Acceptance

When you’re on a bike tour, conversations with strangers are a metaphysical certainty, and they always cover familiar territory. First comes “where you headed?” Then, “aw, some big hills that way” or “hope it doesn’t rain on ya.” Usually I’m happy to stop and chat longer, but If I’m in a hurry I have a pat response: if I didn’t like hills and rain, I picked the wrong hobby.

Rain makes life harder, sure. Hills usually make life harder, but you can’t say they make it harder in New Zealand because the alternatives don’t exist here. Today’s ride from Harihari to Franz Josef is a case in point. My host last night described it this way: “After Mount Hercules it’s flat all the way to Franz.”

I doubt there’s a flat half-mile anywhere in there. Apparently “flat” is kiwi for “not the steepest part.” But hills are just a thing you have to accept if you want to do this. Same goes for rain, snow, mud, flooding, scary rides, boring rides (which do exist elsewhere, though not on the TA), reckless drivers, mechanical failures, muscle strains, bug bites, and shops that sell everything kind of M&M except peanut.

The one thing it’s really hard to accept is wind. After the third day riding west into a westerly, I do start taking personally.

There are some things I’ve had to learn to accept about myself too, things I would have found surprising before the ride. On day one I discovered the limit of my environmentalism. In the past, whenever I’ve been out hiking, when I see a discarded wrapper or something I pick it up and put it in my pocket. My favorite backpack has a hip pocket just for this. But on Ninety Mile Beach, my first thought about seeing plastic trash was “nope.”

I’m running too heavy already. I just got started. I can’t stop every hundred meters to pick up every single piece. I have nowhere to put them all. I have nowhere to put thatone. All perfectly legitimate excuses, all trampling each other in their haste to get out of my subconscious and into the mainstream of conscious thought. Their ultimate expression was a heartfelt FUCK THAT so I could keep riding. I’ve never felt so actively anti-environmental.

Worse was the first time my own plastic wrapper blew away. I never let that happen. Unless I’m tired and biking into a headwind on a beach littered with plastic. Maybe it matters that in that wind I’d never have recaptured it. It definitely matters that I gave only a moment’s thought to turning around.

This latent sentiment popped up again a month later on the South Island. Day three of my westward slog into those ceaseless westerly winds, something had to go. I needed to get more aerodynamic. I pulled my old man chair and my ukulele off the side bags and into my draft. But the ukulele is a wriggly piece of equipment. Anything other than vertical with a horizontal strap around its waist and it does a contortionist act. So I did what I could never have predicted: I gave it away. A cleaner in my hotel told me her grandson wants to learn the ukulele too. I said “that’s a great idea” and left, feeling very much like I had abandoned a puppy.

I fully intend to buy the same model when I get back home— fully intend, that is, to put another unnecessary piece of plastic into the ground someday. I like that one because unlike my wooden one I can play it in the pool. Next summer there will come a day when I’ve been sitting in the pool too long and I feel bored. That’s the day I’m going to buy the exact same ukulele I just abandoned. It’s a waste of fifty bucks, but after three days of the wind blowing right down my throat, it was worth fifty bucks for me to get even a little bit trimmer.

The scheming mind comes back and says “yes, but you could have been driving this whole thing instead of biking it. That’s green enough.” The environmentalist mind retorts, “the flight down here had the same carbon footprint as the rest of your year combined. Green would have been bikepacking at home.” These two can argue ad nauseam, like the two wolves in that proverb, but the fact is I’m not as green as I hoped. I can accept that or I can feed the other wolf.

Perhaps the hardest thing to accept about myself, the one I dread most, is that I really like being out on the bike every day. That stands in sharp contrast to my deep-seated ice cold hatred of cardio. Biking to get somewhere is great. Biking just to bike? Ehhhhhh.

It doesn’t make sense. I spend as much time as possible here trying to live in the present. Forget the speedometer, forget the odometer. I’m so committed to this that I’ve given up planning where I’m going to sleep. I sort that out at the end of the day, sometimes only a minute or two before unpacking the tent. If I can do that here, why not on a loop near my house?

Because cardio sucks, that’s why. But I might have to accept that I like it. If I do, it will throw my life into chaos. At least I assume it will. Surely that’s the reason I’ve so assiduously avoided exercise until now. Surely there are good reasons beyond sleeping in or playing boardgames. There have to be.