Head East Young Man
Standing in a strip mall parking lot on the eastern edge of San Diego, I slowly ate a fast-food bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit.
“You okay?” my dad asked, as he’d been done with his biscuit for a while and knew that I’d usually have kept pace. I am not a slow eater.
“Yeah, I guess so,” I replied, still unsure about the conversation I really wanted to have. Unsure about how to have it. Unsure about how to respond to the inevitable pep talk about perseverance. The inevitability of getting on my bike sat at the end of this biscuit. The slower I ate, the longer I could sit here in the rental car. I wasn’t ready to be lonely again. This break from the trip with Mike and then Dad hadn’t refilled the tank. If this were a boxing match, I realized all the early rounds were just my internal demons setting me up with body blows. Loneliness was playing the long game. I’d been worn down and it was not deterred by my patchwork solutions. As I looked east, at the mountain range I would ride over in just a few hours, I didn’t think I had the strength to pick up my gloves anymore. I was entering a late round and, on some level, I knew I’d already lost.
Dad, trying to be the best corner man he could, talked cheerfully about all the people back home pulling for me. He told me how proud he was that I was doing this, that I’d even had the guts to start. He told me how close I was to being done. “You’ve only got the south left and it’s shorter than the northern route,” he reminded me. These things were all true, but I wasn’t dreading riding my bike another 2,000 to 3,000 miles by myself. I was dreading riding out of this parking lot. One mile was the same as 3,000.
Without any other viable excuses to stall my departure, we stood there, facing each other, and hugged. I began to cry and crying felt like such a relief that I didn’t bother attempting to stop. I cried and sobbed and snorted back snot and cried some more. Dad just held on, probably crying himself, feeling that one of his kids was in some kind of pain that he couldn’t see or diagnose or put a band-aid on. He must have felt helpless. Finally, I stopped crying and I pulled back just a bit and he released his embrace. I shrugged and then wiped my swollen, puffy eyes with the sleeve of my jersey. “I’m pretty lonely,” I admitted to another person for the first time, but in a way that still attempted to downplay just how big of a problem it was becoming.
“I know,” he said, nodding in recognition that he understood. We stood for a long pause, already starting to sweat, as it was warming up quickly and was only going to get hotter the farther I got from the coast. “Head east young man!” he declared, laughing at the directional change to the quote. I knew he’d been holding that one in until this moment, so I laughed too. “I’ll see you in Texas. I love you.”
“Thanks for meeting me out here. I really appreciate it. I love you too!” We hugged again, tightly. This time there were no tears. I threw a leg over the saddle. Gave him my best “here goes nothing” face contortion and pedaled out of the parking lot and onto the highway, heading east, toward my physical home for the first time in months but away from my emotional one.
