A Lonely Road to Nowhere, Article 1: The Lie

When people ask me why I decided to embark on a 6,500-mile bicycle ride across North America in 2025, I like to smile at them politely and feed them a bald-faced lie.

My typical response sounds something like, “Because I’m young, single, I have no kids, and there’s nothing tying me to any one place right now.”

Those are all facts about me. My demographics. The answers to the kinds of questions you see on a form at a doctor’s office before an appointment.

So I’m not really lying, if you want to get technical.

But they’re not the answers to the question.

I could have responded the same way if someone were to ask me why I decided to move to Alaska in 2023. Or why I headed out west and worked on a guest ranch in Wyoming after covid. Or why I hiked across Scotland for a week following a year-long graduate program in the heart of London.

The real answer to the question is a much more meandering tale. The full scope of it would be impossible to elucidate in just a 30-second soundbite.

So, when people ask me why I set off on my bike ride, I give them a soundbite. And since the first time I told a soul about my journey, no one has ever come back to me and demanded I explain myself further.

But why did I really choose to go on my bike ride?

Why did I decide to ride a bicycle through freezing cold and sweltering heat? Why did I climb over mountain passes that never ended and fight through swarms of bugs that ate me alive?

Why did I sleep on the ground, slog through the rain, risk getting hit by countless distracted drivers or attacked by bears? And why did I continue riding with sore muscles, pounding headaches, fatigue, sickness, and injury?

What kept me going through mechanical issues, popped tires, brake malfunctions, and a couple full-on wheel replacements?

But the biggest question of all: How did I manage to stay sane when the weight of crippling loneliness latched itself onto my already-heavy bike and forced me to drag it along with me from Deadhorse, Alaska, to Key West, Florida, over the course of my six-month ride?

Well, that’s what this story is going to be all about.

Freedom and Independence

We all say we want this arbitrary thing called “freedom”. Or oftentimes we use the even more arbitrary term, “independence”. But the trouble is, these ideas are amoebic. They change over time and across circumstances.

What is freedom? What is independence? They are the bedrocks on which the American consciousness was built. They are the truths we hold to be self-evident.

But what, exactly, are they?

Freedom to a healthy eight-year-old boy looks much different than it does to a dying eighty-year-old man. To an eight-year-old, freedom looks like a bicycle, a fishing rod, and an afternoon down by the creek behind his parents’ house.

Freedom to an eighty-year-old man on his deathbed looks like a stroll in a park without the help of a cane or walker.

To a forty-five-year-old businessman facing astronomical pressure at work with a wife who won’t sleep with him anymore and two children whose ages he can’t ever remember, freedom looks like a shiny red Corvette and a night alone with his secretary.

But to a single woman in her mid-thirties still struggling to get her career off the ground, it could look like the very picture that that middle-aged businessman is so desperate to jump out of.

I never was much of a science nerd in school, but Newton’s laws managed to stick with me, especially the oft-cited third law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Translation: For every push, there’s a pull. One side of the teeter-totter goes up, the other goes down.

When a businessman faces pressure at work, he looks around for something to take the edge off. When a struggling professional has taken enough licks without seeing any progress, she might try wooing someone who seems to have things all figured out.

And when a diffident, directionless young man in his early thirties can’t determine any clear path forward in his life other than some hare-brained bicycle ride across North America, he proceeds with gusto.

He takes a hard look in the mirror and asks himself if he really wants to become that businessman with so much pressure on him that he can’t help but picture his secretary without her clothes on.

He questions what decision he ought to make to avoid becoming that old man on his deathbed wondering where his life went.

He wonders to himself late at night what it would take for him to approach every day like that little boy who gets to ride his bike to the creek behind his parents’ house and go fishing.

Coming Awake

In the late nights spent staring at the ceiling of my dry cabin in Fairbanks during the winter of 2024-25 as I worked yet another dead-end job to pay my bills, I determined the only way forward for me was to hop on my bike and go.

That’s what that little boy would do. That’s what the middle-aged and old men wish they had done.

Because that’s what freedom looked like to me. I wanted to wake up when my body felt rested. I wanted to listen to the crickets chirping at night and the birds singing in the morning. I wanted to have nowhere to be.

Of all the definitions for the word "freedom" I've seen, the novelist Willa Cather's has rung most true to me: "Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere."

That's what I wanted.

There was just one small problem: I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.