All journey, no destination

I’m 18 hours into a 24 hour drive, and I’m starting to wonder whether I’ve made a huge mistake.

I’d left my hometown in the desert that Saturday morning, my small suv packed with only the essentials, and made my way to the Pacific Northwest.

Until that point, the only time I’d known was desert time. The day sun moves across the horizon in a perfect arc, disappearing the shadow. The heat of the day turned my skin pink instead of brown and I felt it was time to abandon the sun.

I’d been riding my mountain bike around those dusty foothills for twenty six years. The love of the sport was the strongest pull I knew, and I followed it without asking many questions. The truth is, I had no idea what I was doing.

These are the images circling through my mind at 2am in a truck stop near Boise. My roots were unearthed as I lie awake in my car, listening to my heart pound in my ears and semi trucks rumble by on the freeway overhead.

I left Idaho and continued down the I-90, where the evergreen pines emerged in parts. Treetops and partial views of trunks entangled with fog. My windshield wipers hadn’t been used, maybe ever, as misty rain coated everything with water.

Pulling into the Rattlesnake Mountain Trail parking lot just outside of Seattle, I rummaged through piles of my life, searching for wheels and lenses out from the bottom. Piecing the different parts of my world back together, pushing the pedals up the logging road.

Entering the greenspace, the air cleaned out my stagnant insides and made a rainbow.

On a multi-day cycling trip through the Olympic National Forest, a route planning error stretched time to thirteen hours with half a day’s food and no way to shorten it.

The warm sea breeze washed the dirt lines from my glasses off my forehead as my mind drifted into a blank slate. The inner voice softened to an echo, then silence. My camera became part of me, another mind to express movement as it felt in the body.

I’d felt glimpses of this before, but never so completely. Exhaustion had dissolved whatever usually sits between me and the world around me. In moments of pain, where I sometimes question what I’m doing out there, the reverence of the natural world makes pain start to seem meaningful. I start to look for reasons to express appreciation for even the smallest signs of life, like a stream to filter water or crossing the path of an animal.

There’s joy in the experience of learning I’m not separate from nature, and that I have no more power than any other living part of earth around me, when modern conveniences are stripped away.

When I think back about that night Boise, unsure of what I’d learn by following my heart, it’s that the mountains would show me how to really live.