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My friend Ben and I grew up, during the formidable years of our childhood, in small adjoining towns in New Hampshire. The end of my driveway, as a matter of fact, rested at the border of our two New England villages. However, as fate would have it, we were separated by a twenty minute car ride. As that neither of us had cars or licenses or enough money, we spent the summers of our youth on bicycles. We would wake up, one of us would call the other, and we would decide which park we were headed to. Then we would load the racks of our bikes with our clothing, soccer balls, basketballs, tennis racquets, Frisbees, footballs, and any other necessary items, and we would pedal five to ten miles to meet one another at the designated play area. We would then engage in one activity until we grew of tired of it and cast it aside and started playing another until that, too, had worn us down, and we moved on to the next, and the next, until we had used each piece of equipment and lost every ball we had brought. If we became thirsty or wee bit peckish we might rest for a while, and swing by a country store and purchase ice cream bars and a two liter bottles of Mountain Dew. After four or five hours of sports, we would pedal another five or ten miles and head into an Olive Garden where we ate a standard (and unlimited) meal of Soup, Salad, and Breadsticks for $4.95. Then, a stop at our local Wal-Mart for a large container of M&Ms (me, plain; Ben, peanut) and we would end our day by an afternoon showing of whatever movie we had not yet seen.

This was how we lived during the summer and this is how I remember my childhood. I know that sometimes people over exaggerate the importance and simplicity of their childhood years but I don’t believe I am. Of course, this didn’t happen every summer and I would not be surprised to find that this may have only have occurred over one or two days during a particular summer — however: it is the memory that envelopes all of my youth, for during those summers our lives were as they should have been. My friend Ben, and I, on our bikes with our gear, traveling the streets of New Hampshire, looking for places to swim and play ball; we talked and laughed and ate and watched movies the whole summer long. We went to bed, we got up, and we did it again. That was all and it was enough.

So, while up until the Summer of 2005 Ben and I had never done a proper bike-touring trip together, the concept was very familiar to us from the start. Bicycle riding with Ben is, in all fairness, more intuitive and familiar than riding with him in a car. In fact: it is downright odd to sit beside him in a vehicle — as if we were departing on some strange and special mission (such as, attending a funeral or a brothel). I think we both get nervous driving the other around because, in a car, it requires that one person acquiesce control of the vehicle. Bicycle riding requires no such submission. Pedaling side by side down the streets of Boston or on the throughways of New Hampshire and Vermont is how I relate to traveling with Ben. I have spent more time next to him on a bike and in a movie theatre than I have with any other person in my life (on a bike, in a movie theatre, or otherwise). Ben and I are biking buddies and we always have been and probably always will be.

In the Spring of 2005 we had discussed the idea of doing other things during the summertime — driving across the country, being dropped off in the Alaskan Wilderness for a month via floatplane, hiking across the Sahara, playing video games, etcetera. As spring quickly changed into summer, however, we didn’t have the time or the wherewithal to plan anything outside our scope of experience and it came down to us doing what was most familiar: riding our bicycles, carrying our gear, throwing a Frisbee, eating some food, and watching a movie. That was the plan. That was what we knew. That was what we were going to do for five weeks and it was going to be as it was when we were young: it would be fun, hilarious, and memorable.

After four days, however, our trip was not that. There were moments in which it teetered on the edge of becoming what we had imagined, but it hadn’t fallen into place yet. It wasn’t anything like what I remembered from our childhood and it certainly hadn’t been as fun as I had expected and the laughter we shared had been strained and sparse. I know Ben felt it to. It was frustrating, because we didn’t quite know what was wrong or what was going to happen; the wheel was still spinning, so to speak, and we weren’t sure where it was we would get off.

There is some Buddhist philosopher who claimed that one cannot rise to one’s greatest height until one has fallen to one’s lowest low. This may, or may not, be a universal truth, but it seemed to be the case with us in Washington. If we had to fall before we could climb then we had hit rock bottom quickly, and it was there that the giant bicycle wheel in the sky paused, for only a moment, and then with a great chuckle continued to spin and our long fall into our deepest moments of hopelessness reversed itself and we began to see rays of sunlight at the top of our tremendous climb.

DAMON: 8:30 on June 26th. A lot has happened since we spoke with you last, in fact I think we were at the top of some horrendous pass and moaning about terrible things; since then we moaned a lot more, got rained on, then we had some amazing food at a fairly amazing price and um — but the most amazing is we found an Adventure Cycling group which happens to be camping here in Stevenson, and we found that out by just riding around and someone stopped us and said: “why don’t you camp here?” and so we are camping for free in amongst, I don’t know, what looks likes to be fifty other cyclist’s tents and we’ve just been offered free breakfast in the morning, free showers right now, we’re in a town that has not only a post office but a library and a Laundromat and a supermarket, this after four days of the nearest and biggest town being things like Enumclaw and Tanglewood — no, what’s the name of it? [laughing]

BEN: Randle!

DAMON: Randle! And we were feeling pretty down about thirty minutes ago we were talking about calling the airlines and getting our tickets changed; I was ready to go back to Issaquah even if #6 was working all week it didn’t matter I would just lay in bed and sleep until she came home [sad laughter] and that was about as much as I cared to do.

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