Pint Dreams

I remember the first time I spoke my dream aloud. I’m not sure where it came from, but like all big dreams, it must have sat dormant for long, deep in me somewhere until something stirred it up to the surface. The day that happened, I sat at my local bar over a pint of beer and told my bartender I was going to ride my bicycle down the West Coast. Speaking something aloud like that was a big step for me because once I speak things into existence, I have to do them. It’s a pact I have with myself – to always be a man of my word, even if the only witness to this strange contract is the bartender serving me another pint.

Written and photographed by Dakota Graff

Since, that dream I had in that small bar evolved. I continued to speak it aloud to people with a similar response as the bartender. Eventually I shared it with others who had the same dream. It morphed from a short West Coast bike tour into a three-month, cross-country tour with a social cause. Two acquaintances who were fairly new to cycling became my best friends (and pretty solid bike riders, too). Together, we spent a cold Midwest winter eating a lot of pizza while poring over the plans for the following summer. We stressed over gear. We were giddy as we planned our route. We booked tickets. We started riding.

Seventy-four days later, my alarm went off. I reached for the pocket of my hammock, feeling around for the snooze button on my phone. The sun flared right behind the peak of the mountain, and a cold wind blew out of the southwest. It was chilly. During the night it had dropped into the high 40s, which is cold enough to wake you up at 3:00 am if you’re not adequately prepared for a gusty chill. I wasn’t, so my legs were numb throughout the night.

Finally, the sun peaked and it began to warm. Zzziiiippp. I got out of my sleeping bag and began to prepare my breakfast. It was the usual menu of oatmeal and coffee, prepared while taking shelter behind a rock to keep warm and to protect the stove’s flame from the wind. We squatted down behind the rock in our puffy jackets, our hands moving slowly from the cold, our minds still waking up. We ate and packed up camp mostly in silence.

Yesterday we climbed the Continental Divide, snaking our way up the switchbacks to the top of MacDonald Pass, where we set up camp. The wind made yesterday’s climb extra difficult, and it stuck around through the night and into the day. Our route was all set to make for an easy day, just 50 miles with 3,000 feet of descent. As we started our day, it was clear that it wasn’t going to be as easy as we thought. We battled the headwind as we rode down a 6% grade, which basically equated to us riding on flat ground. Bummer. What was supposed to be one of the most fun descents of the tour became a demoralizing downward pedal. The headwind rushed past my ears, creating a white noise that forced me into the rhythm of pedaling and thinking, that deep trance that is brought about by long-term bicycle travel.

It’s an interesting thing, to choose this type of activity. There is a specific type of suffering, if I’m allowed to call it such, brought on by riding a bicycle 4,000 miles and sleeping in the dirt every night. Some would call it “living the dream,” and I’d have to agree. This was my dream, at least. I chose it all. I invited the world in, and it pressed in forcefully, through my eyes and pores. Bicycle travel thrusts you into the world, coercing you to be intimate with your environment. It seeps into your fabric, and you become a person built of the things you’ve experienced. The sandhills of Nebraska. The water of the Potomac. The mud of Maryland. The sun of the South Dakota Badlands. The people we met along the way. All of these had pressed in and become part of the story that I was telling myself, weaving an inexplicable dream. As I rode west down the Continental Divide, the same force that pulled the water toward the coast also pulled on me. Gravity. That’s what had brought me out into those mountains in Montana. That’s what forced me to tell people that I was going to ride my bicycle across America. Each pedal stroke was an affirmation, pushing along the narrative of my life on a bicycle. It became more of a force, and less of a choice I made.

We persisted along our route. Following the Little Blackfoot River, we wound our way through the mountains, amazed at the beauty of the Montana countryside. We stopped and ate lunch at a small market. Cheap, fried food was appealing to us at the time, so we dined on corndogs and fried burritos. During lunch, we looked at our schedule and realized that we were set to be in Missoula on the 24th of July, a day ahead of our projected arrival date. It’s a rare thing to be ahead of schedule while bike touring, and we’d managed to do it twice so far. This eased our feelings toward the wind, relaxing the rest of the day quite a bit.

We took advantage of our lax schedule and battled the wind just 16 miles past our lunch spot. As we rolled into town, we stopped at a small market where we bought some groceries and a six pack, then we rolled into the campsite earlier than expected. We set up our hammocks and made use of a little free time to do some reading and writing. I cracked a beer and sat back in my hammock. I sipped my beer as I looked off into the distant mountains, something I love to do at the end of a day spent on the road. My beer was cold against my palm as I thought back to sitting at that bar, telling the bartender about my dream of bike touring.

I can’t help but think of the power of sharing dreams and ideas with others. Once I let others in, this half-baked idea became a fullfledged experience. Adding my best friends to the mix is what made it come alive, animating a flat and linear idea. But that could all be bullshit. Perhaps it was gravity all along, and much like the water running down the Continental Divide, it was always pulling me toward this experience and into these mountains, even if there is a little headwind now and then.