July 4, 2003

“Today we celebrate our independence.”

There were no campsites available for the 4^th so I put the moped back in the Righteous Van and drove it home with all the rest of my stuff. Back to square 1. This time it has to be right.

Ok, ready to leave again. I put on my helmet. It’s a beautiful morning: the sun shining, birds singing, my heart racing, everything ready. This time, this time I was really prepared. I’d just get on my bike and ride West. West on my two-stroke covered wagon. See the country. Deal with adversity, meet incredible people. I was ready.

I got on my ped and started her up. Sounded good. Revved the engine. Sounded real good. Check the straps on my bag, hop on, and away I go. I get a hundred feet up the hill and I feel the whole bike start to twist and bend. I look down and the engine is swinging side to side, with every pedal, the back wheel is shifting side to side. I feel like I’m on a sinking ship, headed straight for the bottom. I can hear the first mate of my brain saying “Captain, the main mast has broken, the crew is abandoning ship, we’re taking water fast, and the sharks look ravenous. We’re done for.” I jump off the bike, barely get it onto the kickstand with it twisting and shaking. And it wasn’t the ship that was headed for the bottom, it was my will and sense of self worth. Welcome to hell. “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, this is bad this is so bad oh shit, what the fuck, this is not good.” I started to laugh and lay down on the road next to my sorry sack of a bike. Everything was wrong. Everything was bad. I’d spent every day for so long working on getting out the door, waking at 8 am and staying up till 3, 4 in the morning just to do this trip. But here I was, a hundred feet from my goddamn door and it’s a big fucking wreck.

I laughed so hard I almost cried. I almost cried too.

I wheeled the bike back down the half a block to my house, and looked it over. What was wrong? Was it too heavy? Was I going to have to redo everything? Maybe the moped would go on the trip without me? That would take care of the weight. I could even follow it along online at mopedarmy.com! How cool would that be? A moped, alone, in the wilds of America. It’d do better than I had so far.

I had been ready to deal with problems… breaking down in NoOneKnows, Kansas? Bring it on, that’s an adventure. Breaking down closer to my house than I can throw the moped? Screw that, that’s a disaster. In fact so far this whole thing has been a disaster. I don’t know how I’ve held myself together for so long. Everything gone wrong. The moped was wrong, the website was wrong, the technology was wrong. Everything was wrong. “Captain, the crew’s swum to shore, the sharks have built a trapeze and they’re singing Opera on the main deck. The Tons of Anchovies we were bringing to Anarbor have come back to life and are staging a protest on the Poop deck. Is it time to abandon ship?”

Well that was the bottom. I’d officially hit bottom. But as Admiral Perry had yelled to his crew in the Battle of Lake Erie when he was out-gunned and out-manned, “Don’t give up the ship!” (Erie PA being one of my first known destinations.) And so I called my sister and my friend Zach, and got some great words of encouragement and stuck with it. I wasn’t going to quit now. “You’ve never been much of a quitter, just let go of your expectations, and get it done again. Then keep getting it done every time it gets undone. And then after you keep doing that and it’s still undone, do it again. But you are going on this trip one way or another,” I told myself.

I went and looked at the ped. Apparently one of the main bolts that holds the whole engine and frame to itself had fallen out somewhere or other. Either it had never been put back in, or it had wiggled loose on the way back from PA, or… who knows, it was gone. I went to a bunch of places, and finally got one at AutoZone.

By the time I’d managed that, it was too late to leave that day, so I went to sleep.

I woke up to the booms and cracks of fireworks. Oh yeah, it’s the Fourth of July. Today I celebrate my independence. Independence indeed. That’s what this trip is all about anyway isn’t it. Independence. I thought I was independent before, I’ve been through the loop so many times recently, and I haven’t even left yet. And so I celebrate my independence, by going through all my bags and leaving everything behind I possibly can. Weeding out the things that would be nice to have, but I don’t need. So be it. Tomorrow I leave 10 pounds lighter, and a little bit more desensitized to failure.

One of the ways to get out of feeling terrible when failure comes fast and furious is to say “maybe this was supposed to happen,” or “maybe this was all to get me to remember to put my chain lube in my bag.” In either case, it’s kind of effective because it gets you out of the feeling of being contacted by either a mean-spirited god with a nasty sense of humor, or one that’s trying to tell you “give up now, because it’s just going to get worse…” Well I never believed in an anthropocentric god that has any kinds of plans for me in particular, so to believe it now that the shit has hit the fan and my self worth has taken a hit would be to use god as an excuse, or a crutch. No good for me in the long run… or, if god is other than I believe, I think this explanation would most likely be insulting. The alternative is to say to myself, “This sucks. What’s the best thing I can make/get out of this situation.” And so I did, and I do.

Bring it on.