Doing impossible things
About four years ago, I came across an article online about people who were crossing America off road on motorcycles. The kinds of motorcycles you saw in ‘Mad Max’ movies, as opposed to something James Dean would drive, or Paulie from ‘American Choppers.’ Adventure motorcycles that were designed to go on and off road to places middle aged men like me dreamt about.
There’s a point in your thought process where things are cataloged like a library book being put back on a shelf by a librarian. Will the thought go on the “things I’d like to do but probably won’t” shelf? Or will it go to that special section where only a few books sit. The “I don’t know how, but I’m doing that” section?
I’m fascinated by this moment. How do some thoughts escape the tractor beam of despair and routine? How do others manifest into reality? Is there an electro-chemical involved that determines which thoughts live, and which thoughts die?
I believe the difference – the thumbs up or down moment we see in a Gladiator movie, comes down to micro-steps. Small, almost indiscernible movements towards a goal. It’s a lot like a short documentary I saw about Army sniper schools. A team of young men gear up in these fuzzy bushy camouflage suits and have to crawl on their bellies – inches per hour – towards their instructors who are sitting up on a ladder looking down at the field about a hundred yards away trying to spot their movement. If you move too fast towards a dream sometimes, you get caught. Some dreams – maybe most of them, require sneaking.
I started out by purchasing a motorized bicycle that looked a lot like an adventure motorcycle. It only weighed two hundred pounds. Only went forty miles per hour. But it had a rack for camping gear and had two wheels like its bigger brothers. It had a simple engine I could work on and learn to repair over time. For two years I rode it, and finally took it on a camping trip to a park about forty five miles away.
I felt like an adventurer. And I loved that bike. But it wasn’t going to get me across America’s back roads.
And so when the time came, after I had upgraded many of the parts I sold it. And started saving for a bigger bike. Watching YouTube videos and scrolling past Pinterest pictures…micro stepping towards the dream.
Selling my bike to a guy who thought it “looked good” on the back of his truck
Three years ago, my wife surprised me with an amazing birthday present. Nothing like it had happened before, or has happened since. She bought me an adventure motorcycle. Had asked little unperceivable questions about makes and models and specifications that I didn’t catch in our casual conversations. And there it was in my driveway. Hours before my birthday cake.
Surprised by my wife in 2018 with the Kawasaki KLR650
Over the years, I’ve been sneaking up on the dream, taking small trips to test out the bigger bike off-road. Test camping gear to fit in the special bags that make bigger trips possible. Going further into the woods and building confidence….with trips a few hours away from my home.
Moto-camping in the Pisgah National Forest completely alone
This past weekend, I wanted to see what a full day of riding was like. I’d need to complete two hundred mile sections, every day for thirty days, to cross the country off-road on my bike. A full eight hours of riding and navigating. Gas monitoring and electrolyte hydration. Rest stops and poop breaks. And so I left and headed west into the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
And at one point in the trip, I realized how many micro steps I’d taken to get to a point, where I could see hundreds of miles in every direction. Sitting alone at an overlook eating a protein bar, and sipping from my hydration bladder. Wind lightly blowing on my back and sunshine on my face. I was “doing it.” And realizing dreams aren’t a big cardboard lottery check event that happens in one instant. They are a series of one and five dollar checks, deposited into the larger dream account over time. It’s a game of “red light green light” where moving too fast – running straight at it dooms you to exclusion.
I rode a total of four hundred miles that weekend – there and back. In some terrain that made me pucker up. On some roads where I could see the trout in the crystal streams that ran alongside me in pools besides bubbling waterfalls. Places that existed on old maps, whispered by locals who want their secret spots kept just that. I was “doing it.”
Mount Mitchell overlook protein bar rest break
Blue Ridge Parkway, sunrise, facing south down into South Carolina and Georgia
Dreams require sneaking up on. Crawling out of boxes we’ve lived in our entire lives. We tell ourselves it’s safer inside the box where we can’t fail. We can’t be judged or ridiculed. We convince ourselves that looking at photos and saying someday someday someday is as good as the real thing. But it’s not. It’s not even in the vicinity of the real thing.
I only rode two hundred miles of the TAT. There are three thousand eight hundred more to go before I hit the shores of Port Orford, Oregon. This July, I’ll be sneaking up on that coastline…two hundred miles at a time for a full thirty days straight.
The full Trans America Trail from East to West Coast on America’s back roads