Gearchiveerd onder: _The Preparation
Welcome to my web log, my personal diary that I will be writing during my yearlong bike trip around the perimeter of the United States. My trip will commence on 13th of September in New York. From there I will be descending clockwise to Florida, branch of towards Texas, travel ahead to California on the West Coast, then ascend towards Washington State and from there back again to The Big Apple , Freak show Central (hoo-ah!), Capital of the World or indeed, just New York.
Why this trip you might wonder? Why to the United States? Why now? Why so long? And why of all things stupid and mentally unstable by bike? All perfectly good questions that deserve to be answered. The idea to leave my girlfriend, job, family, friends, home & country behind for such a long time has been with me for about two years, maybe three. How will it be to travel in a foreign country for such a long time without someone to fall back on and with nothing more than a few bags, a bicycle and a digital map to provide me with directions on where to go?
An important reason to go on this trip has been to get myself into the situation in which I could finally take off the coat of normal-life, a coat that never really suited me well and put on the jacket of unknown-life, a coat very much not designed to be worn within a 30 mile radius 80% of the time. It’s the type of coat that could have easily been worn by Columbus, but then as an un-synthetic, un-infused non-polymer, minus-three-layer Gore-Tex® XCR™ Fabric-version of the one that I will be wearing. Riding on my bike to work I thought a lot of Columbus and the time he lived in, little as I do know about how it must have been. A time in which a lot of this world had not been discovered and in which the urge for discovery of new land and definite enrichment of mind and pocket meant venturing into unknown waters with a sturdy boat.
That’s the sort of thing I want to do I thought, be a little like Columbus, but then without the poignant vitamin deficiency and the constant possibility of mutiny and of course with a guaranteed return ticket to The Netherlands. If I’m not going to be rich (and I don’t see how, except for the smallest chance in Vegas) this degree of torture would be a little too much. So, a trip for spiritual enrichment? Hmm, this makes me think of me dancing on a mountain on one leg wearing a thin orange vestment, licking a string of beads meanwhile solidly believing that, at this moment, I’m hugely enriching myself on a spiritual level… No, spiritual enrichment sounds a bit too profound to be the real reason for this trip. What does sound convincing to me is that the eagerness to go on this trip lies deeply hidden in my genetic configuration (and with me in the gene configuration of Columbus and every other person with a bad case of wanderlust). All the time I knew that I would make this trip it felt like my genes were sending signals to my subconscious with a message that I’ve been able to decode only recently, reading: ‘The plane to New York is now boarding. All passengers heading for New York, please proceed to gate 14.’ When I finally understood that I bought a ticket right away and started preparing…
The preparation, ‘carrying out or preparing the necessary in advance’. I just looked it up in the dictionary so it immediately explains my position in proportion to this term. For as far as I know I’ve never planned anything, except when unavoidable in a professional environment (of course). The explanation for this aversion lies at least partly in the fact that I’m not blessed with any evident proof of talent when it comes to arranging my future or the use of indispensable instruments to shape that future, like an agenda. Maybe I’m even afraid of it. Carelessly planning weeks (or even months!) ahead without ever realizing the possibility of a mental break down when total panic takes over requires a courageous mind. And when it comes to planning my mind just closes its eyes and tries to hide away in the bushes. But except for the lack of skill there’s another reason for this behaviour. You see, I’m trying not to think about my agenda to avoid living along the lines of paper and, by doing so, enabling myself to live in total freedom of body and mind.
Right.
The truth of course is that living without any form of planning ends up with reliving the same situations over and over again, but I find it very hard admitting that. I’ve lost weeks of my life searching for my keys and still I’m convinced that I’m less of a free person when I make myself putting them on a hook next to the door right after I enter my house. As a sort of mix between denial and realization, I sometimes write appointments into my agenda after I’ve had them. At least, I used to do that. Now I’m trying to plan for as many appointments as I can and then forget to keep a lot of them. Probably I’m the only one considering this an improvement.
It’s very likely that I haven’t made the necessary arrangements for my trip as well. But what I at least did do is watch an episode of National Geographic about the danger of typhoons hitting the United States at ground level and I’m also seriously trying not to miss any of the episodes of Ray Mears Extreme Survival. If you look at the bright side of things I have at least thought about one of the real dangers a traveller might encounter when venturing on a trip into the heart of nature with nothing more than a rain suit for protection. The weather.Bad weather. I know I’m going to be in it at some point. There’s no possibility of permanent escape during the full year that I’ve set out for this trip. You don’t need knowledge of any meteorological statistics for this, only reason. That I will be smack-dab in the middle of inconceivably bad weather when I’m on my bike halfway along a 30 mile dead straight line. I expect this to happen at some point. What I don’t know is how many times it will happen, and how bad my bike & rain suit will be tormented and for how long this weather will hold when I am in the middle of it. And what if I get sick? Or lose direction (which is actually unlikely with a waterproof GPS-receiver, but still)? Or both?
The possible consequences of such a personal disaster I have seen during this documentary on National Geographic. This episode was a commentary of how on one day about ten years ago nearly two hundred typhoons trashed several western states within a few hours. An extremely rare chain of highly unlikely events led to a jumble of villages ripped apart to shreds at the end of a day, that undoubtedly started very peaceful. Thick long lines of completely shattered trees. Car wrecks folded around street lanterns and trees that had managed to stay upright against the gale force winds. Ponds sucked dry. And covering everything, a confetti of unrecognisable crap. Crap that existed of the once proud belongings of people who, only half a day before, had no idea about the inferno that had passed about two hours ago. Very graphic indeed.
It could be my bike and belongings undergoing the same beastly treatment and maybe I’d be running into such bad fate that I will not live to tell the tale to my friends on a party with a nice cold Heineken in my right hand and some chips in the other, but I’m not expecting it. The USA encounters a storm of such a category only once every fifty years, so there’s an infinite amount of days that I won’t find myself in the middle of such a hell. So no, I’m not afraid of typhoons, I might be afraid of agendas, but not for typhoons. Also, fear would be useless, just as resistance. When a typhoon decides to make its way into my direction all that remains is a very brief moment of bad luck followed by an infinite black hole. An agenda is avoidable, a typhoon that’s heading your way with 180 miles an hour is not, unless it decides to avoid you. If you look at it that way it’s not even that strange to be afraid of an agenda.
