A howling wind blows from the North Sea slamming the shoreline. Pulsing gusts hector the hedges and trees parallel to my narrow track, bending the pale-yellow grasses near to the ground and violently shaking the sheltering foliage. With each successive slam from off the dark, turgid waters, my front tire scrabbles for traction and headway. The dark singletrack threads through the convulsing meadow as I head west and south along the northern border of Denmark’s coastline.
Canting at a 45-degree angle to the ground, I keep the loaded Ritchey gravel bike upright by pressing hard against the surging winds. I lower my head to just above the stem and shift my body weight to compress both tires equally. Against the sideways torrents and the pitched screams of wind originating hundreds of miles away in the Arctic Circle, I pedal circles, adjusting the handlebars minutely against the weather. For a morning and into an afternoon, I hunch and pedal and curse and furtively look for a break in the skies. There’s nothing but thick gray clouds, a shattered sea, and the darker menace of squalls galloping my way.
“If you want to make God laugh, show her your plans.”
–Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
And then, when the track bends harder south the now cross-tail wind and rains push me wildly, accelerating my loaded bike in fits and starts. On cue, my rear tire loses pressure dramatically and I’m riding on a rim with a town 50 kilometers away, with my body temperature dangerously low, and my fund of curses hours ago expended. The bike rolls to a stop and I start removing bags and the rear wheel to repair the problem and get moving knowing my body will start uncontrollably shaking if I dally.
I’d left Stockholm, Sweden 10 days before on the way to Portugal, and during that brief stretch the entire range of possible weather save snow and sleet had visited these northern countries in the normally balmy month of July. The locals apologized. I stared in disbelief every morning at the Ventusky weather app. Ferries from outer islands stayed moored to their docks. I layered and stripped clothes a dozen, 15 times a day. For nine months prior I had planned routes, organized and purchased gear, built a bike from a frameset, and trained 300- and 400-mile weeks during May and June: but Mother Nature smiled, did what she pleased, and showed me once again, over and over for the following two months the humbling arrogance of human endeavor.
The Ritchey and I rolled into San Sebastián, Spain instead of Portugal in October of 2023, but this time the trip-ending reflections which always had found me wistful and desirous to continue, posited differing perspectives which until then felt unknown and once known, disavowed. I’ve kept them ever since.
You’ll never make it
After exiting the bathroom at Half Moon Beach State Park, I found a man appraising my bike. He stood a distance away, then stepped forward to run a finger across the junctions of the head tube, the top tube and the downtube. The once-yellow paint stood scorched and peeled away. Globs of solder sat like bumpy toad skin around the crudely welded pipe sections now gusseting the once-pristine lines of the Ross touring bike.
The tall slender man wore his road persona as easily as breathing. His bleached clothes, ragged hair, and leathered copper skin spoke volumes to me about his journey without a single word uttered. I’d ridden that morning from the YMCA in San Francisco after training and busing up from San Diego at the end of a summer working fishing boats. I’d start graduate school and student teaching in the fall of 1983.
He turned his head slowly my way. “Where are you from?”
“San Diego.”
“Where are you headed?”
“San Diego”
He chewed my answer for a while. I looked past him to the open stretch of beach nestled in fog, a craggy headland to the right and up the coast thrust into the surly ocean and a settling dew that had me dancing to go and set up a tent and make dinner.
“What happened?”
“I hit a rider head-on in the dark two days ago, bent my wheel into the frame, and a skipper in the boatyard made this fix …” my words trailed off as his eyebrows raised and he rubbed his forehead. He tousled his hair and sighed, “You’ll never make it.”
Tremors of fear, anxiety, and some small surges of anger burbled within.
“I came up that way, Caracas as my starting point,” he began, “and you, my friend, will end your trip somewhere down the road. Hate to say it,” he intoned softly, “but your ride is toast. If your frame fails catastrophically, well, it won’t be good.”
I could feel the warm satisfactions from navigating out of the city, along the coast, down the serpentine road to Half Moon Bay, and locating a first ever campsite on a first ever bike tour dribble away and pool at my feet. All summer, I had ridden in the dark to Mission Bay from North Park to start work before dawn on the cattle boats. Riding home, I chose to climb Texas Street readying for the grades in Big Sur. With one week between work and class, this ride would clear my head. And now, this well-traveled rider had doomed my efforts with a few shared words.
“I’m not stopping. I don’t care, I’m not stopping. I’m just not stopping, I just started today, and …” I let the words trail away. There was nothing more to say.
“Vaya con Dios, amigo. Buen suerte a tus viajes.”
Seven days later the boatyard-welded Ross rolled into North Park and onto the grass in my front yard. Resting the machine against a pepper tree I lay down on my back, the sky illuminated through a green lace of branches rubbing their limbs against each other in the breeze. As the sky muted its colors with the passing dusk, a kaleidoscope of images flew through my mind: jagged rock walls plunging into a purple sea, campsites in the redwoods, serpentine high speed curves and dips in Big Sur, a boat ride to Catalina with an overnight at Sharks Cove, and the addictive, sensual pleasures of traveling under one’s own power that only grew as each day passed with an open and unlimited horizon.
Like a true addict, I knew when I’d mainlined the good stuff. And I wanted more.
Only fools and tourists
During the summer of 1988 at a campground nestled on the western slopes of the Cascade Mountains, I stirred slowly boiling water over a single-burner stove, awaiting the moment when pasta added to a single pan would provide me with dinner after a 60-mile headwind ride up the slopes in that verdant pine forest. The day’s breezes that had bent the trees as supplicants toward the Pacific Ocean now wafted gently through their trunks and limbs, rendering the high-altitude melody that airy rivers sing.
I had left the Eugene, Oregon airport that morning brimming with optimism and excitement. Now, hunched over a hissing stove, road-weary and aching, hungry and discouraged, I pondered the weeks ahead that would carry me to Florida on a bike leaning against sugar pines sheltering the tent.
Looking up from my stirring, a kind-faced woman dressed head to toe in denim took in my campsite. The usual pleasantries ensued: she asked about my journey, I asked her about the distance to the summit and the road conditions that would take me down and into the desert landscape of western Idaho.
After pocketing my fee, she turned to leave and I asked, “Do you know the weather for tomorrow?”
She paused a long moment as her face wrinkled a grin. “Only fools and tourists try to predict the weather,” she answered, as if even the trees standing nearby understood such an obvious truism. For the next six weeks as I pushed the Paramount over the Rockies, across the plains of corn-growing America, and finally sluicing right and south along the Mississippi River toward Louisiana where we’d eventually finish in Orlando, I kept my eyes on the horizon and my thoughts with her words. While both tourist and fool, I still knew she had spoken as only a person can who’d spent decades out-of-doors.
A faultline of difference
We rounded a bend to find an immense sign containing a head-high map, where geographic details explained, improbably, the small history of the far-away San Andreas Fault. At this bluff on the South Island of New Zealand, we stopped there. My wife and I dismounted our loaded tandem and read. As we paced the packed soil above the verdant hillside, we came to learn how the Alpine Fault ridging the South Island was in fact a likely cousin if not a twin (in tectonic terms) to the rift that had lurched violently through Northridge, California, a paltry 25 miles from our home that past January of 1994.
After traveling through Europe, Asia and Australia for the previous 12 months, we now saw a split in the earth that would ostensibly lead us home.
As I pondered this idea, reading how the tectonic plates there rubbed against those in California, two fellow touring riders pulled into the overlook hailing us both. Their panniers and bicycle brands showed them as Europeans, so I asked how they now found themselves in the antipodes.
“We started in Alaska …” the taller fellow chuckled, scratching his chin.
“… And,” his bearded companion continued, “we ended in Tierra del Fuego. And now, we’re here.” And with a grand flourish, he waved one hand in a broad sweep across the mountains and the valley below. They both laughed at his gesture and swigged water from their bottles.
Margo and I looked at each other. These two had been on the road twice as long as we two had and their spirits seemed buoyant, effervescent almost.
“Awesome!” I exclaimed. “I have so many questions!” And for a brief time, we exchanged ideas about tires, camping gear, frame material (we three swore by steel), and riding on the cusp of the seasons. Margo drew away and went back to the historical signage. As our conversation drew to its close, I asked, “When do you return to Germany?”
The men exchanged glances; clearly this was a topic of discussion amongst themselves. “Jürgen here, he leaves from Auckland in two weeks. As for me,” Hörst near-whispered, “I’m trying to find a way to extend. I’m an engineer with a firm in München, and … I don’t want to go home.”
Margo heard this, and she looked sharply in my direction.
“And you two, when do you go home to California?” queried Jürgen.
A long pause ensued. Finally, Margo answered, “We’ll fly to Rarotonga, then Fiji, and meet my family in Tahiti. KC here is going to stay on in Tahiti, and I’ll go home.”
There it was, spoken aloud, how we two saw these 15 months of travel: she pining for home and I wanting to continue. Sensing tension and an urge to carry on, Jürgen and Hörst said their goodbyes. “Wiedersehen! Chus!” they called while coasting down and into the valley below. Margo turned to me while we buckled our helmets. “It says on the sign that down in the valley where two plates meet, we can stand on both sides of a divide.”
“It’s a metaphor, Margo, right here at the bottom of the world: you’re crossing and I’m not. You’re already mentally home and I’ve one foot in both worlds. I don’t want this to end, and I’m afraid travels home come to …” I let my words stop there as we’d talked this topic to a standstill over the past month.
“We’re going home, we’re going home,” I continued. “We have jobs, we have a home, we have obligations and yet …” I searched for the ephemeral feelings found in a life on the road and failed. “Ah, never mind. Let’s ride.”
We pedaled on down the road across that island nation and onto three more on our way across the Pacific. And in the fall of 1994, I traded back my bibshorts and boardshorts for leather shoes, slacks, button-down shirts and the complicated expectations of a wife, a workplace, and a society that seemingly placed little-to-no tangible value in the freedoms and insights and explorations found from facing a new set of challenges on the road each day as part and parcel of living.
The rift acknowledged by us both in that valley would start an inexorable parting of a life once bound together and would never after be the same, nor would life together hold us tightly as it once did.
A body of language
Nestled beneath a canopy of trees, the steel and wood tables of the seaside café sat askew on the uneven flagstones verging the Mediterranean Sea. A waiter of supreme calm reinforced by his decades of service walked past my table meeting my eye. I held up the now-empty coffee cup and intoned, “Con leche, por favor.” With a nod, he crossed the street to the main building fronting a cove in Cadaqués, Spain.
An open-water swim competition had transformed this sleepy starting place for the day into a parading mass of vitality. Men and women of all ages, some capped and striding in their body-clinging wetsuits, others clad in only Lycra and slippers met in huddled groups, back-slapped old friends, walked in pairs and threes looking for their start point, and by appearance seemed overjoyed to plunge their wriggling bodies like so many salmon into the Med. Yesterday morning, this café held just a few locals. Today, hundreds of competitors strode and primped and laughed and reveled in their shared joy on a cold, slate-gray morning.
The Ritchey, loaded and ready for the five-day trek to San Sebastian across the spine of the western Pyrenees, leaned against a railing to the right. Ahead at a preferred table sat a mother and daughter, I assumed, who had taken this exact spot yesterday. They wore flowing white dresses of light cotton, they shared walnut-colored shoulder-length hair streaked by sun and salt, and their forms conveyed the wispiness of seabirds in flight. Yesterday as well as today, they sat side by side and talked over coffee. It seemed ritual and comforting, their grace in each other’s presence.
The waiter, near my age, swept my small porcelain cup and saucer onto a tray, and left a few last steaming ounces of caffeine I’d need to climb the nine kilometers out of the town. Crunching the last bits of pan tomate con jamon, I wrote a last few words in a journal and looked up as the mother and daughter’s conversation turned from shared bits of news to a fulsome stream. The daughter, now facing sideways, had both her hands at shoulder height and as she spoke her forearms started a rotation away and toward her mother. The circling hands accelerated with the intensity of her utterances and soon her torso joined in a rhythmic pulsing. She decried a boy, a lover, a man of shoddy character and wastrel ways and she had finally finished with him. Her mother, rolling a cigarette from a tobacco pouch, nodded her head and interjected shrugs, pursed lips, the affirmative “Si si si,” and let the younger continue until finally the distressed woman finished with a curse and a hand spiking upward.
The mother, sitting in a blue haze of smoke, waved the fog away, stubbed the cigarette and reached for her daughter’s jaw with an outstretched and practiced hand.
“Ay, si, cabrón.” She drew her fingers to the daughter’s temple, through her hair, and let her hand rest on the bare shoulder. Those three words spoke of a mother acknowledging the hearts of men and the anguish of the female soul. “Ay, si, cabrón,” she intoned quietly and without rancor.
The movements, the patience, the tenderness, the visceral and loving touch struck me forcibly as these two women spoke and listened in this waterside café. The Moors had swept up from Africa to conquer and hold Iberia for 800 years, the Vikings had plundered and pillaged the northern shores, the Pyrenees kept the Gauls at bay until the Visigoths rampaged, and the Catalan empire had thrived and existed long before Ferdinand and Isabella stamped their names and courtly ambitions on this land. And here before me now at a collection of six tables before a cove of moored sailboats and a bustling mob of amateur athletes, the eternal love of a mother for her daughter played out near silently in a dance of words and touches that long superseded the former rulers of this peninsula.
I had arrived in Cadaqués yesterday, but at that singular moment I felt as forcibly as a plunge into a cold southern sea that I was back. Back to a world of passion, back to a world of maternal love, back to a world where conquerors had come and gone and had left in their wake a people of uncommon intensity and vitality.
I clipped into my pedals, put Hermanos Gutierrez on Spotify, and climbed for a half hour out and away from the sea and a town Salvador Dali claimed as his home and who knew from where his inspiration had come: Catalonia and the passionate people who had lived this land for thousands of years.
No one’s perfect
“Que triste?”
I looked up from my bike in the scorching midday sun outside Pamplona to see a man with a basket and a wide grin.
“Si, triste, caballero. Mi bicicleta no funciona.” I pointed at the brake caliper, held up my thinned brake pads and the mangled spring. “Joda me.”
The man laughed heartily. “English?” he queried, trying to ascertain my origin.
“No, Estados Unidos. Americano. Californio.”
His eyes widened. “Well, no one’s perfect!”
Now, it was my time to laugh. With sweat burning my eyes, and with my bike all but immobilized four hours from its destination, here I stood with a man speaking perfect English delightedly cracking my huevos. So, the chuckles came. I laughed and kicked dirt and stood exasperated at my catastrophic mechanical state. Two months ago, I had departed Stockholm, and now I stood stymied on the verge of completion.
The man saw my dilemma, it seemed. “I have a friend in the next village. He has a bike shop. He is an uncommon mechanic. I will give his name.” I retrieved my journal, and he scribbled the shop name, the man’s name, and the telephone number. I knew his friend couldn’t help me, but I allowed for this kindness because it’s poor form for a traveler to do otherwise.
“I am going there,” he pointed, “to collect fungi … how do you say, mushrooms, for our meal today. If you are still here, I can offer a lift to town.” I looked at his tidy but compact car and knew we three would never fit. It wasn’t a workable offer; it was an offer born of compassion however impractical.
Four hours later I guided the crippled Ritchey down sinuous mountain pass roads, feathering my rear brake and holding high speed corners for fear of smoking what was left of the reduced stopping power. I had switched pads front to rear, ditched a spring, and limped my way to the glimmering La Concha promenade on the Atlantic shore of San Sebastián. I found a remembered tap room, paid for a “llevar” flagon of fine IPA, and lowered my body onto a bench facing the surf break at Zurriola.
Passing tourists stared. Locals paid no mind as this city hosts Camino walkers during season and riffraff like me year-round. I tried to view what they had seen: a bike with discolored and worn bags, an aged man in dirty shoes, salt-stained clothing needing repair and a wash, a head of bleached and ratty hair, and a face worn by wind and sun and in need of a razor. I felt and likely looked like the bike tourer in Half Moon Bay who 40 years ago had tried to dissuade me from pedaling south.
That irony didn’t go unthought.
The travel writer Paul Theroux related in a recent interview with The Surfer’s Journal that when today’s young travelers play one-upmanship with their passport stamps, and then turn to him, he says he’s been places they never will visit: the past. Sitting oceanside at Zurriola, it seemed as if the road that I’d pedaled to reach that bench had lain in front of my wheel 40 years past and had since wound its way to that point.
And so it goes
This past winter as I came awake in the dark and listened to the thump and smack of pitching waves crashing towards shore, my thoughts did not race with expectations of thrilling rides to be had. Instead, I knew by the booming through my bedroom window and by reading the buoy data the night before that I’d likely drink coffee on the shore in the warming sunrise and plot a safer, more aging-body-friendly place to surf than Silver Strand Beach. I was done with hold downs, cartwheels underwater, bouncing off sandbar bottoms and all manner of physical battering surfing waves of consequence delivers as the dues paid for the thrills given. I had come to accept that I was now, after 50 years in the water, more of a fair-weather surfer than a hollow wave, air drop, run-for-your-life player in the ocean.
It’s one thing to have your body tell you this; it’s quite another to have your mind confer with your body and have agreement. Recently, I saw a clip of Gerry Lopez (perhaps the most agile and skillful surfer to grace the ocean) dotter upright. This had given me pause; his decades of yoga practice hadn’t staved off the inevitable. For a kook like me, watching Gerry make three distinct movements to reach his feet reinforced my earlier winter’s affirmation of time’s toll: if Gerry was struggling – albeit at 75 years old – so are we all.
“…I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms …”
–Henry Thoreau, Walden
For the past 40 years, I had commuted to work in the dark and suffered headwinds home. Riding bikes, building bikes, wrenching bikes, talking bikes had denoted the way I had made my way through the world. And, ever since reaching San Diego in the fall of 1983 on a bodged-together Ross following my first loaded tour, I had finished every bike tour the same way: wistful, elated, fulsome, and not wishing to stop. The European Divide Tour last year that finished in San Sebastián, instead of Portugal, changed this. Sweden, Denmark, and to an extent Germany had soaked through my skin and frozen me in ways previously unknown; 42-degree days (that’s 102 in Freedom Units) near the Massif Central of France left me feeling like a rotisserie chicken and wanting nothing more of baking roads and searing heat ever again, and my turn north to the Basque region away from Portugal was prompted by searing temperatures west of Cadaqués. Spain, as it always does, saved my sanity and set my heart alight … but it wasn’t enough.
Sitting on the bench in front of Zurriola, sipping a fine handcrafted IPA and looking at the surf I’d play in for the next week did not send me into paroxysms of regret. For the first time, I was done. I wanted to go home. I wanted time with my partner, I wanted meals with my adult boys, I wanted fall days above Ojai riding a mountain bike in the stillness found little elsewhere in modern life. The familiarity, the acceptance, the comforts of home and family, the ribald camaraderie of lifelong friends now superseded any desire to continue riding a bike in search of the ephemeral pleasures of discovery and body-wracking challenge. After 50,000 touring kilometers and uncountable meters of climbing, I could say to myself that I’d rather drink a coffee with the Channel Islands in my view than sip a café con leche on the shores of the La Concha.
The boy who had shoved a cardboard box onto a train in the summer of 1983 still lives; he’s just now starting to see how life bends in an arc, and that arc’s curve rolls as interminably toward its horizon as a northwest swell slamming the North Jetty after roaring down from the Bering Sea. Those waves travel and end here at the end of my street; this journey of a particular kind of riding and of a particular character of brutality 40 years on have too come to an end. I’ve treks planned for the next decade, and they’ll likely run months at a stretch, but I’ll temper them with the knowledge that 40 years of distance cycling give resilience, grit, and hard-earned wisdom even as those same decades simultaneously rob the body of easy strength, dim youth’s inherent vibrancy, and temper this rider’s desire for unrestrained, days-long suffering.
So, as this surfer contemplates the manageable breaks to negotiate in the challenging seas abutting the shores here, so too will this rider find pleasures in bicycle travel that revives the inherent joys, the freedoms, and elán we all have felt when two wheels first transported us like the wings of earthbound flight down roads to where we had never been.
Kevin (KC) Buddhu is an Escape Collective member who found distance cycling as a 14-year-old in San Diego and has yet to stop pedaling. A retired English teacher who taught in independent and public schools at home and abroad, he used his summers and foreign lands as opportunities for two-wheeled travel. Today, he happily resides in Oxnard, California where you can find him at dawn, coffee in hand, weighing the possibilities of the day to come. Next month, he leaves for a year in Costa Rica with Peace Corps Response. He plans to bring the Ritchey, some bikepacking gear, and a fully rigid titanium mountain bike for whatever adventures he may find. You can follow him on Instagram.
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