The Big Ride Project Travel Log

Follow me on my journey across the midwest!

[thebigrideproject]

A ride in the midwest

A bike route runs east-west through the heart of Madison Wisconsin, and puts you on country roads as you ride northeast, then north, towards Michigan's Upper Peninsula. From Madison, it's almost exactly 400 miles to Houghton by bicycle on a route that covers a panoply of the Midwest's greatest hits. Farmland for miles. ATV trails and sandy rutting that toss your front wheel around like a bird feeder in the wind. Unpaved roads that rise up and roll down in a way that reminds me of the Pacific Ocean when I lived in California. Dense forests that, when it's humid, rain seems to form in the tree tops and sprinkle you gently. Small towns composed of little more than a gas station, an auto body shop, a pub, and a church (the bare institutional minimum to maintain a small town in the Midwest. If you know, you know). And of course, the occasional city like Appleton with its odes to suburban life and material consumption in the form of strip mall after strip mall.

And then there are the bugs. It's not an exaggeration to say that I may have been stung by every single kind of bug between Houghton and Chicago. Black flies, deer flies, mosquitoes, wasps, hornets, bees, gnats, and the other bugs I don't know the names of beyond the curses I utter at them as I ride by. When you're moving on a bike, they chase you. I find it to be the greatest motivation to keep moving. The moment you stop, the bugs will feast, and you will itch (more), hurt (more), or a combination of both. In one memorable moment, I nearly crash trying to swat a particularly nasty fly off my leg. In another moment, I nearly crash when a wasp stings me on the hand and I flinch, jerking my handlebars and narrowly avoiding riding headlong into a ditch. They fly into your helmet, and catch in your hair. One of the most bug ravaged part of my body is the back of my skull, alongside my ankles, the outside of my thighs, my buttocks, and my shoulder blades.

On hot days, the sun pounds upon you from above, burning your skin. You can feel the humidity rising up from the ground too, sandwiching you between a broiler and steamer.

On rainy days, the water hits your face like pellets, that become bullets if you're riding downhill. Your cycling shoes, excellent for riding long distances, become little tubs that encase your feet in an aquarium, and you can hear them sloshing with every pedal stroke. I don't feel too much of the water around my feet though, as by this time most of the feeling has left them.

On long days, you learn about every single physical issue or oddity you have, magnified by the mile, by the hour, by the minute, by the second. I learn that I have blood circulation issues in my left hand that causes it to go numb. I have a shoulder imbalance due to long-standing injuries on my right side, that causes it to throb annoyingly. I underestimate how pronated my feet are, and they tingle and hurt, until the nerves surrender and simply stop asking for attention and, like my left hand, go numb. My wrists are brutalized not just by the distance, but years of sitting at a computer, typing away at a keyboard in professions that reward sedentary existences that characterize 21st century life.

And on top of that, I have pointy sit bones, which my saddle reminds me of every time I push down on the pedals.

I am also keenly aware of just how unprepared I was for the task just one month ago. A true training block of high volume rides would have highlighted the issues I am now facing, and I could have pre-empted at least some of them with either equipment changes or certain kinds of physical training. Although, to grant myself grace, all of that would-a could-a plays second fiddle to being a pre-tenure professor, husband, and father to a child under one year of age.

In this way, endurance cycling is educational. Endurance athletes and pundits will tell you that long endurance events 'strip the soul bare' like an onion, exposing you to the world or, more likely, to yourself. It will take a fair bit more time for me to process what parts of my soul have been exposed, but I at least know the strange contours of my body and its history, and constraints my life presents, in living color and sensation.

But every now and then, when the sun backs off and the clouds lend a hand, a breeze swings in from behind and pushes you along, and you find yourself alone, with just the sound of your wheels spinning, dirt crunching under tires, and your own breathing, you find something that you wonder if others will be blessed enough, lucky enough, privileged enough, to find.

Endurance events and goals are not for everyone. I'm not so naive as to believe that. If you take a step back, it is at its heart a deeply illogical and nonsensical hobby in the modern era. We can travel great distances while seated comfortably, and we can work, play, and socialize without ever having to leave our bedroom or put on pants (one of the few good things from the COVID era). When we commit ourselves to endurance, we not only largely abandon those conveniences, we accept the brutality of what's ahead, i.e. what I've already described. It's not even clear that such activities are better for our health in the long run, as the wear and tear on our joints cannot be ignored, the cardiovascular health benefits notwithstanding. Even now, as I type this, I'm not sure my body will ever be the same again.

But there is something undeniable to be said about what it does expect of you, and the blessing it can be to those who accept it. Triathlete and gravel bike racer Heather Jackson reminds us that "we get to do this." We get to suffer, and in that strange ironic expression loads complexity that doesn't just speak to what makes endurance pursuits a thing at all, but also reveals something about the activist mindset, and commitment.

Occasionally, commitment reminds us why our identities push us along the way they do. Just south of Pelkie is a country lane that leads out of a dense forest. I have about 30 or 40 miles more to go before I get to Houghton, and I've just ridden through a forest rain. As the rain breaks and the forest releases me to the open road, the bluest sky I may have ever seen in my life cracks through. The most clearly defined clouds float by so close I feel I can touch them. Every part of me is tired, and I don't emote in any visible way beyond sitting up on my handlebars. And I breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.

When I get home, just like the quiet reverie of this country lane, there will be no parade for me. There will be no one to greet me at my door. There will be no parade, no fruit basket, no edible arrangement or card.

There won't even be any food.

But only the clicking of my hubs and the familiar creak of my floorboards as I walk in will be welcome.

[thebigrideproject]

After the adrenaline is gone

This morning I rode out of Madison WI. The ground was still wet from the last night's rain, and thick clouds hung over head. The morning air was cool and humid.

Today, the ride home begins.

From my motel in Madison it is 380-ish miles to Houghton. Since I left my front porch back almost a month ago, I've learned a few things about long bike rides.

take care of your butt. It's a long time in a saddle to not treat your rear end well, with the right saddle, and the right shorts.

train tracks are tricky. Ride them as perpendicular as possible.

it's almost always better to take the longer, safer route than taking the most direct route that puts you 3 feet from a busy highway.

patience is key. Better to wait for roads to be clear than to try to beat vehicles.

Etc...

The first leg home takes me around 70 miles from Madison to a town called Waupun. My route this morning takes me straight through the heart of Madison, through campus, and out the eastern side of the city. When riding through a city, you see all kinds of faces of the town from a variety of different positions: within traffic, on the sidewalk, and if you're lucky enough to be in a city that has them, the bike lane.

As I ride through Madison, I'm absolutely sure that the residents can navigate the town with grace and knowledge, delicately fluttering from street to street and cutting across lines of traffic whenever needed to manage the unpredictability of cars, pedestrians, and construction.

I, on the other hand, bumble about, glancing down at the GPS on my bars trying to make follow a little yellow line overlayed on a confusing city map, cursing the very technology that keeps me from ending up halfway to Toledo instead of halfway to Houghton. I have always had a lousy sense of direction, which is a bad quality to have if you are likewise possessed with a wanderlust. The former quality I fear has only been further exacerbated by our increasing reliance on smartphones that tell us to "turn left at the second exit" while cramming a greasy McDonald's breakfast sandwich into your mouth while on the freeway traveling 80 miles per hour.

As for the latter, that wanderlust started young. I must have been under the age of 10 when our family visited the Mall of America in Minnesota, and the very moment we walked in, I slipped away from my mother's grasp and disappeared into the crowds. As a parent now, I can imagine the dread they must have felt as one of their children simply disappears into a crowd, barely 4 feet high. I try not to think now how I will feel when my daughter inevitably does the same, or similar things, and disappears into a crowd, out of my grasp.

This wanderlust remains with me to this day of course, an explanation for why such a crazy scholarly project seemed like a good idea.

That being said, I'm happy to get going on the return because it stops me from thinking about the immensity of the coming miles. If I were to be honest with you, I dread the ride. Having now spent time hearing the stories of so many people, with more than enough for two books, never mind one, the adrenaline is largely gone. Instead, it's replaced by a healthy respect of the numbers ahead, and what they'll feel like.

I have the rhythm down too, to the point of ritual. When I arrive at a location, I:

Put all the food in the fridge.

Unroll the clothes bag and place it on the dresser.

Remove the rear rack from the bike and put it on the floor.

Plug in my GPS to charge.

Take a shower.

Get food.

Write.

Then, in the mornings:

get up, eat as much oatmeal as possible. Grab as many bananas as I can sneak out of the breakfast area in my pants.

decide how long I want to ride today, pick a hotel, and upload the route to my GPS. Then I re-attach the GPS on handlebars.

put the clothes bag back in the handlebar roll, install on bike.

put the food back in the food back, put on fork.

take a shower, get dressed.

Take more bananas.

Leave.

I typically hit the road by 8AM, and ride between 5-7 hours per day.

Rinse. repeat.

With the ritual down, with the stories gathered, and only observation of space and place, from the saddle of a bike, remaining, the excitement, the newness, the novelty of the project is replaced by...well, the normalcy of it all.

Which is wild, I must admit, that there is equal parts normalcy and immense workloads ahead. Because rather fittingly, the last two days home are going to be, in all likelihood, triple digit miles in single days of riding.

I try not to think about this as I pedal. The weather is perfect, and i wish I could be doing more than the 70 miles today.

Hundreds of miles behind me. Hundreds more to go.

[thebigrideproject]

Mount Horeb and the myth of rural red

I rode into Verona over the weekend, a suburb that hangs out southwest of Madison in south central Wisconsin.

While undeniably an appendage of Madison, the place I am working in nearby is separated by farmland and expanse, and is therefore arguably not.

Mount Horeb, a little town west of Verona, with a strange obsession with trolls. Perhaps it's a product of an ostensible Norwegian vibe (there are the occasional flags throughout the town), although the locals speak to the Norwegian identity being no more or less arbitrary than the trolls given that it is the location of a few different European-originating groups. It's a place where the lawns and little green spaces between the road and the buildings are neatly manicured. A cleanly coifed downtown section stretches for a few town blocks, then disappears into neighborhoods and, eventually, into the surrounding Wisconsin farmland west and east of Mount Horeb. Its geography, size, and population density (low) meets the expectations of a rural, midwest town.

It was personally jarring then to see pride flags flying from buildings. Tidbits and expressions of diversity, equity, and inclusion throughout businesses and homes greet you.

It is equally revealing and perhaps shameful that my first response to Mount Horeb was "this isn't a rural town."

It can't be. Rural towns don't fly pride flags. They don't have Black Lives Matter window signs. They don't stand up for immigrants and persons of color, or at least they don't state it out loud in the shadow of the rise of the American Gestapo (i.e. ICE).

When there was push-back from a conservative Florida-based organization against a student publicly reading I Am Jazz, a book about a transgender-woman, to likewise announce her coming-out as a transgender-woman, the high schoolers read the book publicly on their school lawn in support [1].

I spoke with a law enforcement officer who was ready and prepared to stand in front of ICE, and tell them to f*ck off and leave his community alone.

It doesn't make sense, because that's not rural America.

And there is the lie, revealed by my own immediate response that surely, this isn't a rural town.

It is wrong to state of course that rural America is a hotbed of progressivisim. Generally speaking today, the opposite is true. Electoral maps depict a sea of red, coast to coast, across the United States, the vast majority of which is sparsely populated rural spaces. Liberals, progressives, and democrats tend to glibly dismiss this redness as "land don't vote." True, in the brutest sense of truth perhaps. But just like my own reflections on my knee-jerk response to Mount Horeb, revealing of a perspective that played a crucial role in allowing a transformation of many of these spaces from labor-blue into MAGA-red.

Sure, land don't vote. But rural people do. And when you dismiss the land, you dismiss the people.

When I started poking people about this place and its politics, people had a variety of explanations for why Mount Horeb is, well, Mount Horeb. A few themes:

Proximity to Madison and its university is essential as a progressive influence, particularly through its land-grant status and relationship to the local agricultural scene.

Act 10 and the pushback against the abusive cruelty of the Scott Walker administration.

A broader tradition of labor organizing in the state, particularly the Farmer's Union.

Worth emphasizing is its internal considerations too: civic engagement and participation, an activist orientation, and some goddamn chutzpah are forces built in relation to the external factors.

The lie revealed by my own reaction and resistance to the idea of Mount Horeb as a rural community is that rural places are necessarily red.

And if it ain't red, it ain't rural.

The inevitability of rural red is a myth, and a dangerous one at that. It precludes the possibility of alternative worlds for these communities. Ones that can places where progressive values can exist and flourish, and drive decision-making in those communities. In many ways, these communities are where progressive values can and should be the strongest. In small, tight-knit communities that cover our country, the "land don't vote" space, communities can foster a social self-sufficiency that must necessarily embrace difference, diversity, and inclusion. When all we have is each other, "each other" is most powerful when it includes all of us.

But in the land of the forgotten, the opposite can take hold when it is, indeed, forgotten. It can became a place of frustration and rage at a world that has dismissed, fostering the hate that the regime has made not just a byproduct of its policy, but the policy itself.

The inevitability of rural red is a myth. And we accept the myth at our country's peril.

[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aliciamelvillesmith/school-cancels-reading-of-transgender-book

[thebigrideproject]

Summer of Fury, Summer of Destruction

Yesterday, the United States of America, under the domination of Donald Trump and his enablers (both in our government and in our communities), launched military strikes on three sites in Iran. It's unclear at the moment what impact on Iran's nuclear program the strikes will have, although the 47 regime will claim victory through aggression. Then, as it has already done, it will put the onus on Iran to make "peace". I use "peace" in scare quotes because what it actually means here is total and complete subjugation to Western powers with imperial designs, i.e., Israel and the USA.

The last several weeks have marked the rise of a new generation of American gestapo: "Immigration, Customs, and Enforcement", or ICE, conducting daylight raids in tactical gear, brandishing assault weapons more befitting a military tour of duty than domestic law enforcement, and masked faces that paint a ghoul-like figure designed to intimidate and terrorize. While this is part of a longer, multi-generational battle over human rights (I was a legal intern at the ACLU in 2008 where we were contending with violations of due process for irregular migrants), what is new is the bald-faced savagery and cruelty with which these forces now operate. They are conveying the image and behaviors of people waging war on families and cities.

This blog is intended to a space where I can talk about my journey. It is at its heart a scholarly project, albeit one built around the power of story to communicate here, now, and going forward wherever we are, who we were and the places that make activism in this critical moment in our democracy. And there are many layers of story that occur in such a project. There are the stories of activists and organizers. There is the story of my journey across time and space to meet them, and find us, and find myself.

But there is also the story of our country. The expanse of space and identities so large that the vast majority of us can only understand it at a conceptual level, not an intimate one. But make no mistake, our inability to understand it intimately does not mean that it doesn't have a story to tell.

What story does our country have at this moment? Our highest leadership does not have a sense of emotional composure beyond fury and vengeance against evils they imagine in others. Our highest leadership does not have a tool beyond destruction and demolition, a reflection of the very rot and decay at the heart of the regime.

This project was, and is still, a project to reclaim our country's story for those who help make us who we are on our best days. A trajectory of those who continue to "fight the good fight" despite the sacrifices and pains and threats.

Our American Flag and its stars and stripes should also symbolize our ability to be better, day after day, to provide "justice for all".

It should be our symbol. We The People's symbol.

Its story should be our story. We The People's story.

In this moment, the stars and stripes are soiled by a regime that has betrayed the country and all of its people.

I write stories. I record stories. I recount stories. Because the story of our country is the ultimate battleground for me, and my resistance to a world gone mad.

[thebigrideproject]

An unguided projectile shot out of a cannon

Yesterday I left Chicago. I rode a train from downtown Chicago to Harvard Metra, and rode another 60 miles by bike to a small town called Evansville, just a short way to the Madison area where I will wrap up the story collection work of the project. In a geographic sense, I am halfway through the project. I will spend the next week or so in the Madison area, in Mount Horeb to the west and Stoughton to the southeast.

The day before that, my wife, daughter, and mother-in-law visited me in Chicago, and I stayed with them for one day. A welcome respite in some sense from the seeming never ending work of both collecting stories and writing about the journey, all as a new direction of my scholarship.

And Ellie (my daughter) is getting bigger and stronger! I am absolutely gobsmacked with how much a child her age (11 months) can grow in just three weeks. She was on the cusp of walking when I left, but now she can run-walk multiple steps at a time before falling on her butt like a little drunken sailor. Although all children are different, Ellie seems to be learning speed well ahead of control. She moves like a SCUD missile, an unguided projectile shot out of cannon, a straight-line force of nature in a 21 pound package.

Definitely more a reflection of my personality than my wife, although she seems to have much more of her mother's hair and appearance than mine. So let's just say it's a good split of the genes, eh?

It's hard to express though what even a day with your family can do for you when you've been on the road for three weeks, working both physically and mentally to make this project everything that it can be. Family is a relationship that persists in such a unique way where you can be distant for a time, but reunion makes that time feel both small and large. Small in the sense that, walking through the city with her, having the same conversations we have had for years, is as natural as any day that we walk together. Large in the sense that our daughter is growing so fast, and I am missing some of the best moments of her early life, fighting wind, rain, the sun and heat, and my own doubts about the enormity of the project ahead (despite being halfway done with this phase).

The day together is a blur. I could describe it as a series of events in a bullet-point form, reducing the day to cliff notes. We tend to do this with all manner of things, a habit that perhaps emerges when we're in high school and we were asked to read 40 pages of Sophie's World and did not, and need a quick and dirty breakdown of what happened to get us through 8:15 AM AP English with Mrs. Simila (the short answer with regards to that book: not much, but that's not really the point of the book).

But a story is not a series of events. Not a good one anyways. It's a performance, it's an expression of a feeling, of sentiment, of emotion, of humor, of color and touch and feel and sense. All of the things that make life worth living as more than just "he was born, and 80 or so years later he died."

So what does the day feel like?

Like a breath of fresh air.

[thebigrideproject]

What does one make with just potatoes and tomatoes?

To be honest, I'm not sure that I want to share this story, even as I sit down and commit myself to writing it. Not because it's a bad story, but because sometimes our personal stories can feel self-aggrandizing. When we share a story with someone, we are performing. And that means we, as storytellers, have the power over narration. We can paint a picture as we want, or hope, it will be understood. That includes ourselves, when we are in the story as characters. If we're not honest with the shortcomings of our own character, we risk turning a personal journey into little more than grandstanding (which, in our current political environment, could also run the risk of getting you elected president).

And this is perhaps the most challenging part of writing memoir: presenting the honest, sincere self. This requires an unflinching view of yourself, especially in its less than admirable moments.

With that said, I will share this brief story with you about a busy intersection in the Chicago suburbs.

In Arlington Heights there is a busy intersection at the juncture between Algonquin Road and Arlington Heights Road. Just south of it is the I-90 interstate highway that runs east-west across the country. Just north of it is a string of hotels and shopping centers. Each road has 9 lanes as they intersect, and on a busy day, all of them are used.

As Algonquin Road approaches the intersection from the east and west, there is a narrow strip of concrete that rises up to separate directions of traffic. About six inches of raised cement, little more than a foot in width.

It is a hot day. I stand at a small bus stop, huddling in the shade of a nearby utility pole. Even in it's shadow I can feel the sun grasping at my skin.

Across the road from me is a Japanese grocery and market. A woman carrying a tote bag and piece of cardboard under her arm, jogs out of the parking lot, over the lawn, and towards the road. She checks traffic, and when there's a gap, she walks onto the middle of the road. She moves carefully towards the intersection, one foot in front of the other, along the margin, as traffic continues to swirl around her.

When she gets to the intersection, she places her tote bag on the ground and cradles her cardboard sign in front of her body. It has three lines of text, and I don't remember what they say exactly. What I do remember is what the writing communicates: she has three kids, and wants help.

I watch her keenly from the bus stop, at first concerned about the narrowness of her stage. Then, with curiosity. She walks up and down her little concrete island, waving at people in their cars with a single hand. She looks to be about 40 years old, with brown skin tanned in the sun. Not unlike the skin tone Filipinos like me get when we spend much of our lives working outdoors. But the skin is a misleading indicator of a life, and a life-span. After all, one can spend an hour in a tanning booth and simulate the sun's effects while never having so much as picked up a shovel in your life.

Some people stop, squeeze a couple of folded up paper bills through their windows. Good Samaritans on their way. Many others drive by, or keep their windows rolled up when stopped at the intersection.

She doesn't knock on windows, she doesn't stand in front of hoods. It's rather understated in an ironic way, as if the only thing that makes it remarkable is that she stands alone, on her little island of concrete in the middle of a busy road, inches from death, inches from help.

My bus rolls up finally, and I'm frozen in place. I don't look at the bus driver, but I'm absolutely sure that he thinks I've fallen asleep on my feet.

I distantly hear the bus doors close, and drive away, without me on it a few seconds later. The woman is still there.

I guess I'm committed now.

Like the woman just a few minutes earlier, I walk across the road to her. It's a surprising distance given the number of lanes, and it feels longer when the prospect of hurtling 2-ton balls of metal sits in the back of your mind. I get to her little island, and try to talk to her.

She doesn't speak English, and I don't speak Spanish. I ask her if I can buy her a meal, she waves her hands at me, and tells me in Spanish (from what I can tell) she doesn't want money. I tell her that this is good, because I don't have cash. She continues talking to me, and I eventually wave my hands and say the most useful (and only) phrase in Spanish I know:

"Lo siento, no hablo espanol."

(perhaps I should have added "sólo conozco esa frase y ésta que la explica.")

She slows down for a moment, and I am able to comprehend that she needs potatoes and tomatoes.

I ask her how long she will be there, and she says about 40 minutes.

Perfect.

I can feel the whooshing of cars as they pass us on both sides, as we wave at each other and speak in languages that the other doesn't understand. I figure her English is slightly better than my Spanish, but perhaps only just.

I wait for a gap in the traffic and sprint across the road into the parking lot of the Japanese market. I walk with a purpose: Now I'm not sure if said 40 minutes or 4 minutes.

The Japanese grocery store and market ("Mitsuwa Market") is roughly split into two sections: if you turn left just inside the door, you walk down a little row of food vendors and simulated storefronts until you get to a little eating area, ringed with more restaurant storefronts. It does some work to simulate a Japanese aesthetic while still having a plastic, synthetic feel to it. It has a sort of toy-like appearance.

I turn right just inside the door, into the grocery store section. Although the shelves are stocked with Japanese imported goods, produce is produce, and a quick hunt turns up packages of tomatoes (needlessly prepackaged in foam and plastic wrap, all that will someday end up in a landfill) and a shelf of russet potatoes. I grab two 6-packs of tomatoes, and stuff seven or eight russets into another plastic produce bag.

This is a similarity between how we simulate Japan in America, and how Japan is if you visit Tokyo: a comically needless amount of plastic wrapping between you and your food. I don't look closely, but I wouldn't be surprised if each individual tomato has its own little plastic cocoon, inside the plastic that holds the six of them together. If I put this package in a plastic bag, I'd probably have more plastic than tomato in my hand.

I run by the sweets aisle, and hunt around for anything that's not chocolate. Chocolate would melt in this heat, so something more robust is needed for the task at hand. After a brief search, I end up grabbing two packages of cookies in bright pastel colors and cartoon characters, and Japanese kanji and hiragana letters that I can read just as well as I can speak Spanish. Which is only slightly worse than the woman's English, but only just.

I walk to the checkout line. Perhaps sick of all the plastic, and loathe to add more plastic into the process (I'm sure each individual cookie has its own plastic cocoon, inside a plastic wrapper to hold all the cookies together), I grab a $8 canvas tote bag.

She looks like she could use a spare tote bag.

I'm cheery with the checkout lady, a Black woman in her middle age, and she smiles at me as I compliment her Tetris skills in stuffing 12 tomatoes, 7 or 8 potatoes, and two packages of cookies (and their accompanying plastics) into the canvas bag. It all fits, and she hands me my receipt with a smile. I walk out, dashing by the food vendors near the door as they push fried goodies in my face.

It smells delicious, but I'm a man on a mission.

As I speed walk through the parking lot, I'm muttering to myself.

I bet she's gone. I bet she said 4 minutes. And now I have a bunch of tomatoes and potatoes and Japanese cookies I don't want or need. Wonder if I can do the opposite of her and try to give this stuff to someone driving by. Maybe even without consent. A reverse robbery. I'll stuff it in someone's open car window and dash away, leaving confusion and produce in my wake.

What does one even make with just potatoes and tomatoes? Maybe the world's most boring stir-fry.

But thankfully, she's still there. I once more wait for a gap in the traffic, and rejoin her on her little road island. She smiles at me and happily takes the bag from my hands. I wish her the best with a smile, and she blesses my family. Which, having been cursed at by people in Milwaukee for standing in front of a Planned Parenthood clinic, probably balances me out in the eyes of God.

I walk away from her and her little island, making a point not look back.

As I get back to the sidewalk, I keep walking. Past the original bus stop I was at when I noticed her, to another one down the road. Like a criminal not wanting to remain at the scene of a crime. I try not to imagine what people see, what people think, when they see part of this scene unfold through their car windows. They will only see a hand off, or a woman walking up and down an island, or a guy running across six lanes of traffic with an overpriced tote bag of groceries. With no context, it's probably confusing, but perhaps no more confusing than a normal day in the Chicago suburbs.

When I get to my bus stop, I check the text messages on my phone (it is more a matter of ritual than need at this point to look at one's phone when waiting at the bus stop). I have a message: an invitation for a storytelling interview later this afternoon. I accept the invite of course (one does not turn down opportunity when it appears in your pocket).

These interviews requires certain equipment however, most of which I've forgotten at my motel. It would have been quite a problem if I had gotten on the first bus and not seen this message until later.

I turn around, and run back to my motel, passing through the intersection.

The woman is gone.

As I get back to the motel and pack my interview equipment, I imagine a bit about the woman. I do not know what her life is. I do not know her kids or her family, or where she's from. I do not know the path she's tread, nor the path she will tread. She could stay in Chicago, she could leave tomorrow. She could build a life here, or find a better one somewhere else.

What I can do in that moment is imagine, and I imagine that she is made of iron, that she is made of steel.

But what does one make with just potatoes and tomatoes?

[thebigrideproject]

Bathroom Jesus

On Friday, I sat down in Daley Plaza and ate my lunch. It was raining, but only just. Enough to feel a mist, but not enough to drive me indoors. There are tourists and city slickers, mingling in the rain. They share a space, for a brief few minutes of their day.

Daley Plaza sits in the shadow of the Richard J. Daley Center, a towering black building that holds a presence in Chicago's impressive skyline. Its architecture is characteristic of modernistic Chicago (at least according to Wikipedia, from where I am drawing some background of this place), and even held the title of tallest building in the city for a few years. Functionally, it's an office building with an emphasis on law and governance, with a law library and offices of the local government and police.

Where sit is its accompanying plaza, a square plot of land that features a huge sculpture by Pablo Picasso ("the Picasso"), a fountain pool and eternal flame, a memorial to our country's wartime dead.

In the shadow the towering Daley Center, and the shadow of the Chicago skyline, it has a surprisingly serene quality to it. I sit and pull out my camcorder, prop it up on its legs, and just record the plaza.

A man walks up to me and waves a hand in my face. I look up from my lunch at his face. He smiles and pushes a 2 inch folding minibook into my hand and a little rubber statue of Jesus. I say thank you, and leaf through the booklet as I take another bite. It's the same "find God or go to hell" stuff I've seen enough to know what it says, in broad strokes:

You think you're a good person? Well, it doesn't matter! If you don't accept Jesus into your hearts, you will burn!

Eesh. Why do people choose such hostile gods?

I pocket the booklet, and the little rubber statue of Jesus. I know the booklet will find a waste bin somewhere. But for some reason I can't see the statue finding a similar fate. Maybe it's that good old-fashioned Catholic guilt those fallen like me keep around in the back of our minds for the rest of our lives.

Daley Plaza is itself a multi-purpose site. It's the location of a weekly farmer's market. It's where festivals around ethnicity are centered. It's where movies that need a 'big square with a big building next to it' have filmed key scenes.

Most of you have seen it, even if you didn't realize it. The building is Wayne Enterprises in Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins.

Tomorrow, there will be tens of thousands of demonstrators gathering here. Ostensibly a nationwide movement against the self-aggrandizing qualities of the president and its cruel execution that treats immigrants as symbols of "law and order" as opposed to humans with deeply similar hopes and dreams as anyone else here, it will actually respond to a broader set of interrelated issues that stem from the cruel spectacle that sums up this presidency. While it is deeply complicated how a country came to put this man and his sycophants in power, it is comparatively simple how that president operates.

A cruel spectacle.

Daley Plaza tomorrow will bubble and roil with energy, with noise, with music and laughter and life. The weather will start cool, then warm as the sun bursts from the clouds, just as people take to the streets. A million and one messages, coming from a million and one worlds, both imagined for the future and the worlds behind us, will encounter one another.

Daley Plaza will add a new chapter to its history, marked by the bodies and voices there.

Later that day, I stand in a bathroom just outside the Caffe Umbria nearby. I empty my pockets into the trash. The silly little booklet finds a resting place there. My hand bumps into the little rubber statue of Jesus in my pocket, and I turn it over in my hands for a few seconds.

With a shrug, I put it on top of the soap dispenser.

I don't know who will see it next, or how many people will see it. They might smile, they might scoff. They might be reminded of something in their past. Or they may meet up with their friends and tell them how saw a little rubber status of Jesus in a bathroom somewhere.

I don't know, but I do hope that it makes that bathroom mean something to someone somewhere, whatever that is.

[thebigrideproject]

Coffee shops are my lens

I sit in a coffee shop in Irving Park, preparing for another storytelling session. Preparation to me is not really "work" per se, but a chance to reflect and rest before the work begins. These conversations are powerful, moving, funny, sad, and emotional at times, and this takes energy to work with. A conversation is like being one of two, maybe three, sculptors trying to shape something out of a lump of clay. Each has an idea of what the sculpture will look like, and their hands move accordingly. The result is an amalgam that is beautifully chaotic in its own right, a reflection of the shared and differentiated imaginings of the sculpture. If you look at it from one angle, you see the hand of one sculptor. A different angle, you see the hand of the other. If you look at it from a step back, you see all the artists' work.

It takes energy.

So I sit here in a coffee shop, preparing. I spend a lot of time in coffee shops, even when I travel for work. There is a delightful consistency across coffee shops, not the least of which is my favorite drink (a hot black coffee, in case you're curious). And the more you sit in a space, the more it comes to take on new meanings to you. You start to comprehend the space in relation to where the coffee shops are, first, but then also the infrastructure around and to it. What roads take me to the coffee shop? What buses or trains take me to the town, where there's a coffee shop? Which of the coffee shops are good, and which ones should I avoid?

If you love coffee shops like I do, your relationship with a space comes to center around them. I know where they are, think of them as points on a grid, and how to get to them, or between them. At some point it becomes a challenge to remember what the space was to you before you learned where the coffee shops are. The irony of course is that, before your movements were informed by the coffee shop points on a grid, you actually noticed so much more about the spaces in-between. Some of that may be because you were looking for the coffee shop, but perhaps more accurately, the space was generally unfamiliar to you, and so everything, in its newness, its novelty, its unfamiliarity, was worthy of attention. Coffee shop familiarity comes along with general familiarity, and, in turn, the shift from the space as an undifferentiated lump of land, buildings, streets, sounds and smells and rails, to one of identifiable significance.

Places where you drink coffee for one. But also where you work, and where you rest. Where you buy groceries. Where you see the same two children walking to school every morning, hand in hand. Where you saw a car accident 3 days ago. Where the old liquor shop used to be that is now a 7-eleven.

It's where you met the love of your life, proposed, got married, and will celebrate your 40th anniversary.

It's where the corporations poisoned the ground and the water, and where you fight for justice.

It's where you went to school moved to with your partner and built a life.

When I sit in a coffee shop, I like to look out the window at a corner and imagine what it means to people, and how to others that are not me when I travel, they mean something more.

[thebigrideproject]

Ocean trains are all the same

I spent a lot of time in my younger years in Chicago and its surrounding areas. My extended family (uncle, aunt, and their two kids, my cousins) lived in Cicero. I lived with them while I spent a summer training in martial arts in Oak Park. My brother still lives here (most of the time...I think. The guy moves around).

Returning and working here for a few days I struggle to connect the Chicago of my memory to the Chicago that I am experiencing now. This isn't because I've forgotten what Chicago was per se, or that it's changed substantially since then, but rather that it sort of blends into the pile of American cities I've traveled through in my life.

I was sitting on a bus, heading to a station to switch to a train, taking me closer to the city for one of my storytelling interviews. A place called Irving Park (divided into 'new' and 'old' Irving Park, although I don't think that even the locals know the difference between the two beyond the name). I take a spot in the quiet car of the train and I sit there, quietly, and watch. The suburbs pass by silently, concrete slipping in and out of my vision, in and out of my memory. Trees and bushes come and go, and the gentle rumble of the tracks fill the senses. The faux leather of the chairs are a bit grippy, a bit sticky, but almost certainly easier to clean than fabric. Metal rails line our space.

Above me is a second level where people can sit. I look up at them and from where I sit, I can't see their faces. Their upper bodies are obscured by the railing above me. But I can make out their postures, no different than those who sit around me. Sleeping or on their phones.

We sit together, quiet, equally alone just as much as we are together. It is fascinating that, no matter where I've been in the world, the trains feel the same. I'm also old enough to recall different eras. Trains across 20 years of adult life, and a train today feels the same as a train when I was just about to go to college.

Chicago is profoundly different than Houghton both in terms of its built qualities (i.e. a city vs. a rural-ish community), but also its politics. Houghton is a bit of a purple dot, surrounded by a deeply red expanse, while Chicago is deeply blue with little pockets that trend purple. They are reflections of the broader divergence in political inclinations between more dense urban centers and comparatively sparse ruralities, with the caveat that MTU's presence in Houghton shifts the politics to the left just enough for them to maintain democratic leadership at the local level.

When we become aware of our politics, and how they reflect (albeit imperfectly) our values, we also think about the spaces that are "ours". We, acting as individuals, often make personal choices about where we eat, sleep, and shop with at least a gestural awareness of our values and, in turn, our politics. One of the ways I practice this is by trying to avoid shopping at Wal-Mart due to the Walton families political activities, and absolutely boycotting Amazon because of who Jeff Bezos is. It's not just about large corporations though, and sometimes local knowledge of your towns affects this.

When I need coffee, I pick a coffee shop that has and continues to support LGBTQ+ causes.

When I need a quiet place to work, I go to the public library.

To find friendly spaces to align with your values though, this can be pretty restrictive in a red community. And even then, I have mixed feelings about my own behavior in this regard. As someone who is a member of my communty and wants it to be connected and kind to one another, an act of resistance that challenges the regressive political environment that has helped usher in a regime that truly only serves a very small number of people regardless of politics, shouldn't I be shopping locally as opposed to politically?

When I was speaking with an organizer for Indivisible here, a difference that emerged in our experiences were venues. For them, living and working and organizing in a blue area, they don't have to think too deeply about where to work, where to have events, where to meet. Support for the cause is almost universal. Their entire operating region is (more or less) a friendly space.

We in rural areas aren't so fortunate. We can't take support for granted. Sometimes a business will allow us to use the space, but cast aspersions at us the entire time we're there once they realize what we're there to do. Other times additional administrative roadblocks are put up that make it just that much harder to operate in our communities. Insurance coverage at events, for instance.

And that's on top of the fact that, when demonstrations are held, we almost always run up against counter-protesters, a phenomenon that demonstrations in blue areas don't regularly experience.

The result is that we have different conceptions of our space. In blue areas like Chicago, organizations like ours can move freely and operate openly, as if the space before them is a lake or ocean where they are free to sail in whichever direction they choose.

In areas like Houghton, we operate more quietly and carefully, and space to us is a collection of points that exist on a grid. Each square has varying levels of friendliness to us, and we come to know that grid as informed by experiences as an organization, and as individuals.

It is remarkable how being on a train on the ocean can move the soul.

[thebigrideproject]

Imperfect

The first few days of my time in Chicago are in Arlington Heights, a northwest suburb that remains a solid 1.5 hour ride by public transit into the city. It's a relatively tidy suburb, with less of the grunge of more outlying towns like Waukegan or Racine. Or at least the parts I can see, which admittedly, I bet is a self-selecting sample of observation given that by this point in my trip, I just want something comfortable for a while.

So I'm sitting in a Starbucks, writing a blog post, enjoying the familiarity of a chain that, no matter where you are in America, shares a design language that makes an otherwise foreign and unfamiliar place feel just a little bit less so.

Yesterday was a day of rest for me, which was well needed. I have a sore that is healing on my right butt cheek, and a few days of limited to no riding time will do it a world of good. Seriously considering a new saddle. Fortunately there appears to be a pretty fully featured bike shop just a couple miles from my hotel. I'll head over there this morning.

This week I'll be working with Northwest Chicago Indivisible, an outfit that was immediately interested in the project. They're also working on stories too, so naturally they're willing to support these kinds of projects. It makes me wonder what is reflected about the chapters that did respond to my emails. I emailed most of the chapters throughout the state of Wisconsin, and only three chapters responded to me. Turned out that this number was more than enough for the project, fortunately, but it reminds me of two things: first, that this style of recruitment (as a sampling procedure) can have unpredictable results and requires patience; and second, that the resulting sample has a self-selecting quality in that there was a reason these particular groups responded to me that differentiates them in a meaningful way from the pile of others who did not respond.

As is the case with Northwest Chicago Indivisible, there on involvement with storytelling as an important aspect of activism commits them to support similar projects. Other groups seem to have leaders who have stories they want to share with the world, and are happy to use you as a conduit to do it.

Undertaking a storytelling project does force you to think just as much like a participant as the story collector, as you're also telling the story of the project (a big reason I chose to ride my bike rather than simply drive, as most others would). But placing the self as a character in the story can be disquieting. Characters in stories are interesting because of their trajectory in relation to events and actions. How do they change? How do they grow? What are the flaws and faults they begin with? How are they challenged? And how do they overcome?

Placing the self as a character in stories exposes the self to the world. Which means that preparation for the project is not just logistical or physical, but also emotional. If you do something shameful, are you prepared to share it with the world?

Yesterday, I was leaving this very Starbucks and I saw a man, holding a sign, begging for change, food, help of some kind. And I kept on walking. I could have offered the man a cup of coffee, a hot meal, a few dollars from my pocket. But I didn't. I walked on by.

I sat in my hotel room later that night, looking at my phone, thinking about the imperfections of human character, including my own.

[thebigrideproject]

Connecting across time and space

So I made it to Chicago. 80 miles yesterday. I took my time of course, stopping for a few minutes at a park bench somewhere south of Milwaukee. Ate the last of my apples and a bunch of almonds.

The path I took from Milwaukee to Schaumburg/Arlington Heights was a nice one at times, deeply frustrating at others. The path through Waukegan was perhaps the most frustrating bit of riding, with stop signs every block along the bike route. There's no flow, no momentum, and I can feel myself burning through my brake pads and my brake rotors. I begin to think that riding on the road and trying to behave like a car as much as possible is actually superior to this stop-go, stop-go quality of urban/peri-urban bike paths.

I even made a sing-song game of it. The game goes that you sing the words "stop sign" to yourself as long as it takes for them to stop being words and start being just mouth noises.

Try it. I'll wait. My record is about 20 seconds.

Any-who, it doesn't help either that Waukegan and Racine are not particularly "nice" cities in terms of their level of care and presentation. It feels like the corner where Chicago's sprawl pushes its lower socioeconomimc class (largely black and brown communities too). Peri-urban grunge with an annoying bike path.

Once you get past Waukegan, you actually get some nice flow with fewer stop signs on the path (the McClory path, by the way) and you come upon a small town absolutely crawling with cyclists. Lake Bluff I believe it's called?

I was feeling the need for coffee and a bit of a break at that point (I think I'd riding for four, maybe five hours at that point) and, seeing all the cyclists in town, I decided that was a sign.

Cycling is very interesting as a community, as we walk around with what are essentially big conversation starters. The bicycle (and, to an almost equal extent, your attire) is symbolic or suggestive of so may things, if you know how to interpret the signs. Most, if not all, of us 'brand' ourselves in some visible manner. That isn't to say that we wear clothes with brand names all the time, but rather that we present ourselves in a way that communicates our identities, whether we're aware or not. We certainly make judgements about each other based on visual appearance and, if you can interpret the signs, I would even guess that most of us are pretty accurate.

One of the biggest lies that we are told as children is that "you can't judge a book by it's cover". Although maybe it's too harsh to call it a lie, so much as it being more nuanced. Truth is, we judge everyone at first appearance. We present ourselves strategically, even if not consciously.

And of course it can be bad when that initial judgement overrules your actual experiences with a person when you get to know them better, or prevents you from opening that door to begin with.

There is a group of cyclists sitting around a table, and one of them compliments my bikepacking setup. So we chat, and they ask where I'm coming from. I say the UP. They ask where in the UP, because one of them is apparently from the UP as well. When I mention "Houghton", their eyes light up. One of them graduated from the high school there, and went to the university I teach at now.

I ask when he graduated, and he says 2004, the year before I did. We were in school together. He's the brother of one of my classmates, and we were in the Boy Scouts together.

When I'm about to tell him my name, I pause. When he knew me, 20 years ago, I had a different last name. If I use my new name, it would be meaningless. So I use my old name, a dead name. He recognizes the name.

Small world, made smaller with bikes. It's a unique idea to reflect on, that a bike can carry us across distance with some flexibility that can make things seem closer (the issues with inconsistent bike infrastructure notwithstanding), but like any visible displays of identity, can also connect us to each other. In this case, it's a connection across time and space: here we are, hundreds of miles from our birthplace, bumping into each other for the first time in 20 years.

But the name...it doesn't bother me that I had to dead-name myself so much as it is something that I think about for the rest of my ride. When we want to make that connection across time, it's required for us to remember who were we then. We have to reconstruct our identity from that time based on an imagining of how we were seen by this person, and present that past self.

I spend an hour or so in Lake Bluff. I get a cup of coffee, and hunt around for the bike shop. I find it, nestled in the basement of a downtown building. The guy who seems to run the joint, Nate, is a pleasant man, and fixes my broken cleat. I buy new brake pads from him too.

I spend more time there than I expected, just talking about bike stuff. We talk about the direction of our discipline, and ogle over his new bike (a Kona Ouroboros, a fascinating looking bike from a company we all thought was going under a year ago).

Bikes are a connection across people. After all, it's hard to hide a bike.

I'm sitting here in the hotel lobby, the next day, writing this entry. I try to journal everyday, but yesterday I was shattered. The kind of exhaustion where you don't have the energy left to get out of your clothes, to feed yourself, to clean yourself. Even lying down takes more energy than you want to expend. You just find the nearest chair and slump forward, your elbows on your knees and your head hanging down like a weeping willow.

So today is a day of rest. Physical rest anyhow.

Because today, the work in Chicago begins.

[thebigrideproject]

What do you stand for?

I turn my bike sideways, perpendicular to the door, as people quietly shuffle into the clinic behind me. In front me stands the small crowd, trying to yell over my shoulder at them as they enter the building. "Do you support killing babies?" "Are you okay with this?" "You're a small, weak man!" "You have no spine!" They yell at me.

I look them in the eye, and grin broadly.

You folks have no idea what you stand for, do you?

--

Let's rewind the clock about 10 minutes before me and my bike stood between a door and a small crowd. I'm riding in my normal shoes instead of my cycling shoes (which have little cleats that bolt me to the pedals) because the cleats broke as I dismounted at an intersection earlier that day. Bad luck it seems.

Milwaukee is actually a fairly bike friendly city. It's not perfect (particularly as you get more southerly), but it's a far sight better than Green Bay. My GPS turns me from the marina onto a wide stretch of road, with only the occasional car passing through.

As I roll slowly along the bike line, I see an interesting scene. A small crowd, a few adults and a few children looking to be under the age of 7 or so (some still toddlers) are engaging a young black woman. The woman is walking up the ramp to an office building, and as I get closer, I can see her tears.

The words "Planned Parenthood" are written in big blue letters along the side.

As I roll by, I try to make sense of what I just saw. 1 block away. 2 blocks away. 3 blocks...I stop the bike.

God. Dammit.

I turn around and roll back. The crowd is still there. The woman is gone. I stop about 15 feet away from the crowd, and lean on the handlebars. I watch them closely, until I'm sure I know what it is I'm looking at.

The car parked nearby with the pro-life stickers on it answers me.

I walk the bike up the ramp where the woman stood in tears just a few minutes earlier, prop the bike up against the door and walk inside. Inside the door is a woman behind a glass window. The receptionist. But in this situation, she felt more like a guardian.

The guardian of the Planned Parenthood lobby.

She looks at me as I walk in.

"Hello, there was a woman out there a few minutes ago. Is she alright?" I don't really know what to say to be honest. I just want information I guess.

"They're always out there. Every day." she says it with frustration. We converse briefly, reporting what I saw. She shakes her head, repeating to me. "Every day."

I go back outside, and I pull my bike off the wall. I face away from the protesters and take a drink. I'm not sure what to do next.

A van pulls into the parking lot and a family steps out one by one. A few adults, a couple of kids. As they move towards the door, the crowd starts calling to them.

"There's help! You don't have to kill babies! Why are you killing babies?"

They don't have any idea who these people are, what they're there for, or what is happening in their lives. I mutter quietly to them as they walk by: "you don't have to talk to them".

They nod and walk through the doors.

It dawns on me then. Me, I'm small. 5'4" on a good day. Lighter even than normal, given the amount of miles I've ridden as of late. I'm not exactly an intimidating figure. But with a bike, loaded down with stuff, on the other hand...

I turn my bike perpendicular to the door, and I stand in front of it towards the small crowd. There is a man, and he begins to ask me questions. "Are you okay with this?" "Are you okay with killing babies?"

I engage him. I make it as frustrating a conversation as I possibly can. I challenge him to enjoy the day. The warm weather. When he insults me ("small", "weak", "without a backbone"), I chuckle. I can mock him now. When he speaks of sins, when he speaks of the bible and the word of God, I ask him whether his name-calling is a sin. We speak of civil discourse, and I keep asking for one.

There is no civil discourse here of course. Such things require both parties to listen. And that boat has long sailed. They're not here to listen. They never are.

They're here to judge, as if they've been granted magical powers from their god to evaluate the soul of strangers.

They're here to proclaim sins and sinners, to know what people are here for, as if their god has granted them omniscience.

They're here to mislead, to lie, to tell people that "there is help" and they can and will provide it. Yet they've done nothing to uplift people who face these hard choices. Where is this effort to helping lift people out of poverty? Where is this effort to help families and single mothers build lives?

It's not here. Here, there are only words and vitriol. And in that, they have plenty.

So I poke and I prod. I distract. I lead them down little garden paths of discourse always to end up in the same place: the front of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Milwaukee, hundreds of miles from my home, beside my bike. All the while, people keep shuffling in and out of the clinic behind me. The crowd tries to yell around me, but I'm a noisy little bastard.

Just me and my bike. Enjoying a sunny day in Milwaukee Wisconsin.

I don't know when I became such a pain in the ass to strangers to be honest. I used to chat with Jehovah's Witnesses and missionaries, and challenge how well they know their god (especially as one who used to be very religious). I once spent two hours talking to a Hare Krishna in Berkeley, debating the nature of the spirit or some such thing. I once tempted a man spewing anti-LGBT hate to hit me in Ann Arbor when I was a student.

Maybe I just like the battle.

The receptionist comes out every now and then, to argue with the protesters beside me. Her words confirm that these demonstrators were never there for a civil discourse. They never are. Because they never listen.

She offers me water. I say thank you and signal to my bottles. "Thanks, I brought my own" I whisper with a wink.

We go on like this for an hour. After a while, the bulk of the crowd moves on, and they disappear. Things get quieter now, as just two of them remain, trying to hand out flyers to people pulling into or leaving the parking lot.

With a sigh, I prop my bike back up against the wall and head inside. I say thank you to the receptionist, and she says thank you back. She asks, so I tell her a bit of my story. The hundreds of miles behind me, the hundreds more to go. She tells me that, before me, there used to be one other person who would do what I did: stand in the way. And he did it everyday.

Before he stopped coming, he said to her "I'm always outnumbered." She thinks he moved away. Odd timing that a random traveler would show up shortly after he left and, like him, simply stand in the way.

In just that short interaction, I can tell that she is made of iron and steel.

I ride away, not sure if what I did was wise. They could have attacked me. They could have taken my photo and plastered it all over their social media accounts, and call me "baby killer".

I'm not entirely in the moment yet as I turn a corner and run over some railroad tracks. My front wheel slides out from under me and suddenly my bike is skidding on its side.

On instinct, I jump from the bike, running until I trip. I roll to a stop, covered in dust, more surprised than hurt.

I stand up quickly and a woman in a car stops to check on me. She's sure I'm hurt. But, against all odds, and unlike any other time I've crashed my bike, I'm completely fine. Not even any cuts or scrapes. All my clothing is somehow intact.

I pick my bike up and check it for damage. The bars are a bit twisted and scuffed. But it's purely aesthetic, and there's not even a scratch on the frame from what I can tell.

I'm quite stunned to be honest. How am I completely unhurt?

Ah right, the shoes. Clipped in, I would have been along for the ride on the way down, my shoes dragging with my bike. In sneakers though, I rolled away. Perhaps not gracefully, but safely.

All because, just a couple hours ago, I broke a cleat.

Providence or coincidence, who knows. It probably doesn't matter. But I rode away, unscathed somehow, wondering whether there is a god after all.

[thebigrideproject]

Walls of metal and rubber

Today I rode 60 miles, from Green Bay to Sheboygan Falls. I was uncertain how far I was going to go, and the oddity of finding the perfect distance in a place like Wisconsin struck again. Either the route was too short, or too long, but there was so little in the "right" distance that I had to choose one or the other. I had an extra day allocated to get from Marinette to Chicago, so I opted to go for the slightly shorter distance at 60 miles.

Before I left, I had another quick chat with the desk manager at the Super 8. He was a pleasant man, and we had a brief conversation the day prior about what I was doing, where I was going, etc... He mentioned that he met a guy working at a different hotel that was riding from Washington state to Maine, and was passing through. Also, he was in his 70s. We agreed that this was inspirational and inspiring, and that, personally, when I get to that age, I hope to still be doing cool things.

I was relieved to get out of Green Bay. Riding into Green Bay the day before was a harrowing experience. You see, the city has made gestural attempts at bike infrastructure. A bike lane here. A bike path there. If you know the streets and are not going that far, it probably is enough to allow for some degree of commuting. On all of these accounts though, I was not the target audience, and that makes cities all the more difficult for me and my bike to safely navigate.

Something that most people who use cars, buses, or other motorized vehicles for the vast VAST majority of their transportation probably don't see is how car-based infrastructure divides spaces in different ways to different road users. For instance, think of any road that consists of four lanes, two lanes going one way, the other two going the other way. In a vehicle, it's merely a matter of patience to pull out onto this street, if you should need to cross it. You can trust your engine to get you across, given adequate time and space.

To a cyclist however, these streets are always frightening. Despite what many people will tell you about "arsehole cyclists takin' up da roads" and such, trust me when i say we are deeply aware of our vulnerability. A fender bender to you is paralysis or death to us. We may wear a helmet, but the clothing we wear beyond that is no additional protection. And it's certainly not the two-tons of metal, glass, plastic, cushions, and airbags that surround the average driver.

City transportation infrastructure updates to alleviate traffic congestion are also problematic to non-drivers. I'm talking about roundabouts, which when people understand how to use them (as most Americans are, as this European import becomes increasingly common), they function quite well to keep traffic moving.

But on a bike, roundabouts are very unpredictable, so much so that I dread crossing one more so than a basic 4-way intersection. Much of this stems from the massive difference in speed at which one takes a roundabout when on a bike versus a car. Roundabouts work well during times of heavier traffic when those pulling into the roundabout can blend into the flow through the circle. A pause at the entrance, and a touch of the gas and you're in.

Bikes don't accelerate with that speed, especially one loaded down with clothes, food, electronics, and a 150 lb. squishy human being.

So I don't ride roundabouts when there's substantial traffic present. I walk the bike through the sidewalks.

I was relieved when I left the city, and could return to the country lanes. Farm country now, as far as the eye can see. For hours, seeing field after field on both sides. There were trees that signaled forests and some welcome variety (not to mention shade), but they always seemed too far in the distance, and too short in duration.

Wisconsin of course was not always like this. Once it was covered in forests (I imagine). But we've flattened it, terraformed it, turned it into an enormous agricultural space to support an enormous human population.

This section of Wisconsin feels like riding in the plains. Big sky and big wind. Sometimes pushing you along, sometimes shoving you from the side. Sometimes it slaps you in the face.

My route tries to keep me from riding along any highways, thankfully, but this doesn't mean that I avoid the entirely. You still have to cross them from time to time. And, as expected, these can be harrowing if there are any vehicles present. At least a couple of times, I ended up sitting beside a road for 5, 10 minutes waiting for there to be sufficient space and time to cross a highway safely.

Being on a bike makes you see space differently, through our different relationship to the built environment, like our highways or our roundabouts. What's a space of movement or mobility to many, is a wall to us. We see the space we live in as cut up into semi-autonomous squares or plots of land, borders secured not by walls but by flowing streams of metal and rubber that threaten to grind up foreign contaminants, like a bicycle.

I am reminded of the experiments that biologists do on contained populations of fauna through the little plots of lands in clovers around highway on and off ramps. Unknown to most who pass by, these little islands are themselves semi-controlled spaces due to the almost impossibility of safely traveling in or out of the space if you can't fly.

To a cyclist, the world is full of these semi-autonomous islands. I wonder how many purely motorized vehicle drivers know this. Or even care.

In any case, shortly before I got to my hotel for the night, I pulled into a university campus just outside Sheboygan Falls. Lakeland University. Go Muskies!

I leaned my bike up against a tree and sat down at a park bench under a tree and downed three bananas, one apple, and several handfuls of almonds. Once I took a breath, reflected on how I pulled into that campus: I rode along the walkways, as they curved over and around the campus, linking building to building.

My own little highway.

[thebigrideproject]

Come Rest

I got up this morning feeling a bit more sore than expected. Coming off a day of physical rest, I wasn't sure how that was going to bode for the days ride. A shorter day today, just 60 miles, from Marinette to the outskirts of Green Bay. There was an air quality advisory coming through the accuweather app on my phone. A vague haze of smoke from Canadian wildfires was hanging over the state of Wisconsin.

The road to Chicago begins today.

Like the haze, yesterday's interviews hung in the background of my mind this morning. One planned, the other decidedly not. They hung in the air not because they went poorly. Quite the opposite in fact. Particularly the planned one was a resounding success.

No, it hung in the air because of what I learned, and what it meant for me as a wannabe writer.

I committed to this project because I believed that the stories of ordinary people's commitments to their nation, their communities, their friends, and their families were extraordinary. When we live our lives, everyday just grinding and surviving, just how remarkable our lives are, are taken for granted by the ones closest to them: us. And, in many cases, our relationship to extraordinary circumstances place us as actors within an extraordinary story.

Yesterday I heard of extraordinary circumstances that could only exist in places that the eyes of the nation do not see. In corners of America exist communities that are ripe for exploitation by those with power and wealth, and a politics that enables it. In communities seemingly left behind in economic growth, in opportunities, in significance, are epicenters of exploitation and abuse. And people are dying because of it.

I didn't know that this project was going to include matters of life and death, but it certainly makes its significance clear.

Once I got myself out the door and on my bike, oddly enough, the legs felt good. The day of physical rest did me well. Or at least it did the legs well.

Alone again for hours, the weight of what I could be wrestling with in these stories started to feel like rocks in my backpack. And when you're contending with extra weight, you don't always jettison the right things.

So I turned on myself.

I turned on myself because not only did I fear I wasn't enough to handle what I could be seeing and encountering on this project, but also because I felt incredibly selfish. My daughter is 10 months old, and just about to take her first steps. She has two new teeth coming in. She has new opinions about books and food.

And I'm missing these moments, out in the wretched middle of nowhere, in Pensaukee WI, with a sore backside and a growing urge to pee.

"What the F*CK am i doing?" I verily screamed it at nothing in particular.

Because out there, there was nothing to scream at. Just the sky, the clouds, the sun, the trees.

It was a beautiful day.

I came upon a small neighborhood that lined this country road about 30 minutes later. One of those houses had two bicycles, sitting side by side, with grass growing up around them. Aged and rusting, their days of riding were long gone. But their form reminded me not just of what they once were, but that whatever they once were, they were that thing together.

Behind the bikes were two benches, staggered, away from the road. One sat in the sun, grayed with time and the elements. The words "'God is our refuge and strength' ~David" was inscribed on the backrest.

Behind that one, set further away from the road, was the other bench, this one painted in fading yellow, hiding under the shade of a grove of trees. Carved roughly into the backrest were the words "Come Rest".

Not sure if it was an invitation or a command, but I turned the bike around and sat on the yellow bench.

And I took a rest.

[thebigrideproject]

When I ride for hours, I talk to myself. A lot.

I rode about 70 miles again today, and by the time I arrived in Marinette, my backside was ready for the break. Rolled into the motel parking lot around 12pm, well ahead of the 3pm check in time. Not sure I'll stay here for the full two day reservation I've made, as it's not particularly inspiring from the outside.

The route today was pretty easy, mostly road (but with a sudden overgrown trail that required a few feet of hike-a-bike to get around a barrier to block people like me from coming through easily. Google maps, you drunk). Mostly flat as well, although it had a few hills to contend with along the way. Nothing to write home about on some level, beyond the amount of time spent in the saddle. Long hours seem to slip by. At least until you're about 20 miles away, then they drag. I find myself checking my computer every 10 minutes or so to see how close I am, and every time I'm reminded how slow a bike can be when you just want to be done for the day.

I didn't have the nerves of the first day, nor the safety challenge of the second, so this day was actually kind of boring. I try to look around and enjoy the surroundings, and make note of the noteworthy, but the mental notes I took don't seem to suggest too much at first glance:

lots of road kill.

long straight stretches of road, in between farms.

Almost no towns for 50 miles.

More road kill.

Those are some big trucks.

That's a clear cut section of woods. Logging country.

Lots of deer.

Road kill.

And it's that way for something like 60 miles. Which, at my not-so-stunning pace of 15 mph, is a lot of hours.

It's a lot of time on a bike is what I'm saying.

So I talk to myself. A lot. I've always been a self-talker. My wife, bless her heart, now just ignores it, and accepts that I mutter to myself a lot, sometimes laced with swears. I try not to be too loud, but I do forget myself from time to time, and I catch Sam looking at me like I'm a crazy person.

Which, to be fair, I'm trying to bike from Houghton to Chicago and back while collecting stories for a book. Sanity is a tenuous thing at the minute.

In any case, I'm a self-talker, but I believe it's a habit that prepares me for those long stretches of road where I'm alone for hours, turning the pedals over and over and over. Well, perhaps not exactly alone. My bike does have a name after all.

I talk to myself (and my bike) about all kinds of things. I talk about what I see up ahead in the road, or what we just passed by. I talk about some inane thing I need to do when I get a break or stop for the night. I talk about imaginary worlds, like being a professional cyclist to pump myself up when I'm feeling exhausted, giving fake interviews. Sometimes I sing. "Country Roads" was the song of the day, and if you were standing by the side of the road somewhere 10 miles north of Peshtigo WI today you would have heard a full-throated butchering of Mr. Denver's classic by a man in lycra.

Hey, it's company for me and my bike.

I don't really know when I became a self-talker to be honest, but I do know it runs in my family. My older sister was also (and possibly still is) a self-talker, and would have remarkably full conversations with herself that you could hear through the thin walls of our house growing up. Much like my self-talking, it was about all manner of inane things, with only the context of her own mind lending sense to the words that trickled through the walls.

These self-talk conversations just added to the din of an already loud home, and I remember many of the conversations in the house being aggressive. Perhaps it's Filipino culture around parenting to pride brash, if not rude, honesty over feelings or empathy. Perhaps it was just the personalities involved, or having four kids with all manner of tempers. Why we yelled and fought so much remains a mystery to me.

For us (or at least for me), I responded to aggression with aggression. I wouldn't be exaggerating if I told you that I was a pretty angry kid. And sometimes my teachers and friends bore the brunt of that aggression. I probably owe a few people apologies for being, well, a handful.

When I left the home and went to college, my behavior shifted dramatically. It's almost like I became a different person. I mean, I was hundreds of miles away from home for months at a time for the first time in my life, being exposed to all kinds of new things and people, making new friends in a place where the first thing they gave me was an ID card with a number on it. A number I still remember: 1075-1640. It was a new name (of sorts) and, with it, the chance to create a new identity.

But I was still a self-talker. And still am today. Because no matter how things change, the person at the other end of the conversation always listens and lets the conversation just be what it becomes. Aggressive when needed. Soft and reassuring when appropriate. Even educational when the world seems short of answers.

And when you're alone for hours and hours and hours on a bike, its a friendly voice to accompany you.

Even if it's your own.

[thebigrideproject]

A route that was harder than it should have been. But at least I got sushi at the end.

Today I made the trip from Three Lakes to Iron Mountain, mostly along a stretch of highway that connects the north shore to the south shore(-ish) of the Upper Peninsula. Another day of 70 odd miles, and I day that, when I picked the route, should have been an easier one than the first day.

Reader: it was not.

My route today took me about 15 miles east, from the front door of the Three Lakes motel, to a junction (basically a big intersection in the middle of nowhere, with a gas station) with a gas station. An easy stretch of riding with a big wide shoulder for cycling a decent distance from the automobile traffic.

From there it was a right turn onto M-95, a highway that takes you from right around Champion MI to Iron Mountain. It’s about 55 miles.

It should have been road, but if a shoulder is not wide enough to be safely cycled on, it transforms magically into a gravel road!

What do I mean? Well, you can ride beside the road, but only if you’re comfortable with about 1 foot of clearance between the edge of your handlebar and the traffic line. So assuming you’re like me, and don’t think that’s enough clearance to be safe (especially given the semi-trucks that frequent that highway), you’re going to be riding off the shoulder, in the gravel beside the road.

I do ride gravel (in fact, I’m doing the project on a gravel bike), so in some sense I should be accustomed to it. But there are two things to note:

My bike weighs a f*cking ton with all of my gear to live, work, and eat for a month; and

Even if you’re accustomed to it, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t beat you up a bit, and I have a lot of miles to do not just today, but over the next several weeks.

You also go slower on gravel than you do road, so suddenly my arrival team increased more or less by a whole hour.

Not normally a bad thing, but that meant an extra hour lugging around my loaded rig and getting beaten up by the road.

After about mile 25 or so, I found myself stopping every 10 miles and reaching for one of my snacks (for reference I carry roasted almonds and dried bananas, a bag of carrots, and little fig and nut cubes), and taking breaks to give my hands and backside a break from the pounding.

By the time I pulled into Iron Mountain and dragged myself into my cheap hotel room, I was spent. I slumped in the desk chair, which was about a foot too short for me, and sunk as far deep into the already worn our upholstery as I possibly could.

Hungry and tired, but at least there was a grocery store next door.

Let’s just say that cheap sushi never looked so good.

[thebigrideproject]

Why by bike? A reflection on the 'shell of convenience'

First day of riding down, with many more to go! 70 something miles or so, and the legs are good. 1/3 of the way to Marinette, where the first interviews will happen!

Obviously, for the next month and a bit, I will be spending a lot of time on the bike. This isn't just because I like being on a bike of course. The overarching story I wish to tell involves experiencing the physical and material world of the people who I get to speak with. In our corner, we often take for granted the spaces 'in-between' our towns, our villages, and our cities. Its flyover country for most of the nation, but for us, it's more like 'drive-through' country.

The cars we lock ourselves inside of to move from point A to point B are wonders of engineering, full of awesome innovations like warming seats, television streaming, air conditioning, and all manner of creature comforts and entertainments that make the car's cabin feel less like a mode of transportation and more like a mobile apartment.

And every mile is (relatively) easily obtained. You can up your speed and cover more distance using literally your toe on the pedal. Or, if you're not the driver, literally no effort at all. You can whiz by vast expanses of territory while sleeping, or watching a movie, or simply turning your brain off and making sure your front two wheels stay inside the lines (and newer cars will beep annoyingly at you if you don't!).

It's all very convenient.

But you can see in that reality-check why I wanted something different. Surrounded in that shell of convenience the world outside moves by us like pictures in a slideshow, no more real to us than a movie. And, in drive-through country, a not particularly interesting movie at that.

Things change when you don't have that insulation. There's wind, there's rain. There's sun and clouds. It's cold. It's hot. And there are bugs. So many bugs.

So it's not all positive.

And when you have to earn every mile with your legs and your lungs, every mile matters. The spaces 'in-between' matter. You start to see the things that we often miss. That there are people here, living what must be quiet lives, but nonetheless don't want to be forgotten, or ignored.

I think there's a lesson somewhere in there, and it's not just a 'get out and touch grass' one that I'm sure you've all heard before. Thinking socially, culturally, politically, ultimately, it's easy to treat others so much like the pictures that zip by the windows from our shells of convenience. It's easy to lose sight of the physical and material realities that often color a person's views of the world, or form the foundations for their beliefs. Things like remoteness, cruddy roads, having to drive 50 miles to the nearest hospital, or having a grocery store that's also a gas station that's also an auto body shop that's also a community center.

And the bugs.

Although I write this like a bit of unsolicited wisdom (admitting that I have absolutely no authority to speak on wise stuff), this is today a political statement. Musk and DOGE's efforts to replace people with AI in the federal government was, at least on some level, a logic of convenience over relationships with the world, and with each other. After all, machines and their efficiency could make our lives so much more convenient.

Sure, they can.

But in the hell-bent pursuit of convenience, are the actual, lived-in world and its people simply window-dressing?