To Shake the Sleeping Self

by Jedidiah Jenkins

  At one point, I turned my head to see if Weston was still behind me, and he wasn’t. I assumed he’d popped a tire or something, so I turned around and backtracked to find him. I couldn’t see him. Then I saw his bike, turned over on the side in a hurry. But it didn’t look like a crash. Nothing but green bushes flanked the side of the road. Maybe he was peeing? As I pulled up he was shouting.

  “These are blackberries!”

  The exact same bushes had lined the road for three hours, but I hadn’t looked at them. I was staring at the trees and the sky and the road and the trucks passing us. Apparently, late August is blackberry season in Oregon, and the entire state turns into a ripe banquet. Weston ditched his bike and dove into the berries. The thorns tore at his bare skin, but a jackpot fever had come over him. I gingerly laid my bike down, and for half an hour we ate our fill. The bitter sweetness of the berries stung the insides of our cheeks. Our fingers turned purple. By the time we looked up, the sun was getting low. We laughed at our wilderness sweets and pulled ourselves back to our bikes and got back to riding.

  I had wanted to get fifty miles in the first day, but we managed only twenty-two. Every mile was a calculation. “Okay, so I made it ten miles in the last hour, so that means if I bike for three more hours that’s thirty more miles, that would be forty miles, which means tomorrow if I go sixty miles then I’ve gone my first hundred miles, and the whole trip is ten thousand miles, which means I’m one percent done. That’s not bad.” I do this with everything. If I’m at a party, and it’s getting late, I calculate exactly how many hours I can sleep if I get to bed in fifteen minutes, or in an hour. The calculation makes me feel like I’m in control.

  Finally, as dusk closed in, we crossed a bridge over a little river that wound through a farm. Weston stopped at the far side of the bridge, laid down his bike, and peered over to a clearing below.

  I stopped behind him, looked down at the spot, and agreed—this was the place. We pushed our bikes down through weeds and grass till the perfect shelter of the bridge was above us. There were no large trees under the bridge so the hammocks would have to come another day. We would just sleep on our cheap reflectors on the ground. Hopefully around a fire. Time was short; I had to find wood before it was completely dark. Along the river, driftwood had been deposited by flood and tide high on the banks and wedged into trees, messengers of what had been and would be again.

  I gathered wood while Weston started our campfire. He loved making the fire. Perfecting his little wooden teepee, talking to himself about how he would like to learn how to do it without matches, without a lighter. Just friction. I had a small Bluetooth speaker. I put on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks and cleared away shrubs for the campsite.

  Weston made lentils over the fire, stirred in some spices, and we ate our fill. After biking, even just for an afternoon, all food tasted good. I don’t know if we were physically tired, or just exhausted from the electric excitement that comes from a long-anticipated launch.

  We were full, lying by the tiny fire, falling asleep. Astral Weeks played quietly as the embers popped. Then, suddenly, a bright light panned across my eyelids. I sat up like lightning. In the field across the creek was a truck, driving and bouncing through the grass, coming for us. Weston sprung up at the light too.

  “Oh fuck!” he said.

  “They must’ve seen our fire. Dang it.”

  We crouched low and Weston moved like a ninja to pour his water bottle on the fire.

  The truck bounced closer, the thick headlight beams flashing in the trees, then across our faces, then in the trees again. We were frozen.

  “Where the heck will we sleep? Do you think they have guns?” I said.

  Weston was quiet. Watching. The truck got close enough for us to hear music playing inside. The windows were down. Just before it reached the edge of the creek, it made a sharp turn to the left, then kept turning, the headlights spraying around the field and tree line. It kept making the circle. I heard a loud laugh.

  It was kids, doing donuts in the field. They hadn’t even seen us.

  Our cat-stance tenseness subsided, and Weston stood up and went to find more wood. The temperature was dropping fast. I shivered in my sleeping bag.

  Day one was done. The sound of the water. I was under a bridge, tired and full, listening to Van Morrison by a creek. I was doing it. Only 9,978 more miles to go.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE MORNING, as Weston restarted the fire, I asked how he’d slept.

  “I didn’t,” he said.

  “You didn’t sleep at all?”

  “Maybe thirty minutes. My blanket isn’t enough. That was the coldest night I’ve ever had.”

  “You need a real sleeping bag.”

  “I know.”

  We biked that day through a fine mist to a Wal-Mart, where Weston bought a bulky, cheap sleeping bag. Along the way, the Oregon forest came up to the highway in an impenetrable wall, but we could see that the distant hills had been buzzed bald from logging. I thought about my parents that day. My mom back in Louisiana, agreeing to marry this man and walk across America with him. The first day was probably full of wonder. What an adventure my life is! The second day, perhaps less. Maybe more, What the hell have I done?

  We camped again that night on the side of a hill, just hidden from the road by an embankment. We made it close to fifty miles that day and felt very accomplished. Everything on the ground was soaked through. Rotted logs crumbled like cornbread. Fallen branches were slick with moss. The air was like floating rain, suspended and waiting to wet our faces. But Weston kept his singular focus on getting his fire going. He blackened his thumb with a lighter. He tore pages out of his journal. He blew on tiny bits of damp kindling. Meanwhile, I clumsily tied up my tarp and hammock between two trees. Hammock first, then a string above and my cheap blue tarp draped across it like a Civil War tent.

  As soon as Weston got the tiniest fire going, he rolled a joint. I crawled into my hammock to watch, then fell asleep.

  Biking south the next day, the highway took us up and over one steep hill after another. We biked up inclines slowly and bombed down long drops that would wind us back to the beach, then away, then back. Long, relentless uphills, and long, cold downhills in what felt like an eternity of dampness.

  The next night we stayed with a woman whose son knew a friend of Weston’s in San Diego. She put us up in her guest room, and we gladly showered. We played cards with her and her husband. We told war stories of our incredible (two-and-a-half-day) journey. They were impressed and worried and excited for us. She heated up the Jacuzzi. We soaked for hours and she brought us beer.

  In the morning she called her friend down the coast. “Tina, these two young boys are bicycling from Florence all the way to South America! They stayed with Bill and me last night and they are just delightful. Such sweet boys. Think they could stay with you tonight? Put ’em up anywhere! They can even camp in your yard.” She smiled, put her hand over the phone, and whispered, “She says of course. She says you guys are crazy.”

  We cycled fifty-five miles the next day, happy to beat our previous day’s record. The coast highway took us over steep hills and through small towns and evergreen trees and along cliffs. We reached Tina’s house and stayed in her guest room. If this was how the trip would go, people hosting and then calling up their friends down the road, it would be very easy.

  After Tina, we had our first sixty-mile day and reached the coast of California. In just those few days, the trip had begun to feel like our whole life. My theory of waking up my senses and slowing down time was proving true. Those days had stretched into ages, my mind so awake that every foot of every mile was noticed and relished.

  I kept thinking about my parents. My dad setting out on foot from New York in 1975, curious about what he would see, an America that he would discover for himself. He didn’t know
that he would meet a girl in Louisiana. That he would marry her. That she would walk with him to Oregon. That they would have three kids and I would be one of them. He had no idea. I bet all he knew was that the trip would change his life. Which it did. And all I knew was that my trip might change mine.

  Chapter 3

  THE COAST IS CLEAR

  (Northern California)

  13,726 miles to go

  In four days, we’d biked 160 miles. I was proud. How many people did I know who’d biked 160 miles? But I was also tired and uncomfortable. My knees hurt, which I didn’t tell Weston. They hurt bad. This was my fear. What if my body shuts down and I can’t even make it to Mexico? Why the holy hell didn’t I train? Already, I felt like I’d been living on this bike forever.

  But the pace of biking, even these few days in, was having the intended effect: time crawled. Days were eternal. When it would rain, it rained forever. When the sun came out, it would be hot forever. I was a kid again. It was incredible, too, to watch the land change in slow motion. Riding a bicycle gives the land a realistic scale. You notice every seam and crease. The distances between towns and farms and the height of hills, and the way a road will follow a river or instead cut straight over a hill—you experience it all viscerally. You feel it all fitting together.

  I appreciated the accurate map my phone gave me. It alleviated the age-old explorer’s fear of getting lost. But I knew, even as I cycled south along the familiar Pacific Coast, that it cost me something else. It cost me a certain amount of wonder. Not only is every map perfectly drawn, but you can zoom your way into any beach cove in the world and practically steal the margarita out of someone’s hand. How do we explore a planet without secrets?

  I long for the days of lands we didn’t know existed, before the uncharted places all disappeared. That’s why I love looking at old maps, the ones with misjudged proportions and large sections labeled “UNKNOWN.”

  A few years back, some scientists were scouring satellite imagery of Mozambique when they noticed a green spot halfway up a mountain that didn’t exist on any map. It was the lost forest of Mount Mabu, home to animal species completely unknown to science and forests that had never been logged. No roads. Just a thick jungle sitting halfway up a mile-high mountain, the whole thing surrounded by plains. But of course, places like that are the exception today.

  With the Internet connecting us all, the rest of the world feels closer, less alien. But I think that’s only true in our minds. The Internet does not bring Argentina one inch closer to me than before. That’s part of why I craved this trip. Knowledge alone is like an unearned memory, mostly forgotten. Just facts and two-dimensional images. I wanted to physically discover the world, the old-fashioned way. To cross over mountains to see what was on the other side. To hear languages I’d never heard. To take the photographs from National Geographic and put them out in the weather of human imagination.

  As we entered California, it looked exactly like Oregon—another reminder of the arbitrariness of most human boundaries. The California I was familiar with was urban sprawl, palm trees, strip malls, stucco, and cracked asphalt. But Northern California swaps the rules. At least along the coast, it’s all thick and wet with vegetation. Small towns dot the cold forests, feeling far from anywhere. The first town after the border is Smith River, which was falling apart. It was small and seemed to be choking on its modern irrelevance. The paint had chipped from the small houses. The general stores were closed. Whatever reason this town had to spring up in the wilderness, that reason had gone.

  Just south of this tiny town, Weston’s back tire popped. The sidewall blew out, meaning that just patching the tube wouldn’t be enough to get us back on the road.

  We were completely isolated. Our phones had no service. But luckily we were on the only highway along the coast, so any cars had to go this way. We’d have to hitchhike to the next town.

  For some reason, hitchhiking embarrassed me. Not the act of hitchhiking itself, but what you have to do to do it. I stood by the highway, leaning out, trying to make eye contact with drivers as they whizzed by, focusing on trucks and big SUVs because of our bicycles. I had fake reading eyeglasses and put them on, to look more approachable. I’d saved up and gotten Lasik surgery before my trip, simply for ease—I was afraid of losing or breaking my glasses somewhere deep in the Amazon and being helpless—but I knew that glasses made me look kinder, softer, and so I put clear lenses in my frames and brought them along, specifically for moments like these.

  As I stood there, glasses on and smiling big, car after car drove on by. Each passing car felt like a personal rejection. Weston, who had done a lot of hitching before, said the average wait for a ride is an hour. “And we have bikes, so it might be longer.”

  “Damn,” I said. “I feel so unwanted.”

  As rejections whizzed by one after another, we had plenty of time to talk.

  “People just don’t see hitchhikers anymore,” Weston offered. “Americans don’t have the instinct for it like our parents did.”

  “Why do you think that is? Isn’t it just dangerous? I thought, like, every hitchhiker gets raped and murdered,” I said.

  “No. Not at all. It’s probably safer now than it was in the fifties. The only difference is public perception and national news media,” he said, taking the tone he gets when he’s about to teach something.

  “How so?”

  “Back in the forties, fifties, sixties, everyone was hitchhiking everywhere. My dad hitched from Florida to New York and back a bunch of times. What changed was the news cycle. Back in the day, if someone was hurt or attacked in Maine, the people in Los Angeles never heard a word of it, so the sense of safety was only learned organically. National news made people in Boston fear what was happening in Phoenix. It’s the same with people locking their doors in their neighborhoods and not letting their kids play in the woods. It’s no more dangerous now, it’s just the fear has changed.”

  “Well, if we get abducted and put in a bunker underneath an old white guy’s house I’m gonna call bullshit on your theory.”

  I put on my sad baby-sloth face, accentuated by my fake reading glasses, and thumbed at a few more cars, feeling a renewed sense of righteousness after Weston’s lesson on hitchhiking. It felt so stupid that a perfectly good and environmentally beneficial practice like hitchhiking would disappear because of irrational fear. I smiled and made a “pleeeease” face as a large suburban passed. Trucks were better, but we had started trying for anything technically big enough to fit our bikes. The suburban blew past us. I think I might have muttered “asshole.” But after a few seconds, I turned around and saw that the suburban, quite a ways down the road, had stopped, turned into a driveway, and was coming back to us. Weston was off in the woods, peeing.

  “Whoa! We caught a big one!” I yelled. “Reelin’ it in now!”

  Weston ran back as the suburban pulled up just ahead of us at a widening in the road. A woman got out. Middle-aged, with brown hair matted close to her head from just showering.

  “You guys don’t look like you hitchhike much. That’s why I pulled over.”

  “No, ma’am, we don’t. We’re riding our bicycles to South America and we got a flat tire,” Weston said, putting on his theatrical charm.

  “Oh my god. Well, I can take you to town. There’s a Wal-Mart there and I think they got bike parts. You don’t look like the normal people I see on the streets. The gangbangers and crust punks. I’d never pick them up. People aren’t trustworthy these days. You never know who’s trying to get something from you.” She helped us lift the bikes into the back, our gear and bags all disheveled.

  “Where you boys from?”

  “I’m from Los Angeles and Weston’s from all over,” I said.

  “Well, I never do this. But you boys looked nice so I decided what the hell, I’ll pick ya up. Get in.”

  We climbed into the
backseat of her suburban. In the front seat was her daughter. When the girl turned to look at us, I saw the characteristics of Down’s syndrome.

  “This is Lindsay. She don’t talk much. She’s retarded.”

  “Hi, Lindsay,” I said, with the gentle tone that people get when speaking to someone they pity.

  “Oh, she won’t talk to you. She don’t talk to strangers. I taught her that. She’s real stupid. But I love her. But God, no one prepares you for raising a retarded kid. She is more than anyone can handle. I’d send her back if I could. But she’s mine now, I do what I can, isn’t that right, Lindsay?”

  Lindsay nodded and said nothing.

  “I swear I don’t pick up hitchhikers ever. But you guys looked like you needed some help, and you don’t look like tweakers, so I thought what the hell.” She was talking fast, to fill the awkwardness of having strangers in her car. She spoke like life owed her everything, but hadn’t yet paid her a dime.

  “You can’t trust people on the street around here. People don’t got jobs, so they’re all on meth, or some other drug. I’ve been on disability for ten years, and I get help from the government for Lindsay. I can’t get a job, there aren’t none to be had. Stop pickin’ at your nails!” She slapped Lindsay’s hands. “Goddammit, I told you to stop that.”

  “iPad,” Lindsay said.

  “I told you if you behaved I would let you look at the iPad. You can’t have it for an hour.”

  Lindsay started wailing. The cry was low and alien and emerged from a sustained breath. Like a musical grunt off key. I pushed my knee into Weston’s and we gave each other a knowing look. He was watching the mother with half-squinted eyes, probably thinking and placing her into categories.