Day 39: Capcho to Penonomé

212 miles

On paper, today was not a bad day in terms of forward motion. However, it was quite a slog. But I believe I am slowly getting better from my food poisoning. The past two nights I have not been able to sleep very well, and my body has been completely derailed by sleep deprivation and sickness. I feel like a shell of my former self. My body is not recovering. My mind is cloudy, and my thoughts seem sporadic. I feel safe biking, but as soon as I get off the bike, I want to fall asleep instantly.

I threw up a time or two in the morning, but by noon, I was able to start eating some small things without throwing up. I wanted to try to eat some more substantial food but all afternoon I found myself in a food desert. Most of Panama is very rural. I would pass through tiny little villages with small stores, but usually all they had to sell was crackers and cookies. My body was craving protein—anything besides, fruit, dairy, and crackers. I passed by a couple restaurants at different points, but I didn’t want to stop because it would take too much time. Getting to 200 miles today was of paramount importance. I have a flight booked to Columbia tomorrow night and I need to make sure that I get to Panama City by noon tomorrow. Eventually I I found a supermarket in Santiago as the sun set. I rode a couple hours after dark to make it to Penonomè. On the whole, I feel like my riding today was relatively unimpressive. For the first 100 miles the road was smooth and relatively flat. The last 100 miles the road started falling apart and became pockmarked with potholes. For much of the evening I was riding on concrete slabs. The slabs were about 20 feet long and at the end of each slab there was an inch drop down to the next slab. All day I was riding and just going to thump thump thump every second. It wore out my arms and started to hurt my butt too. I rode on Carretera 1 - Carretera Panamericano all day. It was a two lane divided highway the entire way. Outside of the main towns it was very quiet and a peaceful ride. Panama is a beautiful country, but I didn’t have any breathtaking vistas. It was pretty jungle and rolling artisanal farming all day. There were some big mountains inland and my afternoon was full of choppy little climbs that added up to over 10,000 feet of elevation gain on the day, but the mountains seem nothing like those that I saw on Costa Rica. In many ways, Panama and Costa Rica feel very similar. Panama is clearly one of the wealthier Central American countries. I know that The Panama Canal generates billions of dollars of revenue for the government every year. Panama City also seems to be a wealthier city and about half of the countries population is clustered in the metro area of Panama City. I never fully realized how long Panama is. It’s certainly the longest Central American country. Panama City is more or less in the middle of the country and it will take over 300 miles of riding to get there from the border. Much of the country looks to be undeveloped forest and protected lands. Interestingly, most Central American countries are sparsely populated along the northern coast. I’ve never taken the time to really study a map of Central America before this trip. It’s really fascinating how the mountains and jungle remain so wild and untamed in most of Central America despite the massive sprawling population centers.

I really was not happy with my riding today. I know I’m still sick and sleep deprived and yachty yachty, but I still have come to expect better for myself. It wasn’t just that I was lacking physically, mentally I failed myself today. I feel like I haven’t really recovered from cracking my frame in Nicaragua. That incident has had a remarkable impact on my mental state. I feel my time to journal today is limited because of my sleep deprivation and anxiety about getting to Panama City so instead of recounting my lackluster riding, sickness, and the views that are not that dissimilar from what I’ve been experiencing the last 2000 miles, for the rest of this entry, I want to capture for myself where my mind is at the moment because I have thought a lot about it and have a lot of insight into my current mental state, but I need to write it down so I don’t forget it.

When I cracked my frame, it changed something inside of me. It’s not unfair to say that my entire life changed in that moment. I know that the Pan-American it’s not the end all be all and I’m taking it and myself a bit too seriously. However, I’ve been on the road for almost 6 weeks now. Every day it is all I do. It’s always on my mind I. It’s been on my mind for the past two years nonstop. There hasn’t been a day in the past two years where I haven’t spent hours thinking about this trip. I’ve been on the road for so long that I can’t remember what life was like before this trip. I feel like I’ve been on the road for years. I feel like biking is all I know how to do, all I’ve ever done with my life. So, of course it feels like the Pan-American is my world. Right now, it is my world. There exists a world outside of the Pan-American of course, but right now I’m not living in that world, I’m living in the Pan-American.

The weight of my Pan-American dream is incredibly heavy. I see this trip as the culmination of everything I’ve ever done in life so far. Every time I’ve stepped on a bike, or every time I’ve hoped for a better future in terms of the environment, all those moments boils down to what I’m doing right now. This trip is my make or break in terms of professional riding, and perhaps, for now, my brightest opportunity to have an impact as a climate activist. After I hit that pothole and looked over at my crack frame, my mind immediately jumped to the conclusion that my Pan-American dream had just been crushed. For two years of planning I always said that pretty much anything on my bike could break and I would find a way to fix it, but cracking the frame always seem like a trip ender. I think I even said that in this journal at the beginning. So when I saw that my frame was completely shot, my mind simply assumed that my trip was over. The weight of all my dreams came crashing down. The Pan-American is my shooting star and for years I’ve been building a tower and up to space in hopes that I will one day be able to reach out and touch that star. It felt like all the suddenly my tower had collapsed, and I was in a free fall back down to earth. I sat on the side of the road and felt nothing but everything all at once. I could feel myself falling back down to earth like I’d been awoken from my dream. My tower had collapsed, and I was free falling with my back to the ground. My arms were flailing, and my legs were still pointed to the sky. The weight of all my emotions culminating into one intense moment did something remarkable to my mind. It was such an emotional shock that it seems to have completely changed my psychology—at least for now. I was grossly incapable of processing all of those emotions in one moment. My brain really didn’t know how to cope with the idea that I might be flying home out of Managua. All these feelings only lasted about 30 seconds before I got a grip and realized that if I really wanted to keep going, I could bounce back from a cracked frame. But in that 30 seconds, some thing had changed. Something that didn’t really become apparent to me until the last day or two. The emotional shock of that moment seems to have dulled all of my emotions. It was such an intense moment that it feels like very few things will ever challenge the intensity of emotions I felt in the moment. For the past several weeks, I have been trying to combat my emotions and keep them in check. I have talked about having to take my frustrations and loneliness and anxieties and learn how to dispel them or bottle them up and seal them away. Now, it seems that I don’t even feel these emotions anymore. The fact that I overcame the cracked frame and 34 hours also changed my mentality. Right now it is like the Pan-American is an inevitable. It doesn’t feel like my path to Ushuaia is straightforward or clear or guaranteed, but it feels like if I want to, I will eventually get there. I don’t know if it will be in 70 days or 150 days, but if I keep slogging along, it feels inevitable that I will get there. The sense of inevitability combined with my almost psychological change in the instant has completely rewired the way I approach my life out here on the road. When things go bad, or I’m confronting challenges, now I no longer have to battle with my emotions. My mind seems to have accepted the fact that some things are inevitably going to go wrong and it’s not worth fighting against. Forward progress is not worth fighting against. Hence, my mind does not waste energy creating emotions of anger, frustration, fear, or anxiety like it did. It’s implicit that every setback is an annoying chore. With everything that’s gone wrong in the past couple of days after my cracked frame, I seen apathetic to misfortune. It is incredible how I have flipped on the dime. I don’t really understand it completely. It’s almost a little scary in a way because I feel robotic now. I almost feel predestined. It feels like I have somewhere to be, somewhere I have to be. My path there is unknown, But it almost seems scarily inevitable. It’s like a job. I can choose how I want to do my job, but at the end of the day, I have no control over the grand scheme of things. I just clock in and clock out. I can choose if I want to do my job well, or if I want to mess around and do a poor job. I don’t know if any of this makes any sense to anyone but myself. I’m still trying to process what happened. I think it’s impossible for me to fully rationalize. I simply cannot understand it in the moment, and I cannot understand how this accident affected me. I can’t internalize many of the things that are happening to me at the moment.

At Dartmouth we have a class called the 6B. It is a three hour long class block held once a week Wednesday nights from 6:30 to 9:30. I am personally a big fan of the 6B time block since it allows me to ride my bike a lot more. I took a 6B the last two terms of school before this trip in no small part so that I had more time to train during the day and weekends. Anyways, no matter how engaging or important the content matter of the lecture is, after 2 1/2 hours of class. I usually find myself waning a little bit. Sometimes I find that I’m not processing the information as well as I should be. After 150 minutes of class I often have to just take the best notes I can and hope that when I return to them later, I will be able to elucidate the important content of the lecture from my notes. Right now, I feel like I’m incessantly living in the last 30 minutes of a 6B. I simply cannot comprehend everything that is going on. Every day I see so much. I’ve been passing through a country every other day for the past week. 200 miles is a long, long way. I see just an unbelievable amount of things every single day, day after day. On top of everything that I’m seeing, I have the most intense emotions and reactions. This is such a taxing time for me mentally. When you add together all of the information that is coming into my mind and all the information my mind is working through internally—the thoughts and the questions that I come up with for myself—it is simply too much for one person to process in such a short amount of time. I just have to write it down and hope that my notes are good enough that I can come back and glean the important information. I really do wake up every day and feel like I’m in the last 10 minutes of my 6B it’s a very weird way to live, but I am becoming used to it. Like so many other things on this trip, I have become desensitized to an extent. I’m glad that I can recognize what is happening to me and I am very grateful that I am able to capture my thoughts on paper in this way. I look forward to returning to these entries. I realized yesterday that I am just now processing everything that happened to me in Alaska. Mentally, I’m still on the Dalton Highway somewhere. I don’t think I’ve really moved past my third or fourth day.

When I was a kid, I remember watching bike races for the Olympics and every time an athlete would say in an interview “this hasn’t sunk in yet” or “it’s going to take some time to process this” my younger self would always get so confused. What do you mean? It hasn’t sunk in? you just won gold. You should be a super excited, not confused. Now, I understand what these athletes are always talking about. I think it’s going to take me years to process what is happening to me out here. In fact, I think, even if I live to be an old man I will still be taking away lessons from current events. There’s simply so much going on, and so many ways I am changing so rapidly that it is going to take years for me to work through it all. Jaques Derrida once said that writer James Joyce left behind so many literary mysteries that scholars would spend the next hundred years trying to work through Joyce’s writings. I feel like my Pan-American experience is my own personal Ulysses or perhaps more accurately my own Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man since this trip is my Bildungsroman. I am drawing up mysteries and questions for myself that will take years and maybe even decades to fully understand and answer. I think this is beautiful. It’s fascinating and important that I understand this is. I think I will take away so many amazing lessons and experiences that will make me a better person. However, in the moment, it can be incredibly frustrating and difficult because I don’t understand what is happening to me. I can talk through my feelings with other people, but it’s incredibly hard to articulate how I really feel and my experiences are so unique to myself that It kind of feels like I have to work through most of this on my own. It’s helpful to talk to other people and listen to other peoples ideas, but I can’t even articulate my most pressing questions and unanswered riddles so I can’t expect others to give me answers to my own problems. Perhaps it’s unfair to call them problems. I don’t think it is a problem. More of a mystery. I think it is a beautiful thing, but it’s certainly not an easy thing and that’s some thing I have to reckon with.

This is how I feel right now due to my sickness