Arkansas Photo Album

Arkansas Postcard

I’m loving that it’s so dark. By which I mean the towering colossal stupid.

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.

Montana & Wyoming Search Brigade

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.

Maine Search Brigade

Cuba Postcard

The identity of this place is that it is nowhere, towns that we will inertia through when we need to, but the network of agricultural tracks horizons into midmorning heat and we don’t have to intersect anything else.

Cuba Postcard

In the thick experience of movement and days, in the backroads dust and the chest pressing heat, in the hundred laughter cheek kiss embrace conversations we have, it’s there that the void gets filled, making me ride grinning at how close it was.

Three Days on the Colorado Trail

Altitude makes it so that you only have one burst for a rockpile or for a steep bit, legs twang tense up hard spin and the bike lifts but then the delicate state of your breathing spiral lofts into a wobble in an unstable trough and it’s all you can do to keep going forward.

Vermont Dirt Tour

Gliding through all greens tans blue but for the red barn flash, sounding loudly still summer silence.

Search Brigade Journal

These first hours are the merest fragmental sliver of a ride across the USA to San Francisco to Los Angeles and then a New York return. But they’re the hours that set the emotions and put us on a road together where we’ll laugh and see and ride an idea, namely the idea that on a bicycle trip we’re in a place up close with our best vulnerabilities and openness, that we’re supporting each other not by insulating ourselves from the landscape but by enabling each other to breathe better in it.

Search Brigade is an out and back group ride across the USA happening right now and open to all. Live track the ride. Join and pedal as little or as much you like.

 

Rapha Portland Brevet Snapshots

(9-10 April, 2016)

Alaska Journal Pt. 1

That geographic immensity is hard to contain in the imagination so it remains an abstraction, a blurred assurance that on the ground it keeps going and so might you.