Yesterday we rode into Ushuaia, the city at the end of the world, that shining beacon on the southern horizon for the last 21 months, and thus concluded our journey. We have Pedaled as South as they will let you and we cannot Pedal any Souther. This morning I guess we woke up to the first day of the rest of our lives, though one can only pray that waking up hungover in a bunk bed isn’t a sign of things to come. I feel compelled to try to put some words to what I’m feeling. I don’t know that any of us really know how we feel yet; everything always ends up being so much more complicated than you think it is or was or will be.
When we woke up yesterday morning it was snowing. It was the first snow any of us had seen in more than two years. I stood there in the woods after breakfast as it came down thick and white and windy and caught snowflakes on my tongue and tried to call up the first time I could remember standing in the woods catching snowflakes on my tongue. The winds were blowing hard against us as we climbed the mountain pass separating us from Ushuaia, and descending the other side the snow stung our faces and seemed to be coming from every direction at once. At the bottom of the hill the sun came out and I told Riley, “your bike doesn’t sound like she’s gonna make it dude,” and Riley said, “nah man, she’s just talkin to me,” and then his rim cracked and a big sliver dislodged but somehow the tube didn’t pop. With twenty kilometers left to town, fresh out of viable alternatives and bright ideas, Riley took off his rear brake and fender, duct taped the rim back together, and we pushed on. The tube had popped by the time we got to town but it didn’t matter. As usual we came skidding in sideways, wet and cold and giddy, just enough time before sundown to dunk our bikes in the cold Antarctic waters in the harbour and call it a wrap.
I’ve spent a lot of time recently trying to make sense of the last 21 months, trying to figure out what it all meant. No matter how many notes I pen in the dim light of a dying headlamp, broken tent flapping violently overhead in the fierce pampa winds, I just can’t seem to conjure up any nuggets of profundity. I have a sense that something important just happened to us but it almost feels like it happened to someone else, some guys that look like us only younger. Time will grant us the clarity of hindsight or maybe it won’t. As for now, I have some nice pictures and many scribbled moments of beauty or strangeness or the times we seemed to tap into something far greater than the four of us. The pages of late are glaringly void of any concise theses and Answers but they do paint a nice picture of the four of us, road weary and wild eyed and ever in the thick of it as we traversed the pristine and raw and breathtaking landscapes of southern Patagonia:
“Speaking softly with the guys as the embers from the fire tornado on the wind after dinner and the skinny trees cast moonshadow ghosts on the dirt. Dirt is soft and cold on bare toes… bear toes… burritos….” “Whitecaps on green waves seem to churn in slow motion in the Straits of Magellan, spitting rainbows into the mist above the surf.” “Flipped off a trucker today and really meant it“ ”After 130 kilometers or so you will start to feel your knees and the potholes will look like Africa and entropy and you will wonder who knocked down all the trees” “Hobo in a jumpsuit, one lonely tooth, came at us fast but only to offer invite for camping with him in that abandoned building by the tree line” “The fog over O’Higgins at dawn” “Such little time left.”
There’s this Rainer Rilke quote that somehow always makes me well up in inappropriate places where he says:
“I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
It is true that I left home those many months ago looking for answers. Mainly what I’ve found instead are only better questions. The pertinent question of late is where to go from here. I too am fresh out of viable alternatives and bright ideas so I suppose I’ll go north. It’d sure be a nice change of pace. A fellow traveller told us recently that we weren’t nearing the end at all, that we were in fact pedalling to a start, to new beginnings. Ushuaia is a lovely city but it’s clear now that it was never really the destination. The destination was the journey. It was to see if we could do it, to step back for a moment and take a look around, to take a look at ourselves, to live the questions deeply and to try to earn the lives we always wanted. Are we there yet? I don’t know. Probably not. Do I think we went the right direction? Indubitably. It seems ever more an undeniable fact of life that if you’re stoked on who you are and what you’re doing, and if people tell you that you’re crazy, you’re probably headed in the right direction.
With so much love and gratitude and happiness from the bottom of the world,
Tomás