21 August 1999 - Vancouver, WA

I think it’s pretty much official that I’m bicycling to Chicago, possibly beyond. I have the bike and the gear, and my parents are more or less behind me.

For better or worse, I am going alone. This does not bother me as much as it seems to bother other people. I know myself to the extent that I know I am good at being alone. Existence has always seemed a solitary journey to me. Even God, he is strange, alien, and immeasurably beautiful, rather than the source of my own nature. Like most of the existentialists, I have a hard time coming home. Like Johnny Cash sings in The Wanderer—Now Jesus don’t you wait up / Now Jesus I’ll be home soon / Yeah I went out for the papers / Told her I’d be back by noon—I have a ways to go before I will understand enough to marry, to possess, to let go of unfulfilment.

At the same time I know I am leaving something that is a part of me, things that are below my level of perception. I am listening to Mike Oldfield’s Songs of Distant Earth (Only Time Will Tell, for those who care)—what will it be like to have no music except what I sing (invariably silly, dissatisfying compositions) while I pedal? What will it be like to have none of my friends to talk to, for two months or more? Will my own imagination fill in when I have read and reread the two paperbacks I take with?

I should point out that I have no reasons for this trip. I want to do it, and desire, I suspect, has little to do with reason. That does not prevent me from supplying reasons. Some travelers say they want to find America. Some say they want to find themselves. Some wander for causes, some for religious satisfaction.

I wonder if imagination is strong enough to fill the space of an existence; if my own imagination and desire are sufficient to live, or if I need the recorded music, the movies, the news of the world (so much like a movie, unfortunately, for those of us who are not living it), and all the gadgets and toys of modern existence. I believe in low fidelity. In the unpolished works of our own hands and minds, in the things that are made for their own intrinsic value, in a world in which we love, hate, hope, envy, pity, and forgive with our own hearts, in which we do not accept a future that is provided by a government or a corporation. In which we do not accept a salvation that only answers our own appetites and does not give us God. I believe in lost causes, in the supremacy of reality, in the validity of all questions, in the incompleteness of all answers.

I believe in a world to come. I do not know if it will come of our efforts. If we are meant to live our own dreams and write our own futures and die for whatever we like, why is everyone content to watch the television? I wonder if there are only a few people ever capable of imagination. I wonder if it is merely a prize that only a few misfits have valued, perhaps an ability that has no place in this world. I wonder if my own imagination is strong enough, and for the sake of argument, that is why I am taking this trip.

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