Day 10: Liberation

Today is my first day of real climbing and it’s a real pain but a real joy as well. I awoke at the makeshift gypsy campsite and to avoid any wet calamity slowly ferried all my belongings across the rocky creek crossings to get to safe ground and load the bike up. I enjoyed a breakfast of fried dough pancake things with spicy pickle veggies and a couple cups of chai. This ended up being a pretty common breakfast for me throughout my trip, Aloo Parantha. After entertaining an Indian soldier, letting him ride my bicycle, it was off to the races. My bicycle is not a speed demon. It’s a heavy frame, with big tires, and it’s carrying a heavy load. It has a front rack, a rear rack, 4 panniers, a frame bag, and a handlebar bag, along with a tent, pad, and sleeping bag ratcheted onto the back. It’s maybe 32 pounds with another 35 pounds of gear and a 155 pound human riding it, so 222 pounds altogether, underweight for an average NFL linebacker. And the poor thing hasn’t really had a chance to train or warm up. After being chopped into bits, jammed into a box, flown across the world, reassembled, then thrown into a bus, it’s being forced into climbing the highest mountain range on Earth straight out of the box without even a flat road countryside jaunt to gather it’s bearings. The bike is geared for climbing, so on descents I’m not able to gear up high enough to pedal. The lower gears are phenomenal though and worth forgoing speedy descents as I’m climbing often and the climbing isn’t easy. The road has gotten wider and more enjoyable. The trash smoke is mostly gone and I can freely breather air deep into my lungs. The valley is gorgeous. The honking is still persistent and I'm still often driven to the edge of the road and sometimes into the narrow rocky scrabble on its sides. The road is adorned with humorous warnings from the Border Roads Organization, or BRO. One read “BRO, go slow on my curves”. India is a funny place. The adverts are funny, the road signs are funny, the trucks are funny, and even the people are funny when they aren’t focused on disrupting your financial well being. 

One of the bigger issues I’m experiencing with the bike is happening in the pleasure and pain fun zone of the male body known as the prostate. I have a very particular bike fit. Because my arms are short and I easily get a stiffness in my neck I got the tallest shortest stem in the business to accommodate me with a more upright position. I also noticed that if my seat is flat I put way too much weight onto my hands, generating numbness and discomfort all around. To fix this, I tilt the seat ever so slightly up, putting more weight onto my perineum. This fit is great for my neck and my limbs, but my prostate doth protest, and unfortunately its the prostate that must bear the brunt of this tragic compromise. For those who have not experienced prostatitis, it’s like having a UTI at all times and swollen nutsack syndrome too. You constantly feel like you have to pee and when the time does come it kind of burns and you have trouble starting the flow and fully emptying the bladder. Drinking alcohol was giving this to me along with IBS (urgent diarrhea and heightened anxiety the next day) so I cut it out of my life a few weeks ago and my gut, prostate, and mind have rejoiced ever since. Unfortunately, the bike seat is bringing the damned prostatitis back and there’s not much I can do about it other than hope my body will get used to it. The human body is capable of many things, so I’ll try to have faith. 

But I’m on the bike. I’m free. It is freedom in nearly its absolute form, perhaps as close as you can get to the real thing. Without the financial burden and environmental guilt of a car, without the compromise and anchored entrapment of a house, it is a cheap, mobile, sustainable adventure machine that offers you the world and opens peoples hearts to you. My bike is my car, my tent is my home, and I am the fuel, the engine, and the utilities. My freedom is the appreciation of value. People love a touring cyclist not just because of the novelty, but because a cyclist is making an effort and people love seeing effort. A hardworking person is respected in every culture on this planet. How could you see a someone huffing and puffing up a hill and not smile at the genuine vulnerability and honesty of it? Furthermore you’re actually there, on the street with them, living life with them. You aren’t shielded inside the metal fortress of a shuttle van or airplane, you are touching their road and breathing their air and showing your face to them. You aren’t looking down on them with distance and condescension from the safety of a diesel chugging behemoth, you’re face to face with them experiencing their roads in the most intimate way possible. This intimacy and effort unites the human spirit and inspires us to smile and wave and start a conversation with another fellow being. It makes us love cyclists. And just the way that the country folk and the decent folk love the cyclist, the city folk and the car folk of America despise the cyclist. I’ve often wondered why the drivers of America hate us so much. You go to the comment section of any article talking about the police enforcing rules on cyclists and its full of sadistic drooling psychopaths wishing the absolute worst on us. We who reduce pollution, we who reduce congestion, we who fight for pleasant walkable bikeable urban environments. Where does this hate come from? Jealousy. They envy our freedom. While their fat bodies decay in their humming vibrating steel shackles, we are free. Free to pierce through the red light when we see fit, free to hop the curb and get past a traffic jam when its necessary, free to park our steed wherever a hard closed loop presents itself, free to go fast and smile and feel the air on our face. They sit and they curse and they honk their horns and they scream impatience and anger and loathe. Because they bought into the scam package of the American dream. The car, the house, the retirement plan: the unholy trinity of this long con. Instead of giving them the liberty and freedom that were advertised and promised, it has enslaved them. They are forever indebted to this dream, whether physically or psychologically, it will never be paid off, it will never suffice. They will need a better car, a better house, more money for retirement, more more more and it never ends and they will work their bodies to the bone and get fat and watch sports and hate their ungrateful spouse and their ungrateful kids and they die frowning and simmering in their discontent thinking if only they’d made a little more money things could have been just perfect. I will gladly fall for  every scam India has to offer and eviscerate my pelvic floor til there’s nothing left before I prostate myself to this trinity of emptiness.The cyclist smiles as they crunch their gears and inhale the sweet free air, with their mind loose and curious and nothing to look at but the play of the leaves shadows on the asphalt and the mountain range that gets closer with every stroke of the pedal, with tears of sweat burning their eyes, their tongues coated in salt and dust, exhaustion testing their limits, the cyclist thinks “this is enough”. 

I’m sitting in a cafe in the small town of Gund, about 20 km from my destination of Sonamarg. My prostate is mad at me, and sitting of course does not help, but I’m not really in the right place or mood for a jog either. I ordered some lamb biryani but the guy didn’t understand and so I was just sitting around until some teachers came in and we struck up a nice conversation. The Kashmiris are so wonderful and so proud to be Kashmiri. I think I could live here. They helped out with the biryani situation but alas now everyone in the town is praying so I will still have to wait a few moments for my delicious biryani. I don’t mind waiting, this is a beautiful town and I’m enjoying hearing the prayers over the loudspeaker and seeing people shuffle in and out at different times. The beauty of Kashmir and the warmth of its people is making me think of the inevitable descent from the Himalayas back into the subcontinent and what awaits me there, in the real India. 

For most people it is hard to come to India and not feel repulsed. Repulsed by the sight of garbage everywhere, the lack of access to clean drinking water, the urination and defecation happening in plain sight all around, emaciated bone thin sun scarred ghosts squatting in the sewage with flies their eager companions, dogs with their ribs sticking out panting in despair, never having known the loving touch of a human, cows and goats splayed out lazily in the sun breathing slowly in beds made of filth and refuse, the men who shamelessly insert the entire girth of their ample thumbs deep into their nostrils before hawking out globs of wet mucus and staring daggers into you, children of all ages dressed in rags covered in dirt coming up to you mumbling and signaling with their hands and mouths that they are hungry, traffic laws simply not existing with cars and scooters and tutuks going every which way crossing every line and creating the most clumsy inefficient road system on this Earth, the noise that never dies and drives you to madness. It’s hard to see this, smell this, hear this, and to not think of the West, the first world, and how we resolved many of these issues long ago. It is hard to not then have the budding of an ideology of supremacy. It is hard for most, yes, but I am not just anyone. I am, after all, a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, trained in cultural sensitivity. And even I, dear reader, even I still find myself willfully inviting the easy evil of comparison into my thoughts. How hard it is to control your mind when you see such things and to not think about how it is in your own home, and to then jump effortlessly to the conclusion that there are differences between your place and their place and that your place is the better place and your people the better people. But it takes time. It takes time to know a place and see a place. It takes time before you notice the secret smiling glorious humanity of a people and before you can learn to love them despite what you perceive as flaws. Luckily, I have time, and I am starting to see it, and I am loving it. Yes, currently I’m comfortably nestled within the moral familiarity of a fellow Abrahamic society and shielded from the anarchy and chaos of the Hindus who are waiting for me in the south. The kindness and warmth of muslims knows no equal barring perhaps that of hispanic catholics and it is a joy to be within its warm embrace. I am taking this time to mentally prepare myself for the inevitable return to Hindustan, with its mysterious complexities and sometimes aggravating ways. I am hoping to tackle it with far more grace than my first attempt in the delirium of Delhi. And if it’s just 10 degrees cooler I think I might succeed. I’ll have my bike after all, and the bike elicits the best in people. 

The lamb biryani was indescribably delicious and perfectly spicy, it will be hard if not impossible to ever enjoy a lamb over rice white sauce hot sauce classic again. The first few times I visited New York in college I was obsessed with the halal cart chicken over rice and the words New York made me salivate for it, the association was strong. In those days it was $5 and it was actually consistently good. Now it’s around $8 and consistently bad. New York continues to lose its appeal. I finished my climb to Sonamarg and found a lovely camp site by another river. It has only gotten prettier here. The air is thinner and dustier now and it’s hard to take in a full breath, I’m hoping my body will adjust over night. Tomorrow I’ll try to buy a new headlamp and find some black salt or other minerals to add to my water. I hope to make it another 50-70 kilometers, a reasonable goal. When I cycled across Europe, my partner in crime Caleb insisted that we use these computer things that constantly reported our speed and the total kilometers we’d accomplished for the day and the trip. It gave the cycling too much of a kilometer counting vibe in my opinion. We had been endeavoring to crush at least 100km a day, and we did accomplish this, but I’m happy on this go of it to take things slowly and go at my own pace. I’m in no rush to be anywhere in particular.