The Acela Express

One place I consistently find a fascinating microcosm of humanity is the Acela Express from Union Station in Washington to Penn Station in New York on any given day of the week. The journey lasts about 3.5 hours, stops at major cities along the way, and otherwise just flashes across the northeast corridor with old America passing by outside. More than what's outside those windows is what's within. Smart, well-dressed people of all ages all doing interesting things, some de-stressed, taking a nap or reading a book, others taking a call or typing away on a computer. It's a superficial assessment for sure, one that doesn't amount to much in the grand scheme of things, but when I get on that train I always feel like I'm where I need to be, in good company. I never am really ready for the trip to be over, but when it is, I love getting off that train in the buzz of Manhattan, or arriving back home in a grand city that has become mine. My earliest memories are filled with a love for trains, hours upon hours spent building elaborate tracks and stations across the floors of my first house. Easy then to follow the thread of life and find a man, now thirty, sitting in his seat, gazing out the window, lulled into a sense of belonging by the steady vibrations of wheels against track, accentuated by an occasional horn let off into the approaching night. 

Back on the bike

The things that remain most clear in my mind about riding are the roads, and I remember in particular an amazing stretch called Fitzhugh, extending from Highway 290 almost thirty miles out to Johnson City. Two gas stations bounded miles of rural ranches and scorched hills LBJ would have known well. In the middle of Texas summer, we would often drive down and park at one end, load up on liquids, and ride to the other. After refueling, we would ride back. Once, when I was in the best shape of my life and wanted to prove my worth and readiness, I went out and back twice, upwards of 120 miles, and it was probably the most difficult day I've ever had in my life.

I trained and raced long distance triathlons for years, and when asked questions around why, I usually drift back to this ride, and countless others like it that defined this period of my life. I find so much about being a man integrally tied to physical exertion, and the fact is you learn something about yourself when that kind of exhaustion sets in. It's the internal conversations as you pedal along alone across a hundred miles of road, the places your depleted mind wanders. It's the confidence that comes when you feel strong and powerful in your body, an insurance policy against the stagnation of office monotony. Ultimately, I find it's how excuses just melt away when you realize all the many things that are possible, what the human body and spirit can actually achieve. That's contagious. It infects every aspect of your life, this resiliency, this vision, and I often wish the whole damn world knew what that feeling was like.

Recently, I clipped into a new bike and rode out on new roads, from Washington DC crossing the border into Maryland, down McArthur Blvd along the Potomac River. From there, a climb up to the city of Potomac, then left onto River Road and up a beautiful rural farm road called Berryville, one you'd never go down unless you live in one of its magnificent country houses. From Darnestown, you turn and head back home, down Turkey Foot, Travilah, and Glen, before shooting back out onto McArthur into Georgetown. The treasured stops at rugged gas stations, the internal fever that builds and stays well into the night, the getting to know your city in new ways, the hunger, the soreness, the sunburns, the exhaustion. I lost something in my life when I stopped spending hours on a bike - but I knew I'd be back. One hot day and 60 miles in June represent my long awaited return to the stage. 

In Patagonia

It really was a stunning landscape, with all the elements you'd expect of the bottom of the world. Fierce winds blew in off nearby glaciers, and when the clouds weren't out, the sun kept the temperature somewhere confusing between hot and cold. It was dry and rocky in parts, and green and lush in others, peppered with llamas and condors and an occasional cougar. Every lake lit up with a different shade of blue, and one morning absent all wind, at a lake they said was always choppy, it was clear as glass, mirrored, a mountain rising up above and descending below.

Chatwin's In Patagonia accompanied me and gave context to the otherworldly terrain of Torres del Paine, and I'm reminded of the great value in returning to human life as it evolved to be. Stay away from the cell towers long enough, and the brain rewires to its natural state, where you sit comfortably gazing at nothing, or talking to the stranger on your left, rather than reaching for a phone screen and falling into the abyss that comes with being better connected. Here there was so much to see and absorb, an aching to be present, and I found myself later, well on the other side, longing nostalgically for the period of time in which my devices did not work.

There's also a blur of faces from a whirlwind week, some that months later still come to mind. There were the Chilean tour guides running on seasonal rotations that extend outward forever - they either have life figured out, or not figured out at all. There was that wonderful couple embodying happiness and love telling me, the first person ever outside the doctor, on a bus ride across nowhere, that she's pregnant, only later, in an email, to heartbreakingly tell me she miscarried for the second time. There was the beautiful, misplaced, and very taken British girl on my last time warp of an evening in Santiago, looking me in the eyes knowingly, saying so much without words, then saying that fateful final line - "I hope to see you in another version of life" - that then leaves you speechless all the way home. And of course, everything is buoyed, always buoyed, by that one particular friend who knows me on a level perhaps no one else does scattered into memories around the world. Life is injected with excitement and chaos, always, when we manage to link. She will always be integrally associated with lofty thoughts of Patagonia, laughing, laughing without end, laughing until you cannot breathe, laughing until the moment you say goodbye.

When the story of me is written, when I one day look to assign meaning to the swirl of atoms and star dust and energetic currents, it will be these kinds of things that form the substance of the argument I tell the withering version of myself. It's the formation of these bonds in bubbles across the world I want etched into the annals of me.