This is the first long bit of bike touring I’ve ever done so my thoughts on it are pretty basic and not that interesting – it’s great! I’m having a wonderful time!
What does intrigue me, however, are the people I’ve already met in just over two weeks who have arranged their lives to make this a recurring part of what they do and who they are.
I’m just beginning to come into contact with this subculture, and it is fascinating. Roger and I are between two worlds – when we meet people in the usual places such as bars, restaurants, motels, etc., they are (or profess to be) amazed, impressed, curious or interested. These kinds of interactions keep us anchored in the everyday world even as the longer we are out here the more “normal” our journey becomes (it’s curious how quickly we adapt to what become new routines).
When we are actually out on the road doing the ride rather than interacting with the denizens of a given place, we occasionally run into the long-haul serial bike tourers, who are up to something quite different.
Because it’s the only way it can be done time and time again, these folks are camping all or most of the time. They carry a daunting amount of gear and move slowly. They all appear to have near-zero percent body fat and seem like pilgrims crossing the land heeding a call few others hear.
Velocipedic Nomads
In my customarily cynical view about the interplay between the sport/exercise enthusiasms of Americans and the adaptive responses of consumer goods markets, it has long seemed to me that there is a fair portion of the buying public who, having the discretionary income, end up purchasing equipment that exceeds their skill level and actual need. We are all too easily convinced that a step up in the design and fabrication (and cost) of our equipment will boost our performance past where our natural ability lies. No doubt there is some truth to this – which helps account for the prevalence of the phenomenon – but mostly it’s a comfortable delusion that is the coin of the realm of a consumer society.
So one sees fads in biking such as a relative explosion in the numbers of would-be speedsters clocking along to their own TdF-inflected fantasies geared out and riding multi-thousand dollar carbon frame bikes – along sedate suburban bike paths.
But then there are the bike tourers for whom the machine is a vehicle for months of travel across thousands of miles. The ones whom I have met to date seem hardy, resilient and cheerful, as one might expect, but there’s something else – and this is surely anecdotal (and perhaps simply flat out speculative on my part) – they have an interesting conversational style that seems predicated on a practiced familiarity with short-term intimacy.
Some of the conversation is simply rote, the way most conversation is among strangers. But I get the sense that they easily fall in with one another when they meet fellow long-haul riders, and this amiability, together with their own adventurous personalities and combined, I suppose, with the long hours of relative solitude, incline them to be ready partners in as free flowing a conversation as mutual interests admit.
So far, more often than not, the long haulers I have met have been from foreign shores, which may skew my perception toward a romantic/exotic exaggeration. But even so, it is fascinating – it is a mode of being that is rugged and gregarious and enticing.
Here is a picture of Jose and Linda, a delightful couple from a town (whose name I forget) along the coast south of Perth, Australia. Jose flew into LA and biked with some mates through part of California and southern Utah and met up with Linda in Denver. I met them on the Going-to-the-Sun road, and we ended up having a delightful chat over lunch at a cafe on the other side of the pass.
Born in Baltimore and raised in Cincinnati, I have lived on both coasts and driven back and forth across the country a number of times. I now have the "midlife opportunity" to do so on two wheels.
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