To Shake the Sleeping Self

by Jedidiah Jenkins

  The drive to town took fifteen minutes. The woman argued with Lindsay while we sat quietly in the backseat. By the time she dropped us off in Crescent City, Lindsay was whimpering.

  “Sorry about that,” the woman said. “She is just terrible. I don’t know what God wants from me.” We thanked her for the kindness and got our bikes out of the back. Weston and I didn’t talk about it. We felt strange and sad.

  Crescent City had one main drag and a small harbor. Hills surrounded the town. The Pacific churned beneath beige cliffs.

  The only bike shop was closed, so Weston had to improvise. He bought duct tape and began masterfully reinforcing his injured tire. There were no tubes of the right size, so he bought one that was too big and folded it into his duct-taped mess.

  “You can fold a tube like that?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I’ve had to do this before. You just pinch and fold it over itself to make it fit, and then inflate. The pinch will hold. It isn’t ideal, but it’ll work for a while.” I was shaken by my complete ignorance about the workings of a bicycle. I was glad, watching Weston troubleshoot, knowing that he could solve any problem. A Wal-Mart employee told us that there was a large bike shop seventy miles south in Arcata, a college town. We’d have to make it there.

  I stood in the parking lot for a long time while Weston worked his clever magic.

  As I went to lean my bike on another pole, I noticed a bee sitting on my handlebar. Just perched there, perfectly still.

  This wasn’t the first time I’d seen a bee. The week before I left, the Time magazine cover story had been “A World Without Bees.” The article explained the mysterious “hive collapses” happening to bee colonies all over the United States. Something was killing them. This was bad news for humans, because most of our fruits and nuts are pollinated by bees, and without pollination, there are no fruits or nuts. The article said the bees were dying because of something humans are doing. Perhaps it’s pesticides. Perhaps it’s our cell phones, or radio waves, or Wi-Fi. No one really knows. When I read this, it hit me that human civilization has managed to get so complex that we cannot trace out the consequences of our actions. So long as the immediate result is what we desire, we are ready to try it—but the threat of long-range danger is harder to feel.

  The day after I read the Time article, my boss gave me a going-away present. It was a beautiful folding pocket knife, with a polished wood handle and a silver blade as clean as a mirror. And at the joint of the blade and the handle was a silver carved bee. I held it in my hand and looked at my boss in astonishment. He said he didn’t know anything about the article or that I had been talking about it.

  The next day, I was making the rounds to say goodbye to my friends before the bike trip. I met up with a designer friend of mine at a burrito shop. She was waiting for me when I arrived, sketching on a pad. As I walked up, I realized it was a bee. She was designing an album cover for a friend’s band, and they wanted a bee. A fucking bee.

  Now, out on the road, I was seeing bees everywhere. They would land on me and just ride along for miles. I swear.

  * * *

  —

  WE CAMPED that night, our fifth, in a thicket of blackberries halfway to Arcata and awoke at 6:30 a.m., at first light. Rain had dripped into our hammocks and we saw that we’d been sleeping in puddles. Shivering, we packed up our hammocks and bikes, still clumsy at the task but improving. Once our cargo was piled high, we pushed with much grunting back toward the road. My feet slipped in the wet leaves.

  We dried ourselves the best we could and were blessed by midday sunshine. We rode down to Arcata, a town known for its Victorian houses and famous for its celebration of weed. The many coffee shops and cafés had bright colorful murals of mushrooms and psychedelic fantasies. We tracked down a well-stocked bike shop and got Weston a proper tire and new tubes. We stayed with a friend of a friend in a crowded college house and we smoked weed with some well-flanneled college guys. Weston showed me how a gravity bong works in the kitchen sink, using half of a two-liter Pepsi bottle sawed in two. I took a long hit and felt nothing. But I didn’t push my luck.

  We woke the next day and committed to a full day of riding in the light. We cycled through decently sized towns, which now felt like bustling cities. We finished the day with hours of riding through dark forest and camped again. The next day, it seemed that there was a gas station just a mile down the road, tucked in the tiny dirt patch between the only highway and a wall of evergreens. I needed coffee. We found the Exxon market bustling with people—truckers, passersby, locals—getting their coffee and prepackaged gooey pastries or a decent breakfast wrap for $2.50. Apparently it was the only business for miles. I got my coffee and sat down in the haphazard seating area in the corner of the gas station.

  Next to me, an old man hovered over his cup of coffee and a Snickers bar. He wore a dirty thick plaid flannel shirt, with layers underneath, and a thick beanie. His pants were brown and dirty. His clothes looked three sizes too big. He wasn’t reading, or saying anything, or looking around. He was only sitting. He reminded me of the kid in high school, forever picked on, who had retreated into his mind, always a time zone away.

  I drank my coffee and read the news on my phone. I felt him sitting next to me. Ten minutes later, the old man stood up and picked up a bicycle helmet. I hadn’t noticed it sitting on the counter next to him. It was pink-trimmed and certainly meant for a preteen girl. He removed his beanie, smoothed out his thin white hair, and strapped on the helmet before walking outside. Through the large windows, I saw him walking up to a child’s mountain bike. The neon paint had chipped away, but the remains of a lightning bolt remained. Onto the rusted rack on the back, he had tied a ratty flannel blanket and two Gatorade bottles, each half-full of water. He adjusted his helmet and rode away.

  I wondered if he lived in the woods nearby. I wondered if this was his morning routine.

  We finished our coffees and shitty breakfast food and I surveyed the map on my phone. We were headed toward the alien world of the redwoods. The giant groves of Northern California. The guardians. As if the redwoods protected the perfect weather and fertile fields of central California from a northern invasion. As the Sierras defended her from the east. And the desert defended her from the south.

  Two hours into the giant trees, we saw the old man again, pumping up a hill on his tiny bicycle. He stopped as we approached, turned to us, the first time I had seen his face, and asked “Which is the best way to get to San Francisco?” I almost didn’t hear him, his voice was so small.

  Weston answered, “The 101 here will take you there, but you should take the Redwood Highway. It’s more scenic and has fewer cars. You’ll see the turnoff just ahead.”

  “Are there hills?”

  “I don’t know, but probably,” Weston said.

  “Okay.”

  He got back on his bike and continued grinding up the hill toward the turnoff for the Redwood Highway. Weston and I looked at each other. This old man was cycling alone to San Francisco, 250 miles away—and who knows where he’d started. He had no tent. Only a blanket, the clothes he was wearing, and the child’s helmet on his head.

  We soon caught up with him. And as we passed, we cheered. “You got this! Woo-hoo! San Francisco, here we come!” But he didn’t seem to notice. A few hours later, we stopped for a break. We were eating snacks and resting in a moment of sunshine when he came riding up and put a leg down.

  “Well, hello!” I said with delight.

  “I should have stayed on the main road,” he mumbled. “Bigger hills. I like bigger hills. This is too flat.”

  “You want the hills? Aren’t they too much?” Weston said.

  “No.” No eye contact. “I need to get to San Francisco.”

  He climbed back on his bike and left without any more conversation, his little legs pedaling much too quickly, his oversized pants flapping li
ke a joke. We sat there, eating granola bars and drinking our water, wondering what was in San Francisco for him. I wonder now if he ever made it. We never saw him again.

  * * *

  —

  RIDING THE Redwood Highway, I felt like a pauper sneaking into the castle. The trees began to tower above us, like a convention of gods, either speaking so far above that we couldn’t hear, or waiting for us to leave so they could begin again. We stopped a few times for hours at a time, hiding our bikes behind felled redwoods the size of shipping containers, and traipsing into the forest with our paperback books in search of a reading spot by a stream or in a sunbeam meadow. We found it. And we read.

  Along the way, the flora and landforms would change magically and suddenly in a fascinating smashup of microclimates. Dense forest became a golden hillside became a clot of oak trees in the cleavage of two hills became a rocky cliff down to the sea, all within a few miles of one another. Riding through each, we never tired of wonder, and we loved camping in the woods. The practice of hanging hammocks and unpacking and packing our bikes became quick and easy. The rain stopped. When we pulled away from the ocean, the heat became intense. We bathed in creeks and gas station bathrooms. We stayed with a woman we’d met hours before. We drank beer and slowly my tailbone stopped aching.

  As we got closer to the Bay Area, rustic villages and makeshift living transformed into the semi-rural escapes of the wealthy. Second homes, high gates, vineyards, glass castles standing on rocky cliffs commanding the ocean to be beautiful. The coastal roads above San Fransisco are some of the most beautiful I have ever seen. Every turn is a bluff, a farm, cows grazing with a view of the ocean.

  Our individual styles of riding had formed by now. Weston rode in front. Unable to cruise or simply look around, he attacked each mile as though it were a race. He focused on his leg muscles, his form, his speed. I was not like that. I looked around and admired, meandered and felt pangs of love. When we stopped, usually at the crest of long inclines, I asked, “Weston, how amazing was that barn?”

  “What barn?”

  “How did you miss it? It was huge and right on the road. So amazing, falling apart, leaning to its left. I can’t believe it’s still standing!”

  “I didn’t see it.”

  In the evening, we would buy bottles of beer and sit around the campfire and talk. Weston was always talking. “I am pushing myself more each day,” he’d say. “I am a student of my own body. If I ride upright, with no hands, and hold my core constricted, I can work my whole body as I pedal, and if you focus on the glutes, they engage and do the pushing.”

  As we approached the Golden Gate Bridge, so did the fog. It pushed on and around the bridge like milk pouring into coffee, swirling and taking over. When we rode on the giant red structure, we could not see the water below. Only gray. Cars would appear out of nowhere and disappear behind us. It was cold. We stopped. We were out-of-body present, observing ourselves on the bridge, as if from outside. As I stared at the bay below, a boat that looked like a spaceship came into view. It was a catamaran, adorned with the word Oracle across its red and white sail. It moved silently, and by watching its wake, I finally grasped how far down the water was.

  Riding into San Francisco was fun but ridiculously stressful. We hadn’t seen a metropolis yet, and I had never biked in one. Cars felt like enemies, and we were trespassers in their city, on their streets. And the famously steep hills? They are not an exaggeration. For the first time, I had to walk my bike. Weston just powered through.

  Winding through those streets, I couldn’t help but imagine the hills around the bay before the people showed up. How they were once full of shrubs and grass, and now hardly an inch of original nature is left. Almost the entire peninsula is blanketed by cement and bricks and wood and foreign trees and foreign grass. I could feel the heavy human yoke. I found myself wondering, “How can the earth hold up all this stuff?”

  We stayed with an old friend of mine for three days, and in no time, I slipped back into the comfortable urban life I had enjoyed before the trip started. The comforts of Southern California were all here. Coffee, craft beer, window-shopping as we strolled for blocks and blocks. But Weston and I couldn’t stay. We were heading into unknown worlds that, perhaps, had none of those things. I would be stripped of what made me feel safe to make room for something else.

  One morning Weston checked his e-mail and sat up straight. “Oooh! They want to meet us for coffee!”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “One of the top guys at Instagram!”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yeah. A buddy of mine from my New York days knows him, and reached out and said he should meet with us.”

  “Oh my gosh, it’s that easy?”

  “I mean, I guess when you’re doing something badass like riding bikes to South America, people will meet with you,” Weston said.

  “You sneaky man…setting up meetings. What does that mean? Do they want to sponsor us or something?”

  “I’m not sure, but we should meet them, no? They’re down to meet us at a spot called Trouble Coffee tomorrow.”

  The next morning we took an Uber to Trouble Coffee, though we debated riding our bikes for effect. But it was across town and too early and too cold.

  Josh and Matt were there, waiting for us. We didn’t know what they looked like, but they had looked us up and spotted us right when we arrived. They ordered us coffee and cinnamon toast and we sat outside in the misty cold San Francisco air.

  “Nice to meet you guys,” Josh said. He was tall, late twenties, and soft spoken. He was very calm—so calm that he seemed uninterested. He wore a black hoodie and jeans. He was a Silicon Valley heavy hitter, and looked exactly as I expected. Matt was a little more animated, but not by much.

  “Tell us about your trip,” Josh said, almost inaudibly. Weston and I told them about the excitement of starting out, about my parents walking across America, about camping under bridges and by the side of the road. At a certain point, I felt like this was a job interview, where they had all the power and maybe they were humoring us as a favor for a friend, and not actually interested. I felt stupid. They almost didn’t seem to be listening.

  I was telling a story from Northern California. “…So we finally reached the redwoods, and riding bikes through them is the most—”

  “How do you like that cinnamon toast? It’s famous in SF. Toast is a thing here,” Josh said.

  “Oh, yeah, it’s really good. I love it,” I said. I felt stupid. Why were we here selling ourselves? To get some huge company to feature us? These guys were clearly doing someone I didn’t know a favor. They bought us coffee and toast but I was feeling like a schmuck. I quit telling stories. We talked about the toast some more. About the neighborhood of Outer Sunset. About how the fog was nicknamed Karl. That Karl even had a Twitter account.

  “Well, that was embarrassing,” I said when we’d parted.

  “No, it was fine. They’re just tech guys. They don’t communicate like us.”

  “They hated us,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  WE SPENT ONE more night in San Francisco and then headed south—past Monterey and Carmel. I had driven Highway 1 many times, and the Central Coast of California is one of my favorite places in the world. The landscape south of San Francisco quickly transforms from tightly packed city to suburbs to farms and forest. Redwood trees huddle in the moist mountain creases, leaving groves of eucalyptus to climb the drier hillsides. And the little towns on the Central Coast always send my mind soaring, imagining other lives, ones where I would grow up in the eucalyptus forests, building forts.

  We camped and stayed with friends and acquaintances along the coast, but my real dream was to reach Big Sur, the little town about two hours by car south of San Francisco, famous for attracting writers and artists. Jack Kerouac. Henry Miller. Robinson J
effers. The draw comes from its remoteness and grandeur. A lot of the California coast has cliffs and coves, but Big Sur has giant mountains and no easy ingress or egress. It is remote because it is hard to get to. The cliffs are too steep, the water raging into the rocks. The summits are too high and the canyons too narrow for wide roads. It is a coastal ecosystem separated from the rest of California by the scale of its barriers. Biking through Big Sur means miles and miles high above the water, each foot of pavement delivering you to the best ocean view you’ve ever seen. Big Sur is also famous for a thick and heavy fog. Some people make the drive from Santa Cruz to Morro Bay and are lucky to see the red taillights of the car in front of them. But if you know Big Sur well, you know that you can almost always beat the fog. You need only go up. Gain some elevation on one of the many switchback roads branching off from Highway 1, and you will find yourself above the blanket, with the sun shining and rolling across the cotton lumps of clouds. The mountains push up from the fog, cooking in the sun and feeding their cold and damp roots at the ocean beneath.

  On the day we rode up the first inclines into Big Sur, we had hot sun. I felt chosen by God.

  I had always wanted to camp above McWay Falls, a waterfall in Big Sur that spills directly onto the beach. It is a thin stream when seen from the designated overlook point, but it’s a lot of water, if only one could get below it. There seems to be no way down the cliff to see it up close. “Area closed, no trespassing” signs lined the other side of the fences down the cliff. Droves of tourists park along Highway 1 and walk to the overlook to take pictures, and it is very difficult to get a spot to camp there. A few of my friends had managed to get a booking, and they said we could crash next to them. Perfect. Again, the serendipity of some of this was not lost on me. It was just like the bees. Was God sending me signs to make me feel safe and good? I don’t know. But it felt like it.