Birchleaf, VA to Beaver Dam, KY: Biking Meditation and Expecting the Unexpected

Miles Per Day: Day 13=21.87; Day 14=REST; Day 15=56.99; Day 16=43.95; Day 17=76.47; Day 18=39.42; Day 19=67.12; Day 20=74.93

Total So Far: 920.98

Inspiration: Taking my headphones off and listening to the sounds of the road; Rescue Me; Chopin (various); John Coltraine (mostly A Love Supreme); The Wire; The Howard Stern Show; Led Zeppelin

Spirits: Exalted; inspired; strong; strategic; spiritual; joyful

Things Seen On the Road: Hundreds of caterpillars crossing the road; tons more roadkill; several Amish horse and buggy caravans; a goat staring at my bike; dozens more dogs wanting to tear me to shreds.

Favorite Quotes: (1) heading to Beaver Dam, KY, sign on R 62: “Beaver Dam: 42 miles;” similar sign just 5 miles later: “Beaver Dam: 51 miles”; (2) heading to Berea, KY, a sign pointing to “Knob Lick Baptist Church.”

There are things happening inside of me. Strange, lovely, unexpected things. I don't think I've developed an adequate way to articulate what this all means. Maybe I need some distance from the road and all it's allures before I can connect the dots completely. What I do know is that things are changing inside in a very fundamental way.

This is actually rather surprising to me. I never wanted to personify that awful stereotype of the earnest traveler in search of inner meaning. And yet, meaning is precisely what I'm finding on the road. I found meaning in the coal that literally protruded from the ground by the side of the road in Eastern Kentucky. I found meaning in the laundromat I used at a low-income housing project in Elkhorn City, KY. I even found meaning floating inside a bottle of beer an elderly farmer bought me in Western Virginia.

If there is one thing I've learned from just three weeks of riding it is that there is meaning everywhere.

BIKING MEDITATION
I've been meditating while riding. Seriously. While I am almost certain I am not the first one to have done so, the experience is definitely unique. I usually find a stretch of road with little to no traffic. I put my head down low and angle the bike along the white line demarcating the shoulder. I then focus my eyes on the moving road in front of me. Suddenly, everything recedes and it is just me, the road and the sound of my breath. I enter such a state of mindfulness that I automatically react to the sounds of traffic behind me without breaking my concentration. I'm convinced I conserve more energy and have a more enjoyable ride every time I do this. Has anyone done/felt something similar when they ride?

TRIP SO FAR
I don't think it's possible to capture the essence of this trip in a blog post. It's just not possible. Every day is different. There is no such thing as a routine day. The one constant is that anything can happen, at any time, at any place, for any reason. That is what I've come to love about this trip. I expect the unexpected on a daily basis.

Here is a pretty short snapshot of what's been going on:

*Music in Berea: After getting to Berea, KY, my warmshowers.org hosts, Rose and Eagle, invited me to a Jazz-Latin music concert at the local college. It's a strange feeling to find yourself enjoying some pretty cool music in an audience of people when you have just biked 70 miles earlier that afternoon.

*Shortcut Gone Wrong: A couple of days from Berea, I decided to take a shortcut my iphone GPS suggested. Big mistake. Half-way through, I ended up staring at a couple of trees that had cut off the road. The alternative wasn't much better. I had to go through a pretty steep side road full of gravel that had been built for coal trucks. I didn't have to deal with too many trucks but the road grade was so awful that I had to stop every 50 feet just to catch my breath.

*Meeting the Goat: I was trying desperately to catch my breath after taking a good 25 minutes to climb a particularly difficult hill. I looked to my right and saw the door to a modest one-level house open very slowly. And a goat came out. That's right, a goat. He just stared at me while I caught I breath for about two minutes. I'm pretty sure there wasn't a soul around for miles. Methinks there is a vibrant community of goats somewhere in the hills of Western Kentucky that has so far gone unnoticed.

*First Mechanical Disaster: I was heading out from Birchleaf, VA to Breaks, VA one Saturday morning and was in a real hurry. I had arranged to have some mail delivered to the Breaks post office and since it was a Saturday, I needed to be there between 9:30 am and 11:00 am. Leaving Breaks state park I entered a pretty sweet downhill. Within 5 minutes I saw a sign for Breaks and waited to see the town itself. About 2 minutes later and going about 30-35 mph I realized that I had overshot my destination somehow and had to stop. I was pretty pissed with myself because now I had to bike uphill for a mile and a half. I turned my bike around and just as I got on it, I heard a loud clang...I looked down and realized my chain had fallen off the bike. It was about 9:45 am at this point. Let me tell you, there is nothing like walking a heavy bike up a hill for almost 40 minutes, under time constraints, in the middle of a thunderstorm. But hey, I did eventually find the town, picked up my mail and fixed the chain.

WISH YOU WERE HERE
Coal trucks passing me on the road: