BRO QUEST 2009

It's been nine days since we finished our trip, and I have been back in Oklahoma for three of those days. I'm not going to lie, I'm not really comfortable with being back. One would think that I would be relieved to not have to ride a bike, get rained on, camp, eat absurd collections of food, get sunburns and bug bites, perpetuate and worsen nerve damage in my hands/arms, etc, but on the contrary I find riding around in a car and trying to sort out the details of a "regular" life frustrating, scary and above-all, boring.

Some of this might be due to the depression and disorientation that occurs with a major disruption of one's surroundings and daily routine. But on the other hand, this is still part of a pattern of behavior that has been sprouting up since I was in my early teens, a behavior that leads to intense, almost obsessive commitment to some goal or set of goals, which usually results in the completion of the goals, in addition to physical, mental and emotional exhaustion, strained friendships and relationships, and (perversely) an ever-greater desire to push further, harder, to pursue ever more strenuous and esoteric objectives and adventures.

While riding on a particularly long day, I was overcome with a desire to do another Ironman triathlon. Training and preparation for the last Ironman lasted months and led, in part, to one of the most dangerous and prolonged illnesses I've ever had (remember pneumonia-fest '08, guys?) but during the 15 hours that I spent wrecking my body in various athletic disciplines, what can compare? All stresses, cares and even most of myself disappeared from my body and my brain, leaving me and the race itself, with the rest of reality distant and black, like the opposite side of a valley during a thunderstorm. Upon reflection, most of my thoughts and actions are geared towards producing the same effects, towards cleaving my perceptions from their normal reality, I guess it really is a case of being "high on life", and I am hopelessly ensnared in doing more of the same.

It might sound, at first blush, that I am some sort of adrenaline junkie. But that isn't the case--adrenaline can never supplant the feeling of having pushed one's body, one's brain to the absolute brink, to stare all-or-nothing situations in the face and to soldier on.

As Pat mentioned in an earlier post, an elderly gentleman told us that we were living the "real life" on our trip, and that when we finished it was "back to the nightmare". While it sounds overly poetic, it is true--after living homeless for two months, whipping around blind corners at 40mph, one's face turned into a grinning deathmask from wind and concentration, hiking through forests where there are no trails and riding a bicycle until one literally cannot form a complete sentence, who the hell wants to worry about paying a mortgage while sitting in a cubicle and waiting for time to pass?

I realize that one simply cannot live footloose forever, and I realize as well that working 9 to 5 and worrying along with millions of others about money and pollution and heart attacks or whatever helps define such adventures and places them in the appropriate context.

In my early teens I was an avid climber, and I idolized most the rugged mountaineers, who would run risks I could not brave in exchange for a reward that I could not comprehend. I understand now the devotion of those mountaineers, who will risk life and limb to climb frozen peaks in the worst condition, steadily losing fingers and toes over the course of their adventures until finally the icy wind snatches them and drags them into some howling void. And there is some chance that I will run the same risks as mountaineers, but very likely, I am going to continue to push farther, to forge ever ahead into uncharted experiential waters, and I would like to apologize in advance, because I understand that adventurers are often more defined by their absence rather than their presence, be it temporary or permanent, inadequately filled with photographs and incredibly long, masturbatory treatises such as this one. So to my family, I apologize for the empty spot at the dinner table, and to my friends, the empty spot on the front porch or the patio of some watering hole. And to Pearl, I apologize for the times that I wasn't there this summer and should have been, and for the empty spaces as yet unoccupied by me in the future.

This has gotten long, overwrought, and likely gives the (possibly accurate) impression that I am a selfish libertine concerned only with some overly-intellectualized strenuous form of hedonism. But nonetheless, I'd like to invite you to join me on whatever I do next: any and all are welcome to accompany me wherever I happen to go next, and I would love an invitation to whatever you are embarking upon, be it big or small. You know where to find me.

--S