Europe / Bay Bridge

Most of my friends know that in 2010 my friend Zach and I set out to ride these giant steel touring bikes from Montpilier to Istanbul. I don't always mention the part where we ditched the plan somewhere near Florence, took a train to Dresden, bought a beat-up Renault 900 for 500 euros and drove the rest of the way. Still, we clocked in at 1,100 bicycle miles by the end of the three-month trip and experienced a hurricane of stimulus including a shotgun-wielding Slovakian man standing outside our tent one morning, red wine in the childhood home of Dracula, the unabashed hospitality of a murderous former Czech sniper, squatting in a mansion in the seaside town where The Rolling Stones recorded Exile On Main Street, a French witch who paid us in fresh bread to pick cherries all day from her clothing-optional orchard, the list goes on and on. (The clothing optional bit was a rule we made up on the spot. When you're on the road, you need to make up your own rules and adhere to them.)

Today I rode the same bike across the Bay Bridge from Emeryville to Yerba Buena Island, something I've wanted to do since the bridge went up a few years ago. While civilized, it was nowhere near as nice as biking through southern France, where motorists treat cyclists like royalty. On the other hand, it was luxurious compared to riding in Turkey, where drivers seem to relish the merits of vehicular manslaughter. But let me tell you, this ride across the Bay Bridge was windier than a resurrected 1920s Chicago politician giving a campaign speech naked atop Point Reyes lighthouse after eating two pounds of pinto beans.

Before the Bay was colonized by white people, Native Americans did not live on the 7 x 7 peninsula that is now San Francisco; they lived in the East Bay, venturing west for spiritual ceremonies. This makes sense considering the land's being surrounded on three sides by crashing water, making it a volatile energetic vortex, a perfect place to pray.

Here we are in techy 2017. Along my ride, I pass underneath an electronic billboard advertising the Honda "Race To Save" sales event followed by an ad for a CGI movie called Mister Underpants. I am perched between the sacred and the profane, the water on my left and a violent onslaught of oncoming freeway traffic just to my right.

I charge through the windy inlet peddling consistently, and I think about the natives paddling boats through similar winds en route to the special land that is now the tech capital of the world.

My "ceremony" is this ride, where I feel my body interact with this bizarre landscape I call home. Then a meditation in the sun. And finally the eating of a banana - but not before typing out this note that 1,000 people will have the opportunity to read in the next 24 hours.