One Thousand Four Hundred Fifty-Four

A common refrain among cycle tourists is that travel by bicycle affords an opportunity to grasp the true distances between places. When the only way to move is by turning the pedals, it is impossible to get anywhere sitting limp in a seat. You feel the energy it takes to get over every single hill, the sustained exertion you need to crest a major climb. At the same time, you don’t worry about speed limits; doing 70 in a 55 zone isn’t an option. You are the engine, and the odometer counts the miles on your legs.

But when I arrived in Vancouver, I didn’t feel any of that. I looked down at my Cateye, and I saw the display reading out 1454.2. I knew that it had been 37 days since I pedaled out of a driveway in Los Gatos, California. I could run through the names of the places where I had slept each of those nights if I wished. What was impossible was to paint a coherent picture of the distance in my head, to zoom out and process the journey as a continuous whole.

By car, I could comfortably cover the route in five days. I would be able to look back at the distance covered and the time spent and draw it all together with a neat mental bow. Would I remember every climb and every descent though? What about the winds, or exactly where I was at hundred mile intervals? Could I write a narrative of every mile of road? Certainly not. On my bike, however, I could do that and more. I could tell you how many men were sitting in front of the house on Leggett Hill (three), the highest speed I reached in the state of Washington (40 mph on Whidbey Island), or the exact route to avoid a rough dirt section of Seven Devils Road in Southern Oregon (right on Whiskey Run Road, left on Beaver Hill Road).

I can tell you about each individual tree, but I can only describe the forest in generalities. 1,454.2 remains a simple statistic, nothing more. I think of it in the same way that I would of a city of a million people; I know what it means in the abstract, but that does not mean that I can form a clear concept of what they would look like all together. A forty, fifty, sixty mile day on the road is something I can comprehend without a second thought, just as a hundred or a thousand people is not too difficult for the mind to process.

I don’t think I have any better idea about the distance that I pedaled now than I did before I set off. I know many more details, and I can pick out the route on a map. I have heard more people than I can count express amazement at riding so far. But when they ask me what it’s like to have ridden almost 1,500 miles, I cannot answer them, because I don’t know any better than they do.