Third Times A Charm

This past weekend, I caught a ride up to Columbia for contra dancing and to spend time with a family of a good friend of mine. It took dozens upon dozens of phone calls, but I finally secured a ride. I would bicycle a good portion of the way home. I looked forward to it.
The weekend held some noteworthy moments. Firstly, I got the opportunity to go sailing with a brother of my good friend (he is in England on a mission right now). He is very dedicated to his art. He is spending an entire year saving money while working full time so he can buy a sailboat of his own and go on a grand sailing journey. I learned a great deal about the true ancient way of water travel, and I look forward to the sailing trip with my friend after my mission.
After getting back to their home, right back out the door I went! Bicycling to downtown Columbia was old and brown. I had a spare tire wall with me and I put it on the bicycle before I left. It turned out to be unreliable and I traded it out after I lost two tubes to it. I hugged a railroad track for a mile and a half before finding the road to Knox Abbot St. Even in the night, bicycling across the Congaree River and over the lonely railroad track was beautiful and poetic. The moon was burning at full, as I knew it would be. The rocks that edged just above the water shone in the night. The smooth steel of the rails and imagination also were galvanized. I went under the bridge that went humped over the next set of rails, expecting to catch glimpses of a bum taking shelter. None were there. I was in a vastly empty part of town. I enjoyed the emptiness of it. I took some pictures of the cottonball clouds and the USC Campus. I prowled Finlay park like a five-year old. It was huge. It was a maze of water and stairs. I then enjoyed contra dancing. I didn't move much on Sunday. I spent a lot of time at church. Monday morning the brother would drive me fifteen miles south.

I began my journey back home in the same area where I ended my three-week trip by bicycle, intending to tie up loose ends and finish the gap between Orangeburg and Charleston, down U.S. 178. The fog clung just above the cars as we drove down. We arrived to where I would begin to bicycle. I thought of when I breathed in the red dusk in this exact same spot on my way back from Columbia in the spring when I had a car. A truck balled past me, appearing out of nowhere. Having a mist between you and everything you see makes it all a little bit more mysterious, pulls you in just a little bit stronger out of curiosity. It was fifteen miles into Orangeburg. As I made my way, the fog cleared pleasantly, ascending as did my mood, from grounded to high in the sky. I dictated as I rode, "Its the same scenes a thousand times over, whether it be U.S. 21 to Orangeburg in the fog or S.C. 133 out of Clemson." It brings my mind back to a time when I traveled with my mother and a few other people to see Niagra Falls. As I was intently watching the Horseshoe, one of the ladies told me in her gentle Honduran accent, "You can get tired of seeing what man has made, but you never get tired of seeing what God has created, even the same thing day after day." A gentle clack sounded under my bicycle seat, and I knew what it was, though I didn't want to accept it. No more bicycling. The axle had broken. This had happened on my way from the tops of the ridges of Balsam Range to upstate South Carolina, and while it bought one of my greatest stories and inner changes, I did not feel like walking fifty miles. I caught a ride home from Al, he was coming down from Florence to Charleston. I spent the next few days catching as much sleep as possible. This is the second time I finished my trip prematurely in Orangeburg. We brought the bike home, but its useless until fixed. Separated from my Frankie, I am like a bicycle without a back tire. I'm not going anywhere.

Everything in a Blink of an Eye

- photograph by Philip Rodney Davidson Jr

Ah poor mind of man, and lonely man alone on the beach, and God watching with intent smile I'd say . . . and I dreamed of home long ago in New England, my little kitkats trying to go a thousand miles following me on the road across America, and my mother with a pack on her back, and my father running after the ephemeral uncatchable train 

~ Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums

Different stories down ev'ry line

People workin' hard just to live and die

I saw it all once upon a time

Through the window of a train

~Blue Highway

One Year - Transformation

I'm happy to roam
I can find my way from the mountains to the ocean foam

I keep thinking of my descent out of the mountain. The rain came, soaked my sleeping bag and everything, and when I left the mountains, I seemed to take the cloud with me. After the first night of rain on Balsam Range, having gotten no sleep, the prophesying wind came hushing through the ridge where I had set camp. It not only brought cleaner air, but it blew the old out of me and breathed the new in. I know this is so. However, the elements were not done with my psyche yet. Next came the gray. It soaked everything as did the rain. At one point, I thought my skin was gray. I was in a fog for two days, all the while rain was ever-so-lightly yet ever-so-steadily drizzling. I was not at all dry that entire time. It soaked through every part of me. My bicycle was broken. Mile after mile passed under my prune feet, and achingly slow was my lot. I have never been so wet in my entire life, but I kept walking. Each hill which I was so sure was the last before the NC/SC border was surely not. How inspiring of Humility was it all!

I pictured myself in a Denver bar that night, with all the gang, and in their eyes I would be strange and ragged like the Prophet that has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I had was Wow

I came into Clemson wet, dank, and dirt-bummed. I think after the wind had flung some intangible thing from out of me, the water washed away something just as indiscernible. I know this because after I made it out of the mountain, having mostly walked on paper-thin soles, and arrived in Clemson, the looks I got were incredible. My hair was plastered onto my forehead. Thought I smelt damp and earthy. Ghost-white hands clenching the bicycle handles, my pack was laboring and huge on my back. Poorly wrapped around it was Dunbar's blue frayed tarp, secured with bungee cords spanning from side to side. nobody could understand what I was, but nobody could deny it. In their eyes I truly was strange and ragged. It was the virtue of being unfathomable. The last night I had spent in my wet sleeping bag may have been a cocoon. What was different about me did not wash away with the dirt and damp as I showered at a friend's dorm on campus. Until now, I never knew what it was. As I dropped out of the North Carolina mountain, down the Blue Ridge Escarpment, from NC-281 to SC-130, the trees changed. The air changed. The sun momentarily came out. Now before I entered South Carolina, I passed a water-glazed field. The fog didn't dull as it did everything else before. It lent a sullen softness to it. Oh, how marvelous is it that a small field such as this can emit so many fragrances and speak such a variety of emotions! I remember walking into Salem, the town where my traveling life commenced. I found this town at the end of my rope: an hour past dark, the thirteenth hour, speeding through cloud-laden SC-11 (never once had I looked to the right to try to spot what great secrets were concealed above the fog) not being able to find a place to camp for the night. "Oh, go down Burnt Tanyard Road" said a gas-station attendant just about to close the store. I took his directions into this rusty town with a brook running through it. It was beautiful, and I've kept coming back ever since, but now it was my passage into Clemson, where I sought shelter and a way to fix my bicycle (this is why the road was my burden and not my wings). I didn't enjoy it, I merely tramped through it wearily. Waiting for my friend to pick me up and take me into Clemson, I spent maybe an hour and a half in a town store talking with the only person inside (where I was, I do not know) while I was charging my phone. As I remember first opening my mouth, I am estranged to know that I still remembered how. Having gotten in the car, I noted the surreal speed with which we headed towards Clemson.

Four seasons ago (to this date), I awoke from my sleeping bag to the cool coastal air of Charleston, Carolina. The first thing I did was hop in that blue car and drove to the beach. I passed through the island of my childhood in the noon-day sun. I realize now what was different: It was my eyes. My affinity for light. The brightest of rooms was too dark for my taste now. I also realize, as I type this, the symbolism of that album of my choosing for my drive to Folly Beach that brilliant morning. Short Trip Home was what I listened to. I think more and more of how, in actuality, my journey was quite brief. As beautiful and ingrained in my mind as it was (and eternally will be), it was but a blink of an eye.

From the hills to the sea, I'll become a memory

Excerpts From A Work Of Fiction Never Written

. . . My parents have all achieved such great things in the eyes of the world. My father has been head of multiple business and organizations (which I greatly admire, do not misunderstand), graduating in the top of his class with a Doctorate in two very arduous degrees. My mother likewise has been a mover and shaker in her community, and has, amongst all this, raised a fabulous family, which I will forever be grateful for. The greatest success of both my mother and father was in the home, regardless of all the other said accomplishments, contrary to what others only naturally feel, since so many people benefited from their contribution to society. . .

. . . What have I to offer? I "merely" (as both friend and stranger alike disparagingly state) want to "roam around the country like a poor person." I feel a painful chasm between my measures of success and that of those around me. My father wants me to be like him, and I sadly cannot give him that. I can only give him me -- who I am. . .

. . .It matters not. I am accustomed to being true to myself, only this time the stakes are considerably higher. I now make my (rite of) passage into the American West. . .