Last year, a week before Christmas I biked the final 100 km to Punta Chame, a fishing village and windsurfing mecca at the end of a long thin peninsula dotted with shrimp farms, mangroves and golden beaches. What began nearly six months before on the shores of the Arctic Ocean came to its conclusion at the Pacific by the entrance to the Panama Canal.
We celebrated at a beach bar with Prosecco and tapas. In the distance, I could see dozens of massive container ships waiting to enter the Canal and beyond them, sparkling in the sun, the rising towers of Panama City. A couple of hours later, tipsy with excitement and alcohol, we waded into the Pacific to clamber into the rickety motor launches that would take us and our bikes across the bay to the city.
As we skimmed across the water to Panama City, I felt a mix of emotions: elation, pride and, unexpectedly, a vein of melancholy. I couldn’t quite believe that this was it, that I had come to the end of the road.
What had it all been for? What had impelled me to leave the comforts of home, family and friends? For six months I woke at dawn, cycled for hours, camped, then did it again. Day in, day out. For thousands of kilometres.
I’d come to biking late and by accident. Four years earlier, a friend, who was experiencing marital difficulties, called me up. He said he had signed up for a seven-day bike tour in Patagonia. I figured his romantic problems were driving him to extremes. “You don’t know anything about biking,” I said. “You’re coming with me,” he replied. “I know less about biking than you,” I said.
A couple of hours into the ride and I’d had it. We were climbing an isolated mountain road on the Argentinian border with Chile. My tires spun uselessly digging deep grooves in the gravel. I was hot, frustrated and miserable. I swore, never again. Then after lunch something happened. I was picking up speed on the descent when out of nowhere I was overcome by a giddy elation. My perennial internal cloud of anxiety was sucked out of me into the thin Patagonian air replaced by a never-before known lightness of spirit.
Within a year I bought my first touring bike, a bright orange Salsa Marrakesh, and signed up to pedal Africa, from Cairo to Cape Town. My friends and family thought I was crazy. What was I doing at my age, 70, setting off on such a daunting and arduous undertaking; I whose only real experience of biking was tootling around the city on a 20-year-old Norco?
Cycling past the pyramids of Giza, at the start of that journey, I shivered – more from awe than the surprisingly chilly January morning. And apprehension. A small niggling voice whispered I still had time to quit this foolhardy venture. Over the days and weeks that followed, I learned that I, more inclined to books than athletics, could do it. I could cycle day in, day out for six or more hours in the saddle. I could arrive at our destination and set up camp still exhilarated, still full of energy and curiosity.
In Addis Ababa, I had to return to Montreal for a week. My mother was celebrating her 100th birthday. I couldn’t miss it. Mom was in top form. A survivor of Auschwitz, she barrelled through life with grit, determination and willpower. She received congratulatory letters from the Queen, the Prime Minister, and the mayor. The local CBC news came out. When the reporter asked how she felt, my mother said, “I feel…” and here she paused for dramatic effect before continuing with a sly grin, “…young and restless.” That was her joke, the title of her favourite soap opera.
I rejoined the tour in Nairobi. In the weeks that followed, I wound my way through dense jungles and grasslands rippling like waves, into villages with bustling markets, across the mysterious Namibian desert and the rich agricultural lands of South Africa. Along the way, baboons eyed us from the roadside and elephants and giraffes wandered past as casually as a cat on my city street. Biking into Cape Town, amazed that I had made it, I wondered if perhaps I had more of my mother in me than I had imagined.
I came back addicted to the spell of the road. If Africa, why not other continents? But within months of my return from Cape Town, the world stopped. Pandemic. Isolation. The end of travel. As the world slowly opened again, I made plans for another, more ambitious, expedition: cycling 14,000 km down the mountainous spine of North America. But I was three years older now. Shouldn’t I be easing up rather than pushing my luck? I was soon put to the test.
I packed up my tent in the pre-dawn light of the midnight sun. I took a last look at the Arctic Ocean before clipping in and rolling south through the Inuit hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk. In the distance I spotted pingos, the distinctive ice-cored hills which once served as navigation aids for the Inuit. I felt elated and strong, but within an hour I was crippled with severe knee pain. Had the nay-sayers been right? Had my body, after all, reached its limit? I had a bad couple of hours until I realized that it wasn’t a question of age. I’d messed up the adjustments on my biking shoes. Fixed, I was golden.
A few days later, cruising along the Dempster Highway — the 742-km gravel road that connects Inuvik to Dawson City, I took a bad fall when speeding down a hill when the road shifted to deep, loose gravel. My left thigh was badly bruised. My right shoulder hurt like hell. I swabbed my wounds with the small first aid kit I carried with me and checked out my bike. It had survived better than me. I clambered back on the saddle and pedaled the 20 km to camp.
That night my muscles stiffened, and the aches throbbed fiercely. My throat was scratchy. It had to be the tonne of dust I swallowed on the Dempster. As a precaution I decided to take a COVID-19 rapid test convinced that it would show up negative. Wrong. I was positive.
Bang. Bang. Bang. One disaster on top of another. Was the universe sending me a message? I was confronted in the starkest way at the outset of the tour with questions about my physical capabilities for such a demanding endeavour.
My COVID symptoms were mild. I spent a week in isolation in a motel in Dawson City, which gave my bruises a chance to heal and my spirit to recover. Not disasters, I told myself, mishaps. So it turned out to be. I suffered no more misfortunes over the coming months.
There followed days of splendour when I felt as if I were biking on air. They were extraordinary days of riding amid the glistening lakes and pine forests of the north, by the glaciers and snow-capped mountains of the Rockies, on the cowboy trail of southern Alberta and Montana, into the badlands of the American southwest where dinosaurs once roamed, by the red sandstone cliffs along the Colorado River, on the rim of the staggering immensity of the Grand Canyon, across fields where giant cacti stood like beings from another planet, and in verdant mountains surrounded by smoking volcanos.
I cycled lonesome highways, the main street of small-town USA, lined with the Stars and Stripes, into a Navajo community parading their high school homecoming, through Mexican towns festooned for Day of the Dead celebrations, on the cobblestoned streets of ancient Mayan villages and in cities anchored by their Spanish colonial past.
There were hard days. The weather inclement, the head winds fierce, the roads rough, the climbs steep, the facilities basic and everyone, regardless of age, tired from the relentless daily pace. There were many mornings, waking at 4:30 or 5:00 a.m. in the dark to decamp when all I wanted to do was stay curled up in my sleeping bag. I took it all in. Those days were like seasoning, adding spice to our journey.
Everywhere we went the bicycle opened the door to conversations and connections.
Fran is a Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in who is immersing herself in ancient wisdom and modern science of plant lore. Hers is an ongoing quest to reconnect with so much that had been lost or buried with the advent of white settlers and the residential schools.
Amam, a young Sikh, runs a convenience store in northern BC. He tells me he came to Canada straight out of high school. I ask if he finds it lonely to be so far from home and community. He smiles shyly and nods his head.
Luis works at a hotel in Santiago Atitlan. I ask him where he learned his English. He tells me his story. He lived in the States for nine years in Oklahoma, Mississippi and Tennessee. He had a good job, married, had a son. But he was an illegal. One day on a routine traffic stop he was picked up and deported. It’s been five years now. He’s optimistic that he will find his way back. He is one of the many refugees and migrants we encounter who are marching north, determined and optimistic.
There are many others. Their names and faces swirl around me. Through their stories I voyage to lands well beyond the road I am on.
Then it was done. I had arrived at journey’s end. I took a few days in Panama to adjust to “civilian life” expecting at any moment to be back on the bike, on the road again.
Age had not been the impediment so many feared. A friend, more cynical, said, “At our age, we’re in a game of Russian roulette. Every year your body is pointing a gun at your head and pressing the trigger. You hope it’s a blank.”
Maybe he had a point. I had been a runner for many years going out three or four times a week. Then a few years ago I noticed I couldn’t run the hills in the way I had been used to. My breathing was more laboured. I had to walk sometimes. I was referred to a cardiologist. He took one look at me, heard my story and dismissed my concerns. There’s nothing wrong with your heart, he said, you’re getting older. This knocked me for a loop. I would rather have had a treatable disease than incurable age.
At every turn I seemed to be confronted by the fact of my age from my recalcitrant body to various dispensations or exceptions accorded to folks who pass over some symbolic line in the sand. To join the tour, I had to sign a special waver replete with scary language absolving them of any responsibility for my well-being simply because I had crossed their line (over 69 years).
In the bathroom mirror I am always shocked to see a man with grizzled features and a white fringe around a bald dome.
In the mind’s mirror I see a blurred, indistinct figure, constantly morphing, one second a five-year old sitting under a tree lost in a book; in another a confused adolescent; then yet again a single parent perplexing his way through fatherhood. I am all my ages in a shifting, simultaneous kaleidoscope. How could I then be this thing defined by one single number?
I can’t set the clock back, but the clock is not immutable. We do not live in a fixed time that moves us from present moment to present moment on a one-way street to the future. We live in multi-dimensional space-time; there is no denying aging, but it does not fix us like a butterfly in formaldehyde.
Panama City was ablaze with Christmas lights. How fortuitous, it seemed to me, to arrive at this time of year, at the winter solstice, at that turning point of death and renewal, a life here, a life beyond. It came to me that the meaning of my voyage was not in the arrival or even the achievement.
Each day on the road is a rebirth. You are here alive in this moment. Your being is inscribed in, as you are inscribed by the haunting, stark, relentless, transient beauty of the world about you: the hills and valleys, the searing desert and the fertile plains, the forests, lakes and rivers, the bears, stags, bison and bighorn sheep and cranes, hawks, eagles, the sagebrush, cacti and bougainvillea. Life spills its abundance about; you are an integral part of it. You touch the lives of others as they touch you: Inuit trappers, Dene healers, American RV nomads, Bajan innkeepers, Jalisco tequila makers, Mayan farmers, Nicaraguan tale spinners, Haitian refugees, and in your heart those you have, temporarily, left behind.
My mind drifts away from my grandchildren whooping around me. There is a road out there calling me. It’s siren song hypnotic and powerful. Next year, all being well, I’ll cycle South America along the Andes from Cartagena to Ushuaia.
Tom Perlmutter is a writer, documentary filmmaker and the former head of the National Film Board of Canada. His blogs about his African (https://tomstda.com) and North American tours (https://continentalcyclist.substack.com/p/the-continental-cyclist) have attracted a devoted following. He rides the tours organized by Toronto-based TDA Global Cycling.
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