Greetings from sunny Austin, Texas. It's a brisk seventy-five degrees outside of the lovely 19th St. and Guadalupe (pronounced Gwa-doll-loop here in Austin) Schlotsky's, home of freely-accessible computers and internet. No librarians to worry about here--only a bleach-blonde woman with a false sense of entitlement that wants to kick me off of yet another computer. Ah, the electronic workstation follies continue...
Last Thursday I set off for Brownsville, Texas. Logging in six and a half hours at a break-neck clip of thirteen miles per hour, I made my way to the action-packed town of Nixon, Texas, where the most excitement you'll find is a two-hour wait for a county deputy at the local sheriff's office--but we'll get to that in a second. As the sun began to set, I sat in the Nixon Dairy Queen with my chocolate milk in hand and a dancing, euphoric grin on my face. After eighty miles of cycling, I had reached a blissful state of enlightenment. I had done; I had accomplished; I had arrived, if only for a day. I couldn't have been any more content.
I cycled another five miles south to a picnic area that I had penned out previously on my map. The idea was to find a place to camp for the night, and I couldn't muster up the courage to knock on a farmer's door and ask him for a humble evening's plot. So, finding that the picnic area itself wasn't exactly suited for camping, I chucked all my gear over a barb-wire fence and pitched my tent about thirty yards away in the backwoods. I chained my bike up to the chest-high fence and called it a night.
I awoke several times--and you can see where this is going--to the sounds of cars passing through the picnic area. People got out of their vehicles and eyed over my locked-up bike. After a couple of minutes, they left and I would go back to sleep. I woke up the next morning to the sound of a trunk slamming repeatedly. In little more than boxers and my jersey, I tossed on my shorts and sprinted over to my bike just as the car took off southbound. Then, calamity. In place of my bike was the tree I leaned it up against. The fence had been snipped, and the barb wire lay forlorn across the leaves. Someone came back from the night before, brought wire clippers and stole my bike, lock and all. I couldn't have been any more upset.
To make a long story short, I hitched a ride back to Nixon with a farmer down the road (it turns out that I did have some courage in me after all), and put in a police report with two counties. A freshly-made friend from Austin drove down to bring me right back to the hostel where I was staying, and I've been plodding around here since.
All's not lost, however. The bike's gone, but I still have all my gear and most of my gumption. The invincibility complex took a beating though, and I've been doing my fair share of soul-searching. This is a project that I believe in and one that I want to sail with, but feelings of frustration and disappointment have stirred up some choppy waters.
Those waters I can navigate.
I hadn't told anybody, but I named the bike "The Endurance". The name comes from ill-fated ship that met its demise in the Antarctic around the turn of the century. Sir Ernest Shackelton, the captain, intended to cross the continent via an unexplored route through the south pole. Months into the voyage, pack ice surrounded the ship and it slowly began to sink into the depths below. The crew set up temporary camp next to the ship and eventually sailed off to a remote island with two of their lifeboats, the Dudley Docker and the James Caird. Shackelton and a hand-picked few left the remaining crew on the island as they set out on an improbable venture for help. Their new ship: the James Caird. In what some call "the greatest voyage of all time", Shackelton arrived at a Norweigan fishing station, having travled three-hundred and eighty miles through rough waters and with only four sightings. He eventually returned to rescue his waiting crew. Though the ordeal lasted almost two years--twenty months--all survived.
So, Plan B:
I'm going to sail out again. With the help of some really knowledgeable and generous folks at a local bicycle cooperative, I've been building up a new bike and should be ready to head out again this Friday. The immediate destination, however, has changed. I've set my sights on Houston for a leadership and unity conference keynoted by Dr. Jose Angel Gutierrez, a key figure in the Chicano activist movement of the 60's and 70's. My new ship: the Dudley Docker II. For the time being, I'm just trying to make it to the next island. After I arrive in Houston, I'll figure out what I'm going to do--(1) continue on to Brownsville or (2) delay the trip until the new year and make way via Greyhound to El Paso and Tucson for some time-sensitive and very important projects.
I knew that this kind of thing, i.e. someone jacking my bike in the middle of the night, could and most likely would happen, so I named my bike with a little bit of foresight. I just didn't know that it would happen so soon. I don't want this trip to become a protracted rescue mission, and I'm not thick headed enough to continue on in a despite-all-odds fashion. But I am one to keep going. Like Shackelton, my plans have changed. I might just end up with my own James Caird someday.
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