Why Not Just Drive?

by Robin Brodsky

These canyons share the color of a winter sunset.

The muted yellow, ochre and red stone is a symphony of geologic time. Standing on the rim of this canyon, I can feel the passage of time through the ages.  The molecules in my cells resonate with the vibration of rock solidified at the bottom of a vast inland ocean. I am a molecule of a living planet.  Wet sand transforming itself into hard rock to morph again into this canyon over eons. 

The walk up the wash in mid-day sun presses against me and I stop to sit on a rock which felt older than the sand my shoe sifted into.

The rock is gray like my hair.

The imprint of a worm that lived here ten million years ago. Its tiny body moved through mud and soft sand.  Ten million years ago! What does that even mean? I can barely get my head around my own lifetime.

With each huff and puff, I pedal my way up and up and up these switch backs on my bicycle. I move through the strata of time as each layer of muscle presses into the incline of these monolithic canyons.  I stop at a spot where a hole gapes within a rock, gapes so large that a full-sized car could fit inside.

So, I take walk.

There are drill holes where they placed dynamite to blast through sandstone to build this road. A red rock half my size but probably five times my weight has been moved, broken off from a cliff above my shoulder. There is a textured pattern. It’s not random. It’s been hand pecked into the rock with a small tool. A series of lines that zig and zag from one end of the rock to the other in a series of three switch backs. I’ve always suspected that this road was once a footpath from the river to the top of the mesa. A story of switchbacks made long before the landscape was altered by the machinery of progress. 

An ancient map.

I am often asked why I ride my bike in these remote out-of-the-way places. My response is always (to those with patience enough to listen) is, “To get away from the noise and mind clutter of the ‘everyday’.” I say, “It’s so noisy in town and hard to see the stars at night.”  There is something deeply spiritual that moves over the landscape with me as I travel under my own power. It is more mesmerizing than driving a car. My body moves, floats noticing the beauty with each bump, each push, each passing of boulder and forest. I miss too much if I am in a car. I can’t feel the microclimate shift from shade to sun.

The breeze on my face cools the heat inside my thoughts. The rhythm of pedal strokes soothes the turmoil. 

I once cycled across a section of Nevada at night. The moon was almost full, but the light was diffused because of a thin cloud cover- a thin veil behind the eye of La Luna. A family of coyotes greeted me as they romped in the middle of highway 50- The Loneliest Road in America. In Basin and Range John Mcfee said Nevada was formed not by a pushing together of tectonic plates but a pulling apart. Wrinkles in the Earth that trend north and south have created this vast, desert landscape. It was summer, I was cycling from San Francisco back to Colorado. The top of the range was seventy-five degrees. The bottom of the basin was one hundred and thirteen.

It’s a great thing to cycle from the ocean to the top of a mountain over days. 

The landscape changes by the minute.

I cycled across the high plains of western Kansas to eastern Colorado to the Rockies and the only thing I could hear was the breeze in the wire and the song of a meadowlark. There is no horizon because the land undulates and it’s like being on the ocean. The constant shift of the perspective gave me vertigo.

Australia is the driest continent on the planet.

There are deserts that have not seen rain in a thousand years. Once, I encountered a thundering waterfall where rain fell 10,000 years ago. It made its way to the sea. And people live out there. In fact, there are people that have been there for upwards of 70,000 years. They change and adapt as the climate and landscape changes with time.

I ride a bicycle to meet the people that inhabit these landscapes.

Kansas. One of the most conservative states in the country has some of the friendliest, most hospitable, and generous folks I’ve had the good fortune to meet. They leave their churches unlocked for weary travelers who have nowhere else to go. A pastor in a small town invited me to sleep in her church right in the center of town one afternoon. It was a modern looking red brick building. I asked her if I needed a key. She said, I’ve never seen the key and I’m not sure there ever was one. She pointed to the sidewalk at a key embedded in the concrete and she said she thought that might be it but couldn’t be certain.

With no destination in mind, I cycled across the Yucatan peninsula once.

Deep in the jungle, I encountered Mayan villages where no-one spoke Spanish. Villages built around the cenotes formed a million years ago when Yucatan rose out of the ocean. The peninsula is made up of limestone, the skeletal bodies of countless crustaceans. Sixty six million years ago the surface was smacked hard by an asteroid killing off 75% of all life on earth. It cracked the limestone into a million miles of fissures that collected rainwater which now comes to the surface. It is clean enough to drink right out of the ground. 

Cycling the length of the interior of Baja, I found small farming communities built around five-hundred-year-old missions. Figs, dates, and oranges brought from Spain prospered and grew fat and juicy around the springs where the churches were built from mud to make adobe. The tortilleras still build their open fires at about three in the morning to provide tortillas for inhabitants by the time the sun makes its visit.

The people in the small towns along the coast of Peru assured me that all the people in the next town up were thieves and murderers and asked me how I survived all the miscreants in the last town I biked through. The ride from the Pacific Ocean to the Cordillera Blanca in the Andes was less than one hundred miles. Snowcapped peaks at nineteen and twenty thousand feet rise out of the coastal sand dunes. It took me days and miles of switchbacks to reach the first pass. Exhausted, I managed to hitchhike with two Nuns in traditional white and black habits. They drove a brand-new pick-up truck carrying twenty-two cases of wine for their convent. 

We threw my bike on top of the wine.

I jumped out at the pass. It was thirteen thousand feet. I rode my bike the last eighteen miles into Huaraz. It sits at eleven thousand feet.

Cycling has its drawbacks honestly. The howling wind, driving rain, blistering sun, mosquito, and the miscreants I have yet to meet . Why not just drive?

Maybe you need to go back and read from the beginning.