As I Go: bike Guiding PAcific Northwest

Hurricane Ridge Road, Washington

The steel machinery connected to my body hours on end, propelling me efficiently forward, making it’s quirks familiar while returning smooth grooves for my tired bones to find comfort in, my bike is like a companion, one strongly relied on.

Inside the walls of this triangular-shaped one-man tent encompasses necessary isolation, fueling that percentage of introversion threaded within. Individuality is shaped in this seclusion, no matter how thin the barrier.

This tent, and this bike, they are comforts, tokens from home, reminders of something connected to my personal self. Everything else- my priorities, state of thinking, transportation method, level of busy-ness, sense of need and urgency, it is different out here, in this state of removal, it has shifted to a new place, almost as if my personal self is different here.

Out here, I am concerned about basic fundamentals of health and safety. Is there enough food? Are we going to make it to the campground before dark? How long until the next water stop?

At home, there is fine-tuned details intermixed into the basic survival questions. More existential, more to do with a personal sense of adequacy, public profile and the creative search of self. These questions, they can be heavy, and days can be less clear than out here, and slower, almost as if in the busy-ness, I am dragging through.

Removal is necessary. Through many accounts of mankind, perspective has been shaped through intentional stents of removal. Being a camp-kid growing up, coming near the end of a fun-packed week designed in dreamland, I struggled with a question I still face today, how do you go back into every day life carrying the same light-ness, peace and perspective found in the removal?

I could cry in fear of re-entering the same way I left. The self- induced pressures, the juggling, the going quickly, the incapabity to stop, to breathe, to gracefully allow open space- I can’t feel that again, not knowing what I know now, not after escaping it’s arbitrary walls and finding the same world exists without all that noise and chaos.

"You can’t live on the mountain," or so I have always been told. I can’t stay in removal, or else it would defeat it’s own purpose. Re-entering is part of the process, one I am discovering- how to take with me the truths of nature’s teachings to the man-made institutions of business, self-development and paying dues. ​