To Shake the Sleeping Self

by Jedidiah Jenkins

  We drank wine every day. My dad would have two glasses and slur his speech. It was cute. And listening to them was fun.

  “You’re such a lightweight, Peter,” she told him. “I guess it’s better that way. I can’t be with a drunk. Absolutely not.”

  “Kelley makes me a better person,” my dad interjected, out of context.

  “Oh, Peter. So sentimental. But really, I do. I am amazing,” she said and let out a cackle.

  “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” my dad said. Which stung until Kelley chimed in, “Besides your kids, of course!”

  “Oh yes, of course,” he said, backtracking. “They are truly the best thing in my life. That goes without saying.” She rolled her eyes at me.

  I enjoyed her. She was age-appropriate for my dad, but she had the wit of a twenty-something. He watched her. She seemed to love him without needing him. She wasn’t performing for me, either, which other women had done in the past to win the kids. It wasn’t theatrics. She was just a cool woman.

  We decided to drive the rental car over the Andes to Santiago, Chile. “I’ve never been higher than a molehill,” said Kelly.

  She was so charmed by it all. We drove up over the Andes, at the foot of the tallest mountain in all the Americas, Mount Aconcagua. It’s also the tallest mountain outside of Asia, at 22,838 feet. We drove right by it. Kelley was gasping. It was completely white with snow, and unlike Everest or other famous high mountains, Aconcagua stood alone. It was more like a volcano than one peak in a chain of mountains.

  “I have never seen mountains like this in all my life. And there are almost no trees. I’m telling you, this is weirder than anything I’ve ever seen. Makes me thirsty.”

  At one point we drove through a tunnel that was many miles long—definitely the longest tunnel I’ve ever been in. Kelley, again, was gasping. When we finally popped out the other side, in Chile, we were quickly surrounded by more vineyards, but this time sprawling, green estates with lush trees everywhere, nothing like Mendoza’s brown-and-gold desert.

  We had three nights in Chile. We’d go to dinner, then return to our little hotel, where Kelley and my dad would say good night and retire to their room, excited to watch Downton Abbey. It was unbearably cute.

  As the ten days went on, I watched their kind and encouraging relationship. My dad, in his early sixties. Kelley, fifty. They had been dating over a year, and it was so clear that they fit together. Easily. Without fireworks. Just a key in the door and it opened without even a creak.

  Watching them, I found myself rethinking the messiness of my family story, what was right and what was wrong. It still felt wrong for my dad to leave my mom. But because he did, my beloved little sister was born with my stepmom.

  Because he did, he eventually met Kelley. I watched him and Kelley and thought, “They are soul mates. It took him a long time, but he found his soul mate.”

  If our shittiest actions can lead to beauty, what does it mean to do right and wrong? Is it about avoiding hurting others? What about the scripture, “All things work for the good of those who love God.” That sounds about right. But some things never get good. They’re just terrible and then you die.

  Spending time with my dad, who I had always loved and always made me feel loved, got me thinking about the causes of homosexuality, if there are such things. I remember my college pastor taking me to lunch one day and just flat-out asking me.

  “Why do you think you’re gay? Was your mother overly involved in your early years?” he asked.

  “No. I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Did you have an absent father? That’s a big cause in homosexuality with boys,” he said.

  “No, he was a great dad. I mean, he did travel a lot. And they did get a divorce when I was four. I saw him every other weekend and on Tuesdays.”

  “Well, there you have it.”

  That conversation planted a suspicion that my father’s absence had made me gay. At least it gave me some framework, and I was desperate to understand why I was different.

  “Another reason is sexual abuse,” he said. He had this thing all figured out.

  “I was never molested,” I said.

  “Well, maybe, but also a lot of people block that stuff out. You may have been, and just can’t remember it.”

  What a cancer in the mind. To be told you could have been molested, but that it’s buried in your subconscious. How do you fight that kind of thought? My warm and nurturing childhood was just a delusion, a defense from trauma?

  Back in Mendoza, we spent one more night together at the same hotel. By then, my understanding about what made me different was no clearer, but my confidence in my dad’s love was strong. Life was complicated. My dad had always loved me. He always made me feel safe and okay in a world where boys need to be good at sports and date pretty girls.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS ALMOST October when Dad and Kelley flew out. Springtime down here in the upside-down world. Two friends, Parker and Ronnie, were coming down from the U.S. to ride with me for a few weeks. Parker was from Santa Barbara and Ronnie from Saint Louis. I didn’t know either of them very well, but south of Mendoza was a long stretch of desert and I didn’t want to do that alone. Besides, they’d both reached out, asking if they could join me. I told them to meet me in Mendoza.

  I was entering the home stretch. It would be three weeks biking with them. Then three weeks alone again. Then it would be December and my mom would fly down to meet me in Punta Arenas, the southernmost town I’d see on this adventure. The ramp up to the end felt oddly abrupt, the way Halloween begins that sudden slide into the holidays and the new year.

  Parker and Ronnie showed up to the little hotel with mouths dropped open. “What the hell have we done?” Parker said, laughing and pulling his bike out of the trunk of the taxi. Right away, their eagerness gave me energy. Parker was a surfer kid. Ronnie was a wide-eyed kid from the Midwest who had never left the country. They were both in their early twenties. We soon packed up our bikes, made a quick stop at the grocery store, and we were out.

  South of Mendoza we headed into the desert. Patagonia was straight ahead.

  Chapter 19

  ENTERING THE HOLY LAND

  (Mendoza to Bariloche)

  2,225 miles to go

  Even telling this part of the story is tiring. The light in my eyes, or should I say in my writing, has dulled a bit. I’d been living on a bicycle at this point for more than a year. I don’t mean to diminish anything that has come before, but I want to make sure you’re with me: I was tired. I had been torn up by Weston’s sharp ideas, and softened and changed by whatever happened on Machu Picchu. I had asked this trip to teach me things, turn me upside down, and it was doing that.

  But, man, I guess I thought it would’ve been a bit tidier.

  For all the beauty of Argentina, which was quickly becoming my favorite country of all of them, I was ready to see Patagonia and get this whole thing over with.

  Argentina’s gateway to Patagonia is nothing like the famous and apparently photogenic south. Mostly, it is bleak expanses of sandy, rocky earth. No naturally occurring trees. Very few people. The occasional farm, enclosed by tall poplar trees for a windbreak. As you head down the loneliest road in the world, you see the snowcapped Andes far away on your right, like a wall built to keep the Chileans away, and on your left, flat desert, empty as Mars, extending beyond the horizon to the Atlantic. I knew I would enter Patagonia soon after leaving Mendoza. We biked for three days and then we saw it: not some massive gate or canyon or mountain pass but a tall cement monolith with blue panels on either side reading, “Welcome to Patagonia.” Below the words, a photo of a dinosaur skeleton. Parker and Ronnie were biking behind me. I stopped to take a picture.

  “Whoa! That’s it? This is Patagonia? Just a sign on the side of the road?�
�� Parker asked.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “Well, dude, you could stop now. You did it. Oregon to Patagonia. Technically you’re done,” he said.

  “Should we turn back and go get a beer?” I joked. But I knew that Patagonia is massive, larger than Texas and California and Oregon and Washington combined. I had so much farther to go.

  Still, the desert south of Mendoza looked familiar to me, like a geographical cousin to the American West. Expanses of cacti, and between the cacti, dirt untouched by walking life. The dirt is soft, like brown flour. But the wind is hard, like the blast of a jet engine. There were times on my bike when the wind held me almost at a stop, no matter how hard I pedaled. When the wind was at my back, I could swear I was on a motorcycle. It pushed me up hills, without any help from my legs at all. It felt like a metaphor for life, of fighting against or riding with the current of God. Life can feel effortless, like you’re carried along by an unseen force. Or it can feel like you’re in a losing fistfight with a brick wall. It all depends on which way you’re headed.

  After a couple great days cold camping and battling the wind, we pulled into the little town of Tunuyán and booked a room in the only hotel. Splitting it among the three of us, it was six bucks each. They had Wi-Fi. I checked the news and everything was about Ebola in West Africa and the protests in Ferguson, Missouri.

  The disease was spreading out of control. In Liberia, people were dying, literally by the truckload. Flights were being screened and canceled. Someone in Texas had contracted Ebola after coming back from Africa. Our interconnected world. Humans carrying diseases, coughing and perhaps carrying death with them, unaware, to every corner of the globe. Except my corner. I felt distant enough from the world I was reading about that it could all implode, and I’d be untouched.

  Parker and Ronnie said their moms had e-mailed them about Ebola and told them to be very careful. We laughed at how remote we were and how silly their fears were. But we also wondered if Ebola would spread over the whole world and kill us all. After that sobering thought, we got some beers next door and decided to double down on our fear by watching the movie Contagion, with Kate Winslet and Matt Damon. We watched the world fall apart from a virus no one could stop. I sat on the edge of my hotel bed, wondering if the world would be in ruin by the time I finished the trip.

  I couldn’t stop reading about Ferguson. Why were there such intense protests in the streets? First Trayvon Martin, and now Michael Brown. I found myself reading a lot of black writers on Twitter and Tumblr. Not mainstream journalists, but activists. I read about white privilege. Maybe I had heard that term before, but it had never hit me. It made me uncomfortable. I am in trouble for existing? I don’t think I’m racist. And yet, just by being white, am I oppressing others? That doesn’t seem fair.

  Ferguson made me uncomfortable with my country and my understanding of it. Uncomfortable with a part of myself I took as nothing: my whiteness. I took it as a floor, unseen and stood on. Now I was becoming aware of how the floor was built, and of the systems in place that kept it there. Seeing police brutality and protests in Missouri reported in the Argentinian press embarrassed me. The way that indigenous South Americans were treated, from Colombia to Argentina, felt different to me. They were second-class citizens, certainly, but at least the ruling elites didn’t pretend that everyone had equal footing. In the United States, white kids grow up on a mythology that everyone has the same chances, and hard work and responsibility will lead to success. The American dream was a meritocracy. But all that looked different from down here.

  * * *

  —

  WE CAMPED WHERE we needed to, and stayed in little hotels where we could. The far-flung little towns, no matter how depressing or humble, arrived like welcome resting spots. These towns that crouched in the fields were wind-beaten and crumbling—and very far apart. Every ten or twenty miles, a tree would stand sentry by the road, and we’d stop in its shade to drink water, eat an orange, complain to one another about the goddamn wind. The goal was again sixty miles a day. This was doable on flat roads when there wasn’t that god-forsaken headwind, but it was hard in the hills and impossible in the mountains. We bought boxed wine and drank like idiots around fires we made from dried brush. The stars were as bright as anywhere in the world.

  Seven days of windy biking later and desert camping under bridges and in dried-out creekbeds, we slept in a field in the town of Malargüe. Poplar trees, which had become ubiquitous since Mendoza, walled in the town. They looked like feathers stuck in the ground. Our little campground—actually just a field not far from the river that ran through town—provided a public restroom but no real campsites. We enjoyed craft beer and pizza at a restaurant that seemed much too metropolitan for this little spot on Mars. I still don’t know why it was there, but the pizza was damn good. We slept in our field that night and woke up to intense squawking. Hundreds of parrots had decided to ring in the day from the trees directly above us. We got up early thanks to the birds, found coffee at a gas station, and headed out.

  The map showed that the next town was too far to reach in a day’s ride. We loaded up on water, cookies, fruit, and salami and crackers. Plus two boxes of the cheap wine.

  Outside Malargüe, we reentered the treeless plains, and soon began a descent that lasted thirty miles. This was the longest continuous downhill of my entire trip—and it was a delight. The slope was just right to allow for the perfect speed, one that lets you ride comfortably while sitting straight up, no hands, threading your fingers through the air like claws in water. In moments like these, I couldn’t help but sing.

  Unfortunately, after fifteen or twenty miles when the hill ended, so did the pavement. As far as we could see down the valley, we saw only dirt. Apparently, the government was repaving the only road through the area.

  “Well, fuck,” Parker said.

  Of course, we had no way of knowing how long the roadwork went on. A mile? Twenty miles?

  As soon as we started off, we discovered that the surface wasn’t so much gravel as freshly turned-over soil, soft as sand. Ronnie had a road bike with thin tires. He’d make it ten feet then grind to a halt as his tires sliced deep into the soil. We soldiered on for an hour, miserably, making perhaps two or three miles, until the sun started pulling the Andes up over itself, and the sky turned purple. This meant we had about an hour to find a spot to camp and set up our tent.

  My camping-spot expertise knew what to look for: thickets of trees. Bridges. Abandoned barns or foundations. Places to hide. Over these thousands of miles, I had developed an instinct for surveying the scene.

  But today, no bridge, structure, or tree came in sight. The entire valley was covered in leafless, shoulder-high bushes with thorns as long as my pinky. Even if we avoided the bushes, any thorn on the ground would puncture a tire, a lesson I’d learned in the deserts of Mexico and Bolivia.

  With the light fading, we labored around one last bend in the road, hoping for something, only to be met with a vista of inhospitable terrain all the way to the southern horizon. Toward the mountains to our right, the thornbushes looked thick enough to prevent us from even getting our bikes off the road. To our left we could see a river valley, perhaps two miles across. Halfway to the river, the thornbushes seemed their highest, but a cross-stitch of cow paths in that direction offered up a trail. In the center of the valley, another two miles down, we spotted a row of poplar trees—in all likelihood, signs of a farmhouse. The only house in fifty miles.

  Not wanting to be seen, we dipped off the road toward the valley and into the soft dirt of the desert. Pushing our loaded bikes through the labyrinth of thorns was stressful and difficult. The bushes were so tall that only the tops of our heads would have been visible. Halfway to the river we came upon a clearing that was big enough to accommodate one tent. Gingerly we laid our bicycles down, careful to avoid any thorns. Ronnie yelped as a thorn ripped at his bike
shorts. I quickly set up the tent and we put our sleeping bags inside.

  Despite our exhaustion and the oncoming darkness, we decided to walk down to the river. I wanted to walk, loosen my legs up, and lift our frustrated spirits with the beauty of the pink sky over such a barren, hostile waste. About thirty yards from the water, the thornbushes cleared and short grass and snow-white tiny thorn shrubs lined the marshy ground. From here I could see the house clearly in the distance. I saw cows but no other sign of movement. The river flowed cold and clear in the sharp air. We remarked on the different types of thorns and the beautiful pink sky. I splashed my face, stood up, and we headed back in the direction of our tent.

  But just as we approached the edge of the thicket, we noticed a rising plume of dust coming from the house. I squinted toward it—and made out six men on horseback racing toward us. The horses were galloping so fast that the dust was funneling out behind them like a tornado. I said, “Holy shit,” and ducked into the thorns.

  “What??” Parker asked. But as soon as he and Ronnie saw the plume, they dropped to the ground.

  “Maybe they didn’t see us,” I said optimistically. “Maybe it’s their routine for herding the cattle at sunset.” I was making up stuff to appease my fear. We raced through the maze of thorns back to my tent, hunched over like thieves, but somehow the spot where we had set our things now felt much more exposed than before.