August 9, 2006
Headed Home : (
Squished hip to hip with a stranger who obviously wants conversation on my flight home, hoping to make a tight connection in Phoenix on an already delayed flight--pensively reflecting on the end of the trip--about the transition to real life--about the disparate emotions of the moment. I had over 3 hours at the Portland airport and accomplished nothing as I restlessly wandered the concourse--eating, trying to nap (interrupted by the sniffing of a nearby bomb dog), avoiding conversations in this strange city world where people are scared of each other and speak meaningless things to fill air space and hide their real selves.
I'm looking down at roads from 30,000 feet up and wondering how long it would take my two wheels to travel them, what stories might be had along their seemingly desolate shoulders. Wishing my new friends were still riding along beside me instead of scattering back to their own real lives.
And it's not that I mind my real life. In fact, I was pretty happy with it when I left, but I dread the transition back. I have to start remembering what day of the week it is. I don't have any good reason to ignore emails anymore. I'll find myself submitting back to a scheduled life with demands beyond eat/sleep/bike, demands and expectations from people other than me...
Part of me wants to jump out here as I'm flying by Lake Tahoe and get lost along the lake or in the nearby valleys. Good thing Kert is enroute to Indiana by a different route or we might just have done that, bad back wheel and all. Part of me just wants to travel, and to write, to learn how to write memorably/provcatively (and to skip the dissertation writing). That's the worst part of the return--the uncertainty of the dissertation--I'm unconvinced that I actually want to do the theoretical work of my chosen topic--questioning why that work would matter in the world I just rode through.
Maybe I've set myself up for more wanderlust driven adventures instead of just giving myself the academic break I wanted when I started the journey. In yellowstone, two months into the trip, I was ready for it to be done. Now I'm sad it's ending...has ended.
Now I'll have to comb my hair (haven't in over three months), wash my socks after wearing them once instead of 3 or 4 times, not just randomly pulling over to pee on the side of the road, maybe find out some depressing world events.
Of course, I'll sleep in the same spot most nights, have the luxuries of pillows, towels, and ice at hand, and not eat out of convenience stores or buy everything in single serving sizes. But I'll miss my new friends and the freedom of the road. And I'll always have memories and stories of the strange summer where I was a stranger everywhere I went and met all sorts of wonderful people (some stranger than others), saw just a ribbon of the scenic wonders of this vast and varied country, learned something of people (myself included), beat up my body, fed my patriotism, and was reassured that the world isn't as bad of a place as the news and naysayers would have us believe.
In fact, it's quite a nice place when your pace is 10 mph...
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