BALM: Week 3 Day 6

The only time I've ever been out of the United States was when Ann and I lived in Buffalo, and we'd ride or bike the across the Peace Bridge to Canada. It was fun to ride along the Canadian side of the Niagara River and read historical signs about the great British victories over invading American armies. Once I stood in Nogales, Arizona, and looked over the border into Nogales, Mexico.

I've never been to the United Kingdom, I've never been to France. I'd like to some day. I'd like to see Stonehenge and vineyards in Champagne. I've never been to Africa or India, though I'd like to see the Congo River or the markets in New Delhi. There are a lot of places abroad I'd like to go: Beijing, Hanoi, Istanbul, Moscow, Thailand. I'd absolutely love to take my bike to Nogales, Arizona, ride across the border to Juarez, Mexico, and Gump it through Mexico, south through Central America, across the Panama Canal, into South America, where I'd follow the spine of the Peruvian Andes into highlands of the Argentine cowboys and on down to the tip of the continent, Tierra del Fuego, just to say I've contemplated the fearsome straits before turning around and pedaling back to Juarez, Arizona.

You can say my world view is limited to international friends, novelists, and poets, travel books, the Travel and Food Channels, reports of my well-traveled friends, the world news, and other similar sources. You can say my world view is determined by some other amorphous other. Though I accept this view, it is not of my creation. It is not my thought. It is not the image of the huge world that I would have if, like my sources, I had been of or travelled the globe. As such, I am diminutive.

But from my bike I have seen much of the United States. I have seen the rolling hills of Kansa, and from atop one, saw and smelled the cow feeds of Dodge City. I have seen the Nebraska Sandhills. I have seen the streets of Chicago from Union Station to south of the City to RT 66 or northwest of the city to Wisconsin. I have seen secluded spaces of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, seen only by hikers or bikers. I have seen a highway rise over La Vida Pass in Colorado, descend into a valley, and rise again up Wolf Creek Pass.

Today I saw the sand dunes along the Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore. I never would have thought such a place existed. I've seen sand dunes along Atlantic Beaches (they are nowhere near the size of these) and I've seen the Sandhills of Nebraska, which are the largest sand dunes in the country. But the Sleeping Bear sand dunes, take you by surprise, jutting up suddenly from the shores of Lake Michigan, their blinding beige faces staring out across the expanse of the lake. They stun you.

This is a site of the country, and there are so many more I'd like to see from the point of view of my bike: the Grand Canyon, sites of Indian massacres, Mount Rushmore, Death Valley, the Alaskan mountains, Hawaiian forests, the Underground Railroad, redwood trees, salmon running up the Columbia RIver. I'd like to understand what makes me completely before I ride out into the world.

I'd like to know what luggage I carry before I travel south to Tierra del Fuego.

Follow the BALM