Day 35 - Spokane

One final ride:

For one last time I woke up to a deflated back tire. For one last time I pulled off the wheel, replaced the tube, presurized, and reinstalled the wheel.

For one last time I left the motel later than I hoped. For one last time I listened for cues telling me when to turn and where to go.

But it wont be the last time I push off with one foot and start pedalling. This time Spokane, next time… who knows?

And off I go:

Leaving Coeur d’Alene meant getting to the trail system, which took some doing because I was in the part of town where parks and trails are scarce, but fast food and mattress stores are plenty — you know those places.

Within a few miles I was back on the trail I had been using the day before, headed towards Spokane.

Functionally there really isn’t much to say about this ride. It was just a ride beside the river for about 35 miles. I saw the sorts of things and the sorts of people that you might see on a mixed use trail.

Two men on bikes struggled to stay in front of me and I was enjoying being the benchmark for their speed, knowing full well I could have easily dusted them if I cared to do so. This went on for miles, and eventually I shouted “Passing on your left” and layed down the power, changing my leisurely pace of 15mph to 22mph in a moment. I never saw them again.

I took note of the deep green of the river, and of the urban sprawl encroaching on the trail, but honestly this ride was more functional than enjoyable even though the surface was pleasant.

There were people walking dogs, pushing strollers, an old woman in a mobility cart with a dog in wagon behind made me smile. I watched a man fruitlessly fish in the river for twenty minutes while taking a rest. It was pleasant, but my mind was elsewhere.

That same negligent drive was propelling me forward. I was ignoring a squeak in my drive train. When I passed a composition I thought would be pretty I didn’t go back. I was both ready to be done, and yet sad to be so close.

Eventually entering the city proper had a sense of muted finality. I posted on Facebook that I had arrived, but I was still a few miles from the finish.

I texted and then spoke with Kevin, my friend who would be my final host and base for getting back home. He let me know his schedule and I would need to kill some time, suggesting I head to a market near his house in the interim.

I biked past what I can only describe as a “Butt plug for giants” and up the monumental South Hill of Spokane, towering some 600ft above the bottomland.

My GPS app felt like it was taking me up the most torturous inclines, and I was watching my battery swiftly degrade. This felt like one final thumb in the eye from the trail, albeit a sweaty thumb.

I eventually reached the market, got a coffee and a lemon tart and started blogging. It was perhaps two hours before a sandy blond man in blue reflective glasses sat across from me. Kevin had arrived.

We talked for perhaps thirty minutes about different things before he suggested we head back to his house. He wanted to throw my bike in the truck, I felt like it would be less of a hassle to just ride it over. So that’s what I did.

I met him a second time outside of his 1940s cape cod in a quaint neighborhood of South Spokane. He ushered me inside after we dealt with the bike and trailer and introduced me to his wife Stefani, and his son. His eldest daughter was working, and his youngest sequestered elsewhere with an iPad.

I quickly showered and rejoined them upstairs before we both went back down into the basement and just did some bro-hang movie watching.

Kevin is a guy I’ve known from internet conversations for well over a decade at this point. We have always had a copacetic nature and affinity for the way each other carries themselves. It was a natural transition into the physical world in the same way that meeting Bob and Robin, Jessie and Joel and Jeff all was. What is our flesh but a vehicle for the mind within anyway? In no way was it awkward to fall into conversation with what is effectively an old friend.

This was the endpoint. I was done.

What does it mean to be done?

There are a thousand ways to approach the idea of completion. But life is a fundamentally incomplete affair. Few things are truly final. I’ve reached Spokane, and my friend Kevin, but is that the final chapter of this story?

There was no fanfare. No finish line that I suddenly crossed and then I was done. There was the collision of the functional concerns of life, and the practical demands of the ending where I did. My tour is done, but my journey is incomplete.

Even when I dipped my wheel in the pacific ocean in 2011 I wasn’t at the finish line. It was a simple marker of accomplishment. But this trip has no such big finale, or at the very least it hasn’t yet occurred.

We do not exist in a reality of well defined binaries. There is no on/off switch for this thing.

This was and is a journey to put faces to people I have come to deeply love, to challenge myself to do something foolish and dangerous and wild that by any outside judge would likely fail, and almost did many times.

I can’t give you the ending you deserve, because I have neither fully processed, nor could I contextualize my feelings for you if I had. For me in this moment life is a mix of two very big forces: the functional tasks of getting home, and the desire to be with and honor the people at the end of the journey.

I need you to understand something about long tours — about throwing yourself into the chaos of the road for weeks or months at a time. There’s an emotional reservoir that fills as you go, quietly and steadily. Every mistake, every headwind, every failed zipper and unfixable breakdown trickles into it as it slowly fills. Every beautiful moment too — the silence of a sunrise across an empty prairie — that goes in there too.

But it doesn’t come out when the tour ends. That’s the part people don’t get.

You imagine there will be some clean catharsis — a finish line, a homecoming, a moment where you lay the whole thing down and let it go. But that moment doesn’t come. Not really. Instead, the emotions leak out sideways. Watching shows like The Long Way Round and breaking into tears at the most unexpected parts as I deeply connect to their struggle and vulnerability. Feeling a sudden wave of grief for a stranger on a trail documentary. Not because you envy them — but because you remember. Because you know what it is to suffer out there. To come apart and hold it together in the same breath.

It’s what I’ve called “good PTSD.” Not because it’s pleasant, but because it’s honest. A side effect of being cracked open and exposed for too long. Of existing at the edge of yourself. There’s a kind of duality in it — this feeling of being unbelievably tender, easily moved, always on the verge of tears — and yet also stoic, solid, a reservoir of strength that doesn’t break. Like a non-Newtonian fluid: press gently and it gives, slam your hand down and it becomes rock. That’s what the emotionality becomes — fluid until it isn’t. Pain that is somehow also a form of endurance.

There’s no sharp line between being on tour and being done. What people see as the end — the last day, the last photo, the last climb — that’s not closure. That’s just when the survival part ends. The part where the functional tasks of getting home begin. The real processing comes later, if at all.

I’ve realized that what I miss isn’t just the beauty or even the accomplishment — it’s the difficulty. The frustration. The long stretches of emptiness where it was just me, the wind, and whatever voice I hadn’t yet silenced in my own head. There’s a grief in losing that. A yearning, not for more adventure, but for that fragile, vulnerable state of being where everything is sharp and raw and real. The challenge was awful — but its absence is worse. That’s why I don’t call it wanderlust. It’s not a desire to escape. It’s the ache for something real. Something demanding. Something that asks everything of you.

Few people can understand that unless they’ve lived it. There’s a quiet fraternity among those who’ve broken out there — who’ve screamed at the wind and cried under bridges and kept pedaling anyway. I see it in their eyes when they talk about their rides. A look like they’ve seen something they can’t explain. And underneath it, a groaning — deep and wordless — for the loss of who they were in that moment. A grief not just for the journey, but for the person you were when life was stripped down to its bone.

I’m not done with this story. I’m just back in the part of the world that doesn’t know how to hear it.

Here, now, in Spokane, I warned my friend Kevin that at any moment I might break down in tears, overcome by emotion over what seems like a simple story or experience. Often times never seeing that emotional wave coming at me, but understanding that its tied to the latent emotions of the experience itself — that reservoir.

None of what I’ve written is said to diminish anything you may feel for me or about me. Be proud. Be joyous. Be excited. Those things are just as real and honest as my experience. And I’m certainly not setting myself apart from you in some way, I just need you to understand there is a deep pain and joy within me, and they are linked, and from the same source. I feel like rationally some of you may be able to connect with my words, but it’s that deep groaning, wordless connection you probably lack.

But. But…

You have your own deep reservoirs I cannot swim through. Your hurts and experiences have also given you a comradarie with others I simply am not a part of. Walking with a loved one as they go through a terminal illness, dealing with the struggles of divorce or abuse, living with the joys and difficulties of a child with special needs. I cannot understand your struggle but others do. And I think some of you understand that mixed melancholic joy and deep feeling I am referring to, and the comradarie with those who know.

There is a verse from the Bible that has always hit me — and for those of you who are not Christian, just roll with me here:

“For now we see in a mirror dimly. Then we will know, just as we are fully known.”

That. That is the end of the journey.

It’s encapsulated in a conversation with Frank when I say “Man that frontage road was awful”, and he simply nods. That.

The end is the beginning. A great snake devouring its own tail — Because an experience initiated by a desire to connect with others, and that was defined by lonliness and difficulty is fulfilled by connection to people and the sharing of joys and hardships.

Your tour is not my tour, but I know that we all experience our own struggles. Some self imposed, and others imposed upon us. These moments teach us, change us, tenderize us.

I am not better than you. I am not stronger than you. I am not more capable than you.

I am only different by degree, affinity, circumstance.

Moreso than anything else though I hope that my story becomes your story. That its the start of something for you — to embrace a difficulty you hesitated in the face of and master it — whatever that difficulty may be, because we are no different. Face it squarely, be afraid, and pedal anyway.

On the practical act of getting home:

I’m going to be real with you all. The functional work of getting home is more expensive than I had hoped. My plane ticket, across multiple layovers, is around $400, and shipping my bike and kit is likely to top $600.

If you’ve enjoyed reading a long so far — and there is certainly more to come — please consider helping defray some of these costs by donating to my PayPal page. I won’t bug ya, but it would be super cool.

Here’s the link to my PayPal donation page:

@TheMidlifeCryclist Donation page

Pedal on, baby.