Trying To Be With My Friends Again: The Afterglow of a Cross-Country Bike Trip
If I could see all my friends tonight
This is Part III of a three-part series on my first bike trip across America. Part I is here, and part II is here.
(Required listening: All My Friends by LCD Soundsystem)
It took us 70 days to bike from Maine to Seattle, and about a week to drive back.
Our improvised route back brought us through multiple places that were destinations in their own right — Portland, Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, Jackson Hole, Boulder — but to us they were just items on a checklist we’d made. For the first time in months we had no mileage quotas or campgrounds to check into. It was time for us to go back to Virginia, and we could take whatever way home we felt like.
On our third day on the road we drove through Wyoming until night fell. The nearest motel was hours away and our cell reception was spotty, so we found a grassy area off the highway, put up our tents and dozed off under a sky loaded with stars.
Another time I recall seeing the Kansas City Royals’ ballpark lit up with floodlights, the crown atop its scoreboard standing out gleaming in the night. Baseball-Reference tells me they beat the Tim Lincecum-led Giants that night. In any other circumstance I’d have pushed for us to stop and check out K.C. or catch the end of the game, but the gas lights of our personal energy tanks were glowing orange. We pressed on, the stadium just one of the many roadside attractions we didn’t bother to stop and see.
I’m sure you’ve had travel days where the lines between “last night” and “this morning” become blurred. The road trip back felt like that pretty much the whole time, and somewhere along the way the line between “my future” and “whatever I’m doing with my life right now” also started to blur.
I was gazing out at the Kansan plains when it occurred on me that my calendar, and my life, stretched out forever in front of me, each totally empty. I’d taken my final final exam. I sure as hell didn’t have a boss or a paycheck. My belongings were either in the duffel bag in the back of the van, or in boxes at my parents’ house. I was a Lost Boy.
On the trip’s fourth night I slowly began drifting in and out of sleep in the van’s third row, with no idea where we’d be when I woke up. I don’t know if it was on someone’s playlist or whether the radio summoned it, but All My Friends began to play.
When we finally pulled into Blacksburg I hit up Mark, one of the last friends I had that was still a student at Tech. He welcomed me back and became the first person to whom I’d wax eloquent about the Northern Tier. You, reader, are the latest.
The Midwestern evenings in my tent where I’d check the radar and see blips of green, yellow and a little red heading our way. The moments where I’d check my bank account and see only two digits left of the decimal point. The countless garden hose showers. The Neapolitan ice cream-looking tan lines I had to wear through the winter. These were the penances I paid in exchange for a more full life. Remembering this has served me well in the years since: Travel will be uncomfortable at times, and that’s kind of the point.
My feelings on living through The Documented Era are complicated. I’m not sure it’s good for us, but damnit if I’m not grateful there are so many videos, blogs, photos and journals that keep me connected to the trip like phylacteries.
Thanks to the bike tour, there will forever be a 23-year-old within me, reminding me that there were so many magical moments that I couldn’t even keep up, that fuck man, life’s just better out there. Part of my daily pantomime includes putting that 23-year-old version of myself into a headlock as it yells through gritted teeth, “THERE’S STILL SO MUCH OUT THERE YOU HAVEN’T SEEN.”
There’s also a little goblin that lives inside me. It likes to rear its head and tell me I’m an underachiever and always will be. Reaching Seattle shut him up for a while, but all I remember about the months that followed the trip were long days at Lamplighter, sipping cold brew I could hardly afford while writing cover letters for jobs that went nowhere fast. The goblin was hollering in my ear nonstop back then.
One afternoon that fall I came across a commencement speech John Green gave, and like so many things that guy says, it stuck with me. “The real hero’s journey is the journey from strength to weakness,” Green told the graduates. “You are about to be a rookie.”
Eventually I got a job bussing tables. It wasn’t what I thought my first job post-college would look like but it was a start, and I was grateful for it and all the harebrained decisions I made that led me to it. I was back to Day 1 in Belfast, legs cramping up and seeing cross-eyed. I knew I’d be alright.
All My Friends opens with a hyperactive piano note played over and over at 140 bpm. A hi-hat and snare pattern gradually joins in a minute later. By the 90 second mark it sounds like the two are competing to see which can play more notes faster. 45 seconds after that, the guitar joins in and the song is off to the races.
iTunes tells me (not Apple Music, iTunes, the under-appreciated, MySpace of music platforms that I will use forever, fight me) that I’ve listened to All My Friends 240 times in the 10 years since that 2014 night. All My Friends might be one of the most blogged-about songs by a certain subsect of Millennials (I’m partial to Ryan Leas’ ode to it from 2013) because people will be finding safe harbor under All My Friends forever. When each generation reaches their mid 30s, the same age James Murphy was when he wrote it, they’ll hear Murphy sing about spending the first five years trying to get with the plan, and the next five years trying to be with your friends again and want to call up their best friends and tell them they love them.
All My Friends came on right when I needed it most. It is energetic and wistful, youthful and wisened. It’s everything I felt that night in the van in August 2014.
All My Friends reminds me that the world’s a giant playground and that we shouldn’t just stay on the monkey bars. That with enough peanut butter and gumption I can do anything. That spending time with friends can make anything feel better. That the sense of wonder I felt every day on the Northern Tier is out there, hiding in the places I haven’t been. That all I really want in life is to go to new places with my friends.
It reminds me that I still haven’t gotten out of that van.