To Shake the Sleeping Self

by Jedidiah Jenkins

  I also tried to draw maps of my trips. Old-timey ones that looked like a field guide Darwin would carry. I love old drawings and the sketches of cities and animals from ancient field guides. I like timeless things, old things. They’ve made it to the modern age and taken on a meaning larger than their intention. I wanted my journal to be like that. There is a weird paradox in trying to live a meaningful life, one you will talk about and tell about. There is the present experience of the living, but also the separate eye, watching from above, already seeing the living from the outside. Darwin and Steinbeck wrote alone by hand in leather-bound books that only later found an audience. Still, they wrote as if to an audience, with the presumption that someone, one day, would read their private work. Is this so different from what I was doing on Instagram? It feels cheap to make the comparison, but maybe it’s not.

  We stayed just one night, all Weston could seem to handle, and packed up to head out in the morning. Out in the driveway again, and ready to roll, Weston’s mom said, “Okay, boys, be safe. Weston, I love you. Jed, take care of him, okay?” Weston hugged her loosely and pulled away before her hug was finished, kissed her on the cheek, and we biked away.

  From Pismo, we biked away from the coast, into the golden hills of central California. The farms and dusty oak trees and gentleman farmer ranches sprawled on both sides of us. Born and raised in Tennessee, I have always wanted hills and trees. I trust land like that. Flat land and barren desert threaten my sense of understanding. I cannot get my bearings. I have no point of reference, and can’t wait to leave. But around hills, trees, streams, and valleys, I want to linger. This part of California does that to me. I want to know every streambed and hill. I want to climb into the rafters of every barn. But I think it must matter where you were raised. I have friends from the Mississippi Delta who can’t stand land like this. Because they can’t see the sky behind the hill, they don’t trust it. They need the sky and land to be wide open. And I have friends from Palm Springs who feel claustrophobic around too many trees. They want the land to be naked and honest, with no secrets.

  We cycled over the mountain pass on Highway 154 and down into Santa Barbara. Behind us, mountain ramparts, too steep and wild to be developed, protected it from the hot dry interior. And the smaller hills, dotted with perfect Spanish homes, seemed to crawl on all fours down to the ocean.

  Santa Barbara is one of those places that’s so beautiful it can feel like you’ve wandered into a European postcard. The Santa Ynez mountains are steep and green behind the coastal hills of town. They push the city right up on the Pacific Ocean, with mansions and Spanish cottages covering the hills. From the coast, you can see the Channel Islands, long and large, a jagged sleeping dragon in the water, some twenty miles off shore. The place is so picturesque, the Mediterranean climate so pleasant, that it gives me pause. This kind of perfection can breed something like arrogance in those who live there. I have met many lovely people from Santa Barbara, but I don’t think I would raise my children there. I’m not sure any of us are at our best living in paradise.

  From Santa Barbara to Los Angeles, the wild coast of California that feels too mean and holy to belong to anyone lost some of its agency. This was the manicured, bought, sold, developed, regulated coast of Southern California. Still beautiful—still wild in many ways—but it felt more like real estate than nature. The best beach houses, the best cliffs, the best coves—but owned by someone else. And the public beaches are covered in signs and controlled by rules.

  We spent a full week in Los Angeles. It was a welcome home and a sendoff at the same time, an “Oh my god, you’re actually doing it” week of celebrations. It felt good. The muscle that knows routine takes time to be reprogrammed, and being in the city with my friends, going to our old restaurants, sitting on the same old couches, watching the same shows and laughing, it felt like our trip had only been a weekend excursion and not a real, life-altering choice.

  All week, my mind flirted dangerously with this comfort. I was at my friend Willow’s house, on the couch, watching old episodes of Breaking Bad and feeling incredibly normal. I sat on the couch I’d sat on a thousand times, drank the same Trader Joe’s wine I’d always drunk, and made the same jokes with my friends.

  “So you’re actually doing it, you’ve already biked a thousand miles!” my friend Jenny said. “Feels so weird having you back on the couch. Like it’s not real.”

  “I know. I feel like I haven’t started yet, though. I have nine thousand more miles. It feels fake.”

  She laughed. “You aren’t on some epic adventure. You’re the same asshole who dances to Sia with me in the kitchen. You’re a scam.”

  “I won’t be a scam when I bike out of Los Angeles in two days.”

  “That’s not happening. You can’t leave us. Just google some photos of South America and post them to Instagram and make shit up. No one will ever know.”

  Weston and I stayed on the east side of LA, in a hilly neighborhood called Los Feliz. It is composed of old houses restored and preserved by artists and actors. It feels like the kind of place Joan Didion would have lived, smoking cigarettes, and watching musicians and actors experimenting in excess. The surrounding neighborhoods play host to the culture makers of Los Angeles, from Beachwood Canyon to Los Feliz, Atwater Village to Silverlake, Highland Park to Echo Park, to Lincoln Heights, to the Arts District downtown. The key to living happily in LA is localization. Newcomers try to have lunch in Venice and dinner in Studio City, and end up losing their minds. The traffic turns visiting these towns, only ten or fifteen miles apart, into day trips.

  People love to blame a place for their own failures. Los Angeles is the king of this. So many people move here to chase a dream, or to escape the cold, or to escape their family. The city is supposed to be the answer to their discontent, to whatever it was that rejected them at home, and in their mind, simply having the bravery to get out west deserves fanfare. But once here, they find that no one cares about them as much as they do. If vanity drove them to this city, they discover that vanity doesn’t like peers. It likes followers. In a city that feeds off the big-fish-small-pond kids, they discover a big pond swarming with over-the-top talent and perfect bone structure.

  The moment I got to USC, I was humbled by the caliber of human beings. Back in Nashville, I thought I was the next Spielberg, but in LA, I was just another wannabe. I discovered this when a friend of mine was directing a short film for class, and I offered to help. On set, there were fifteen people, lists and lists, rented equipment, lights, a boom, walkie-talkies. I stood on the tiny set and thought, “This looks terrible. All that pressure. My god.”

  I felt a spinning sense of loss when I realized I wouldn’t be a director, but it was the first time in my life where I learned the difference between dreams and goals. Each of us has a mash-up of talents and experiences and potential that plants something in us, and becomes a dream. A dream of being a creative, or an executive, or a father. A dream is the myriad ways we could be fulfilled in life using our talents to make beautiful things. But then there are goals. Goals are specific guesses at what we could do or become to fulfill our dream. Dreams are like a compass that points in a general direction, and goals are the islands in the ocean along the way. Goals are just guesses at where to make a home, and when they aren’t right, we try another. It isn’t a death, and it doesn’t negate the dream. I had mistaken the goal for the dream at USC, and in that moment, Los Angeles could have eaten me up. Instead, my confusion eventually led me to law school, which led to my charity work, which led me to this bike trip. You could say I was saved from misdirection by not being too handsome or too talented or too ambitious.

  After a dangerously comfortable week in LA, eating tacos and telling stories like we’d been on our bike tour for a year, we headed south on a hot sunny day. We pedaled along Santa Monica Boulevard, where cars choked the roads and we needed to be agile and all-seeing. But my bike wa
s so heavy, I couldn’t turn on a dime or make a quick decision. Weston, who packed virtually nothing and rode shirtless, moved as if weightless. I made a wide left turn onto La Cienega and a car screeched its tires to avoid me and honked. It was that sustained angry honk when the person holds it many seconds too long, to signal to you and the world how sinful you are—not just your action, but your whole being.

  Fortunately, Weston had mapped a way to bike along the cement canyons of the Los Angeles River and its tributaries. Once we made our way into a canal bike path, the world slowed down. I felt safe again, cruising through a part of Los Angeles I’d never seen. As if layered on top of my familiar streets, or maybe beneath, was a highway for cyclists, a parallel universe of ways to get from A to B. I felt like a stranger in my own city.

  In the beach cities of the South Bay, an area in the southern part of Los Angeles County, the cycle path emptied out onto the Pacific Coast Highway. From there we made the easy ride through Orange County, stayed with Weston’s cousin, and then on to the coastal military base of Camp Pendleton. We tried to bike through the base but the soldier wouldn’t let Weston in. “You have to wear a helmet on a military base if you’re riding a bicycle,” the soldier said.

  “Okay, but come on, we just have to get to San Diego, and we’re riding to South America, you can let us through,” Weston said.

  “No, you’ll have to turn around and ride down Interstate Five.”

  “You’re joking,” Weston protested with attitude.

  “You’ll have to turn around and ride down Interstate Five.”

  Weston fumed as we rode on the shoulder of the interstate. Apart from this military base, Southern California’s coast is one giant connected suburb. This makes it feel easier to bike across. The ride to San Diego took two days.

  Once in San Diego, Weston and I felt something new, ominous, and exciting: the gravitational pull of the Mexican border. The crossing point from known to unknown. From my language to their language. From trusting myself to trusting God. From me being right to my mom’s worst fears coming true.

  We were drinking craft beer around a fire in a friend’s backyard. A law school buddy named Michael Gonzales joined us. We called him Tank. He grew up in a Mexican community outside LA, and he’d made so many jokes about imagining my scrawny white ass in Mexico that I invited him over to teach me how to make it down there.

  “Tank, so, I know I was supposed to learn Spanish. But I got busy. Whatever, I suck,” I laughed. The anxiety of crossing the border into another world had wiped my brain’s hard drive, and I had lost what little Spanish I’d picked up from my single week of using Rosetta Stone. “At least I tried,” I said. “Weston doesn’t know shit.”

  “Hey!” objected Weston. “I am good with my hands. And that includes hand gestures and also smiling.”

  “Boys,” Tank said, taking on an uncharacteristic fatherly tone, “you’ll be fine. No one is nicer than Mexicans. When your food’s that good, you’re nicer.”

  “Okay, so, tell me some music to listen to so I can connect with people,” I said.

  “Like modern music?”

  “No, like what is so classic Mexico that anyone in any village will like me more for knowing it?”

  “Oh, I know. Vicente Fernández!” he said, springing up in his chair. “He is El Rey de la Música Ranchera! The king of ranchera music. He’s like a cowboy Sinatra. Just go around singing ‘Volver, Volver.’ You’ll make friends everywhere you go.”

  Tank taught me some other phrases in Spanish. Excuse me, sir, my bicycle is broken, do you know the closest bike shop? I am lost, which way is town? Do you have any water? I couldn’t count to twenty. I was frozen. Sure, I was excited to discover Mexico, and I led with that emotion. But beneath that, my animal brain was terrified. Ahead, 760 miles of desert. Hot sun. Cacti. Hardly any people, hardly any towns. Could I carry enough water? Would a rattlesnake get me too far from town?

  We drank more beers, and the fire crackled as I stared off in thought. I was scared. I felt the weight of the duty too much to enjoy everything that was ahead of me. What if I hated it? What if it didn’t give me the revelations I asked for? What if I failed? What if risking it all was a scam, a selfish worship of the grass being greener everywhere but here?

  But that’s not what I said to Tank.

  “I’m so excited! Ahh! I just want to be on the road sleeping with the coyotes,” I said, my eyes a bit glazed. We cheersed our beers and Weston took a long drag of his joint. Tank was speaking to me in Spanish. He said something about tarantulas. That would have to do for now.

  Chapter 5

  CROSSING INTO BAJA

  12,765 miles to go

  The final night in San Diego we slept on the floor of my friend’s house. We wanted to cross the border pretty early. I was tired and thought I’d fall right asleep. I didn’t. I just lay on the carpet, staring at the ceiling fan above me, my stomach in knots.

  We had been on the road for five weeks. I’d learned how to change a popped tire, and my tailbone had grown immune to the ache of the bike seat. I knew how to find a camping spot during the golden hour. I knew how to hide my bike from the road. I knew how to ride sixty miles a day, and how much water and food to replenish each day. I knew where to put the food in my pannier so I could reach back and pull it out as I cycled. But tomorrow we would cross the border and ride through Tijuana to Rosarito, Mexico.

  I woke up with the sun. I got up and rubbed my eyes and walked with heavy, sleepy legs into the kitchen, where Weston was making pour-over coffee. He turned to me, bright as Bo Peep. “Good morning, you pale Mexican! We gotta get to our home country!” I shook my head and laughed and yawned all at once.

  “You excited?” he asked.

  “I am. But a bit numb to it, too. Doesn’t feel real,” I said.

  “Yeah. I wish I’d learned a little Spanish right about now. I mean, I did take it in high school. But where did all those words go? Oh well. That’s the adventure. I’ll just mime my way to Patagonia.”

  Our friends woke up and we made eggs and dragged our feet. I kept unpacking and repacking. I kept worrying about water. “Oh shoot! Do I need to run by REI and get another water bag? I don’t know if I have enough,” I said.

  “Dude, you have a ten-gallon bladder. That is insane. People live in Baja, and they drink water. We’ll be fine,” Weston said. His tiny panniers seemed ludicrous. I wondered if I’d have to provide water for both of us. He was so confident we’d be okay. I appreciated that, and hated it.

  Finally, we put our bikes in the back of a friend’s truck, and he drove us to the border.

  I’ve read that the San Diego–Tijuana border runs down the middle of the largest wealth gap in the world. On the American side, the stucco tract homes with Spanish-tile roofs of San Diego, with green lawns and flowers and wide, clean roads. Then a barren stretch of swamp and brush about half a mile wide that touches the border. Then begin the fences. Our side has fences made of tall cement tubes layered together like a zipper and driven into the earth like an alien art installation. The tubes are separated by enough space for a fox or a cat to slip through, but not a person. On the Mexican side, they have a fence too—rusted and brown and flaking, nailed together like a hippie quilt.

  San Diego’s cliffs are made lush and green by water piped in from faraway mountains. In Tijuana, the same cliffs are parched and flaky.

  Passing from the United States into Mexico is very easy. If you go by car, they don’t even stop you. Weston and I walked our bikes across a cement bridge and down a winding zigzag ramp and found the passport check. There was virtually no line, maybe fifteen people in front of us. The signs led us into a small room with aging white walls, yellowing at the top. The fluorescent lights above were tired. We were causing quite the inconvenience, wheeling our fat bikes with us in the cramped hallway. But there was nowhere to lock them. And we were cauti
ous about Mexico already, words from my mother sneaking in. Mexico is dangerous. They behead tourists if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. Look at these headlines—it’s a war zone down there. Why don’t you bike across Canada?

  At the front of the line, the woman at the desk asked how long we were staying. “We’re taking our bikes from here to the southern border. So about sixty days, I think,” I said.

  She looked up. “Really?” she said, with consternation.

  “Yeah! Wanna come?” Weston said.

  She let herself smile and then laughed. “Absolutely not.” And stamped our passports.

  We walked our bikes over one more bridge and into Tijuana. Weston was barefoot, which he noted out loud as we entered Mexico. We got on our bikes and rode into immediate chaos. No shoulder, no sidewalk, roads and overpasses and busy cars everywhere. Everyone driving like they’re racing to the ER with their wife in labor. Some of the buildings looked new. Others, right beside the new buildings, were falling apart. There seemed to be no plan, no uniformity, no grid. Without a shoulder to the road, we tried to stay as far to the right in the lane as possible, but this only made things more dangerous. Rusted trucks tumbled past just inches away, and drivers got honking furious at us when, unable to find a pattern or direction, we had to cross lanes at the last minute. I counted three dead dogs, mangled from being run over dozens of times. It is one of the few times in my life I have feared death. The sound of screeching tires and honking horns followed us the entire two hours from the center of the city to the quieter beach road.

  The final exit out of town and toward the beach required a dash across four heavily trafficked lanes to an exit ramp that wrapped around to the quiet coastal road. Weston made it over fast and easy, and I tried to follow. But as I crossed, a truck speeding toward me slammed on its brakes. It skidded and fishtailed before coming to a complete stop only five feet away. The man never honked. Actually, he looked as terrified as I did.