January 16, 2016
The Burrito Had Not Yet Been Invented
There's this half-mile stretch of road that runs north-south through the city of Torrance, a southern suburb of Los Angeles. Each direction carries four lanes of traffic with only a narrow strip of concrete and dirt and scrubby little trees separating them. There are sidewalks on both sides of the street but they're always empty. I've never seen a bicycle anywhere near this place. Red lights at either end hold back long lines of cars and lifted trucks and low-slung SUVs that have never and will never drive on anything wilder and more untamed than a gravel parking lot. When the red lights fall to green the cars speed away as if they've been launched from one of those catapult-like things that aircraft carriers use to get fighter jets airborne. The drivers charge ahead like it's a race, weaving and swerving and cutting each other off, except it's a short race, because twelve seconds later everyone reaches the next intersection where the light has just turned red, because that light always turns red moments before someone approaches it, and so all of the cars slam on their brakes and at least three people avoid rear-ending the vehicle in front of them by about a foot and a half. This pattern repeats itself in either direction every minute and a half from around six in the morning until some time after 8:30 p.m. when the last of the commuters are making their way toward home.
Office park buildings painted in the most neutral possible shades of tan and green and brown flank the eastern side of the road. They have different numbers screwed into the front of them and they sit at slightly different orientations but they're otherwise the same. These warehouses of mediocre human productivity are guarded by bright green lawns, garbage bins and cigarette butt receptacles made of off-white-colored concrete, and well-groomed bushes where the tops have been cut so perfectly flat that I can't tell you for sure that they aren't elaborate props. One of these office parks has both an Olive Garden and a T.G.I. Friday's restaurant. I don't mean that these restaurants stand across the street from the offices. I don't mean that they're located adjacent to its ends. I mean that they're on the ground floor of buildings within the office park itself, so that workers don't have to get in their car or break a sweat or even throw on a jacket when they feel like grabbing some disappointing baby back ribs or bacon-wrapped stuffed jalapenos or deep-fried balls of risotto. Reflective signs that read This property is under video surveillance have been clamped on to every other light pole to help keep order.
I know there's a Ferrari dealership that stands shoulder to shoulder with a FedEx Office and a low-end Mexican restaurant on the western side. You'll only ever see that in Southern California. But unless I force myself to pay close attention, everything else blends together into a singular strip of commerce. There are multiple nail salons, several neutral-looking stores with few windows selling doors or home furniture, a gas station, two chiropractic clinics, a Subway, dental offices, an animal hospital, a real estate brokerage, a Five Guys burger joint, a location of what might be the country's only Peruvian chain restaurant, and one mysterious store that goes by the name Tuesday Morning. A mile to the north sits the Del Amo Fashion Center, a sprawling shopping complex with 200 stores, 2.6 million square feet of retail space, and more than 12,000 parking spaces. This sounds impressive, but it makes Del Amo just the fifth-largest mall in the United States.
This road is like so many others in the South Bay, to the point that if the street signs were removed it wouldn't be hard to confuse it for one of a dozen stretches that look just like it. It's neither old nor new, rich nor poor, ugly nor beautiful. It is zero standard deviations from the mean. It just is. In fact, take out the palm trees, lose the Ferrari dealership, and play around with the weather dials a little bit and it could be any of a thousand places in this country. And yet this road holds over me a particular power like none other. For a reason I can't explain in any coherent or meaningful way, every time I'm on this road, near this road, or think about this road, I start to look inward. I travel to somewhere deep inside my mind; somewhere near the essence of my being; somewhere real and honest and true. And in this most existential of places, wordless sentences become paragraphs, then chapters, then books, then volumes, different in shape and tone each time, but always leading toward the same conclusion, a conclusion that not so long ago would have seemed both improbable and ludicrous. It's here that I realize: I'm not equipped to deal with the stress and sacrifice and detachment required by the typical modern American life – and I'm not sure I ever was.
Hawthorne Boulevard isn't some grand aberration, either. It's not this isolated vortex of doubt and ennui and aggressive driving in an otherwise calm and peaceful world. These same kinds of feelings rise up within my chest and charge through my brain all the time now: when I watch the guy walking in front of me chuck his plastic soda cup into the bushes because he can't be bothered to place it into the garbage can that stands less than ten feet away; when I see open spaces that have existed in my home town for the last hundred years replaced with close-stacked box houses that will each sell for three-quarters of a million dollars, financed by mortgages that their owners won't pay off until a year or two before they retire; when I hear the commercial on the radio that exclaims without irony, "You might not be fat, you might just be bloated!"; when I'm stuck in highway gridlock so profound that it extends to the end of my horizon and then an unknown amount of distance beyond; when I walk up to the flagship REI store in downtown Seattle and I'm stopped by the homeless man with fat, sticky, glistening lines of spit and snot intertwined into his disheveled beard who asks me, with severe pain in his slurred and permanently rasping voice, for a dollar so that he can buy a Happy Meal at McDonalds; and every time, every single time, I pass by a Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant.
Whoa, man, don't you think that's kind of dramatic?
It sounds that way. And before you start trying to set me up with a therapist, let me be clear: I'm grateful to be here. I'm young and healthy. I'm almost never in a situation where I feel unsafe. If I want good food, craft beer, a nasal decongestant, or a fake plastic fish that hangs on the wall and starts dancing and singing a song whenever I walk past, all I have to do is I get in a car, drive for ten or fifteen minutes, and then I have it, without worrying if there's enough cash in my account. I have friends and family members who I care about and who care about me. I make money by typing letters and numbers into a little box made of plastic and silicon and magic. I have a college education. Some day I'll own a sailboat. And I live in an age of history unlike any other, an age where it's considered appropriate for women to wear yoga pants in public. This country has given me freedom unlike any other could, and there isn't a day that goes by where I take this freedom and the opportunity it affords me for granted. I feel happy and content and fulfilled with my life in ways that I never could have imagined.
But at the same time, let's not kid ourselves. This country is hard on people – even people that appear normal and productive and well-adjusted. It's been like this for as long as I've been alive, but it wasn't until the last few years that I started to understand and appreciate the scale. For most of us, modern life means resigning ourselves to rigid schedules, to spending the vast majority of our lives indoors, to eating processed food, to living dozens or hundreds or thousands of miles from our families. We have to learn to ignore our fellow human beings when they walk past us, to pretend like they don't exist. We have to become comfortable spending fifty to a hundred hours a week staring into the screen of a computer, a mobile phone, a tablet, a TV screen. We have to become just as comfortable giving up another fifty or sixty hours of every week to working a job, traveling to that job, or coming home from that job – even though most of the people I know and most of the people you know work at jobs they would quit tomorrow if they could. We work so hard, for so long, that by the time the average American retires they will have only thirteen years left to live. Getting by in this society means finding a way not to become overwhelmed by the amount of words and sounds and images that show us the terrible, awful, horrible things happening to people we don't know who live in places we don't call home and will never in our lives visit. It means rationalizing away the profound and continued destruction of our planet. It means coming to terms with being told over and over and over again that we don't have enough money, that we aren't attractive enough, and that we aren't reaching our greatest potential.
From the biggest cities to the smallest towns to the most sprawling suburbs, this kind of stuff is wearing us down to a degree we've never before experienced. At least 80 million Americans – that's a quarter the country's population – now take psychotropic drugs. (Nine million of those haven't yet turned eighteen years old.) I say at least because that number only includes people with a valid prescription. You and I both know not everyone's going that route. There are tens of millions more who try to find relief in other ways, like with alcohol or painkillers or some other kind of illegal drugs. The situation is so dire that a million Americans – an amount equal to the entire population of Montana or Rhode Island – attempt suicide every year. We are scared and tired and burned out. We're also lonely. One out of every four people in this country report having no meaningful social connections. Half of all adults say they don't have even one close friend. In a place that's full of people we spend so many of our waking hours by ourselves. And despite all of our money and comfort and safety we're still so angry. Tell someone you're raising their taxes, drive in front of them while going six miles per hour below the speed limit, or go to a Donald Trump political rally and you'll see what I mean. It's no great exaggeration to suggest that for every person who's able to navigate their way through this complex society and thrive within it there's another who's struggling. Most of us don't want to think about these kinds of things, but that doesn't make them any less real.
Fair enough. But it's not like this is some recent thing. Life's always been hard, right?
Yeah, but up until a few thousand years ago it was hard in very different ways. People had to worry about dying during childbirth, dying because of a snakebite, and dying from one of fifty other immediate concerns. They didn't live nearly as long as we do now. If you fell sick, you suffered. If the weather turned cold and wet, you felt cold and wet. You were born and lived and then died in more or less the same place. There were no toilets, no showers, no California King mattresses. The burrito had not yet been invented. And yet it turns out that hunter-gatherers were able to handle this high risk and general discomfort a lot better than the relative luxury we live in today. In the face of all these challenges they didn't get depressed or anxious or find themselves unable to focus on any event that lasts longer than about fourteen seconds. They weren't overweight and didn't have heart disease. Their eyesight was precise, their immune systems strong, their bodies fit. Degenerative disease was rare. They ate healthy food, were part of active social networks, and slept enough. We know this because a few small bands of hunter-gatherers still exist in remote places like the highlands of New Guinea. In studying their way of life we see people who thrive in small and tight-knit communities, who spend their days outside working on meaningful tasks, and whose minds and bodies are engaged in activities that hold their full attention.
Okay Mr. Sociological Researcher, but what does this have to do with cycle-touring?
Ask most anyone who's left home behind and spent a few months hiking or biking while sleeping outside most nights and they'll tell you the experience was life-changing, life-giving, life-affirming, or maybe all three. There's something to this, because although some of them were rugged outdoorspeople before they set out, others weren't. Take me for example. Before I decided to start traveling by bike I had camped exactly twice in my life. I didn't hike or kayak or run or rock-climb. I couldn't swim. My sleeping bag had never been used outside of the basement in the house I grew up in. I had ridden a bicycle one time since I was in elementary school and that ended with the bike shoved in the back of a taxi. And yet with no good will toward any of this stuff, riding long distances on a heavy, awkward bike and going to bed on a thin air mattress inside a drafty tent out in the woods of Washington felt right almost from the beginning. The 20,000 miles of loaded touring that followed only made those affections stronger.
My point is this: those hunter-gatherer behaviors have 150,000 years of evolution behind them. Whether intentional or not, when we dive into grand adventures propelled by our own power we end up tapping into instincts that have always been a part of us. We also leave behind so many of the behaviors that bring us down. On the road, I wake up in the morning not knowing where I'll find myself when the sun goes down, but it doesn't matter; I figure it out. When something breaks I find a way to fix it. I run into bad weather or rude drivers or dead-end roads but I don't dwell on them; I focus on what's ahead and just keep pushing. And the farther I go, the more the stresses and pressures that otherwise seem normal fade into the background. I have to make sacrifices of comfort and safety and security, but these sacrifices bring with them rewards that far outstrip the costs. My body turns leaner and my lungs fuller. Sleep comes fast and runs deep. My mind becomes more attuned with the world around me than it ever could when I'm writing code, driving to the grocery store, or trying to decide what type of pork to put on top of my pizza. Strangers talk to me and I talk back. I ignore the news in all its forms. Digital devices become the exception, not the rule. My only emissions come in the form of a fart cloud.
Adventures make us feel so healthy and vital and alive. And the tighter that the madness of modern life tries to grab hold of us, the more important they become. That's why Kristen and I have set up our lives so that we can throw ourselves into them with reckless abandon whenever the chance presents itself.
That chance is here once again.
| Rate this entry's writing | Heart | 3 |
| Comment on this entry | Comment | 0 |