- "The trick is to die young as late as possible."
- Ashley Montagu
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- Through the years, I've picked up pedal partners during
my travels around the world. They've pedaled through 50 states with me
for a glimpse of one of the wealthiest societies on the planet. Sometimes,
they discover different aspects to the United States of America than what
they expected.
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- Heading east on Route 64, my Australian friend John Brown
and I had coasted more than ten miles off the plateau leading out of Grand
Canyon National Park. We stopped at the Chevron gas station where 64 intersects
Route 89. Our water supply was low from camping in the desert the night
before, so we filled our bottles out of the station spigot. I pumped air
into my tires when John said he was ready to ride. A few seconds later,
I replaced the air hose, but nature called.
-
- "Gotta' hit the bathroom," I said, as I hopped
off and leaned my bike against the station wall.
-
- When I returned, John had a puzzled look on his face.
He twisted around with one leg swung over the top tube and looked down
the road. He clicked his brake handles by pressing them and releasing
in rapid succession.
-
- "What are you looking at?" I asked.
-
- "Don't know," he said. "I barely got a
glimpse of a guy riding by on a mountain bike, at least, I think it was
a mountain bike. I don't know because he had gone by when I looked up
from my map. It was the strangest bike setup I've ever seen."
-
- "Let's catch up to him and find out," I said.
-
- We headed north on Route 89 into a blustery wind. The
highway swooped down a long incline into a valley. Multicolored buttes
and mesas slipped by us with sand swirling through the sagebrush alongside
the road. Minutes later, we spotted orange flags flapping from the back
of what looked like a small wagon moving slowly in the breakdown lane.
-
- Up closer, we saw a bicycle loaded like a gypsy wagon.
Two dark blue mountain backpacks hung vertically stacked (in place of
panniers) over the back wheel like saddlebags on a horse. A tent, sleeping
bag and mattress filled the middle section over the rack. A wooden stick
crossed in back where two orange flags hung out on the traffic side. In
the middle, like the back bumper on an old Cadillac, a spare tire hung
from the stick.
-
- Pulling alongside the rider, I saw two blue front panniers
under a plastic beige milk crate, which was braced, to the old-style flared
Schwinn handlebars. Two one-gallon white Clorox bottles hung from the
handlebars, on both sides of the gooseneck. A second set of Clorox bottles
was tied to both backpacks behind the rider's arms. Sitting up in the
milk crate and with its head poked out of a six inch round hole in the
cardboard cover, a black cat stared at me. He appeared to be the navigator
of this two wheeled road-ship.
-
- I slowed to eight miles per hour, to match the speed
of a wrinkled old man spinning a low gear. He wore blue work pants, high
top leather work boots, a red nylon windbreaker, leather work gloves and
an orange stocking cap. His weatherworn face and thin, wiry frame cast
a tall shadow under the morning sun.
-
- John and I introduced ourselves to the fifty-nine year
old man who called himself Stan. I asked him what kind of gear cluster
he was cranking. He said it was a 22 front chain ring "granny"
to a 32-toothed rear end low gear. That explained why he was going slowly
and cranking fast. He acted reserved, but as the miles unfolded, so did
his astonishing story.
-
- "Thirteen years ago, my life lacked purpose, so
I pressed the eject button on the plastic world. I sold my computer company--bid
farewell to what was left of my family and took off on my bicycle. I've
worn out three others until I came across this mountain bike. I'll wear
it out too, but so far, it's the best of the lot. I've customized it over
the years so it's able to carry the 200 pounds of gear I pack on it."
-
- "200 pounds!" I gasped.
-
- "That's right," Stan said. "This is my
home. I never thought I would be on the road so long but I know I will
never go home. I live on my investments. My wife died of cancer and my
kids don't give a damn about anything. If I had stayed in my job or tried
to keep caring about things they didn't care about, I'd have gone nuts.
Instead, I decided to be happy."
-
- Our group rolled further into the desert as John and
I probed Stan for more of his background. Thirteen years on the road from
Alaska, the Yukon Territory, through the USA, Mexico, Central America and
to the bottom of South America. Never the same road twice! With that many
years on the road, he possessed the stuff of legends. While he shared
some of his experiences, the cat issued a "Meow." Stan smiled.
-
- "This is my best friend Little Chum. Life has had
its disappointments, but Little Chum never lets me down. He's great company
and never complains. He's cycled with me from Canada to Argentina with
never an argument. He sleeps during the day and prowls around my campsite
at night. We communicate unlike any two creatures. Little Chum knows
my mind."
-
- "Don't you ever get homesick for friends?"
I asked.
-
- "No point in returning. Life is today. Anything
else doesn't mean squat. I don't look back, nor do I have any false aspirations.
I rarely think of home. They are busy with their lives. It's no longer
my problem. My philosophy deals with this instant. Stan's Law states
that wherever you are right now, bets are you're better off than you will
be this time tomorrow."
-
- "What about expectations?" John asked.
-
- "No disappointments with my law," Stan replied.
"You won't see me straining my neck around the next bend in the road
or even talking about next week. I keep a diary, but when it's full, I
throw it in the fire."
-
- "What?" I gasped, nearly wavering into his
packs.
-
- "What's in the past is done. Besides, can you imagine
carrying around 13 years of diaries? I'm already too heavy. No! I never
ride the same road twice and I don't think about yesterday. I don't even
care about yesterday."
-
- Stan sat erect in the saddle. His smooth cadence complimented
the millions of pedal strokes his legs had pounded out over the years.
Deep lines in his face showed a comfortable acceptance of life, as he
knew it. Stan was a road warrior.
-
- "Twenty-five miles is my daily target," he
continued. "If I don't make it, so what? On the flats, I average
8 to 10 miles an hour. I figure I do a million foot pounds of work a year.
But I'm in no hurry. Isn't that right Little Chum?"
-
- A faint meow came from inside the crate as Stan's legs
spun their way through time. I thought about my load of 60 pounds and
my own travels that paled in contrast to Stan's. What single event sent
that intriguing human being toward his extraordinary destiny? My amazement
increased as Stan revealed a few episodes from his bicycle sojourn.
-
- "Hell, I've got enough roads to keep me busy 'til
I die. I never think about how far I've gone or how far I'll go. I stay
in the Americas because there are sufficient experiences here."
-
- "Any funny ones?" I asked.
-
- "Hundreds," he said. "The one I cherish
the most happened a few years back in the Yucatan of Mexico. I was camped
out one night in a stand of scrub trees. As usual, I put Little Chum out
for his nightly prowl. I put my dentures in my coffee cup outside the
tent. I got tired of knocking them over at night and getting water on
the floor. Next morning, my teeth were missing, so I called to Little
Chum. He sniffed the cup and followed his nose to a burrow about 20 feet
away from camp and started digging. I helped him. I pulled out sticks,
fur balls and rodent skeletons before I got a foot into a pack rat's den.
Wouldn't you know it, there were my teeth, smiling up at me. I rinsed
'em off and popped 'em back in my mouth. I tell you breakfast wouldn't
have been the same that day without my teeth."
-
- We laughed before John asked, "Any dangerous times?"
-
- "My worst experience was in the Peruvian Andes when
soldiers slashed through my tent with their bayonets cutting my shoulder
at the same time. They hauled me away to jail. They interrogated me just
like you see in the movies. Bastards anyway! I wrote letters to the U.S.
Embassy until I got some attention. My educational background and innocence
got through to them. A sergeant befriended me and even discussed Mark
Twain while my tent was being repaired. Two weeks later, I was released
on a weekend, but since I didn't have any money until the banks opened
on Monday, they let me stay in prison two more days. I can tell you
that Americans don't have any idea of how lucky they are living in a free
country. The kids growing up today take too much for granted.
-
- "Another time I camped out in a bad spot, but it
was my fault. I was tired and didn't think about where I set the tent
down. It was in a dry wash. That night, a desert rainstorm drenched the
area. I woke up to water seeping into my tent. I kept picking the floor
up until a flood of water was pulling at every corner of my tent. I looked
out the flaps to see Little Chum standing on high ground with each lightning
flash. I was in the middle of a flood. I leaped out of the tent as a
wave of water swept it downstream. For the next couple of hours, I sat
in the rain, talking to myself on how stupid I was to set up the tent in
such a bad place. Little Chum was soaked to the bone and shivering. In
the morning, I tracked downstream and found my tent snagged on a stick.
I was lucky to recover everything."
-
- John and I kept trading places in order to hear Stan.
He proved a remarkable character. I felt like a polliwog and he was the
big daddy, the one who had gone before-- who knew the ways of the world.
His philosophy intrigued me even though I couldn't begin to live like
that. I had great expectations for each new day on a bicycle adventure.
-
- But that proved the key to his unusual life path. That's
the one thing about living and being human. It's a miracle on this single
green planet somewhere out in the black void of space. It gives a beginning
and a lifetime later, it ends. What we do in the interim is our choice.
We're given certain abilities and intelligence, but for those of us born
in a free country--we can decide our life choices. What's more important,
we can change our decisions at anytime.
-
- As for me, I am a professional cloud watcher. Clouds
are not in a hurry. They change so slowly that most people never notice,
never look up. But each of us CAN look. That's what Stan is doing. He's
out there tonight under the stars, filling his days with living. Stan
doesn't complain, nor does he live in desperation. He allows the wind
to caress his cheeks and shoulders. Its stormy fingers play in his hair,
and the rain cleanses his spirit. The stars, moon and sun have shared
sweet secrets with him in the morning dew. He makes love with nature on
his bicycle. Stan celebrates the moment.
-
- Ahead of us in the afternoon a crossroads appeared.
Stan pedaled through it without looking back as we turned east.
-
- "Take care guys," he said.
-
- We watched his orange flags vanish over the hill. John
and I continued our transcontinental trek with new ideas about life. The
one thing that dismayed us most was Stan's disregard for the diaries he
had thrown into the fire. But that was Stan. If it weren't for the way
he lived, we would never have known about his teeth smiling up from the
bottom of a pack rat's hideout.
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- Excerpts from: Bicycling Around the World:
-
- Tire Tracks for Your Imagination. Bicycling the
Continental Divide: Slice of Heaven, Taste of Hell. Handbook for Touring
Bicyclists By Frosty Wooldridge Motorcycle Adventure to Alaska: Into the
Wind An Extreme Encounter: Antarctica Copies available: 1 888 280 7715
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