Onward to a Wildfire

The glow of an early summer day is brushing away the darkness and painting the sky orange and yellow as I say goodbye to home for the foreseeable future. Three thousand miles of road and dirt and sweat and finally Los Angeles lie ahead, all slowly illuminated by the same rising sun as I get dressed in the growing light. I’m trading my apartment for a tiny nylon dome for the next month. I’ve ridden the bike I’m taking cross country just once prior to today, never weighed down. I’ve never ridden a century and we’re planning on averaging that every day. I’ve never climbed a mountain pass. I keep telling myself I’m mentally prepared; that’s about 80% naivety.

Written and photographed by Zach Dolinaj

The grogginess of no sleep and too much caffeine has me on autopilot as I pedal a familiar route south from my place in downtown Minneapolis, riding toward my friend Devin’s house to meet up with Jen Whalen and Alex Gutierrez. They’re these two Hyperion figures who’ve been pushing west for two weeks and have made it all the way from Times Square to Minneapolis with only a single day of rest. We’ve never met, and I’ve only got social media and its tale of ones and zeroes to rely on for everything I know about them. I feel the stale, warm summer air as I walk into the house. Jen is brushing her teeth, Alex is filling his water bottles, Devin is on breakfast duty, and I’m the new kid in school.

Thirty-six hours later, we’re huddling in a ditch in the flat north-middle of America, 170 miles from Minneapolis. The wind is blowing at 30 mph. The air is hot and dust from the fields is hurling across the landscape. After having a snack and grumbling among ourselves about the conditions, Devin and I walk to the farm across the street. We might have been looking for a way out, a ride to the next town. Maybe one of us will ask if we can camp on their land for the night, I know I’m thinking it. We forget that it’s Father’s Day, and quickly realize we’re interrupting their dinner. What I don’t expect is the kindness with which our tired inquiries are met. They offer to fill our bottles, even offer us food, though we politely decline.

It’s fucking tough hitting your emotional low on the second day of your first big bike tour. Not knowing whether or not things were going to get even worse out there over the next 30 days feels alarming. Yet I feel buoyed by the direct, honest kindness the family offers. I’m sure if we ask, they’d let us stay the night. Instead, we get enough of a boost in confidence to push on that last 15 miles, landing us at a fine BP gas station for dinner, where the warmth of a microwave burrito, a decent campground, and an awesome overnight thunderstorm round out what started as an utterly terrible day, getting us back on track. In weathering that low, I started to piece together what would eventually become the imprint of this trip.

This trip could never really be confined to the pages of a report on where we went, our route maps, our overall mileage, or our elevation gained. We did some pretty incredible stuff, saw innumerable epic – and just as many mundane – places the likes none of us had ever witnessed before. And, in many cases, will surely never see again. That’s all important. It’s beautiful. The peaks piled up on the horizon, the desert, the endless seas of grass stretching 360 degrees around you as the sun sets on another day. But if there is any reason to get out and experience the world at large, it is human.

...if there is any reason to get out and experience the world at large, it is human.

The road west is made up of the interactions that connected our nervous little traveling enclave to the greater whole we found out there. It’s not counted in miles. Rather, it’s counted in more human figures. It’s the number of diner coffee pots consumed in a one-month period (I literally couldn’t fathom a guess). The color-coded warning system you can apply to the level of annoyed mumbling from someone whose tent door has been hastily unzipped and a call to, “get up!” has been issued. It’s in how many times we farted in each other’s faces while drafting into the perpetual westerly winds. In the luck of striking up a conversation with a guy you meet at a gas station who’ll offer to cook you a fresh caught fish dinner, buy you beers, smoke you up, and let you sleep in beds after days on end sleeping outdoors on the ground. It’s the spontaneous dancing, the roadside karaoke, the swim we stole in an alpine lake when we knew it meant we’d be arriving late at our destination and would put us behind schedule.

It’s the angry barbs we throw around when we get lost and have to hop a fence into a very much in-operation Air Force test range, getting to camp in the dark and struggling to pitch your tent, tripping over one another in a tangle of tired limbs. The reality that you’re really eating off the gravel turn-off like it’s your dinner table, and the highs of sharing a meal with the most incredible collection of wayward passers-through who just happen to be on a beach in Marin County for the night. Watching from the end of the dock, clinking spent bottles of beer to the wooden floor as the marine layer engulfs the end of the sound and inches ever forward as the night carries on into guitar picked tunes and the kind of slumber that only follows a good drunk.

All those moments, all those long days crossing the vastness of this country, and finally, the Pacific Ocean. We’d been moving consistently forward the past few weeks on the road, and all of a sudden everything came to a grinding halt when we hit the coast. Maybe reality set back in with the overnight fog. Our group began to splinter the following day, as we rolled along the Pacific Coast Highway south of Half Moon Bay. One of us wanting to get home to his new family, one wanting to take the last days of the journey slowly, savoring mythic Highway 1, the remaining two of us riding on somewhere in the middle. The last days were perhaps the most beautiful, the most quiet. Hours went by where we didn’t need to say anything, our moves were synchronized. Everything became gestures or anticipated stops, we knew when the others were tired or needed to pee. Time slowed back down to a crawl. I was finally able to think back on what I was about to finish, and just what that meant.

We rolled into LA while the wildfires burned the hills above the city. I stood on the beach in Santa Monica and saw the same sun I’d watched rise up over my departure fall into the water. It cast a pale, otherworldly hue up through the smoke as it fell. I saw the past month burning and the last 30 years along with it. I left my home ready to say goodbye to what I had known all my life, to see what all was out there beyond. There on the beach I saw it brightly glowing in my memories of everyone I’d met on the long road west.