local minimalism, or maybe just an inflection point thereof

things.

i’ve gotten rid of a lot of things in the past six months. big things, like a place to live, musical instruments, a bicycle, a job. little things, like shoes, shirts, phone numbers, pencils. and now that i’ve reached somewhat of a stopping point, i’m starting to reaccumulate those things. and it feels great. right now i “live” in a series of friends’ apartments in the mission district of san francisco, and i spend my days trying to find jobs, so i can have enough money to get another one of everything i’ve left behind in north carolina. since i have no money, every purchase carries the same electric rush that i felt when i saved up my allowance for whatever the hell it was worth spending on way back in 1995. for example: since i don’t have a key to the place i’m sleeping in, when i leave, i can’t get back in until my friend gets off work. if walk out mid-afternoon in a t-shirt, i’m stuck in it till midnight. last night i got cold and walked into a walgreens to get a tshirt, and even though they only had $2.99 shirts in my size in purple, i’m still excited about my purchase thirty-six hours later. since arriving here, i’ve also bought a pair of slightly-too-small-but-super-sharp shoes and a pocket-sized map of san francisco, all of which have made me positively giddy for inordinate periods of time.

some things, however, come even easier. getting off the BART on the way to Berkeley, i found a pair of shoes in almost my size. a pair of tims. a pair of brown suede tims. a pair of brown suede slip-on grad student tims. i was hoping they’d be at least comfortable, but they aren’t at all. why the hell do people wear those things, then?

my job search has been trying, at times. it turns out there’s like, a recession, or something? my one success thus far (among many “promising” leads, although the threshold of promising is pretty much the existance of a lead in the first place) is a cashier position at burger joint, whose fancy flash website underscores the glut of web designers in san francisco–one more thing to cross off the resume. basically, if i end up flipping burgers, it’s because i got a promotion.

beelines

and then i was in cannon beach, oregon; i had just turned left while katie and adam turned right. you can define ends and beginnings however you want, i suppose, but i couldn’t count on seeing either of them again at any near point, and that’s a marked difference from the past two months.

i was going to san francisco, with an aching in my heart, or flowers in my hair, or something. actually, those somethings consisted entirely of one change of clothes (unless you count the two changes of spandex i still had), a camera, and a lot of water bottles. i was going to hitchhike as a sort of consolation prize for selling my bike and not riding down the famed highway 101. the county had cheap local bus service, however, and i elected to take it as far south as i could.

sandy had a aggregate weakness of body and mind that made it difficult to tell her age; she carried a child’s pink backpack and a tattered duffel bag and she was suddenly one more person in a waiting room that i had previously practically owned. the other sudden occupiers were a child, who pointed to me and said “stranger! that man’s a stranger,” and its mother who replied “yes. yes he is.” thus began my conversation with sandy.

“you know, i think more children have gotten in trouble because they’re taught to not ask ‘strangers’ for help than have been abducted by people in vans,” i mentioned. “i used to get lost in the grocery store all the time.”

sandy immediately turned her bulk as towards me as the bench permitted. “i think they should start charging, you know, maybe five cents more for a pop. because a pop is a luxury. and they could use that money to pay for, you know, doctors or whatever. and beer. they should put taxes on beer too.”

in situations like this, i often use a fictional grandfather as a sort of oscar-wilde-esque mouthpiece to give an opinion, in this case one supporting small businesses (like oregon’s many microbreweries). politics are dangerous to talk about with strangers, especially ones that are going to be trapped on a small bus with you for the next few hours. fortunately, i soon realized that sandy threaded her conversations together with nouns rather than more esoteric concepts, preferring tangibility to any sort of logical progression.

“i keep all my nickels in a jar. it’s good to have money in case something bad happens. like if your credit card doesn’t work or i have to pay my rent i can pay it in nickels. if you save your money in fifties and hundreds people will think you’re rich but not if you pay them in nickels.”

i didn’t know what to say. that made one of us.

“i was doing laundry the other day and guess how old of a quarter i found.”

easy response. “1995.”

“no. guess again.”

“1963.”

“no, you’re still wrong. older”

i lowballed her. “1894.”

“no. it was a 1944. i think it’s valuable. mr peterson offered to give me a dollar for it but its more valuable than that. i was lucky because i was doing my laundry and i saw it and i almost put it in the machine but it was old so i saved it. i probably used a thousand quarters last year and this one was old.”

in richard adams’ watership down, the protagonist rabbits have words only for the numbers one through four (never mind that one of the main characters is named “fiver”) and a thousand, which functions as a catchall for larger quantities. i found the book in powell’s bookshop in portland, which is the largest bookstore in the world, apparently. i hadn’t read it in maybe 18 years, and when i picked it up it became apparent that i hadn’t actually read it then, either, so much as i had made my eyes rigorously touch every word.

sandy and i got on the bus. we passed some bikers. “they should make bikers pay taxes for the roads because they use them too,” she said. “just, you know, a dollar or so.”

i kept my mouth shut.

*     *     *

mike stopped his ’93 subaru hatchback as quickly as he could. he yanked a string tied to some interior linkage in the door that had long since divorced the handle, and i hopped in. the first thirty seconds in a stranger’s car are the most awkward: your bags are stacked in your lap and between your legs, so your knee is right where third gear is; you’re both falling over and echoing each other’s words; in this case, you’re trying to graciously decline of the offer of a bowl hit while concealing your worry that he had recently indulged.

mike was a nice guy with lots of good advice. “if you ever want to get rid of some pot plants, sprinkle ‘em with slug bait.” or, “if your granddad leaves you lots of cool shit when he dies, bury it quick because your in-laws are going to try to come steal it.”

noted. mike’s best narrative, however, involved why he will never go to tillamook again (hence our detour around it off the highway). about five years ago, he was in town with some buddies and rented a couple of movies from the local mom ‘n pop video store. unfortunately, his buddy’s mom got sick, and they all drove back to portland without thinking of the movies. about a week later, the shop called him up to ask about the movies. “you need to bring them back.”

“listen, guys, my buddy’s mom got sick, i don’t have a car, i’ll get down there when i can. it might be a few weeks, just charge me the late fees or whatever.”

“no, you don’t understand, we’re a small movie shop. you have to bring the movies back now.”

“look, i’ll buy new ones on amazon or whatever. i just can’t get down there.”

“no, you have to bring us back our movies now.”

mike told them where to put their movies. a year later, he’s hanging out with some friends and their dogs in a park. a cop shows up to tell them dogs aren’t allowed, and proceeds to run mike’s friends ID and give him a ticket–only, mike’s friend had an outstanding warrant for “some bullshit”, and into the cruiser he goes. the trooper decides to run everyone’s IDs, and it turns out mike, too has an outstanding warrant.

“for what?”

illegal possession of stolen property. mike spends two weeks in jail and eight hundred dollars in fees ‘n fines for two movies. don’t f#$k around with mom ‘n pop.

*     *     *

jake picks me up at the bus station at 3:00 in the morning with a bike he had slung over his shoulder, a bottle of jameson, and a can of sparks. i sleep on a windowsill and fall off at seven in the morning when my phone rings. i go back to sleep and wake up to screaming on the street: some girl and her phone having an argument. “don’t you dare laugh at me!” she cries. “how dare you!”

how dare i, indeed. and now i have to find a job, and an apartment, and a bike, and things.

et fin

we settled, to varying degrees, in portland. i sold my bike to a lady who’s going to use it to haul her kid around. adam started picking up job applications. katie went church shopping. we went to concerts and ate pizza and rode around the city, and felt finished. it took three days for us to gather ourselves for the final push to the coast, and by that time i had nothing to push on; i hitchhiked west while katie and adam pedaled drastically lightened bikes. we met in cannon beach, OR, dumped the ceremonial bottle of atlantic water in the pacific, and all of a sudden we had different agendas. i turned south to san francisco, adam is staying in portland, and katie is going back to work in indiana, which is in fact a different state from illinois. for one, it’s almost impossible to pronounce indiana in a french accent, nor is it possible to go to any city named chicago in indiana.

all that love all those mistakes/what else can a poor boy make

in the ranger station at the top of lolo pass, they give out free hot chocolate. we hung out there for a while, enjoying the latest in a string of “highest point for the rest of the trip” moments and ogling the 3-D relief map of the area. the descent from lolo pass brought us to the river corridor that would take us all the way to the pacific. in theory, one could build a road that was downhill all the way to the ocean; adam wanted to test this theory by pouring hot chocolate onto the relief map but decided against it in deference to the families of mudslide victims. on our way down, we passed a family on a triple bike pulling a trailer. at a rate of around thirty miles per day, it’s going to take them around four months to get to wherever they’re going. they financed the trip by selling their house and cars–sort of a financial cleansing, in an effort to turn back the clock fifteen years to when they first rode their bikes cross country sans fils. will i have a wife and kid and midlife crisis in fifteen years? hopefully i’ll have the sense not to try to climb up lolo pass on a triple. good lord.

idaho was a lot like kentucky in several ways. for starters, it suffered from position–being one state away from the finish (at least, according to the plan) made us want to get through it all the quicker. also, the population was described as mostly mormon fundamentalists and anarchist white supremacists. lastly, they were suffering from a heat wave, with temps hovering around 105° for most of the time we were there. although we encountered neither packs of polygamist offspring nor gun-toting maniacs, we did see more confederate flags and homemade camo paint jobs than we had since back when radio stations started with Ws. idaho itself was beautiful–crystal rivers winding down through sheer gorges for the vast majority of the state.

washington was hilly. and windy and smelly. we weren’t even supposed to be there. but when given the choice between continuing on to the dalles in your wagon and rafting down the columbia river, what did you do? you rafted down the damn river. this was a mistake, because the columbia river is the biggest windsurfing spot in the world, and if you stopped pedalling (wagonning?) you went backwards. and lost 343 pounds of food, and your oxen all died. of dysentery. also, if you’re like us, you got 18 flats in three hours, shredded a tire, ran out of patches, ate nothing but pop-tarts and tuna for a day, and your ass looks like van gough’s starry starry night if he had only used red paint.

oh hey, look! a waterfall! and, now we’re in portland.

sure enough, chocolate milk

after crossing the continental divide 36-odd times in wyoming, we were surprised to run into our old friend the missouri river in northwestern montana. we were on our way to helena, montana, in between rainstorms and wind gusts and truck slipstreams, and got midwestern flashbacks with wide rivers and whipping winds. helena was nice, but the real highlight was the string of inspirational messages painted every 500 feet or so on the bike lane over macdonald pass just outside the city. someone with a can of spray paint and aching in their heart for the days of serialized shaving advertisements had littered the shoulder with sayings like “come on france/give lance/a chance” and “how much higher/you will see/at the sign/getting nigher”. the top of the pass also marked our final crossing of the continental divide, and our entrance into the pacific northwest.

missoula, montana is home to the legendary adventure cycling association. since the official route has cyclists take a thirteen mile spur into town, effectively adding twenty-six unnecessary miles, a lot of folks are of the opinion that the ACA are just a lonely bunch trying to trick people into visiting them. since a) we were off route and were coming through missoula anyway and b) they give you free ice cream and soda for visiting, i didn’t mind the trip. they took our picture standing in front of the sign, and now my “loose” rig is immortalized in polaroid in the presumed world headquarters of adventure cycling. it truly is an international institution–waiting for the computer in the “cyclists’ lounge”, i was the only one who didn’t speak german. the lounge itself was decorated with maps and portraits of cyclists from the 70′s and 80′s, who look more or less exactly the same as cyclists from the 2000′s except that their ancient steel-tubed frames still have derailleurs on them.