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My astrologer, a handful of psychics, and numerous individuals with mystical personalities unanimously agree: I was a monk in my former life. And probably in the lifetime before that and maybe even the one before that. I lived in a cave and did not speak to anyone for years at a time and instead of running around killing animals and getting the plague and having sex I meditated fanatically and practiced abstinence from the finer and more enjoyable aspects of existence on earth. Having been a monk in my past lives does not make me a better or happier or even more spiritual person in this life; in fact, whatever influence it has had on me could be classified as detrimental and while it hasn’t been approved yet, I am awaiting social security benefits because I believe myself to be disabled from my own karma and am hoping to get on Universal Welfare.

If you do not believe in reincarnation, or God, or religion, or eating tofu, or the internet, or Umberto Eco, fret not: I am not sure the astrologer, the psychics, or the numerous individuals with mystical personalities did either. The only truth found in the hyperbolic guesswork that outlines my most recent incarnations is the accurate expression their influence has had over my current lifetime and, as most who know me would well agree, it is a surprisingly irrefutable claim. Like a little monk who lives in his cave far removed from the people of his village, I am a cultural outsider, a hermit, a sad little man who doesn’t like talking on the phone, a scared squirrel holding his nut sack, a person who doesn’t like making friends, or sex magazines, or anarchy. Instead, I like to keep to myself, I enjoy quiet pursuits, I prefer silence and solitude, and I remain unattached and worry mostly that I am not spending enough time in my cave meditating. My assessment of my peers and cultural compatriots is one of utter confusion and horror: I haven’t a clue why it is people do what they do and I am sure they all feel the same way about me. That I was a monk or will again be a monk does not surprise me at all; it suits me well-enough.

Bike touring also suits me well-enough. It is a practice of solitude, of self-reflection, of time alone and apart from the general flow and concern of every day life in America. It is a way to avoid the general stream of progress, of automated movement, of effortless travel. Bicycle touring is a way of life. Even if it is for a weekend, or only a single day, it is a lifestyle and during that time apart you become a nomad, a wanderer — the type of person willing to move himself from day to day and from place to place. Whatever you were and whatever you did before no longer matters as you join the collective force of people who are not working currently and do not have a particular schedule or a Mocha Latte Vente and who are, instead, out living as wandering monks searching for answers to life’s persistent questions. You ride to escape the modern world; to escape the cars and diesel and buses and trolleys and planes; to escape the phone call, the voicemail, the email, the instant message, the alpha-numeric text page; to escape the burden of a thousand possession you never needed but can’t bring yourself to part with.

At home, something can be misplaced for days (years even) and it goes unnoticed and unfound in the hustle and clutter of every day living. I have items of no value that I keep only because I have always kept them and I know not else what to do with them but keep them. It is just stuff — stuff that I happen to have and having it I have happened upon no use for it. When you are traveling on a bicycle, however, each item has a personality and a purpose, and every piece has a small place in an even smaller puzzle. Ben and I knew the quality, timbre, and facet of every item we owned. We knew where the tweezers were and how the spoons were packed inside Ben’s cup which rested at an thirty degree angle slightly skewed against the inside of my cup, which nested within the pot covered with the bag containing the lighters and matches we had in case of an emergency. We knew that the only discernable difference between my spoons and his was that mine were made in Japan while his were manufactured in China, however, just by holding them we could feel the uniqueness of each cultural construction. Our clothes became an extension of our person. They sometimes wore themselves and more often than not we fell into conversation with some of the more entertaining garments that we traveled with. There was Big Red and Little Green — Ben and my outer and warmest garments and the most popular of the bunch. There were my shoes and Ben’s sandals that fit over Big Red tightly packed into The Bob — both of which were never zipped in without the appropriate amount of muttering and complaining from Benjamin over their bulk. There were the books and the maple syrup and the five pound bag of pancake mix. There was the Clearsol zit cream and the organic Vitamin C infused facial lotion and Ben’s enormous bottle of contact lens solution. There was the micro-cassette recorder and the camera and Ben’s cell phone — on which he called his girlfriend twice, because he got absolutely no service whatsoever on the entire trip except when he was standing inside of a payphone and using my phone card. There was the way we packed The Bob, layering first the sleeping bags, end to end, with the tent squeezed in along side under the mattress pads followed by the black stuff sack that Ben had at first scoffed at and then embraced as his own. There was how we packed the Panniers, working from the dirty clothes on the bottom to the clean clothes on the top, separated by the carefully cut heavy-duty plastic bags manufactured by Ben for the purposes of keeping our clean clothes dry, and covered with our current reading material and emergency warm outer-garments. There were the bags on top of our bike racks, carrying our days supply of food and our playing cards and journal. There were Sharkies — Sharkies hidden in every nook and cranny of every one of our packs and pockets.

At home, there is clutter and inefficiency and confusion — I stare at a computer screen or at a vacant room or at a pile of clothes and wonder what it was I had planned to do and why it was I held an empty bottle of alcohol in my hand. I wander aimlessly, at times, not sure what to do next or even where even to begin. With bicycle touring, however, there is no identity crisis or ever the feeling of being overwhelmed by mountains of mundane tasks. There are real mountains when you are on a bike, and they are simple to conquer. Ben and I had a specific series of functions that needed to be performed — we needed to eat, to sleep, and to ride our bicycle. That was all. And we excelled at all of it. After a few days, efficiency became too weak of a word to describe our actions in regards to the packing and unpacking of our campsite and gear. We were machines. We could cook dinner, pound tent posts, clean our chains, wash laundry, and play cribbage without thought. Like Forrest Gump striping his rifle we could take apart our campsite with our eyes closed and put it together in the rain, naked, surrounded by mosquitoes with paint guns.

Bicycle touring is the embodiment of simplicity; it speaks of a forgotten time and culture, when our lives were easier and more direct and when people didn’t ask esoteric questions because they knew they would only get esoteric answers. With each pedal forward and every rotation of the tire, touring reminds us that the very nature of our existence is mutable and ephemeral and that nothing remains unaffected for long. Then, after a moment, we are awed by the duality of the universe and, the farther we travel, the more we see that nothing ever changes. When Ben and I setup camp at night I could barely conjure having ever camped anywhere else — it was as if the previous night, the previous ride, the previous everything hadn’t really happened. As if I was recounting some exaggerated tale that hardly bared any semblance to what it originally was. And then we would wake up, take down camp, and — before we had even left — it was as if we had never been and all that existed for me was the road in front and the miles ahead. As if the moments before never were.

Perhaps this is why we like it, why we get out the bike, why we fly such long distances to such far off places, why we take vacations or walks through a park or close our eyes in the sun. For a brief time, we are given the opportunity to forget that all the other harshness, all the other atrocities, all the other terribleness, exist. It is just us and the road and whatever we have chosen to pack and the rest of our lives stretch out in front of us, undisrupted and unfettered by our everyday burdens.

And this is the universal truth of bicycle touring.

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