Today was certainly a wild day, a day that will never be forgotten throughout the process of my lifetime. I sit in a Perkins at 10:30 at night bike less in Duluth, MN. My bike sits 35 miles north in the middle of the woods somewhere out as far away as existance stands. But despite my misrebile situation, in the end I stand with a renewed beleif in the idea of people being natrually good.
It all started with a wrong turn onto a logging road that lead into the middle of nowhere (like really the middle of nowhere!) Thinking that it would take me to another road I rode all the way to the end (about 15 miles) not being from Minnesota, I had know idea what a logging road was and what its purpose was. The thing is that logging roads don't go anywhere! Except out into the middle of nowhere where they clearcut a large section of woods and leave! Eventually the road dead ended. Not wanting to turn around and go all the way back to the end of the road, my headstrong brain told me that I should keep going forward. I looked at my map and spotted a road that looked like it was only half a mile from my current location and if I could just get there, all would be fine. Only a half a mile, I would have to bushwack my way through the woods, but it really wasn't that far, I could make it....
So I started bushwacking my way through the woods to the road that I thought was only a half mile North. As I started walking through the woods, they became so dense that the my GPS did not work and having no direction of where I was headed, I was in deep crap. I wandered around the woods in circles not knowing where I was headed. Soon the bike became to laborious to carry though the woods and in a complete state of panic, your mind tells you really stupid crap to do. In a panic similar to the one probably felt by the kids in the Blair Witch Project, I ditched my bike and started walking, packing everything in my messenger bag that I felt I would need if I had to survive in the woods by myself for a couple of days. It was the real life little scenarieo that they always give us in those team team building exercises where if your plane crashed in the middle of the woods what would you bring with you? So I packed food waterbottles, a sleeping bag and thermals to sleep in. After walking through the woods for about
3 hours in circles, I eventually found a trail that lead me out to a road. It was a logging road, but it was more than I had going for me in miles. Luckily after walking down the logging road for an hour, a truck with a retired guy from Minnesota who spent his summers there and winters in Flordia, picked me up in my frantic wave. He took me to the nearest town which was about 15 miles from where I was at the time. I rejoiced, I hadn't seen another human being for 6 hours and he was my saviour.
When we arrived to town, I sat in Cotton, MN. Now I assume that you've probably never heard of Cotton. All that Cotton has is a gas station, a bar and diner. What was I to do now? I had no idea, with no bike and nothing but my messenger bag and sleeping bag I was kinda screwed. After soliticiting all the truck drivers in the diner for a ride back to Duluth, I had no luck. I went outside to where the highway passed through and sat, trying to hitchhike my way back. I figured that if I could get to Duluth, I could at least gain my senses and figure out what to do next. However, hitch-hiking was not working. There was one other option here in Cotton, and that was the bar.
I walked into the bar sat down, and had a beer praying that someone here could take me back to Duluth. At the bar I met Joe, Bob and Scott. Joe had a way of laughing that was like no other, he always seemed to laugh louder, longer and harder than the rest of the bar combined. Tall slender with the wrinkling tan that only spending to much time outside working will give you, I was greeted with hospitality. Bob was Vietnam veteran who is currently unemployed, but has spent most of his life working on the railroad building grades up the hills that allow the trains to go up and down without sliding. Bob was probably about 70 years old had probably weighed only 95 lbs but could drink the weight of someone twice his size and still hold himself up to convince a cop that he was sober if he ever got pulled over for a DUI. These folks didn't care who I was or where I came from they had been through it all, at that moment, I was in their territory and one of them I had a misreable story that gave me initiation. The bar was full of white, blue collar Minnesotianians. When the bar opened and they all came in, nobody knew each other, but after guzzing beers together for a couple of hours, they were the best of friends all with dreams of women who were willing to share some loving. Flirtation with the women across the bar was endless. The stories of hardship and misery came natural serving as complex pickup lines that any college frat boy could not even dream to imagine. Each one had a story, a bad relationship, a war that each had been through and all of these stories unfolded between the shots of vodka and pints of cheap beer. Suddenly the completely screwed position that I was in dosen't seem so bad. After telling my story, I was nervous, scared and not knowing what the hell I was gonna do however, my life has been a breeze compared to these hardships. Scott revived me by telling me that it was the train wreaks that people always wanted to hear. "Nobody cares if you made it all the way up to Canada and back without any problems, what do you have to write about then? What story is there to tell?" exclaimed Scott. My social location in relation to theirs is distant, these aren't the kind of people that were supposed to be talking to. These folks have no networks, no ladders to climb, no rich friends that are going to be able to help you out on the road to what our society calls success.
Scott, whose name I learned from the weathered stiched on name that clung to his collared shirt turned out to be my saviour that day, from the onset I calculated Scoot to be a drunk deadbeat failure who constantly drank to must and inquired about the closest titi bars and constantly thought about which girl in the bar that night would be most likely to give him a blowjob. I soon learned that all my original perceptions about Scott were completely flawed at best. I had thought and wrote off this guy the second that I walked in the bar and he turned out to be the man I could count on. He was the only one in the bar that was headed to Duluth that night. "Things just never happen the way that they are supposed to, and if they do life is boring." Was Scotts concensus, Scott had worked hard all of his life as an HVAC technican and had seen it all. From his long string of love lost, money trouble and alchohol problems Scott had learned this lesson early. The clashes, the miscalculations and crap that goes down in this world is where the human spirit must thrive, only when we are at our lowest can we make sense of what the good is. We need that scale to appreciate the good. As Scott bought Bob and I another drink, we discussed this, the clamor, the battle scars, failed marriages, kids that they wished still loved them. These folks in many ways were aleinated from me and my experience, but somehow I felt in community.
We sat in the bar for hours just talking aimlessly, it was beautiful. Could I really have not learned anything through these college years spent sucking up to every last social theory as if it was God. No! social theory was right here in the trenches and everyone in that bar knew more of it than I ever learned. I may have had a peice of paper that certified that I knew somthing but these people had experience in life, worth more than any stupid diploma could ever certify. They had found somthing that I could only hope to acheive. In many respects are current connected and fast moving globalized world would have thrown them away in the trash, they were racist, sexist and hard, but had more knowledge than I could touch. They had never lived in that American dream and knew that striving for it was as useless as walking in circles of woods.
As Scott and I drove down the road to Duluth, we talked about the state of nirvana and how to acheive it, women and men, theological basis in Christianity and Buddhism and everything in between. His words were so profound much of the time that I could hardly respond, his basis for everything he discussed was based on pure life experience, all I had done was read this stuff in a book. I didn't talk much, just listened and soaked up the wisdom of a man who had seen it all, somthing that I couldn't touch. We talked about this thing called a thin space. A thin space is a thing constructed by Christians that serves as a nirvana like state, but can be associated with Christianity as to not offend Jesus and all the higher folks in the Christian faith. A thin space is a place where everything around you is completely connected with the world around you. The state of christian nirvana. Scott told me that he experienced his first thin space 6 years ago out fishing with a few of his friends. He asked if I had and unfortunately I could not respond, I guess somtimes when riding you feel completely connected, but not to the extent that Scott had exclaimed. I wanted to feel that 'thin space' I wanted an escape like a thin space to find somthing truly meaningful that had so ellusively elluded me for the past 22 years.
Scott dropped me off at a Perkins in Duluth after the drive and sent me off with his address to write him, 20 dollars for good luck and a handshake. We would probably never see each other again, but I had learned so much in that car drive, I wanted that experience and I had learned so much. From Scott, I learned more in half a day than I would have on this whole trip if I had reached my planned destination to Vogeaurs. Just as Robert Frost said to follow the road less traveled, the opportunities of doing so puts you in places that you would have never known. Profound!
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