Two years, fourteen thousand miles, a five hundred dollar bicycle. 1999 to 2001.
Nepal, 2000. A rural hospital. The sick lie on the concrete floor. Some moan from somewhere between consciousness and death; others seize, and are held down so their skulls will not strike the concrete.
I have been here two hours, and no one has examined me. The pain comes in waves. Between them I have time to think, with a calm that surprises me, that it has been a lucky life. I close my eyes and wait for it to end.
I am twenty-three years old, and I am wrong about this, as I have been wrong about nearly everything that brought me here.
A plan. Ride around the world on a five hundred dollar bicycle, then return to Asia, shave my head, and spend the rest of my life as a Buddhist monk. I had read the sutras. I had meditated every day for years. I had ten thousand dollars and no doubts.
The plan lasted until the first monastery, where the monks ate better than I did and the women of the village prostrated themselves before them on white tile. I had come looking for holiness. I had found an institution.
I kept riding anyway, and it took me twenty-five years to understand why. Leaving cost me nothing. There was no house I would miss. I had learned young to look after myself, and on the road that old necessity became a kind of genius: I could sleep anywhere, fix anything, talk to anyone, and I could not bear to do the same thing twice.
The road never asked me to. It was the one place where the way I had been made was of any use.
In Laos a girl sees my face and screams “Falang!” Foreigner. The whole village runs into its huts.
I had come to Asia to dissolve the self. It turned out to be the only thing anyone could see.
Soldiers guard the opium fields. In China I want to quit nearly every day. On the Tibetan Plateau the nomads laugh at me and pour me yak-butter tea, which is the worst thing I have ever tasted and the only thing they have to give.
Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, China, Tibet.
The appendix comes out. Two months on my back, and then the road again, down into India.
In a stone temple in the Himalaya a sadhu passes me his pipe. In Dharamsala I hear the Dalai Lama speak and understand exactly one thing: transformation does not come where you have scheduled it.
Nepal, India.
The Swat Valley, years before the Taliban. Among strangers I keep seeing faces like my own, and the history that put them there runs straight through me.
Damascus. In a Shia mosque I pray behind an imam until nothing is left of me but the prayer. I walk out under the stars certain that I have finally understood.
Some days later, in the mountains of Lebanon, a man pours arak and makes me drink to the health of George W. Bush. Then he puts a gun to my head and orders me to ride into the dark.
Between the certainty and the gun: a few days, one mountain range.
Pakistan, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon.
Rhodes. White yachts wait out the winter, and in a youth hostel I read Thucydides: the strong do as they can, and the weak suffer as they must. I had set out to transcend the world. It turns out I am one of the strong.
In the middle of Italy the bicycle falls apart, and so do I. I decide to walk to Rome and fly home. Then, through the salt and sunscreen in my eyes, a sign for a bicycle shop. A mechanic named Marzullo, his hands flying above his head as he talks, takes me in like kin.
I keep riding. Over the Alps in a snowstorm. Across France beside my father, the two of us laughing, mending over a thousand kilometers what had been broken for years.
Turkey, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, France.
Honduras. Soldiers at the roadside: if you are robbed, do not fight. They kill.
In Chiapas I ride with Carlos, a young Nicaraguan going north at the risk of his life, toward the country I can fly home to whenever I like. For two years I have called my journey a quest. Beside his, it is a holiday with hardships.
In the Baja desert a van hits me. That night, shaking, I camp in the dunes and watch the sand drift past like something leaving.
Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico.
Southern California, 2001. Fourteen thousand miles. My heart rests at thirty-four beats a minute.
I have not become a monk, or a saint, or anything I set out to become. I have become, mostly, a man who knows how often he has fooled himself.
And for the first time in my life I am at home in my own skin.
The roads are still on the map. Most of them are closed to a man like me now. Syria went through a war that emptied its cities. Lebanon has been bombed again. The Taliban took the Swat Valley and were driven out. Tibet no longer lets a foreigner ride alone. Honduras and the south of Mexico have grown harder.
I did not know I was seeing the last of something.
One never does.
Cycle Nomad is a book in progress.
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