Why I'm Biking Around the World

TL;DR: Surprise! I'm taking a break from my career to ride my bike around the world.

According to my mom, who would know about such things, my first words were, "Bye-bye."

I've been leaning into that sentiment every since, traveling whenever I can, seeing the world, having a look around. I even did a doctorate in cultural psychology to support my habit, plying my skills as a behavioral scientist to check out six continents. (Antarctica, consider yourself warned.)

But the pandemic put the kibosh on all that. To cope with my newly clipped wings, I took to the road on my shiny bicycle and explored all the nooks and crannies of the Bay Area. Channeling the inimitable Dervla Murphy, who rode her three-speed from Ireland to India in 1964, I found myself thinking, "f I went on doing this for long enough I could get round the planet."

I wasn't the only one with this idea. In 2018, Jenny Graham smashed the women's record for fastest circumnavigation of the world by bicycle. News of her radness finally percolated in my direction. I got ideas.

Then, on September 9, 2020, the unthinkable happened: The sun didn't rise in San Francisco. The smoke from several wildfires was blocking our star.

Here's the view from my home office at about 11 am that day:

To my astonishment, my virtual meetings continued to grind on, with no one mentioning the apocalyptic hellscape outside. Ever the pointer-outer of elephants, I kept saying things like, "Um, y'all. The sun hasn't come up yet." And my colleagues would look at me with mild pity, then return their attention to the More Important Business At Hand.

The absurdity called to mind Auden's poem about Brueghel's painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus:

(Thank you for indulging my liberal arts education. Now back to our regularly scheduled blog post.)

I realized a few things that morning:

1. I can't take for granted that I will have a world to ride my bicycle around much longer,

2. Most folks will deny and repress the end times even as they knock on their door, and

3. I need to get the hell out of Dodge.
   

And thus began my dreaming and scheming to have a look around this glorious and suffering planet of ours.

I was not sponsored. I was not fundraising. I was just a burned-out, middle-aged, adequate athlete having a pedal around our burning out planet, while we were both still up for it.