It's the Mileage

 "Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they’ve faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked."

Mary Schmich, "Wear Sunscreen" hypothetical commencement speech, Chicago Tribune, 1997

Some weeks ago - enough that they amount to "last June," I took the plunge, as it were. Not a big life decision, nothing like that. There have been plenty of those in the last three years. I mean that I ventured to "Mike's Cameras" and invested a few dollars converting into digital form about a third of the photographs - which I'd had developed as slides - taken during Bikecentennial '76.

It was the bike ride I took, from Reedsport, Oregon to Yorktown, Virginia...June through August. I was unprepared to see some of the images, having tucked them away more than forty years ago.

There is one taken in the very early days of the ride - my modest fitness level apparent in the shape of my calves. I am looking into the deep forest approaching Eugene, Oregon, in the first week of June. Everything, including me, is clean and bright. My journey had just begun and the miles, the many arduous miles, had not yet tempered us.

In another, I am somewhere near the top of a climb, looking back at the road I have traveled. I was riding a bike with (perhaps - I never really weighed it) thirty pounds of gear that represented home and hearth.

I had not arrived at that point effortlessly, but that I was there at all was a testament to naive optimism as much as skill or preparation. It wasn't long after that I reached the highest point of my journey, in Colorado.

It wasn't long after that a chance encounter led directly to a return to Colorado, mostly for good. She would enter the University of Denver that fall, in the same school year I would graduate Northeastern University in Boston. Although the relationship was short-lived, the roots I set in Colorado proved impossible to ignore. Less than two years after I moved to Denver I found the law enforcement job that I sought, and that would be the beginning of a career that provided - and continues to provide - everything I might ask.

In Missouri I met a couple from San Francisco who, like many of us who'd been on the road for nearly two months, were ready to be finished. "I just want to get to the fucking end," muttered the male half as we rode together in the late July heat and humidity. In August, I got there. The last stop, the last office of Bikecentennial '76. The trailhead that marked the official end of my journey. Good byes.

I had no idea, then, the adventures, the possibilities, that were ahead. Sitting here, happily retired in the company of the love of my life, and our companion animals, I don't look like the young, exceptionally fit rider who met an improbable challenge in one of the summers of my youth.

So many miles have disappeared under the front wheel of my bikes in the intervening 47 years. I am blessed that the front wheel is still turning.