Kerouac...he didn't mention Saginaw

Not sure if I’ve lost my tongue. It has been over a week since I first began this project, and I already lost my words. Oh, they’re floating around in my head in non-systematic orders of confusion, but I lost the ability to harness them. At least for a while. Here it goes, once again…

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I really dislike Saginaw. That’s not a revelation to anyone who knows me. The whole area is stifling, at points. Though I should not cast blame for my loss of words, I do think it’s this area. People are often shallow here, they have to be, in order to survive.

Midwestern sensibility combined with no frills sense of being. Good people, we Midwesterners are, but we’re boring. God-fearing, hard workers that see no reason to waste time on the arts and frivolities of free expression.

And I am struggling with this boredom. Overcoming the monotony of late winter/early spring is a mind draining experimentation in self-reliant psychotherapy. It’s early April, so the seasons go back and forth between winter and spring.

So, I grabbed last month’s edition of Bike magazine off the coffee table and read about Virgin, Utah; thumbing through some other articles as well.

Guess it’s a search for something beyond here. A search beyond the monotony of flat land, beyond people without the sense of individuality, beyond the knuckle-dragging kids who are too afraid to leave home for fear they’d be less then their pitiful existence is today.

I miss Kentucky, I miss Tennessee, and I miss Colorado. Bike, it made me think beyond here, biking does this.

Mountain biking offers you a chance to become one with a machine, and nature. It offers you a chance to experience love and fear. It takes you beyond the comfort of normalcy.

Becoming one with the machine is knowing how you handle it, and how it handles you. Unless you ride, this may not make sense. Most Midwesterners cannot understand this. My bike is a part of me when I ride. So much so that I fear replacing my friend of 14-plus years (that’s over 140 people years).

It’s a no frills, no suspension, Trek that has taken me through the single tracks in several states, down the Rockies, through the Midwest ravines, and along the Gulf shoreline (the salt and sand really mess with the drivetrain). But, its simplicity is its beauty and intrigue. It’s like Willie Nelson’s or Stevie Ray Vaughn’s guitar: beaten, old, true, and yet a part of them. My bike is a part of me when on the trail.

Now the purists would degrade this machine, overlooking its purpose, that purpose being to connect my soul to nature. Not by taming the trails with high speeds and daring jumps (though I like a bit of speed periodically), but by allowing me to experience the trail, the beauty, and the serenity. We can at least obtain serenity in this part of the country.

Maybe you can’t in Saginaw proper, but what city can you find serenity within? I have no love for cities. Respect and fear, yes, but not love. They engulf your soul, they enhance the Mega Mart mentality, they force conformity, and they fuel the struggle for power.

So tonight, amidst cool temperatures, I opened my front window to let both the night air and the night sounds within.

Secretly, I think it was to let my soul roam for a bit.

It searches for God, poetry, the understanding of philosophy, nature, the trail, and the bike that allows you to chase all the above.

When your soul is restless, there is only so much time you can quell it’s freedom. My wife longs for California, and I for Colorado. Interestingly enough, neither of us longs for Saginaw. Only Simon and Garfunkel wrote seriously of Saginaw; and they were leaving it.

The trail calls me, the bike calls me, the water calls me. Crossroads: “the road less traveled” calls my soul. And, it puts “A Little Mud on the Tires.”

Kerouac’s Book of Blues, partially read, sits by my side, as does this month’s edition of Bike, not yet read. I’m searching for Kerouac's San Francisco (fear and respect, not love), searching for the mountains, and searching for my soul.

Delusions of a nomad never seeks out forgiveness, only truth, silence, and serenity. EjG