Into the countryside, we’ll link spomeniks while harassed by sheets of rain that turn the track into mud and leave us shivering wrapped in grey. Unphotographed moments that have now only retrospexistence, which can often be truer.
Cycling adventurist, bikepacker, travel writer, photographer, speaker, professor of philosophy
Category: Bikepacking
Spomeniks
The Spomeniks of former Yugoslavia are future thinking, political, and mnemonic. They are notable in how their materiality achieves spirituality. To me they have a powerful beauty and they continue to speak even as they decay and are in many cases neglected.
Notes from a Border
A line that in this part of the country doesn’t follow something natural like the Rio Grande but instead is a cartographer’s dashed euclidean creation. Maybe that’s more honest with respect to the contingency and arbitrariness, maybe it doesn’t let us off the hook by encouraging lies about the separation and the essential unalloyed luck of being born on one side or the other of it.
Appalachian Gravel Growler
This ride breathes and coils. Sometimes big climbs, other times flick woodsy singletrack turns. Logan’s route inscribes dirt road motifs in a more expansive land’s humps and berms and valleys movement.
Wyoming Postcard
We say it matter of factly, and the facts are just bricks, our talk mortar—one could build walls or a paved path.
Fuji to Hiroshima Photo Essay
In Japan we followed roads in the densest cities with glinting rolling boxes and chirping screens and orderly crosswalks as if from a polished wood future, roads swaying up peaks into greys greens with pavement glinting from recent or hinting rains, some roads that are hardly intact anymore, forlorn tracks between trees.
Japan Journal 02
We’ll visit some sites from tour and guidebooks, mostly we’ll be breath slowing across landscapes to find less insistent beauty, the beauty in the ordinary things in their ordinary state.
Japan Journal 01
Everywhere is in our imagination before we go and even after, but Japan unusually so. Landscapes outside of temporal location, in the city it’s dense quiet incandescent tidy shoulder to shoulder bullet train shoe fall spider web of communication lines vending machines shrines at the foot of glass sheen. We’ll try incompetent noodle slurp, we’ll drink beer with men with loosened collars and identical sloppy knot black ties, we’ll stand quizzically in front of blinking lights for some sort of tawdry robot show.
Tassie Photo Essay
Tasmania registers a conceptual far away, even to the Aussies among us. Sparse like a poem with just a few words on each line, gappy typesetting the distances over open spaces .
Tasmania Postcard
The syllables of the word Tasmania stretch across the space in my consciousness, resonant with being a little kid watching cartoons and knowing only that it’s far. But now here it’s an unexpected closeness.
Autumn Maine Tour
Rolling waves and roads coastline, we’ll see the ocean overflowing any sensible sensory scale and will get blown sideways across the yellow line on Cadillac Mountain.
Croatia Postcard
Those next days headed toward Sjeverni National Park, startlingly dry, a concrete impacted heat, leaves us heaving into noons. Well above the sea and the E65, we don’t see anyone for twenty hours. As if we’re pedaling against a static painting, pebbly grit, haze chalk green.
