To Shake the Sleeping Self

by Jedidiah Jenkins

  “I really did.”

  Chapter 13

  GOD ON THE TRAIL

  (Medellín to Salento)

  7,689 miles to go

  In the morning, we packed up, joking about scary dogs, and headed back to Medellín and the hostel. I kept thinking, I did mushrooms in Colombia. Who am I?

  The next day, we said our goodbyes, and biked into the green mountains beyond Medellín toward a town called La Dorada, 150 miles away, and beyond that, Bogotá. One night we camped in a dark thicket of vines and trees, so thick that it wasn’t until morning that we noticed we’d camped only meters away from a house. The next night we camped under the highway below a bridge. We wanted to be under the bridge itself, but no trees grew under the bridge, so we hung our hammocks on trees that lunged over the river. Unfortunately the plan was more picturesque than practical. It turned out to be very difficult to get into our hammocks and impossible to get out during the night to pee. It rained harder than any rain I’ve seen in my life that night. The humidity that enveloped us felt so thick that I thought I could bite the air. The rain broke my rain cover and filled my hammock with water. Sleep never came. The next night, tired and hot as hell, we slept in a forest on the side of a hill.

  After that, the highway dropped from the jungle into a long agricultural valley that cooked us at temperatures over 100. And not the dry heat of Baja. Crushing humidity, black clouds of smoke from trucks passing by, and beating sun. By 11 a.m., Weston had run out of water. He pulled over on the side of the road.

  “I’m light-headed.”

  “You want some of my water?” I said.

  “This is scary. I’m sweating too much. I’m dizzy,” he said, the seriousness in his voice unsettling. I was hot as well but not dizzy.

  “I have water,” I said. “We can stop at the next gas station, hopefully one comes up soon.”

  “I don’t know if I can bike in this heat. I may need to hitchhike or bus.”

  I stood there, cooking in the sun, and checked the map on my phone. “La Dorada is coming up in twenty miles. Let’s make it there, spend the night, and we can find a bus to Bogotá.”

  “I just don’t want to pass out. Dang, this is freaky. It sneaks up on you,” he said.

  A miserable hour later, we rolled into La Dorada, a midsize town built along a river and bustling with motorbike taxis. We found a janky little motel with air-conditioning and sat in our cold room for the rest of the afternoon. I found a bus that would take us to Bogotá in the morning. I got on Warm Showers, the app that connects cyclists with free places to stay, and found a guy who’d host us in Bogotá. We messaged and he said he’d meet us at the bus station and take us to his house. Weston was shaken by how dehydrated and hot he had become.

  The next day, we bused up more mountains and through thick forest to enter the giant metropolis of Bogotá. Like Medellín, Bogotá is another ocean of red brick, but instead of being wedged into a narrow valley, Bogotá stretches out across a high plain. A steep mountain rises next to the downtown area, with a gondola to the top. The air is thick with smog; cars and people are everywhere. Houses are jammed together like town homes covered in red brick and stucco and chipped paint. Power lines tangle above the streets like black knots of hair. Every intersection is a sea of mopeds and bicycles. The city sits at 8,600 feet, and the thin air and proximity to the equator make for sharp, piercing heat in the afternoons, and nights as cold as ice.

  At the bus station, we waited by the entrance for our Warm Showers host. A teenager walked his bicycle up to the door and introduced himself. “Hi, I’m Luis.” He was probably sixteen. Weston and I smiled at each other and hopped on our bikes and he led us through the city for an hour to his house—a brick sliver of a house behind heavy metal gates. He unlocked what must have been ten different locks to get us in. Inside the humble house we met his mother, who looked very surprised to see us. Clearly, Luis hadn’t told his mom that two large gringos would be invading her home. She seemed pretty uncomfortable the whole night, and as she cooked us dinner, she was ready at any moment for us to rob or attack her. Weston sat on his phone, flicking his thumb across the screen. He found a girl on Tinder that said she would host us for a night.

  “Your Tinder girl is going to accept two guys?” I asked.

  “Yeah, she seems amazing. She wants to show us around.”

  “I thought Tinder was for sex?” I said.

  “It’s also a way for great people to meet each other. This is going to be great. And maybe she’ll be into me,” he said with a wink.

  Mariana showed up the next morning with a small red car and a Bernese mountain dog named Copernico. She was tall, with long straight brown hair. She had a severe but pretty face, and spoke perfect English. She was talkative right off the bat, and addressed us like old friends. No niceties. “Get in, I have several places to show you before we do dinner.” Mariana seemed able to answer every question. Even if she didn’t know the exact answer, she could say something that felt like an answer. As we drove around, and her dog licked my face and slobbered everywhere, she answered my questions about the Colombian economy, the government, the history, the treatment of natives.

  She told us she was from a well-to-do family and had studied political science. “Sometimes my grandmother says I look native,” she said, “which is her trying to insult me. To look native is bad. Dark skin. Short. That is her generation, they are very racist.”

  “See all these nice cars?” she said at one point. “All these big trucks? Colombia is trying to be America. They want new and nice things, and they buy it on credit. It’s all on credit. No one can afford this stuff. It’s all going to crash.”

  We stayed at her apartment that night. Weston slept with her in her bed and I slept in a hammock hanging in the corner. While they made out, I fell asleep thinking about how smart she was and how glad I was to meet her.

  Her place was pretty small, so she suggested a hostel for us to move into the next morning. But she made it known that she would like to show us more of Bogotá while we were there.

  The hostel was a lovely old house with a big gate and a bloodhound living in the courtyard. The cheapest room had fifteen bunks, but Bogotá was expensive, so it was our only option. That or miraculously find more Tinder girls. I found out that a bunk room full of backpackers will punish you all night with snoring of incredible volume. No doubt the altitude and the smog weren’t helping, but some of these backpackers must have developed brain damage from the choke-snoring they were doing. I lay awake for two nights, waiting for one or two to die.

  We hung out with Mariana all week. She would tell us exactly when she would pick us up and where we were going. She was always in control. She took us to breweries, steak houses, coffee shops, museums, and even a cathedral in a salt mine. Weston thought she was only sticking around because of me.

  “She doesn’t even really talk to me,” he said.

  “She’s my Colombian girlfriend,” I said with pride.

  Weston clocked the beautiful girl working the front desk of our hostel. She was short, with a Salma Hayek vibe and long beautiful dark hair. Her accent was Colombian raspy perfection. He turned on the charm and they went to dinner. He reported that they had raucous sex at a cheesy sex hotel. “Apparently these hotels exist because people live with their families till they’re married, so they need places to bang.” He said the television was on and it was The Simpsons turned up really loud. He said she was equally loud. He said she might have “broken his dick.” He said she had changed him. “She did this ball-slapping thing. I am a changed man.”

  During a FaceTime with my mom, she tried out an idea. “Jed, what do you think about me coming down for Easter? I have a lot of airline points from my Costco credit card. What if your brother and Anna and I come down for Easter? I’ll rent a house. Where could we meet you?”

  The thought of seeing family aga
in was a welcome thing. But at her offer, I noticed that my homesickness had lessened. I wasn’t desperate to escape the road anymore. My dad was right, the road had become my life now. I am a nomad, I thought. I am comfortable in this homelessness. This at-homeness on the road.

  A plan occurred to me. I told my mom, “Well, if we time it right, we’ll be in Quito, Ecuador, by Easter. That’s in one month. Why don’t you check tickets and rent a little Airbnb down there and we can do Easter there.”

  “Ooh, Ecuador,” my mom said with a playful Spanish accent, “that sounds beautiful. I’ll do some research and let you know. This will be an adventure!”

  Twenty minutes later, I got an e-mail from her with her Airbnb receipt and flight itinerary. She had rented an apartment in Quito for a few nights around Easter Sunday and then a house on the beach. My brother and sister-in-law would come, too. I was excited, though stressed about making it to Quito in time.

  To be in Quito by Easter we would need to travel 1,100 kilometers in just a few weeks. Uh-oh. That would be a race.

  We said goodbyes to Mariana and Copernico and cycled out of the city. It took us a whole day just to get out of Bogotá.

  Camping at such elevations was cold and difficult, and we tried to stay in hostels and hotels when we could. The two-lane mountain roads were crowded with semitrucks and massive buses. Several people had told us we had to stop in Salento, a coffee-growing village in the mountains famous for its attractive buildings and surroundings. We didn’t really have time to stop, but I got mad at having a schedule and racing to Quito, so we rerouted our course for Salento. After several days of biking, we arrived at the beautiful little town, loved it immediately, and ended up staying there for four days. Green mountains surrounded the town, and a picturesque river wound through the valley below. It is how I would imagine Switzerland if it had been near the equator. The high elevation and the weather—a mix of chilly and warm—made the region perfect for coffee.

  Our hostel was tucked into an old Spanish building with high-ceilinged rooms. The owner was an American, a geologist with gray hair and turquoise beads around her neck. She had come down to study the volcano near Salento years ago, and fallen in love with the place. A messy breakup and perhaps a midlife crisis had brought her back. She said that the volcano nearby was due to blow at any time. She said the last time it blew, more than a thousand people died. She said this with the indignation of scientists in sci-fi movies, when they warn of the asteroid or alien invasion, and the world doesn’t take them seriously. Weston and I liked her right away.

  She recommended a hike in the Cocora Valley. “The scenery is stunning. Waterfalls and cliffs and a café at the end where you can get a beer.” The valley, part of Los Nevados National Natural Park, also features the national tree, the Quindío wax palm. She pointed one out down the road, and Weston and I recognized it. We’d seen a bunch of them on the roads. It looks like a typical palm tree, but taller, as if Dr. Seuss had given it a cartoonish stretch.

  In the morning we enjoyed our free coffee and pastry, then caught a shuttle bus to the trailhead, where the valley closed off into a box canyon and the river came cascading out of thick forest. Our trail crisscrossed the river with exotic-looking wooden rope bridges. I don’t know if this valley had a special spirit about it, or if Weston and I hadn’t had a real check-in in a while, but we got to talking about more than our usual surface observations.

  “Jed, I have a question,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you believe in Jesus? Like, for real?”

  I laughed at the bigness of the question. He smiled in the asking, knowing it was almost absurd to ask something like that outright.

  “Do I believe he existed? Yes,” I said.

  “Do you believe he is the son of God, the actual son of God, to wipe away the sins of humanity?”

  I was quiet for a beat, thinking harder now. “I don’t know.” I had never been asked that point-blank, and my once intact certainty had been eroding for several years. I tried to convey what I thought now. “Yes. In a way,” I said. “I mean, I believe in His teachings and His life and His message saving us from our sins.”

  “You do? Do you actually believe He rose from the dead? Like for real, did He miraculously rise from the dead?”

  Weston’s pointedness rattled me. I had spent so many years in church not actually being asked. He was like a reverse Inquisitor, demanding statements of unfaith.

  “Well, I think so,” I said.

  “You think so? Doesn’t it all come down to that? Like, all of Christianity rides on this miracle? If He died for your sins, and didn’t rise, then was He really God, and what does it all mean?”

  His questions weren’t antagonistic or charged. He was just looking down, hiking, stepping over rocks, thinking out loud and asking me questions. You know, the masculine way of having vulnerable conversations: a shared journey, no eye contact, both looking ahead, seemingly uninterested in the answers.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Do you believe in sin?”

  “Yeah, yes.”

  “Okay, what is sin?”

  “It’s doing things that separate you from God. Like choosing yourself over God. Thinking you know better than He does.”

  “And how can anything separate us from God? He made everything, right? What’s not His? Isn’t He everywhere?”

  “Yeah, but He gave us free will. Or some version of it.”

  “You really believe in free will?”

  “Yeah,” I said, without hesitation. “I know it’s a weird concept, but how else would we be in relationship with God? Without a choice, we’d be robots.”

  “So sin is what again?”

  “When we choose to do things our way, and not God’s way, I guess.”

  “But wouldn’t an all-knowing God forgive us those things? Like correct us? Show us a better way?”

  “I guess that’s what Jesus did, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but do you really believe He had to be tortured and murdered and sacrificed to make up for a game that His ‘father’ invented? One that He knew all the players would lose?”

  I couldn’t tell if Weston was on a quest to understand himself, or simply to challenge me. But he was thinking about something other than his body, his steps and his breathing. He had slowed his pace. I had, too, walking just a few steps behind. We kept on like that for a while—him peppering me with questions; me regurgitating what I’d heard and read over years of church and Bible studies, at once agreeing with what I was saying, wondering if I really believed it, and hearing how ridiculous it sounded when I said it out loud. Weston’s mind was moving fast, his words starting and stopping, unfinished thoughts leapfrogging their way to other thoughts.

  All the while, though we barely noticed, we were climbing higher, along and over the cascading creek.

  “So you’re telling me you really think this was the best idea God had for us…to build the universe in such a way that we show up with a deadly handicap that will doom us, hundred percent, unless we learn a story about His son, and say His name, and understand the story of how it happened? That was God’s best idea? That was the thing I could finally not overcome, and why I walked away. It didn’t make sense.” Weston was beside me now, looking at me when he talked. We had crossed the creek several times, and almost ignored the beauty of it all, our heads swimming in the meaning of life.

  “God is so much bigger than us, it doesn’t always have to make sense,” I said, falling back on the time-worn justification.

  “Jed, you’re a smart guy,” Weston said. “But I don’t think you’re supposed to be a Christian.” I recoiled with a surprised laugh.

  “I think you’re really just a kind guy, trapped in a tradition,” he continued. “You’re gay and you’re out and free but you were raised a certain way and you won’t let go of it. You
don’t want to spin through space without a tether. I remember when I was a Jesus freak, I was preaching from park benches and screaming the Gospel. Salvation of souls was an emergency. I don’t see that in your eyes. I see a guy who likes the idea of God, of love, of defending a faith system that is the norm and the majority, but pretends it’s a victim and the underdog. If you really thought about it all, you would realize that the Jesus story is too small for God, if God exists.”

  I remember reading somewhere that when people argue, their brains seize up and lose the ability to take in new information. But this wasn’t exactly an argument. Yes, I was recalling defenses and thoughts, but I was also listening.

  “Well,” I said, “I don’t pretend to have all the answers. I just know that God, if you zoom out a bit, doesn’t have to be so small. I agree with you on a lot of this, Weston. I’m just not ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It feels untrue to do that. It feels like you’re trying to convince me not to be a Christian. I don’t need you to do that.”

  Here we were, walking through one of the most beautiful places on the planet, with giant mountains surrounding us—and the two of us were looking at the ground, our minds somewhere else, lost in our histories and cosmologies.

  “You say the universe is patient with us,” I said after a brief silence. “That the universe put magic in mushrooms and whatever. But aren’t you just talking about God, with another name? Aren’t you just personifying it the same way Christians do?”

  “Well, sure, yeah, I guess that’s right. But I don’t think that the universe loves me, and calling it the universe leaves it open to mystery and implies how big and unknowable it is.”

  “You think we’re the same as animals?” I said, trying to cover all angles.

  “Yes. Why wouldn’t we be?”

  “Because we have consciousness, we have a soul. God made us in His image.”