Return

Request a taxicab big enough to load the bike box into. Rolls up in the clinging arrogant heat that only cities, glorious historical ones, have, can see immediately it won’t work. But we make it do with the front passenger seat down, the corners crumpled, bisecting the car diagonally and I am still sweating in the back isolated from the driver, talk over the barrier but mostly quiet. Staring at the architecture the crowds the clouds against distance, but not so much seeing anything anymore, tired of seeing? or shifting to seeing something else, it will be days yet before coherence and coalescence will make the trip vivid again, I know it will. Now the airport, dragging gear, questions from strangers of what it is, so obvious to me like with x-ray vision, takeoff, folded too excited for sleeping a refutation of exhaustion, passport control and baggage claim and announcements in English and the language sounds wrong, and then there is home waving and standing and an embrace.

Bags stay in a pile just off the middle of the room, laziness and distraction, maybe, but also they were so long all that was with me it is hard to imagine them put away, where would my things be? Fascinating selection of clothing, disgust at all the things I don’t need, surprised at the things I thought I had but don’t or just didn’t remember that they looked like that. So many spoons in the drawer, out of habit I use one pot where three will be natural again in a week. I’m suspicious of the shower and of the thermostat.

Ride to work, a different bike and I fit it all wrong right now, shimmying on its unladenness, it’s mist and cold and an opposite season, sit in a chair I haven’t for awhile, I like it. Open a book, I’ll start reading it in a second and then it’s hard to say where I will be, but not yet.

Solitude

Famous hot spring nearly sunset all to myself washing the chalk white grime and drag and my battered threadbare from me. Hard wonderful days on tan orange greyblack windswept tracks close to the clouds. Now I watch the birds, the swirling horizon, the spring outflow and try to will my fatigue into a different register.

A group of twenty arrive in four SUV’s, no matter, had it in solitude for a long while, they strip down to trunks or bikinis hopping around in the forthright cold before getting in, I track the mix of English, Irish, Aussie and American, more or less all speaking the same language, and think about leaving but realize I crave the company and human postures. They have the jolly moronic giddy rapport of having known each other on a tour for a few days, I admire it. After awhile it occurs to someone to try to talk to me, “oh, you’re the guy on the push bike with fat tires, we saw you two days ago,” I want to make a feeble joke about how, yeah, but I wasn’t pushing, instead I ask if I was nice and she says that I was, that I smiled and waved cheerfully. Good, just checking.

A group now around or maybe I drifted into their circle, hard to distinguish, someone asks if I get lonely. And aren’t I concerned about going all Aron Ralston?, all and only us three Americans smile at the reference. I suppose you’re supposed to say “no” or “yes, but not much, it doesn’t matter, it’s fine.” Or there are stock perfectly true serious answers about how pedaling alone is importantly different, not as much locked into the eco system of you and your companion(s) and so forced or given the chance to be open to people in the place. That people react far differently to you when you are alone, curious and positive and more giving. That at desolate exhausting crushing freezing hypoxic heights, the body just does and there’s no direct signal of a missing sociality.

“Don’t you miss…”

But, no, yes I do and it’s devastating and gnashing and that’s part of the why and the point for me, I explain, to crack break everything that I am, all my assumptions and prejudices and ignorant half ambitions, let it all shatter in the absence of what and who I know and think I do, wait for it to reassemble just a little different, if I’ve been far enough away, then, I hope, a little bit better. That it’s sometimes misery, and it is, is relevant, certainly, but not in the sense of being a reason not to do it. They listen to me curiously and partway between that I’m just some cycling nutter and other possibilities.

Tent nearby, later listen to the locals splashing at 10pm, a sound that makes me happy alone except for boots in its juxtaposition with the earlier scene when we were talking loudly and consuming the mana of the place.

Markets

Here is not for the claustrophobic, bodies shuffling chaos very close at varying speeds according to age or browsing impulse or impatience. The streets are not closed to traffic, so taxi and bus horns punctuate the minuet, drivers not shy about using the bumpers to shoulder you aside as gently as can be done by polyhedral steel. It’s spatially continuous but architecturally heterogenous with permanent building storefronts, then semi-permanent structures leaning up against the brick or concrete, then stalls huddled together for vertical support in the middle of the thoroughfare resembling a tidy shantytown, all tarps and rope, not to mention the carts ranging from beer cooler size to full on NYC falafel trailer and then umbrellas over mats with vendors camped in optimism. Sometimes at the very center there is a vast enclosure like a hockey rink sheltering endless produce bins and boxes and butcher racks and cheese round piles and buckets of fish. The dogs patrol in well behaved trios or quintets, this is an eco system at a dozen levels of resolution from economic to social to trash management.

I keep attempting to conceptualize these enormous town markets by trying to divide areas into what seem to me natural kinds. I repeatedly fail. Certain items — mobile phones and their accessories, sunglasses*, squeezed juice, candy, fried foods — can appear anywhere, as likely to be found amidst the power tools as the sheep carcasses. Other cluster transitions make sense, the half block of DVD’s segueing into audio equipment leading to a maze of televisions all showing a match or a show where contestants vie for superlative resemblance to Britney Spears (yeah, I wish I was kidding, too). But the bicycle repair stalls are not near the hardware shops, which in turn remain distant from the gardening tool hawkers who are inexplicably near the colorful crappy plastic bins of all sizes sellers.

It is easy to default to the explanation that these organizational configurations reflect only the vagaries of history and accident, but I keep having the sensation, like a word on the tip of my tongue, that there is a rationale dictating the juxtapositions that is part of local cultural knowledge but that remains frustratingly elusive to me. There must be a key to the cipher, like at home learning that at the fancy grocery store the soymilk is with the smug organic products, not with the cereal as it is where ordinary folk shop. But it never comes: I ask for coffee at the stall that sells powdered milk and oatmeal, she regards me with lamenting disgust and says, no, I’ll have to go a block and a half to where the coffee grinder is, in between a shop that recharges phone cards and a futbol jersey store, which, by the way, is nowhere near the for sale footballs themselves. I’ve been walking for twenty minutes triangulating on the precious mantequilla de mani based on the assurances of numerous jarred products shopkeepers, never do find it. I’m looking for replacement hose clamps, but they’re not at the hoses store, they’re with other metal things like doorknobs and screws, and that’s back where I passed the belts and tight jeans. Uh huh, okay.

I know the image will snap into clear resolution someday. I just know it.

*Which is completely baffling, since I’ve literally seen fewer than ten people wearing sunglasses in this town, in spite of the abundance of sunglass sellers with life size cardboard cutouts of Halle Berry at the beach.

Travel companions

A diversion from the AM sun and road tilt, I expectantly spool up Schwalbe tire tracks and craft scant hint fictions about the pair of cyclists I am trailing. One rides the shortest line, the other the smoothest. One creates a clearly defined imprint in the sand, breaking off the track’s edges the way small ocean waves whittle and then abandon crumbling ledges on the beach. The other’s marks sometimes completely disappear to return in softer or wet patches. They are moving quickly and leave early in the day, once a woman doing wash in front of her house tells me my two friends came through at noon, it’s 4:00.

And Tom and Sarah and I will ride as friends, we’ll meet up after two more grey afternoons, exchange of cyclists’ news, easy familiarity, remarks on bicycles and gear then making way for deeper themes. From western Australia (Tom originally from England), they started fourteen months ago in Banff, Canada, followed the Great Divide trail and onward through Central America, now this continent. Relaxed and efficient habits of having been on the road a long time, riding companions accepting my quirks for a span, fellowship and tales and kindnesses creating a cheerful team approach to the route, camping, cooking. We share an aesthetic for challenging rough dirt ways, for taking the long way to a destination, our riding animated by the thought that a detour on a beautiful track is worth the hours or week. Chats with both about books and ideas, future ambitions, Tom’s willingness to drink Cusquena Negra in the middle of the day a happy intersection.

It changes things, not worse or better, but different. Usually when I ride alone, and that is usual, I sway into an overt sociality with local people I meet, craving the contact for the spontaneous energetic spark, each conversation and encounter updrafting me higher into the place, giving me a certain sense of it, a crucial part of my being there. Touring with people that I know and care about is a contrasting way with the culture and landscape, affording chances to articulate and share subtle details, a quieter engagement, more serious than is possible in a flicker of a brief meeting, less heat or exclamation point, more sustained reflection on what is there or not. I appreciate the chance to undermine my habits for a while, we’ll part in affection and serious promises to ride together in future (Canning Stock and Munda Biddi in ’13 you say, Tom?).

Eating

There is no sign outside the concrete block like a garage, you’d spotted the tables and people sitting close. The bike is against the wall in a conspicuous place and ideally where you can see it from inside, or at least can see people’s eyes and posture as they look at it. You’ve already negotiated the checkpoint of children who want to touch the tires or fiddle with the grips and brakes, the young men who gather ’round were offered an opportunity to take a ride and often older men enthusiastically accepted honorary invitations to these sessions, unsteady circles in the street as everyone cheered and whooped. No matter how hungry or cranky or in a hurry you are, you’ll do this, everyone around now knows about the bike and cyclist, knows where you are from, heard your voice and your Spanish and where you are going, where you started, what’s in the bags because by now you’ve learned or reminded yourself of the words for esoteric camping equipment. All laughed together.

You walk in, there are four or five tables. You don’t necessarily get your own, you just find an open spot, perhaps people rotate around and bring in a chair to make room for you. If there are no chairs then you wait outside, diners know when there’s a queue and there isn’t any dallying after the meal. Usually men outnumber women five to one, sometimes no women at all, sometimes a more balanced ratio, very rarely a child, that’s not what this place is for. You take your seat wishing everyone who is already eating buen provecho, better just “provecho.” There’s likely a tv on, everyone staring up at it. When there’s not, the people not yet served can be joking, murmuring to one another quietly but that will stop when their food comes. The other electrical outlets are recharging mobiles. The men who work outside still have their stained ball caps and dirty work boots on, no one cares that you’re soaked with sweat, you’ve greeted everybody and everyone has acknowledged you in some way. Sometimes you’ve even clasped hands with the people at your table if they aren’t already eating, and you certainly have with the server if he’s a he but not if she’s a she. You wait, you don’t ask or interrupt, you were noticed and the arrival order is taken seriously, no matter that it’s full of regulars and you’re an outsider you won’t get served especially early nor be skipped over, and soon you will receive a small tray of utensils and immediately a bowl of soup. Napkins are likely already on the table, with not very hot hot sauce, catsup, a bowl of sugar, salt and sometimes pepper. If there aren’t these things on your table and you want them, you pardon yourself as you take them from another table, no one minds your reach.

When your soup is placed down you will be asked what version of the meal you would like, usually only two choices though what two will vary by region. Fish or chicken, or chicken or beef, or chicken or pork, or fish or beef. Fairly frequently there is no choice at all, and then you’re not asked. Shortly after your soup is finished, maybe it was chicken or potato or green vegetable or pasta, two or three or all, or quinoa, your plate arrives. Always a substantial bed of rice, then regional adornments, a few tomato and onion slices, red beans, lentils, hominy, cornmeal, some combination of these, cheesy spaghetti on the rice once, the animal on top of the heap. You could, of course, have declined the meat altogether which would be double checked to see if you’re serious and then honored indulgently since you’re a pain in the ass gringo with special needs and ideas and don’t really belong here or expect much to fit in in any serious way. Or you could unscruple communality, sociality, eating the same things in the same movements, your body in a parallel arc of energy transformation. Within a few minutes of your starting in you’ll receive a tall glass of fresh juice, once in awhile instead a cup of hot water for tea or to make coffee from the jar of instant now placed on the table. Some people will ask for a beer or Fanta Orange in addition, there can be a refrigerator in the room and you’ll just get them yourself. You’ll never eat with your hands no matter what, everyone around you works the utensils in the European custom, knife never leaves the right hand, everything is stabbed or scooped with the left hand fork, no switching. Unless it’s a very small town in which case you only received a spoon, then everything scooped, the meat manipulated with the spoon’s perpendicular edge.

The pace will be steady, verging on hurried. When you’re done and especially if there are others waiting, you’ll stand and find the server in the kitchen. It will cost $1,50 or $2, or if it was dinner and the portions were a bit bigger, as much as $3. You’ll walk out wishing provecho to anyone who arrived after you did.

You’ll pedal off, a few people will wave and wish you a good, safe journey.

Ecuador Postcard

End of the day, descending into the town square next to the basilica, I am on a one-way street going in the correct direction, motorcycle red blue red lights coming towards me. Pull over, there is a slow moving car and a long procession, cask aloft by four men, people walking close in groups of two or fives, some solo in reflection, flowers, black clothing. Children swarming aunts, cousins, friends. I remove my cap, watch, nod at eyes met. It’s far from silent, a flash of laughter, a murmur of affirmation, burst of voices. In the last rank a trio of men start arguing about whether my bicycle has motorcycle tires on it, they ask me, somewhat dubiously I sense, wondering if I’ll get the question. I explain that they are not normal bicycle tires, they are for special bicycles. This satisfies everyone, they declare the wisdom in it, and they walk on, shuffling shoe heels now the only sound.

This blend of solemnity but also an acknowledgment that life is full and humorous and curious, that people walk connected at varying but never infinite distance from one another, is a placeholder for my thoughts on those I have met here. Not the full on boisterousness I’ve known, but, how to say?, always almost on the brink of it, willing for it.

Earlier, passing near a technical university. A little shop, I can’t quite tell, a garage, ten or eight in their twenties, half men half women, clink of beer laughter bottles. The gang’s extrovert calls out to me, “have a beer with us!” It would be rude to say no but I explain where I am headed, he says “oh, you’ll be there in a half hour” in the spatially distorted confusion of someone who gets around by motor vehicles (it will actually take me two hours). I circle, hop off, I drink the offered yellow can pilsener, we talk about Ecuador and bicycles, about the jungle that I’m headed to, I continue on with that dehydrated and had an ill-advised beer wobble, too quickly for real politeness, I regret it.

Relaxed, a bit shy, curious but reserved, supportive, a lot of thumbs up. Drivers are enough on the shoulder of chaos so that when I, say, ride in the median to pass traffic or weave through construction, there is no righteous judgment. Truckers and cabbies and adolescent men in fauxFastandFurious whaletail lowriders, they are all perfect, they pass close but predictably and expect me to mind myself. Others if anything are a bit too accommodating, won’t go past.

I like it that people dress up a bit, ties, smart cardigans, shiny shoes, never sneakers, jeans tight and designer. Then there is the traditional clothing — though this is a precarious phrase given the manifest imperialism of it — of villagers in the mountains. For women, black or dark green just below the knee skirt, copper or maroon sweater over a white blouse, a hat like a cross between a tyrolian and a fedora, color-matched to the skirt. Did I mention the white stockings or the black pumps? Kindergardeners to grandmothers wearing this without exception, chopping wood, running to catch a pickup truck, tending sheep.

Strangers, if they see you eating, under any circumstances including shattered disheveled and sweaty stuffing crackers with peanut butter into your mouth, wish you buen provecho, enjoy your meal. Three course lunch is usually $1,50. And so is a Snickers bar.

Soaking my tired legs in a hot springs at 10pm, I’m in the pool with the old folks pretending to read my book but eavesdropping on conversations: family, aches, holidays. I’m drawn in with the usual questions one asks a stranger. I’m told of a nephew in New Jersey but times are tough, buys houses, fixes them, sells them, everyone grimly acknowledges that now is not a great time for this enterprise in the USA, but all other jobs are closed. I ask how things are locally, depressed, too. Someone else, I can’t quite decipher the emotion behind it, maybe it’s not fully resolved, says that since dollarization — i.e., the adoption of US currency in an effort to control inflation — Ecuador is just an economic colony. I’ve wondered about the effect on Ecuadorians, eleven years on now, of taking out an Abraham Lincoln five dollar bill or an Alexander Hamilton ten to pay for gas, dinner, or groceries.

South America Bound

Envisioning volcanoes, jungle tracks, salt flats and glaciers. Altitude and crater lakes and sawtooth crags, hypoxic dirt routes (if I’m not careful, tourist nonsense pan flutes). For me, South America is to Asia like ground is to figure. Passable and cultivated theoretical knowledge of India, Tibet, Pakistan, Nepal, but little and woefully incomplete embodiment in habits, movement, postures there. SA, in contrast, I cognize at best superficially, but expect a familiar subsonic cultural rhythm, language, similar motions at least to the small degree that Spain’s tendril’s histories bear an affinity to my parent’s island or to my New York City childhood neighborhood. Looking forward, then, to filling in words learned not in conceptuality, but through magical sources using magic, my favorites, Borges, of course, and  Cortazar and Fuentes and Puig.

Gathering Gear

Picturing the destination, half remembered images seen or interpolated from descriptions in books read while comfortable on a couch long before ever imagining I’d visit there. Reading a few other people’s packing lists and past ones of my own the way that some might compare recipes in cookbooks. Turning first to things that I always need or, anyway (but which is different), that I always bring. Absentmindedly pulling these off the shelves, the shape and textures trigger stories, so already this enterprise is not as inert as it might seem. Headlamp, camp towel, fleece bag liner. Nor any shortage of comedic hyperbole, a titanium cup when a plastic one would do, a cut down toothbrush so I can hold it up triumphantly to baffled acquaintances, “no, of course I’m not kidding,” I laugh at myself. Coffee strainer, now that’s important, I wonder if I’ll need the head net, spork — seriously, a spork? it’s titanium, too! — space pen, gather all those up. Clothes are in another place, but that’s going to take a bit of reflection and imagination, I expect to go through several iterations over different moods, drinking Ardbeg or Elijah Craig, changing my mind about whether every single thing matches with every other, envisioning as vividly as I can riding in sweating, humid midday sun heat, up at altitude in a snowstorm, for the ninth straight day of pouring misty rain. The nano puff pullover, obviously, the Ibex merino polo has been as far away from home as I have so it, too, I’m going where I’ll be culturally comfortable wearing shorts, so I will, but not cycling ones since they’re only useful while cycling, and one occasion of use isn’t nearly enough; old reliable gore-tex booties. Gadgets are the least interesting part, I like the camera but that’s not one of the pathological things, I’d no sooner forget the iPhone than I’d leave behind footwear, maybe the Kindle will go but maybe it won’t. Most of the tools and spares are kept in a bin separate from the stuff used daily at home, even where identical. Ditto toiletries, drugs, first aid, that’s just a matter of grabbing the right mesh bags and confirming that I’ve replaced what got consumed.

So then a pile of stuff to go through: did I use this last time?, how many times?, can I get one of these if I don’t bring it and need it?

Detachedly, I strongly sense that the incommensurate care with which I scrutinize gear is displaced anxiety about the trip itself, not fear of going but more like girding oneself for difference and alertness. The stuff is not the part of the trip that matters, but acting as if it does gives conscious attention something harmless ritually fretfully to do.

True cliché: Cyclocross bikes are excellent

Must have misunderstood the phone message mission description, somehow under the impression that we’d load up bikes, drive to the distant trailhead, do the mysterious on the map long loop, back in the truck and then call it beers and lies time. Sure, yeah, I heard him when he said we’d be on road bikes to test the limits of the format or somesuch foolishness, “there’s likely to be, um, some walking,” but that’s normal with Craig, he’s a demented lunatic. Last time around I was irritated, though, Speedplay cleats plugged with sticky mud, so I cleverly contrived to use mountain bike pedals and shoes; once you’re that far, well, then there’s the normally dormant in summertime cyclocross bike with chubby tires and better dirt clearance on the fork and rear triangle, so, whatever, okay he’d be on his Seven — he’s still a good person, honest — and I’d not be on the Look, but one that appeared enough like a road bike so as to earn fewer but still some maybe style points on an excursion that would be witnessed by no one. Plus I hate loathe abhor walking sections, so I was going to ride all of those instead.

First perception that something was awry when Dukes shows up at the coffee shop in regular fauxpro kit, none of the little details that signal that we’re off to do a different cooler ride like in a Rapha video. He frowns at my rig but says nothing, Craig rolls up decidedly not in a truck. I try out a few searching and diplomatic whatthefucks?, we’re evidently riding an hour to the venue, I resist their encouragement to go home and get another bike, rolling now.

Strangely fine in the paceline, they feel sorry for me, and when all hell breaks loose on Dutch Hill — this is where the weak are left behind during Tuesday night world championship rides — I’m most of all noticing that nothing is different from the race bikes, not any slower, though, alas, not any faster, either (and second of all noticing that one can notice the absence of difference, which you might have thought is nothing and therefore not noticeable). I can tell that they’re irritated, yeahwellbut and another thing about that out of place thing, which will only grow when we leave the asphalt, cross that questionable wooden bridge and then they’re walking up the babyhead ruts moss covered rock broken culvert loose climb and it doesn’t look like anything to think about so I ride up it. Or pedaling full tilt on abandoned New England road rollers. Or on the way home again on pavement, we’re battered now, been in the woods for hours, Whitcomb is behind us and we’re high speed descending the Hairpin Turn, weaving through less agile Harley’s. And for sure the damned 30mm Michelin Jet’s with 60 lbs of pressure should be Way Worse, but they’re not.

Fast road ride, I lost virtually nothing, but on broken dirt almost flat out mountain biking I gained a great deal. Which is, of course, what the cliché says, but everyone still thinks it’s a wishful exaggeration, the kind of thing you’d say to your neighbor who wants to get one bike to ride “…on the road mostly maybe on a fast club ride, with some occasional trails but not serious mountain biking.” But you wouldn’t be entirely serious because you really fantasize that every quality of terrain calls for a special bicycle. Well, next time I say it, I will be.*

*No, for all that, I’m not going to rush off and sell the road bikes. Fashion isn’t everything, but it’s still a lot.

Books about maps

In them danger, confidence, mystery, promise, potential. It’s the initial fantasy meets The Plan, then as part of the essential equipment that gives a unity and a steadiness in the span of the doing, found temporal coherence projected two dimensionally spatially. Afterward bicycles bags tents titanium cups put away, maps remain clues and cues, where we were and therefore what we were. In form, unfolded into texture, peering hunched over protecting it from the rain lest it disintegrate more, or on a small glowing screen, or clipped on the stem, crinkled in the jersey pocket, under a persnickety plastic cover, committed to imagery from the local’s linear narrative of landmarks.

And then in their history even more, not just aesthetic but so much that, not just technical, but so much that, too. Artistry governed by formulae, formulae transformed into a visceral sensation crossing like magic back over from abstraction. All painted against a more whole synthesis of prejudice, cultural jealousies, triumphant aspirations and just flat out lies and guesses, picturing what’s important and more importantly what’s not, typography has to converse with the representation of the topography, fidelity inevitably competes with utility. I think we learn through maps that representation is only uneasily symbolic, we do better when the representation can transmit bodily movement through spaces, but nor would a simple satellite photo do, either, since that’s not our vantage or need.

These are my favorite books on and of maps:

Maps: Finding Our Place in the World
James Akerman & Robert Karrow Jr., eds.

Transit Maps of the World
Mark Ovenden

Oxford Atlas of the World

Mapping the World: An Illustrated History of Cartography
Ralph Ehrenberg

Cognition in the Wild
Ed Hutchins

Maps of the Imagination: The Writer As Cartographer
Peter Turchi

Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet
Nicholas Crane

(And, of course, the blog Strange Maps)