Experience the Event - 2004

Harper's Journal

June 15, 2004 (Day 3 post-ALC)

I have been steeped in California . Soaked in it like a sponge. I rode open-mouthed, breathing it in in deep inhalations as my legs churned it all up and assimilated it into my tissues. I feel it now. A deep calm. The hills, valleys, and desserts are a living part of me. Day in and day out, for seven days, I thought of nothing for hours a day, listening only to the deep, meditative thrum of my wheels on the pavement, the rhythm of my own breath, the songs of birds, the reassuring and constant beat of the waves on the coast, as my eyes scanned the mountains, the plains, the sea.

I thought a lot about nothing, but I also thought a lot about our cause. I signed up for AIDS/Lifecycle having never been directly affected by the virus that we were fighting. I did not know anyone who was openly HIV positive. AIDS was a disease that I wanted to fight because it is a disease, and I hate them all for what they do to the human body and spirit. In the six months of my training and the seven days on the ride, it has now become an issue that gnaws at me, that wrenches my heart. It is way too close to home for me now because I have friends, good friends, with whom I have experienced one of the most life-changing events in my history. It is way too close too home for me to hang up my cycling clothes and consider that a job well done.

Time is of the essence. We have incredible, life-saving medications that enable my HIV-positive friends to be some of the strongest people that I know. Many of them led the pack of cyclists each morning, pedaling hard and wowing me with their muscles. Because of these medications, you would never know that they are sick. But these medications can be hard on the body. They are expensive. They buy time. Lots of quality time, even, but they are not a cure. They will not get rid of the virus, and they will not prevent the virus from moving into a body and taking the cells hostage.

It is easy to not see AIDS. It doesn't get much media coverage anymore, and I would imagine that some people think that it's pretty much over in our country. That we've got a handle on it. And if you don't see it, maybe it's just not happening. I saw it. I saw riders weeping for friends and family that have been lost, I saw riders taking their meds each night, I saw the proud bright orange flags on the backs of the bikes of my fellow cyclists designating them as positive peddlers. I felt it. I felt the strong presence of those who did not win this fight against time on the beach of Ventura when over a thousand cyclists and volunteers made a circle in the dark and held candles up in the air to let them know that we have not forgotten them. I heard those who are no longer physically with us cheering us on in the silence of the dessert. Ride. Ride. Ride until this disease no longer takes us out one by one.

Day 5

I woke myself up whimpering this morning. My body was frozen – from the cold and from the stiffening of my muscles after another night on a Thermarest after pedaling nearly 100 miles. I got packed up and on the road by 7:30 today despite being exhausted and sore and motivationally challenged. As soon as my butt hit the seat and my legs cranked a few revolutions, I was in a different world. I was instantly light in my bones, energetic, chatty, happy. I can do this!

Today was Red Dress Day. People wore (obviously) red dresses or red jerseys or really anything red so that we formed a long, dynamic, alive red ribbon unfurling down the roads of California. A red ribbon to symbolize our determination in the fight against AIDS. People looked so fabulous. I have never seen so many sparkling red tutus, cocktail dresses, taffeta, sequins and feathers in one place before. I’m sure there will be plenty of great pictures and video footage up on the website. Check it out!

I rode and thought of the book The Stand by Stephen King for some reason. I was thinking of how one person was infected by some deadly disease and how quickly it spread across the entire country. I thought of the giant red ribbon moving along the road and the visibility of our group. If just one person saw us and went home and told one or two other people, how quickly our message and mission could spread across the country and the world. A message of hope and love. We are determined to win this battle and to support those on the front lines, fighting for their lives.

The red human ribbon was so visible, in fact, that it saved me from missing rest stop #2. A deep red-brown beautiful horse was rubbing its majestic bottom on thje corner of a low billboard, scratching an itch, and it looked so happy there in the vast, green field surrounded by hills that I broke a few of the safety rules and did the look-quickly-at-the-horse then look-quickly-at-the-road, look-quickly-at-the-horse, and back at the road. As I rode past a side street (the horse behind me and my focus back where it belonged), I saw a long and sparkling red ribbon flowing down the street and realized that I belonged there.

Today was a short day (about 45 miles) but with big hills that came at me in a seemingly nonstop pace. So many I lost count. But after we got to camp, I got a massage. And then slept, my body sprawled out on a hillside right next to a duck pond, under a tree, the sun reaching its fingers into my paraspinus muscles and prying the knots apart a little.

Everywhere around me, my new community did the same. Stretching their hard-worked muscles on the ground, playing cards, and having conversations that didn’t include the words “on your left” or “car back.” And I think we all needed it. Because tomorrow, again, we ride. Ride on beautiful human ribbon.

Day 4

This morning we headed out for the Evil Twins, two steep, long hills on the gorgeous road from Paso Robles out to the coast. I felt pretty tired when we first got going, but as soon as my muscles started getting another taste of the repetitive motions that are pretty much all they’ve known for the last four days, the endorphins started kicking in. Wow, those endorphins are lovely. One of the many things that I love about this ride is being hopped up on endorphins and surrounded by over 1000 other people who have that same natural high coursing through them.

I watched the scenery roll past me as I climbed, idyllic little farms in the valley below me, a wooden bridge over a stream, Spanish moss hanging from old trees, and wavy hills as far as the eye can see. Purple mountains’ majesty. Before I even realized it we were to rest stop 1. And I had a nose bleed.

It took a while of pinching to get it to stop, and I was itching to get back on my bike to ride up the second evil twin. Finally, the fragile clot in place, I rode up the second twin, trying not to breathe too hard and get it going again. I rode slowly up the second long hill, so thankful that I did all of my training in the hilly Bay Area. I made it up just fine.

After the crest of the hill and several photos, we started downhill, and I found a pink plastic egg on the side of the road from the Chicken Lady. The Chicken Lady is a man who has ridden in 22 rides for AIDS all over the country. In a fabulous multi-colored skirt. He leaves plastic eggs behind him as he rides, and he lovingly fills them with inspirational quotes and candy. He had a heart attack a few years ago, and worked at the AIDS ride instead of riding in it because his doctor wouldn’t let him ride. He has a wonderful plastic bag on the back rack of his bike with a stuffed chicken in it and various other chicken decorations on his bike. He keeps us all going when we don’t think we can anymore.

We crested another hill, and we were halfway to LA! Halfway there. We took pictures and stared at the view. Only hills and wild nature as far as the eye could see. We have ridden half of the miles to our destination, and it feels good.

And now I’m going to go to bed. I have volumes more to write, but this has been a tough day. My shoulder hurts, and my own power has run out. But tomorrow I will keep pedaling. For the new friends I have made who are Positive Pedalers. To get rid of this disease. And, although *my* power has run dry for the time being, the strength of this group will pull me on. The hum of the valleys, the whisper of the trees, and the tailwinds, that by the grace of God, continue to find me, will get me to LA.

Day 3

I was in one of the last groups of riders out of camp again this morning. How can it be that my alarm goes off at 5:00, and I don’t ease out onto the road until 8:15? It isn’t as though I am attending one of the yoga classes or anything. I am usually just messing with my stuff, digging around in my backpack, unpacking, repacking, rustling plastic bags.

It was yet another gorgeous day. We set off out of King City heading for Paso Robles 77 miles away. Today we would conquer The Quadbuster, one of the biggest hills of the ride. This morning I had heard that it was 14 miles long. I got on the bike in my last-resort shorts, having not had time to do laundry yet this week. My bottom cringed when it touched the seat, and judging by the scattered “Oh my butt!’s” scattered down the line of riders, I was not alone. I pedalled slowly but steadily toward rest stop 1. You don’t have to get there fast, you just want to get there.

I leaned over, staring at my feet in the port-a-potty line. If I stood up straight I would wet my pants. I am doing a good job of hydrating. In my pee crisis, I stood next to a member of Positive Pedalers (an HIV+ cyclist group) as he was interviewed by the web camera person. He spoke proudly and confidently of his HIV status, surrounded by people all doing this for him.

Once the camera was off, he expressed a little anxiety over being so open on the Internet about the fact that he has HIV. Here on this ride, people help each other for no reason. People support each and every thing about their fellow cyclists – HIV status, riding skills, sexual orientation, horrible taste in clothing. No one is judged.

I made it up Quadbuster without walking. There were people on the sidelines of the entire hill, cheering, dancing in drag, one woman beating a drum. People were pushing riders up and over the last hump. The lovely Ginger Brewlay gave me a handful of candy at the top, and it was delicious standing on top of that peak.

The route continued to make me realize what a powerful, beautiful, and still wild place California is. We passed miles and miles of golden hills dotted by green, solitary trees. One tree alone on a rippled, velour swelling of the earth. I stopped riding because I had to. I couldn’t ride past this particular scene of one brown and one sparkling white horse on a golden hill, blue sky, and puffy white clouds. I stood and stared at it. My friend and fellow rider rode past me and stopped too.

“It’s so beautiful it’s like a cliché.”

And that statement pretty much sums up this entire ride.

Day 2

I. Panic.

The sweep vans were circling. We got on the road a little bit later than our goal of 6:30am. Nearly two hours later. There’s no good explanation; it is what it is in my chronically behind-schedule life. After 10 minutes of wheels on the road, Mat got a flat. Neither one of us has ever fixed a flat, and it took us *forever*, and the sweep vans were closing in on us. If you’re not out of the camp by 8:30, you get swept to the next rest stop, in the van.

Now there’s nothing wrong with being swept. Nothing at all. But it’s not supposed to go down like this! Not after 10 minutes of riding on Day 2! Oh my gosh! Fix the flat! Fix it faster! No, no Mr. Sweep Driver. We are fine. Thumbs up. Keep driving. We made it, flat got fixed, and we were off, a lesson learned on the fragility of my hopes to not get swept this week.

II. Produce.

We rode through the verdant, green strawberry fields outside of Santa Cruz. Through the Monterey Peninsula, we cruised down empty, quiet back roads, surrounded by the short jungle-colored bushes with the little heart-shaped fruits in varying degrees of crimson, clinging to the branches. Sweeping vistas and views of the coast.

It broke my heart in two to look out across the rich expanses and see hundreds of Latino migrant workers, brought in by the busloads literally, stooped over the berries, their backs bent in two, picking them and putting them in cardboard boxes. The whispered twinges in my own spine receded as I thought of the yoga classes, massages, and chiropractic work awaiting me at the end of my day. I grieved to think of how easily a group of people can be marginalized in our society, not seen, considered subhuman. Strikingly similar to the way people with HIV and AIDS are treated by the ignorant.

III. Steinbeck.

After lunch, we rode through 60 miles of John Steinbeck’s California. In the Salinas Valley, we rode between voluptuous, golden liquid hills rippling like flags. Yellow hills, green trees, tiny brown dots of faraway cows. The dust reigned victorious over the irrigation pipes, and swirled up and into the air. A real live dust storm, straight from the Grapes of Wrath. Through dusty eyes I gazed out at the inspiration for one of my favorite authors of all time.

IV. Power.

The desert valley thrummed on, and the heat combined with the surreal scenery to put me in some kind of trance. The silence was permeated only by the creaking of a fence, the cries of hawks, the eerie haunting sound of wind through the electrical wires. The oooh of the Spaghetti Western breeze seemed fake, played on loudspeakers in the hills. In the Salinas Valley, my legs found strength that they have never known.

V. Clarity.

After the Firehouse-themed rest stop like a mirage in the desert, we rode a tailwind home through the most striking and dramatic dreamscape I have ever ridden through. The hills held the spirits of the loved ones that we have all lost. Several times as we rode the last twenty miles, I passed weeping riders, the scenery heartbreaking, powerful. The air was free of dust, the sun preparing to set, the wind pushing us from behind. Someone started whooping. “Yeah! We’ve done it!” A victorious war cry sounded as we rolled up and down hills, passed the 100-mile mark, and crossed the finish line. Together.

Day 1

I’ll finish packing a few days early, I promised myself, so that the last night before I embark on this seven-day, 585 mile journey will be spent doing yoga, hydrating, calling friends and family, writing thank-you notes to my donors, and some meditating, yeah, some meditating and some incense and prayer and lots of peace followed by getting in bed by 8:00 pm so that I will have eight good hours before the alarm clock goes off at 4:00.

Except that really I didn’t pack until last night -- maybe because Mat, my husband and riding partner, and I decided that we *had* to have new bathing suits, fabulous and stylish new bathing suits that would show off our newly muscled legs at the pool of the hotel where we’ll stay in Los Angeles and then we really needed to have some sushi since protein is good for muscles, and you really can’t eat sushi without beer, so we had to split a Sapporo. All the while asking each other, “Should we be doing this? Should we be going to four different stores on the eve of AIDS/LifeCycle to find super-stylish bathing suits? Should we be drinking dehydrating beer the night before we set off?”

“No, we shouldn’t. We should not. But we are. Tee hee…”

I cannot imagine that today could have gone any better than it did. The weather was shimmering and swirling, the sun rose over the stadium as we all did 80’s-style aerobic dancing to warm up our muscles. It wasn’t cold. It wasn’t foggy. It seemed as though we were somewhere else, not San Francisco in the early morning. We were told that we have raised almost 5 million dollars. That stadium of over 1000 riders erupted. We come from six countries. It is so amazing to be a part of this large, global effort to end the AIDS pandemic. We honored the riders that we have lost with a riderless bicycle walked down the field. And finally, after months of training and begging for money and speculation about what it would be like, the ride started. The Positive Pedalers, a group of cyclists who are HIV positive and who ride to raise awareness and funds for AIDS services, led the long human chain as we set off through the sunrise city towards Aptos. Crowds of people lined our route ringing cowbells and shouting “Go riders!” It was like a cross between Critical Mass and a parade. I felt like a celebrity.

“When it’s giraffe hoola-hooping time in Kentucky , well it’s giraffe hoola-hooping time in Kentucky …” a beautiful tenor belted out behind me as we rode. He had asked me to name an animal, a state, and an action verb, and then he made a song. A rider beside me at another point on the road pointed to a giant clay Tyrannosaurus rex at a roadside ceramics shop and said, “just what every home needs!” I rode along, entertained by the huge spectrum of personalities distracting each other as the miles melted away.

This is truly a supported ride, even down to the fellow riders. “Supported ride” often means some stale bagels and a port-a-potty somewhere along the route and some little cups of water and a t-shirt at the end. I had no idea just how supported I would feel. I mentioned before that I felt like a celebrity. That’s not really accurate. After my first 88 miles, I really feel like the most adored, heroic, appreciated person in the world, and people are hugging me and yelling thank you at me and feeding me and protecting me and pointing out the railroad tracks to me all for doing something that, in itself, is a lifetime experience. Something that I would love to do even without the adulation and the peanut butter and jelly graham crackers. And I get to do this, ride beside the sea and under the shade of trees and be a part of a true community, to ultimately help those members of our community who have been stricken with HIV and AIDS. An ever-growing number of people who have been infected.

The support is truly amazing. There are crews of motorcyclists riding up and down the route, showing us which way to go, pointing out hazards. They are our protectors. They are intimidating on their choppers, and they’ve got our back, man. One of them walked in front of a car that was obviously antsy to turn right into our paths, calmly holding his hand up to guard the road as we passed.

There is an ambulance, our own AIDS/LifeCycle ambulance that rolls up and down the route, ready to swoop down and scoop up the fallen. There are medics, hot nurses and doctors in skimpy shorts and stethoscopes, tending to the wounded and making sure that everyone is staying hydrated. There are so many volunteers that it boggles the mind. SO MANY PEOPLE are doing this to help other people for free! With no motivation except to help people LIVE with respect, dignity, and love when their bodies and societies have betrayed them.

The people in each community that we ride through jump up and down and dance and clap for us, yelling, “Thank you for riding!” and hand us popsicles at the top of a hill. A coffee shop, The Ugly Mug, in Santa Cruz gave us all free coffee, and not just coffee. I mean they whipped up espresso drinks for us. For nothing. Because we are riding.

Tomorrow I will describe more of the details of this ride, the roads, the weather, the feelings and deep calm that I am feeling as my tires hum on the pavement and the ocean crashes beside me. Tonight I am just sill in awe at this collective effort to celebrate life and to rally around those with HIV and AIDS. I cannot get over it, and I cannot adequately describe it. I am part of it. And thank you God for the tailwind that basically whooshed us all to camp after lunch. I’ve never felt such a ride in my life. Like wings.

Why I Ride

I'm not going to lie. I was selfish in signing up for AIDS/LifeCycle. I signed up for the physical challenge, bragging rights. Having been robbed at gunpoint in my own neighborhood a month and a half before emailing my application, I was deep in the throes of the type of angry self-absorption that is common after such an event. I had already severely dyed my hair, was listening to a lot of angry punk rock music, smoking cigarettes, and doing a lot of brooding while writing a novel based on exaggerations of my own neuroses and the crippling anxieties that racked my soul. I wanted everything about my life to be completely different from the way that it was, and the thought of throwing myself into rigorous physical training sounded like it would help.

At some point that changed. Completely. Somewhere in between waking up each morning and struggling hard with the discipline that I had to exert to get on my bike and train, resenting the fact that this was now something I had to do, I accidentally gained insight into the true reason for the ride. I think that the very first organized training ride I went on (see below) made me realize that I had started riding each day because I wanted to help those living with HIV and AIDS live a better life, with dignity and respect. That I wanted to support an organization which strives to allow people infected by a cruel virus to continue to live with control over their own situations, and with kind faces helping them through their particularly rough journey.

I am now riding because somewhere the medical field has dropped the ball. People living with chronic diseases are treated as numbers and diagnoses. They lose their individualities, their sparks, the unique features of their faces that tell you something about their souls. They come to a hospital seeking help, scared and uncomfortable or even in pain, and the very first thing that they have to do is fish through their wallets for their insurance card, their identifying number, so that someone can enter it into the system. So that a large group of business school graduates can analyze the services they receive and decide whether they are necessary.

I now ride to take care of my own. People in my community are living and dying with HIV and AIDS, and they have families, lovers, gardens, pets, and favorite books. They have climbed mountains, run marathons, written poetry, swam naked in the ocean at night, eaten way too much chocolate, and watched the sunrise from their friends' rooftops. They are each one a story and a rich history, and they are sick. And I ride to help them achieve the highest level of functioning during each stage of their disease that is possible.

A song has played in my head almost continuously as I have pushed the pedals over the past few months. It is a song by The Postal Service, and the lyrics speak to me in so many ways about AIDS/LifeCycle:

"They shall see us waving from such great heights.
'Come down now', they'll say.
But everything looks perfect from far away,
'Come down now', but we'll stay."

It doesn't make sense to the majority of the people in our society to be riding our bikes from San Francisco to Los Angeles . It really doesn't make sense to be doing it for someone besides ourselves. But we are a team. Each rider and each volunteer and each donor and each person affected by and infected with this disease. "Come down now," they'll say. But this AIDS ride and this gathering of a community around a common cause has brought rider, volunteer, and patient to such great heights. And it hasn't even started yet.

April 2004: First group training ride

"The light of San Francisco is a sea light, an island light, and the light of fog blanketing the hills, drifting in at night through the golden gate to lie on the city at dawn, and then the halcyon late mornings after the fog burns off and the sun paints White Houses with the sea light of Greece, with sharp, clean shadows making the town look like it had just been painted, but the wind comes up at four o'clock, sweeping the hills, and then the veil of light of early morning, and then another scrim, when the new night fog floats in and in that vale of light the city drifts, anchorless, upon the ocean."

-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I walked out of my front door and into the halcyon light of Saturday morning. It was 8:00, and the street was empty except for the birds singing, and I felt so … responsible. I was up and out of the door, carrying my bike down the stairs, swinging up onto the seat, my feet clicking into the pedals, right one -- click!, left one -- fumble fumble, there it is, click! The clicks of my cleats into the pedals echoed off the trees, warming their trunks in the new light. A happy and chattering group of four cyclists glided past me, loud and trailing an excited energy. I pedaled out into the street and drifted behind them, wondering if they were going where I was. At the end of Golden Gate Park, we all pulled into the lodge's driveway and my chest softened and wobbled as I looked at the crowd of 85 people here to train together to ride their bikes against the AIDS pandemic.

I kept to myself (as usual for me in a large crowd) until one of the riders that I had followed down Page Street looked at me and asked me if this was my first group training ride. I answered yes, and he started clapping and saying, "Oh! This is your first training ride!" and introduced himself as James and then introduced his three friends who had ridden in with him. From then on throughout the morning, I could tell that he was looking out for me, clapping for me at the top of a hill, asking me how I was doing as he passed me, always remembering my name and calling me by it. As I would pedal with these people for 77 miles that day, I’d learn that he would not be the only one looking out for his own, pulling people through the mileage and making it fun. They all do it. All of the cyclists who have ridden in previous AIDS Rides and AIDS/LifeCycles, the veterans.

We stretched together, people hugging and talking about the ride. I leaned over to stare at my toes and stretch my hamstrings and admired the guy next to me's socks that had "Bitch" on the sides. We got on our bikes and started through the park and toward the Golden Gate Bridge, loud bunches of cyclists yelling "slowing", "stopping" or "car back" to let our fellows know what was going on around us. "Slow down!" as a car gunned its engine, passing us in the park. It was like Critical Mass but on a spotless Saturday morning, fresh and new.

At parties with groups of people that I don't know, I tend to isolate and talk only to the two or three people that I do know. But today I rode by myself for only the first few miles. As we passed through Marin’s small towns toward Fairfax, I found myself repeatedly involved in conversations with people as I rode beside them, or more often with riders whose faces I had not yet seen as we rode single-file up a hill, at a slowed pace perfect for conversation. I talked and laughed with these voices -- one ahead of me and one behind me -- so naturally, so comfortably, with none of the pressures of the face-to-face conversation that is relentless at social gatherings. Then, after making it to the top and flying down to the bottom one after another like birds, then we would shake hands, exchange names. After I had already learned who they were.

As we began to enter the Nicasio area, the scenery was too beautiful to talk, and the cyclists had spaced out pretty widely by then so that I was riding with a group of three other people only, every once in a while passing other groups of two or three or solitary riders. I flowed through the miles, my body locking into a rhythm, efficient and smooth, as I stared at the decompressing expanses of green fields, of black-and-white dairy cows, the air punctuated with the cry of hawks or the gargling song of red-winged blackbirds. We passed a piles of bones on the side of the road, surrounding a giant ribcage. There were fields of wildflowers, and some of dried, brown grass.

We rode through Samuel Taylor Park on a paved cycling path, down deep into a shaded redwood forest; the air made me high as I breathed in the resinous sap diffused into mossy hillsides. I threw my chain and got off the bike to fix it, surrounded only by quiet giants, the glittering panels of sunlight reaching through the branches and down to dapple the earth.

Then I was tired and hungry and I shook up my bottle of Cytomax. The top accidentally came off and sticky-but-delicious electrolytes splashed all over my bike and my shorts and my shoes and my legs … potassium and salt that I would not have the pleasure of absorbing, and that I needed because it was hot. The kind of hot where you stop riding, and there are salt crystals formed on your face.

We stopped for lunch in Lagunitas, and the people who were already there clapped for each new group of riders who joined them. I sat with James and Fred and Lisa and Jim who I had ridden into the park with early that morning, and two other riders, Megan and Kim. They gave me tips on training and chafing. We laughed at our voracious eating habits and James told a story of eating half a tuna sandwich off some complete stranger's plate from an empty table one day when he’d had two flats before pedaling into the lunch spot. He had been too hungry to wait for his own to be fixed. As my stomach growled and my blood sugar felt like it was about ten, I thought, "I would totally do that and not think twice."

I decided to ride with James, Fred, Lisa, and Jim for the rest of the way home. We crowed and laughed and talked about how much "this hill sucks" as we rode up, smiling and breathing hard as a little pack. We crested White's Hill, and I stopped to let my friends go around me since I am a brake-rider on the downhill. I don't trust the little road bike yet, and the skinny tires and dragonfly-wing construction of the little beauty make me imagine some part falling off as I fly down a hill. But I eased up on the brakes a little and got going up to about 35 mph before noticing a lot of people in their cars motioning for me to slow down as I zoomed past them. "Assholes." Everyone in a car while I am on a bike is an asshole.

Then I noticed there were cars pulled over on the side of the road and a bunch of people standing on the shoulder. I slowed my bike with great effort, and my eyes locked onto the face of a man. His look shocked me, and I felt like I was floating or like my back tire had come off the ground, a surreal feeling as I knew that something horrible was wrong.

"What's going on?"

He answered, "There's a biker down."

"I'm a nurse."

He begged, "Can you please help? It looks bad."

I got off my bike and walked it down to the scene. A biker lay on the shoulder, covered by a green blanket. Blood was coming from the front of his face and from his leg, making red puddles that pooled and then continued their course off the road. He looked around, panicked, needing eye contact with those who knelt beside him, speaking soothingly to him, patting his leg and face. I joined them, clamping my fingers around his wrist to check his pulse. Weak, thready. He would struggle for air sometimes, complaining of a pain in his chest. There were a few other people around him. A chiropractor stabilized his neck and had her calming fingers on pressure points on his chest. There was another nurse and an OB/GYN. Lisa was a doctor, an internist with emergency room trauma training, and she immediately started a head-to-toe assessment. At a speed of probably 40 miles per hour he had hit the shoulder at such great force that he had come unclipped from his pedals and slammed repeatedly into the side of the mountain. His helmet was on the ground, bloody, and the lenses had popped out of his glasses.

I moved to the other side of him and lifted up the blanket to check his legs. A huge chunk had been torn out of his left leg, a piece of muscle missing like someone had carved it out, scooped it. I didn't allow my expression to change as I looked at it, like nothing I had ever seen before. I didn't want him to see my reaction. I put my hands on his feet, checking them for warmth and feeling for pulses as he held up his left hand. "I can't feel my thumb." It was pale blue-white, and Lisa quickly assured him that he had probably just banged it really hard. "You're going to be OK." We all told him that.

The fire department got there with their ambulance and loaded him up. He asked about his bike -- he was an AIDS ride cyclist.

We rode the rest of the way home slower, calmer, closer knit. We watched out for each other and paused when someone lost their chain. We performed frequent head counts, and when we stopped for the bathroom in Fairfax at the Coffee Roastery, James hugged me. We had just met that morning. But we had shared nearly 65 miles. We had seen things together, and I hugged him back and marveled at the number of other people I had met that day that I felt instantly close to. The fog began to roll in as we rode through Sausalito and up the unbearable hill coming out of that town.

We crossed the Golden Gate Bridge with the wind gusting to the right and left so hard in each direction at the same time, that I felt as though I could see it in front of my face. I felt it stir my heart, and the bridge's cables moaned, crying their songs of the sea and the mist and the fog in a high-pitched wailing, and the water beneath me churned. There was a large spot of blinding golden light far out into the sea where the sun had broken through.

I had set off that day through Ferlinghetti's halcyon morning and was welcomed home by the new night fog. I had seen whole revolutions of life and death and God's miraculous creation, I had breathed the old wisdom of redwoods and ridden through lonely stretches of open space. And I had done it all with 84 other people who wanted to make a difference in it all somewhere.