Having decided during my sophomore year at Yale to try distance cycling solo, I set my immediate goal to commute during the summer between home in Glen Ellyn, IL and Batavia, IL, where I was going to be in my second summer working at Fermilab as an electronics technician. The trip is about 10 miles one-way. To start it off I wanted to taste a small two day ride to Wisconsin and back. I purchased a Raleigh Record for about $60. (This was in 1971.) Then I worked on assembling everything I felt necessary for the trip and was up until about 3 am. I felt that a 6 am departure would be prudent considering I had no idea how long it would take me as a total neophyte to reach WI. Then I realized I didn't have an alarm clock and didn't know when my mother would be getting up and so couldn't see my way to interupting her sleep to ask her to wake me up in three hours. I knew from school what toll staying up all night takes, and the value of every minute in slumber when you must perform the next day. I decided I simply would wake up in three hours by creating some sort of subconscious imperitive and surrendering my fate to it. It was not complicated. It was simply the net consequence of a host of prior decisions.

I woke up at 6 and took off.

I chose to travel by the only north-south state highway passing through our area. I didn't know how long it remained north-going. I just knew it went north from town. I don't remember if I had a map. In any case, I decided just for the experience of learning to reckon with my senses rather than with the more intellectual faculty of map-reading. If I did have a map, I didn't use it.

The route was not scenic. Traffic was fast. I tried to keep up a good pace, estimating my mileage against my estimate of the distance to WI. I don't recall seeing any mileage signs.

About an hour into my trip I suddenly got the feeling I was off-course, traveling more north-westerly than north. Again, if I had a map, I didn't use it. I just decided to make a 180 degree turn and find a place where I might have had an alternative route heading due north.

I found a route I believed would take me north again and turned onto it.

A little later, I started to have trouble with my rear derailleur, brand of Simplex. I had no choice but to disassemble it and learn how it worked. It soon became obvious I had unleashed a monster. The spring in the thing had one end that was manufactured bent out so that it could fit in a little hole in the body and load with force when you assembled it. Getting the right tension on the screw inside the spring turned out to be touchy, and it slipped out of allignment time and time again as my fledgling bike-mechanical impatience became a burden. At least I had made the right decision to take allen wrenches with me. I applied a little sweet-talking both to the bike and myself and somehow it came out all right and stayed that way for the rest of the trip, and the summer too for that matter.

I realized I would eventually have to separate from the bike for appreciable lengths of time and found a motorcycle shop where I was able to buy a motorcycle chain and lock. I had never seen a lock and chain that big. Thus my username, enormouslock. The security I got kept the bike with me through two summers of commuting to Fermilab and two 1800 mile trips. I let my guard down when I lost my apartment to fire and left the bike unlocked and unattended on the porch of the girl whose love I was sick over causing me to be negligent and cause the fire to begin with. Then my advisor dropped his objections to my major coursework plan, just before graduation, because I appealed to his sympathy with the story about the fire and the bike. Had I not had that excuse I might have had to spend another semester to get my degree. What is fortune; what is misfortune?

When I got to Wisconsin my bottom began to hurt badly. I figured it would go away so I learned to live with it. It was a Brooks leather saddle.

I had always been a stickler for language propriety but when I got to a point where there didn't seem to be anyone around for miles I decided there was something, what I didn't know, demanding me to swear at the top of my voice, which I did with some sheepishness, if that is possible. It was a transition. Later, a station wagon was traveling ahead of me with some fellows on the tailgate and they shouted out some fraternal idioms at me. I had never used idioms, as weird as that sounds. But on this occasion I was sufficiently beyond any world I had previously thought I would travel that I felt I needed to return in kind, so I shouted out, "right on!" It was my first descent into counter-culture and opened up new avenues of social give-and-take for me. It doesn't sound like much, but for someone who would refrain from saying, "heck", it was a clear departure. I had been the managing editor of my high school newspaper and I always considered my audience.

I got to Lake Geneva and somehow discovered I had traveled 60 miles, by map or other means I don't recall. I found out there was a big name band playing nearby that night and went there and joined the crowd, I remember walking around feeling very Illinoisan among Wisconsiners, but not unwelcome. There were about a thousand kids there. That night I camped out on some road in the bushes and the next day started out feeling more confident of making the 60-mile trip in one day. I don't remember details of the trip back, which I suppose is strange, considering how much of the trip up I remember. Maybe I went up on the strength of uncertainty, if there is such a thing, and came back in the arms of certainty missing anything that might have marred the trip, or worse.

I don't remember the moment I arrived back at my house. When I cycled between Seattle and Chicago at a later date, and came bombing into town on a wave of ebullience full of the swell of places and atmospheres, especially the rocky mountains, I will always remember the way my mother had no greeting for me of any consequence, and the way I accepted that token of passage into an uncharted region of experience, beyond the ability of old habits of speech to communicate, even to your own mother.

But as for my Wisconsin trip, it was formative. What perhaps amazed me most was the sensation, somewhere along the way, that my body had grown more muscled, despite the knowledge that that was quite improbable. I also started to appreciate food, but not water, yet.

My commute to Fermilab was pleasurable all summer long and I repeated it the next summer, but not before going to Europe to cycle from Stockholm to Nice, and not before going to Seattle to cycle most of the way back to Chicago, just as long a distance as in Europe. (I got tendenitis because my crankarm got bent. I hitched for a while. One ride I got was in the back of a pick-up truck where I found an old pipe six feet long and with the owner's permission I used it to bend my crankarm back. When my tendenitis healed in a few days my bike was back in good shape, like me.)

But that's another story.