life cycles

Me and the Bicycle

Throughout that journey, from a child to an adult, I suppose the bicycle became my touchstone, my talisman. Of all that will be sold away, please allow that the bicycle be the last thing to remain sacred.

I loved cycling through impulse, through instinct, and long before I was cursed to try articulating that feeling with words. Across the miles I’ve given it a great deal of thought, finally resolved that perhaps for me the bicycle represents some small saviour from mortality, the opportunity to make something greater of myself, to move with such speed and power that a portion of the mind is able to believe in magic, believe we humans are not after all so banal as I must otherwise confront. I love the bicycle like nothing else, the one institution I’m happy to live by, for in it you can feel euphoria.

Kash d’Anthe

It had started in Istanbul, the Cihangir crossroads, where I’d met a couple who were a year into cycling around the world. They’d told me of a Scot by the name of Kash d’Anthe, aiming to break a world record for a circumnavigation by bicycle. Back in London I’d looked him up, and soon after, by chance, scarcely had to look for him at all… d’Anthe was well on his way to minor stardom, a subject for television, advertising and corporate endorsements. Come that time he’d broken the record, ridden 18,000 miles in little over six months, an average of 90 miles daily. The start of my curiosity was the feasibility of the target. Riding leisurely to Istanbul I’d averaged 70 miles a day despite lengthy breakfasts, no thought of haste and sitting in cafés scribbling stories for five hours each afternoon. And yet that alone would never have been enough to tempt me into the pettiness of that dumb record.

It was the manner in which d’Anthe went about his feat that roused my ire… snagged a pathological part of my personality I’m not the least bit proud of.

He was sponsored, up to the eyeballs he was sponsored… banks and investment funds all over his chest, his smiling face and a thumbs-up next to a business model that cared nothing for people or for bicycles, only the right numbers in the right columns of a balance sheet. I was well desensitised by then, didn’t expect much to be left sacred, but it was the final straw… to see the bicycle reduced to no more than a corporate marketing strategy. We had things in common… d’Anthe and me were not so very different, both in our mid-twenties, both politics graduates. I couldn’t fathom how someone of such similar years and education, of the same passion for travelling by bicycle, could come to hold such different priorities.

His pitch was a strong one, a stroke of genius. The financial sector he endorsed was without heart or love, working only for financial gain, and so the undertaking, ostensibly for spiritual gain and the joy of the task, was perfect. Their business wore suits and worked in skyscrapers while d’Anthe would see those who still lived in huts and dressed in loincloths, all traditional-looking to offset the garish and the modern. Finance wanted to be brave, to be beautiful… finance wanted to be adventure. They loved d’Anthe, were ready to make his whole life easier. They threw money at it… he sold… and with a smattering of charity thrown in, the banking world purchased a tiny piece of the human spirit.

I decided to go around the world, faster than him, and without bankers billowing my sails. The following excerpts are from the book I’ve since written about that ride.

Russia – Day 27 – 2,801 Miles

It was enormous. Russia. A place in which to realise just how you squandered all your superlatives of size back in the Ukraine. You see the trucks coming down the road from five kilometres away… thin pipes run above the wheels, trickle water to quell the heat that builds in the tyres. Road signs show cities 1,000 kilometres in the distance. The people are silent. They’d planted trees, twoskin deep, all along the roadside. It was so you couldn’t look out, out into the abyss, that endless vast that would creep into your mind and drive you insane. Occasionally at crossroads I would catch a glimpse of that sea I swam in, where I could drown in land long before there came a town in which I might slake my thirst and revitalise. As I rode, I saw squares, off-colour rectangles drawing closer. Houses, habitations… I thought I’d made it, that I was saved. And then I neared, and those squares and rectangles were only the spaces between the trees lining still more endless fields. Green, gold, brown and ploughed, black and ashen, the thing that never changed was it would always be only another field.

Kazakhstan – Day 35 – 3,722 Miles

In Kazakhstan I spent over 2,000 kilometres on a single road with hardly a turning, a gallon of water carried over my back wheel, pannier full of bread and jam, a head full of worst-case scenarios in which my bicycle broke down between settlements. The villages were 100 miles apart, then 150, and eventually 200. Imagine London were only a village, Manchester were another, and now imagine nothing in between upon that single road that joins them. You can see the towns in the distance, a single radio mast stands skinny against the horizon, comes slowly into view from 30 miles away. Kazakhstan is the ninth-biggest country in the world but with a population of just 16 million. I rode through some 3,000 miles of it… find it hard to believe even that many people are living there.

The land delighted in its endless scrub, and among those wastes I found myself smiling, simply smiling, for never have I been so at peace. The steppe was just a mirror, could comfortably represent either stark death or perfect simplicity, and each time, against that landscape so eternal I realised all I saw was in fact only a measure of my own impatience or contentment. Out there I was humbled, so tenderly was I humbled, for I took with me all my earthly weight… my cynicism, fear, my ego and insecurity… and, when we arrived in those wastelands, they saw the world in which they wished to live, so that very soon, all had fled from me.

At dusk I watched settlements from afar, eating a small meal before disappearing back into the road. Trails went, kicked up behind the goats, the horses and bulls being driven back inside the mud walls of the village. A bell would ring from a short tower, and I watched figures sitting lazily on horseback as they rounded up the herd, lines of dust making their way slowly back through the gate from different points on the landscape. Those sunsets in the Caucasus were something else, a tiny, nightly supernova, like a hot ruby sinking to the bottom of a well… you could light a candle on them, smouldering in a pink that turned to blood. Peels of black cloud would sit upon the red, leeches sucking that firmament to the last before floating to the tops of the sky, greying, and then melting to join the night.

For a while I’d lay awake, growing certain the stars were breeding overhead. Every night there were more, new stars appearing among the million, white waves of cosmos trailing among them. Sometimes I would stare upwards and imagine the outside universe as nothing but light, the world itself wrapped in a black paper bag with tiny holes, pinpricks all through the walls and roof of our resting place. In those lands there was no need for a tent… rain was impossible and the mosquitoes could not survive, the silence too absolute for their wings to hum through. The stillness would play a lyre as I looked up at the sky, resolving to keep my eyes open until a shooting star had passed. In most places I have lived, such a game would have failed entirely, yet out on those plains it comes within five minutes. The tail of that burning rock would take a needle from those scrub thorns, and together they stitched closed my eyelids each night. The scrub sat over me, bathed my forehead as if a warm flannel, soothed me to sleep beneath those acrobatics.

China and car horns – Day 72 – 7,333 Miles

The car horns, ever the car horns wore me down, screaming all day long. They screamed that I move, screamed that they were coming… no thing too complicated, no situation too nuanced for explanation by car horn. Each time, for a whole month, it felt as though my eardrum was being spliced open with a blunt dagger. I grunted, grimaced, shouted, grew ever more furious, but it was futile – the car horn is invaluable to Chinese culture, it props up the nation itself. That horn expressed all standard scenarios of the road plus infinite more besides. I imagined the hidden rage that horn must have buried in the population, grew convinced

Chinese society retained its order by use of that horn and the frustrations it nullified. I’m 5’2” and identical to half a billion others, listen to this horn! My culture, history and ethnicity are repressed, listen to this horn! They think they’ve made an emancipated woman out of me but all they did was give me a truck to drive through a desert, listen to this horn! I’m a homosexual but don’t even know it because of this crushing, sexual conservatism, listen to this horn! Ten per cent economic growth? Maybe on the East Coast, listen to this horn! China, a great nation, then where are our basic freedoms? Listen to this horn! The sky is thick with smog, rivers run black and my child coughs blood… listen to this horn! Listen to this horn! No use gesticulating either for, if I waved a fist at them in rage, they simply took it for greeting or support and let off another volley my way. No concern could not be raised and answered by the blast of a horn. Like a psychiatrist’s couch, it saved them from themselves, it was their dissent, their protest, their therapy.

Thailand – Day 88 – 8,943 Miles

Thailand was kind to me, the coast drawing me out through canals and estuaries, beneath highways that lifted traffic above the water before sinking into Bangkok. Evenings broke with the smell of incense lit, and I watched people leaving their houses, slipping on a pair of sandals, the heels of which would clap against the ground as they strolled to shrines at the bottom of the garden. They placed gifts, put flames to incense, said prayers and bowed, unscrewing the cap from a bottle of water and setting it down for the dead to drink. I remember the monk, sitting in orange robes upon the rear of a pickup truck driving by. He looked at me with a smile, put out a level palm in front of him, pushed it towards me and picked something from it with the thumb and fingers of his other hand. In his grip he lifted some invisible ball of sorcery, and with a flick of the wrist, he cast it into the air, blew… commanded his blessings upon me as his outline pulled into the distance.

America – Day 100 – 11,356 Miles

Those first two weeks in America I was on holiday, rode the most generous Pacific tailwind and still turned out the slowest fortnight of the whole six months… all of it lost in discussion of capital punishment and gun laws, watching the Pacific, singing aloud, full of Dylan as every state in the Union went down into my soul.

Oregon. It was Oregon that really did it… it was Oregon that sunk me. I rode through Oregon, through Oregon, through Oregon… I want to ride through Oregon every day for the rest of my life. All down that coast you climb up into the forests. Climb up. Climb up. The road tilts, hugs cliffs, hugs hillsides, runs under cover of the trees until you reach the top and begin to pick up speed… lots of it… more still, and then you’re sweeping back down, and up ahead the dark of the forest gives way to the light of the sun, and you sweep out the forest so that the sun it hits everything at once. And the trees, they are emeralds… and the Pacific, it’s sapphire, and it all glows white in the sun, and the Pacific… my god, but the Pacific it’s such a good name for an ocean. Rocking and fluttering and sparkling, with the turning pages of books and stories and gossamer yarns. The ocean moved against white sands with their dusty trunks of driftwood, washedup and tossed to the beach, like dinosaur remains and whale skeletons, a cemetery of rib cages and tusks from creatures of another world.

I would ride down those hillsides, my head would fall to one side, my nose and the corner of my mouth would lift in enquiry, eyes glazing in search of clarification. Really… are you sure? Excuse me, but there must be some sort of mistake… for this cannot be. I died about five times a day down that Oregon coast, don’t hesitate in saying it ruined the rest of my life. The air from the Pacific made me sad to think one day I’d have to breathe the air of the deserts, the air of a city, the air of any place other than that Oregon coast where I rode my bicycle. I saw infinity there… that was the problem. Right there in Oregon I glimpsed infinity. The history of the world came down to meet me, revealed all of the serene chaos that wound up beautiful. I saw it all in the palm of my hand, and with it my mind blew open, so that afterwards, once I’d pieced myself together again, so it was that I saw how small I was against it all, my blink of an eye that passes for a life. I know I probably don’t seem so very old to most of you, down here and still shy of thirty… and yet, once you’ve seen infinity… you come to realise how soon your time is up, how quickly it all goes by. Live life like you’re dying… that’s what I’m getting at, my advice in all this.

Day 163 – Castille – 17,103 Miles

I rattled big days: 150, 150, 150, 150, 150 miles… five in succession, knocking them off the bat, one after the next, with an average three hours sleep. I still like the ideal, that back-against-the-wall sort of stuff … but even with that… I’m not so sure I was enjoying life much by then. I hit La Mancha… La Mancha hit me back with a force far greater than I had spirit to resist, Don Quixote illustrated in town centres and bars for 100 miles, riding with horse and lance through the windmills of La Mancha in the name of chivalry and ideals. I chased after him with my bicycle and panniers, just as hopeless, the end of my quest for a world bettered by circumnavigation. The end was in sight, the money all but gone, my enthusiasm for records long a thing of the past.

And now, looking back, I have a peculiar relationship with the ride in so many ways. Despite the good intentions with which I set out to break the record, riding a bicycle around the world presents so many experiences that teach you how silly the idea of records is, and I was never that convinced to begin with. The idea of racing against someone else’s time was at lots of moments a lot of fun... perhaps even more so with hindsight, it’s exciting to remember waking up after a few hours rest and knocking out another 150 miles. That said, my fondest memories, really, come from the very steady, manageable, hundred-mile days I rode for the first three months, through central Asia to Shanghai. If not then, then the days in the US, when I forgot about the record altogether and just stopped to talk politics, or took it so beautifully easy as I rode the Pacific Coast.

I think the record adds something to the book that I subsequently wrote; it lends a good narrative, and a context of time that I hope distinguishes it from a lot of literature from the saddles of touring cyclists. The sense of wanting to change the world, and the ideals I set out with, offered some strong touchstones that I always found myself returning to. The people you meet, and their own life stories, never stray too far from those same values, and now that’s how I see my book in some ways, the story of the world by bicycle. Next up is the story of the city by bicycle, drawn from three years as a courier in London. I’m still developing as a writer, just as we’re all always developing, either as people, or in the skills we turn our hands to. That’s what keeps the wheels of life turning.

Julian’s book, Life Cycles, from which the excerpts above are taken, is out now.

Standing inside the pipe, our eyes looked up to the funnel’s beginning, as if we were tiny ants trapped in a sink’s plughole.