When Jedidiah Jenkins set out to bicycle from Oregon to Patagonia in 2013, as recounted in his best-selling book “To Shake the Sleeping Self,” he had no bike touring experience and didn’t even own a bike until shortly before he set out. He’d been inspired by a co-worker who had completed such a trip a few years before, though he doesn’t share any advice his friend may have given him other than he should start telling all his friends he planned on such a trip so he wouldn’t back out.
He followed that advice, beginning to spread the word among friends three years before he set out that he intended to quit his job as a lawyer and bicycle the length of South America when he turned thirty. Despite having three years to prepare for it, he didn’t have the sense to train or bother to learn Spanish, dispensing with the language course he purchased after a couple of days.
His trip gets off to a rocky start, managing just twenty-five miles the first day and after several more days bemoaning he hadn’t trained for it. When he reaches Mexico he begins hitchhiking and taking buses. If nothing else, this book is a strong testimonial to the axiom that if one isn’t fully committed to the bicycle, remaining faithful to it in all circumstances, and starts taking alternate means of transportation when the challenge becomes too much, one is doomed to continually abandoning the bike when adversity presents itself.
Once one buckles to headwinds or boring scenery or too much traffic or fatigue or excessive climbing or heat or any of the many other challenges that is the lot of the touring cyclist, he will be continually beset by the temptation to quit when the going gets tough, disqualifying him from the great sense of accomplishment one feels upon completing one’s trip. After one long bus trip in Mexico he admits he felt like a cheater, but it hardly altered his behavior.
When he reached Nicaragua he wrote, “I was excited to see Panama, Colombia, Peru, Patagonia. I was. But the damn bike. I wanted to take more buses. To skip the boring parts. But I also didn’t want to. I felt the duty of the promise I made to myself and the expectations of all my friends watching. This trip had become my job. Hourly, my thoughts transitioned from dread to duty to excitement to anxious.”
His honesty is admirable, but it was most disheartening that this book became a tale of traveling with a bicycle rather than a tale of riding a bicycle. Not only that, he grew tired of camping, one of the greatest features of traveling by bike, and welcomed a hotel whenever he could find one. Even though he had a companion much of the way, all the time on his bike allowed him much time to reflect on his Christian faith and his church’s regard for his homosexuality, two of the major themes of the book. He goes round and round about such issues. He begins the trip thinking Jesus is his savior, but by the end he isn’t sure.
This was no eulogy to the glory of the bicycle nor the glory of traveling by bicycle. When he reached his ultimate destination of Fitz-Roy mountain in Patagonia, he makes the tragic revelation, “I never got on the bike again.” The bike failed to win his heart. When I completed my first big bike tour, coast-to-coast, I didn’t want it to end, as is the common feeling of many. I turned left when I reached Oregon and continued another thousand miles. Jedidiah chooses to take a bus the final thousand miles to the tip of South America. When I reached the tip of South America on my ride of the length of the continent I hopped up to Buenos Aires and biked an additional 2,500 miles to Rio da Janeiro and only reluctantly flew home from there, resisting the urge to continue another thousand miles to the Amazon.
He had so little bicycle consciousness, that from beginning to end of the book he refers to suffering a flat tire as “popping a tire.” Not once does he use the term “flat tire” despite having many. He began the trip not even knowing how to fix a flat. Fortunately his companion, Weston, a former New York bicycle messenger, had that expertise. Weston was a last minute addition, much to the relief of his mother, who insisted he find someone to accompany him, fearing for his safety through Mexico.
Weston didn’t have the financial resources of Jedidiah, and preferred spending money on marijuana rather than lodging. Jedidiah was continually paying his way when he was short on money, even covering the hefty expense of a week-long boat trip from Panama to Colombia around the Darien Gap. They have continual friction with “every conversation feeling like a negotiation.” He didn’t let on to his thousands of instagram followers that Weston was “driving him crazy” as he didn’t want to “damage the perception that Weston and I were on this perfect fantasy trip.”
In some respects the book might be taken as a confession. He is honest enough to admit early on that he feels lucky to be on this trip and “not stuck at a desk job, but damn, the adventure wears off. I’m not ready to quit right now or anything. But it feels good to admit it isn’t one long string of euphoria.” When he reached Oaxaca, he took a break and flew home for Christmas. His mother joins him in Ecuador and at the end of his trip.
His father too, a legendary traveler, meets up with him in Argentina. His father, Mark, is the Jenkins who achieved fame for his three books about walking across America in the 1980s. He met his wife in New Orleans and she joined him on his walk. They divorced when Jedidiah was four, he says in this book, though in his follow-up book, “Like Streams to the Ocean,” he wrote they divorced when he was “five or six.”
That was one of many inconsistencies in the two books. He admits in his second book, published in 2021, three years after the first, that his first book was “about chasing my dream to be a writer.” He never acknowledged that was his impetus in his first book. Rather he wrote, “I went on this bike trip to chase adventure and avoid the assembly line life of routine and expectations.” The subtitle of his first book was “a quest for a life with no regret.” In his second book he says he regretted the way he treated his younger brother.
That second book is a collection of essays, or “notes,” as he terms them, on “ego, love, and the things that make us who we are.” There is bare mention of his bicycle trip, which he alludes to once as having “lived in South America for a year.” He also refers to that book as a memoir “about my struggle to be a good church kid from Tennessee in a family who loved me but thought being gay was a death sentence” and about the “dismantling of my faith.”
He mentions at one point that he tried to overcome his addiction to coffee, but not his cigarette habit. His strength of self-reflection allows him to let slip a couple times in both books that he smokes, but without further comment. As a youth he was obese, 190 pounds at 5’ 8” tall, and not in a “cute teddy bear kind of way,” and drank a six-pack of Dr. Pepper every day. He has always had a warm personality that wins him friends. Straight friends would introduce him as being “gay, but not THAT gay.”
Both books include quite a few movie references. Movies are such an integral part of his life he downloads them to his computer and watches them in his tent at night, a tent he didn’t acquire until well into South America, preferring the great challenge of trying to find a place to hang a hammock when he camps for much of his trip. He doesn’t explain how he came to the choice of sleeping in a hammock rather than a tent, but it could have been inspired by one of the blogs he read in researching his trip. Before crossing into Mexico at San Diego into Baja a blog warns of lots of flat tires ahead, so he inadvisably stocks up on an excessive number of “tire tubes,” ten of them, another mistake he admits to.
His books have found enough of an audience to inspire him to write a third, to be published this November on a five thousand mile trip with his seventy-year old mother retracing some of the walk she undertook with her husband. I suppose I will read it since I can’t resist books on travel, but not with any eagerness. He writes well and has a tender, caring soul, but he doesn’t speak to me as a cyclist or traveler. All too often in his first book my heart sank at his ineptitude, though it did stir my urgings to be off on the bike doing it in a proper fashion. I can at least thank him for that.
That was one of many inconsistencies in the two books. He admits in his second book, published in 2021, three years after the first, that his first book was “about chasing my dream to be a writer.” He never acknowledged that was his impetus in his first book. Rather he wrote, “I went on this bike trip to chase adventure and avoid the assembly line life of routine and expectations.” The subtitle of his first book was “a quest for a life with no regret.” In his second book he says he regretted the way he treated his younger brother.
That second book is a collection of essays, or “notes,” as he terms them, on “ego, love, and the things that make us who we are.” There is bare mention of his bicycle trip, which he alludes to once as having “lived in South America for a year.” He also refers to that book as a memoir “about my struggle to be a good church kid from Tennessee in a family who loved me but thought being gay was a death sentence” and about the “dismantling of my faith.”
He mentions at one point that he tried to overcome his addiction to coffee, but not his cigarette habit. His strength of self-reflection allows him to let slip a couple times in both books that he smokes, but without further comment. As a youth he was obese, 190 pounds at 5’ 8” tall, and not in a “cute teddy bear kind of way,” and drank a six-pack of Dr. Pepper every day. He has always had a warm personality that wins him friends. Straight friends would introduce him as being “gay, but not THAT gay.”
Both books include quite a few movie references. Movies are such an integral part of his life he downloads them to his computer and watches them in his tent at night, a tent he didn’t acquire until well into South America, preferring the great challenge of trying to find a place to hang a hammock when he camps for much of his trip. He doesn’t explain how he came to the choice of sleeping in a hammock rather than a tent, but it could have been inspired by one of the blogs he read in researching his trip. Before crossing into Mexico at San Diego into Baja a blog warns of lots of flat tires ahead, so he inadvisably stocks up on an excessive number of “tire tubes,” ten of them, another mistake he admits to.
His books have found enough of an audience to inspire him to write a third, to be published this November on a five thousand mile trip with his seventy-year old mother retracing some of the walk she undertook with her husband. I suppose I will read it since I can’t resist books on travel, but not with any eagerness. He writes well and has a tender, caring soul, but he doesn’t speak to me as a cyclist or traveler. All too often in his first book my heart sank at his ineptitude, though it did stir my urgings to be off on the bike doing it in a proper fashion. I can at least thank him for that.
No comments:
Post a Comment