Traveling

 12,554 miles.

I haven’t gone anywhere.

Yet I’ve gone everywhere.

I first got on the bike in May 2005 and I couldn’t get the pedal around once.

My knee was miffed. Round as a pancake as it was after surgery, it was hard on the eye and it seemed to know it, so it decided not to bend.  After many days getting on the bike with the pedal not budging, one afternoon at physical therapy I started to cry. I tucked my head down as if that would somehow make me invisible but an older gentleman who’d been walking on the treadmill paused on his way to a weight machine. “It’ll go `round eventually.”  When it does, he said, just keep going.

It did. And I have.

We bought a stationary bike, carted it upstairs and there, when the sun is near rising, I hop on.

A few months into it, I wondered how far I was going. So I copied a map of the U.S., mapped a route and kept track of the miles. Four miles a day.  After five weeks, I made it across New York into Pennsylvania.  It took me two years and a month to make it to the Pacific. After a while I didn’t map the route anymore but I penciled in the miles. Four miles, five miles each morning, now six.

I didn’t see the pretty back roads I would have loved to have meandered by. Didn’t ride the just-waking streets of Chicago or stop to admire a sudden field of sunflowers just around a bend, didn't smell the sweet tang of just-cut grass.I didn’t see a river threading its way through a hillside or a small town as the evening lights start to twinkle on.

But a few minutes into each ride, something always shifted. With Joni Mitchell playing or Chaka Khan, Wye Oak or the B-52’s, my mind would flutter off elsewhere. The world would wash away and I’d start traveling.

This week, it turns out, I’ve gone 12,554 miles. A grand number built on four and five and six. I’ve discovered there really is something to what Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher,  said so many, many years ago:  a journey of a thousand miles does begin with a single step, or once around with a pedal.

                                   ~                                             ~                                           

282 miles - London to Paris

32 miles - the Greenway bike path around the island of Manhattan

1,599 miles - Key West to the tip of Maine

655.8 miles – the length of the Pacific Coast Highway

13,171 - the span of all of the parts of the Great Wall of China

1,290 miles - Victoria Falls, Zambia to Mt. Kilimanjaro

312. 4 miles - Lisbon, Portugal to Madrid, Spain

2,981 miles – Connecticut to San Francisco