First: Hey! I got a thing published!
If you’ve gotten roped into a conversation with me in the past few months, I probably brought up the topic of running (to your dismay), and, ignoring all signs of your disinterest, I most likely humble-bragged to you about the wack-o volcano race I ran in El Salvador back in January. (I know me.)
Well, I wrote a report about that race and about the people involved in making it happen, and then I sent an email pitch to a sports magazine in the US about it, and then they didn’t reply, and then I sent four more email pitches, and then finally they agreed to take it. Woohoo!
In brief, the story is about trail running in Latin America, and an organization trying to balance the global visibility of a Western-dominated sport. It’s published online by Run, a division of Outside Magazine. If you’re short on time, please just read that — it’s something I’m proud to have done, and it's more interesting than the self-indulgent gunk that follows in the rest of this.
But, hey, if you're into the gunk, I'll provide some of the traditionally strange, slightly distasteful updates, too.
As always, thank you for reading. I’ll be home soon to yap at you with stories you'd wish I’d stop yapping about.
Okay, here's the thing:
____
And okay, here's the gunk:
Back on a Bike — The Chilean Patagonian Highway
“You know how to change ze bike tube?” Moritz asked me in a thick Swiss accent. We were standing in his kitchen in Puerto Varas, Chile, which served as the office to his small bike rental company.
I thought about it. I had seen people change bike tubes. I had watched a video on patching flats. I understood the logic, the air, the rubber, etc. I knew the theory.
“Yurp,” I affirmed. I could change a tube. In theory.
I was in the office to rent a total bikepacking setup from Moritz — bike, panniers, tent, sleeping bag, cook gear, repair kit. My plan was to bikepack the northern stretch of the Chilean Patagonian Highway, Carretera 7, which runs north to south through Patagonia in, well, Chile. It’s been a destination for people who can’t sit still ever since the road was completed in the 80’s, and in peak season — January and February — the highway is packed with cyclists; it’s supposed to be one of the most beautiful highways there is (behind VT 7 through Rutland). Now, though, at the end of March, Moritz said I’d probably have the road to myself. And it might rain.
He fixed a skeptical Swiss side eye at me. "You have ze rain gear?"
I had a counterfeit North Face rain jacket and a pair of “waterproof” pants I bought at a market in Medellin for $3. Neither inspired confidence. It doesn’t really rain in Medellin.
“Yurp,” I said.
“You have ze map? On ze phone?”
“Well…” I pulled out the backup Guatemalan potatophone.
What?! No iPhone 13 Pro Max?
Allow me a digression:
There’s a saying in Colombia that goes, “No dar papaya.” That means, “Don’t give papaya.” That means, don’t give opportunities for people to steal from you — like wearing flashy jewelry or using your phone out in public.
Well, there I was towards the end of my time in Colombia, sitting on a minibus on my way back to Medellin, listening to garage punk through my headphones, lost in my own little noise-cancelling world, violently playing the air drums with my baby blue iPhone 13 Pro Max in hand. Truth told, I was dar-ing papaya. Mucho papaya.
So naturally by the time the bus stopped I had been pickpocketed, liberated of said iPhone. De-papaya’ed, if you will.
If you’re keeping count, yes, that’s two baby blue iPhone 13 Pro Maxes I have lost on this trip. And, if you’re curious, AppleCare Plus Theft and Loss insurance covers up to two incidents per annum (heh, annum). So I’d get a replacement phone, but not in time for the bike trip. I’d have to do the ride through one of the world’s most beautiful roads with, ironically, one of the world’s worst cameras.
Moritz grimaced when I pulled out the potatophone, the face a doctor makes when a patient shows just how far the athlete's foot has spread. The phone would work, though.
He then reminded me that in ten days I had to deliver the bike to the person who would pick it up in another city, Coyhaique, 400 miles south.
“Ten days,” I confirmed. I had ten days to bike the 400 miles, lugging a tent and sleeping bag and a repair kit I didn’t know how to use and enough peanut butter to close down a public school system. I had one pair of biking clothes and one pair of sleeping clothes. The rest of my junk, computer included, was loaded on a shipping truck, and I hoped it'd be waiting for me in Coyhaique.
"You can do it?" he asked skeptically, by which I think he meant, "I don't think you can do it."
"Ja," I said, by which I meant, "Brother, I'm about as clueless as a CIA-sponsored coup."
I rode the bike through town to the hostel I was staying at for the night. I couldn't figure out the gear shifters. I got lost and got caught in the rain. It was gonna be a hell of a ten days.
Zoomed out and zoomed in -- the route
On the Road:
I left Puerto Varas the next morning under an overcast sky. I picked up the Carretera 7 along the coast and followed it just about all day, singing to myself and questioning my life decisions on every uphill. Thankfully, the route was simple -- follow the highway. When the road ran out I knew I'd have to climb on a ferry, and then keep biking on the other side. Repeat until Coyhaique.
Once out of town the road became pretty rural. In the afternoon it started raining and I discovered that the “waterproof” pants I had bought were really just blue doctor scrub bottoms that clung to my thighs like plastic wrap on raw chicken. Wet and cold, I pulled off the 7 on a little path that went down to the coast, and found a clearing above the water to pitch the tent for the night.
There was one house above my spot, and when an older feller stepped out onto his porch I emerged from the shrubs to ask if I could stay there. He said of course, and then invited me in for coffee, which ended up being a full meal prepared by him and his wife. They were a sweet, retired couple who stuffed me full of fish pulled from the ocean below, and they told me travel stories and how they built the house as a getaway destination for themselves. All told, lovely, lovely people. At 8 o’clock I said goodnight and crawled into the tent. A good first day.
Day 1: 47 miles, 2,400 feet of elevation
The next morning I awoke to fisherman getting their boats ready on the shore below my spot, and I boiled instant coffee on the camp stove and said good morning to them. I had a short ride to catch the first ferry under a blue sky, the ocean shimmering to my right.
After the 30 minute ferry ride the route became seriously empty, with one town about every 30-40 miles. The road followed a pattern of long, slow uphills and fast, steep downs, and my tailbone by midday felt like it had been pushed through the meat grinder attachment on a Kitchenaid. I pitched the tent in a guy’s backyard across from the dock for the ferry I’d have to catch the next morning. Peanut butter and Harry Potter en español before bed. I wrote a few notes in my journal:
-Eternally hungry
-Empty road, many hills
-Pain in butt and both achilles
-Dang great so far
Day 2: 41 miles, 3,500 feet of elevation
Day 3 was a doozy, with a 5 hour ferry ride across the fjords and into a national park, during which I read on the deck and dried my socks outside. I biked from 3-7pm and got soaked in the rain again on empty dirt roads that turned to mud. I pulled into a black sand beach to camp, wet and pissed, to find signs that said no camping. I camped and got invited to tea by a couple who had a whole adventure rig. I cooked pasta in my tent in the rain. So it goes.
Day 3: 30 miles, 2,800 feet of elevation
The ferry, the road signs, the snack shop the tent
By now the themes have emerged. I bike all day and listen to the same songs over and over again. I eat peanut butter and ice cream and drink Coca Cola and sleep 11 hours a night, and my body feels like I am biking all day and pumping myself full of Monsanto's snacking side projects. Good, honestly. The road goes up and down, very green, very remote. Little towns all a day's ride apart. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it is sunny. It undeniably beautiful, riding along the coast and around fjords and into deep green damp woods. It's not all that fun in the moment, especially on the ceaseless uphills, but at night as I drift off into the bliss of Spanish Harry Potter (“Eres un mago, Harry,”) I feel pretty dang alright.
Day 4: Woke up and watched a seal in the water while I ate peanut butter sandwiches. Put on wet clothes and biked all day. Sunny and flat, finally. Cows and dogs and sheep on the road. One big uphill at the end. Pitched tent in lean-to and made fire and ate pasta soup.
Day 4: 56 miles, 3,700 feet
I started the next day drinking coffee and chatting with Daniel, the guy who ran the refugio where I had pitched the tent. He was escaping what he described as an affluent hell working as a financial engineer in Santiago, and he had found peace by living on his ownsome out in the middle of absolutely nowhere, Patagonia. He was a great guy, and it was nice to talk to someone who thought solitude was important, since the closest thing I had to a companion was the neck gaiter I had blown so much snot into that it was developing sentience.
Anywho, shorter day, sunny. Net downhill, rolling green hills and mountains. Stopped at the next town 40 miles away and bought chips and candy and ice cream and coke and went to the river and jumped in in my skivvies and ate ice cream and chips and candy and coke shivering by the water in the sun. A good one.
Day 5: 42 mi, 2,600 ft
And then things started to unravel.
Here’s my journal (like a diary, but for big grown men) entry for day 6:
Oof. Wet.
Woke up cold and early, knowing rain was coming by 2 pm. Had plan for 65 km to beat rain, on bike by 9:15. Morning was nice — foggy, sun burned through, changed to shorts on side of road + loaded sleeve of cookies in pocket — one cookie every 5 songs.
Motored along rolling hills like that. Lunch in Puyuhuapi — empanada + coffee, 1.5 hrs to get to planned campsite, clouds coming over.
Knew I could make it, pedaling well, good time, until gravel stretch — thumpthumpthump — flat tire. Right as rain started, 10 km from camp. Crap.
No real idea how to change it. Took me a couple tries, hands shivering in the cold rain. Finally got it done, but total mess. Last 3-5 miles in solid rain, soaked thru. Oh well. Now definitely know how to change tire. Not just theory.
I made it the last 10 km in the rain. But, as the saying goes, when it rains, it rains for a while. So day 7 was another start in the cold wet yuck, riding around a chilly fjord, quickly realizing that whatever I did to the tire last night on the side of the road wasn’t going to hold. So back to fiddling, until finally I figured out how to keep the silly little air inside the silly little tube.
And then, a hill. As the rain kept coming down I had a 3 mile death march on a fairly vertical plane, climbing 1,900 feet along muddy tight switchbacks. I was frozen to the core and my headphones died. It took about 2 hours to get to the top, colder with each step, but when a guy stopped his truck and asked if I wanted a ride I said no gracias, which I guess exemplifies something (maybe that I have donkey brain).
Down the hill fast and chilly, shaking my way into a refugio at the next town where they had a wood stove.
Day 6: 42 mi, 3,400 ft
Day 7: 43 mi, 4,300 ft
Traffic, rainy ice cream, a local delicacy
But, hey, then it was day 8! And I made a friend! Bonnie the French anarchist was the only other person staying at the bike refugio, and we agreed to do the last push to Coyhaique together. She had just graduated French school in France studying some French thing, and now she was at the relative start of a bike trip around Chile, also heading south. We rode together and the day passed much quicker in company.
Also, she had a camera, which meant actual nice photos of where we were.
We biked all day for day 8, and I had a lunch of cookie sandwiches, made by stuffing cookies in between slices of bread. We stopped at a town called Mañihuales, where we paid $3 to stay in a refugio with a wood stove — now, further south, the nights were below freezing and too cold for a tent. At the refugio we spread out our sleeping mats on the ground around the oil tank wood stove and met the only other inhabitant staying for the night — Luis, the coolest dude ever.
Luis is currently 72 years old. He walks all hunched over like a question mark. He has the classic wrinkles and bushy eyebrows and big ears of a grandpa. He's also been living off of a bicycle for the past year, having logged some 3,000 miles since January.
As Luis tells it, he returned back to his native Colombia from a stint working abroad and sat down on his brother’s couch. There, holding the remote, about to click on the TV, he had a realization.
“I could sit there for the rest of my life and wait for death to come,” he told Bonnie and me, “or I could go find it.”
Pretty fricken' metal.
Luis is a wonderful, kind guy. When he watched me get up after eating a pound of pasta to make two peanut butter sandwiches for dessert he exclaimed, “Davíd!” in a tone that felt familiar, like I was getting lightly chastised by a relative. A funny, intimate moment, in a little shack in the middle of nowhere. And that was day 8.
Day 8: 42 mi, 2,400 ft
“Today’s the day, Bonnie!” I said to Bonnie the next morning, both of us blowing on our hands to warm them against the frost. “We can make it all the way to Coyhaique!”
“Pepe fromage escargot omelete,” she said. Something like that.
Anyway, we did it. We made it all the way to Coyhaique. It was a long old day on the bike — 57 miles and 3,700 feet of climbing with a big hill at the end, but I did the cookie trick where I put a whole sleeve of cookies in my pants and ate one every five songs, and that powered me through the whole day. I waited for Bonnie at the top of the hill and we rode down into Coyhaique together, laughing, happy to be done for a bit. The next day I gave the bike to the person I was supposed to give the bike to, one day ahead of time. And that was it. Bikepacking the north stretch of the Chilean Patagonian highway. Done.
Day 9: 57 mi, 3,700 ft
Some great photos from Bonnie
Catching up the Clock: A Slice of Argentina
I ended up spending a week in Coyhaique with Bonnie waiting for my darned laptop to make it — turns out we beat the shipping company by quite some time. During that stretch I worked at a public computer at the Coyhaique library from open to close, banging out the draft of the report on El Salvador. My achilles went back to normal and my tailbone did a salamander-leg-esque regeneration. I submitted the draft report a day before it was due.
Eventually I got my computer and I got my replacement baby blue iPhone 13 Pro Max. I am nothing without my toys. I was ready to keep moving, and Bonnie and I said "Adieu." She's a good friend and a wicked biker, and we left with tentative plans to meet up again in Paris, where they let you pee on the streets in public.
From Coyhaique I kept making my way through Patagonia — I took a bus to Cerro Castillo and did a hike there, then took a bus to Chile Chico, a border town with Argentina. I crossed the border with Casey and Taylor, a couple of squash botanists from Oregon. We ended up walking across the empty no-man's-land between the two countries, which was fun, and then we split ways.
I headed south to El Chalten, Argentina, which is supposed to be one of the best hiking spots ever, and I spent five days there doing day hikes and trail runs (and I took nice pics with my new replacement iPhone).
Chalten looked like this
And then I went to Calafate, Argentina to see the Perrito Moreno glacier, and I took a picture of that.
And then I flew to Buenos Aires, and spent a weekend with my dear friend T and his wonderful partner S, who is from Buenos Aires and who was a wonderful host.
And then T and I flew to northwest Argentina and spent a week romping around, doing day hikes, road tripping and laughing at silly things and also having nice conversations, because he’s a great person and a better friend.
And then I left Argentina. And that's where the timeline for this one stops.
Buenos Aires and the red rock Argentine north
On Running and on Writing and On Biking: Reflectionisms
Firstly, I recognize that the bit about Argentina deserves more space, reflections on its own. T and S are great people, and Argentina is an incredibly cool, interesting place where the political shapes the now and where I got scammed out of $150 from a taxi driver. So there are stories there, too. But I'll save them for another time.
I'd like to end writing about the El Salvador article. It's something I've been working on since February, with rounds of revisions and updates through every country, and I think there's a through-line there that can pull all this gunk into something vaguely coherent. So, a word on the process:
I wrote the first draft of the report sitting in a hostel in Leon, Nicaragua after having taken a fifteen hour bus from El Salvador, two days after running the race. My toes were wailing like lonesome beagles under a full moon and I kept blowing black volcano dust out of my nose. More than anything, I had the feeling that I had stumbled upon something that people should know about.
I started by spending two full days listening to interviews and Instagram Live streams from the people directing the race and Circuit. They all repeatedly brought up the same mission: letting the world know about the strength of the people, organizations, and events in Latin America. I felt compelled by their mission, in part because it aligns with how I feel about Latin America from my travels. Also, when I left El Salvador, I had the notion that I wanted to repay the kindnesses I had received. Helping spread that mission was an opportunity to do so. I wrote a 4,000-word draft and started looking for an audience.
Eventually, by the time I had gotten to Colombia a month and a half later, having sent five email pitches with increasingly desperate attempts to gain attention, I finally got a reply from someone at Outside magazine. The message was clear: there was a story, but it needed some major work.
The biggest change was the thing that tends to keep me from being a pee-hole in general: realizing that it wasn’t about me. The first draft was admittedly pretty self-indulgent, highlighting me myself and I's experience running the race. (To be fair, I also thought it was darn funny.) Here's an excerpt:
"
Finally, for the final stretch, the last 500 meters, the route pointed downhill. I executed my race strategy to the last. Do my gosh dang best. I crossed the line in 3:20:10, good enough for fifth place. My belly button had rubbed raw on my wet shirt and I was covered in mud. My pocket was smeared with melted Snickers and the sweat weighed my shorts down further. I had two raw nipples and no ride back to the city an hour and a half away.
"
Not exactly the pinnacle of journalistic integrity. So I scrapped that stuff and made the focus on the people who the focus should be on.
I had a month to submit a new draft, which aligned with the time I was stuck in Coyhaique waiting for my computer. From the public library I set up phone interviews with the people I wanted to speak to, and I did them all in Spanish. Then I translated them them from Spanish to English, and I used that information to write a more compelling, professional report.
And then I didn’t hear anything back for a while, and then I heard back from a new person with new edits -- mainly that it should be half the length. So, in between touring the salt flats of Uyuni, Bolivia and trying to sleep on five-dollar night busses, I grabbed the metaphorical editorial alpaca shearers, pinned down the metaphorical alpaca, and shaved the metaphorical fluff. Like a metaphorical young farm boy pinning down his favorite camelid, it was emotionally kind of hard, cutting hours' and hours' worth of work. But it made a metaphorical farm man out of me. It made a for stronger piece.
Then another round of edits, this time from a team, and that was it. I wrote an author blurb and chose a picture where I looked like I had most of my faculties about me and sent them. And that was it.
There’s a lot that I could say about the thing. From one yarn, many undies, so to speak. On the big scale, the purpose scale, it was a meaningful project for me -- I had found something that I felt passionate about, and I got to do what I enjoy doing (writing) in such a way as to support that mission. That's a pretty cool thing. A pretty significant thing.
On the technical side, it was great getting to work through an editorial process in a way I hadn't before. Way back when, I spent four years (and $200,000) studying creative writing, and I lived in a bubble of higher ed and literary analysis and elements of story. It was a total blast, but it wasn't the same as the direct feedback and editorial cycles, the whole real-worldness of this project. That was neat to experience.
And finally, there's something to be said for the first draft, the strange, self-indulgent, weirdly open style I chose to write with at first. Yeah, lots of it was garbage, and lots of it had no place in a real magazine. But it also forces some honesty to glimmer through all the alpaca turd. Looking back at it now, I think there's something meaningful there.
I included in the first draft a short section called "A Little Bit About Me." (Ironic, since so much of the whole thing was about me.) I'll quote the section here:
I suppose that when I decided to go off and travel for a year, part of it was born of the desire to have an interesting life, to do things I could point to later and say, “See, I did that! I am accomplished/good enough/cool/athletic/whatever-other-adjective-I-didn’t-feel-like-for-a-period-of-time.”
Running, in a lot of ways, has helped me fill that. For a while it was an escape from work. Then it was something to work towards, something on the calendar. And more recently it’s become a format through which I can interact with the world, a haptic suit that lets me get out and enjoy the simple pleasure of doing.
If, for a while in my life I felt like a spectator, passive, running was the single habit that taught me that you don’t need any specific qualification to go explore, play, enjoy the world around you. You just have to go.
I am twenty seven years old. A former, probably future, high school language teacher. I’m currently living out of a backpack and traveling Latin America. I’ve been on a Pam Houston kick lately. And I like to run.
It didn't make the final cut, but to me, that's the through-line for this whole experience. The lesson for me, the greatest discovery, which started the day I started running, is that you don't need any real qualification or invitation to do stuff. You just need some gosh dang gumbo.
That inner gumbo took me to traveling, even though people told me not to go where I was going. It took me to signing up for a race I had no way to get to and knew nobody else running.
That inner gumbo took me to a journalism project, to interviews in a language I'm not perfect at, even though the only other time I interviewed someone was in high school cinematography class (during which Andrew Gayda and I spent most of our project time getting high in his Honda Pilot and trying to freestyle rap).
In the same way, it took me to stumbling upon a cool bikepacking route and thinking, with no real qualification or experience or coordination or knowledge, that I could probably do it. And I could.
That, I think, is the grand lesson of the whole thing. The running and writing and biking and traveling -- it's all the same. It's the notion that you don't have to know what you're doing to start doing it, and you definitely don't have to be good at what you're doing to enjoy it. The greatest waste is to wait a lifetime for an invitation to jump in the mud.
The mud is cool and thick and silky. Nobody can see the bottom. Shan't we dip our toes in?
-Mudball D
Great post David, I really enjoyed the photos too!!
I agree with the summary vibes too. I've succeeded at being marginal at everything I've ever attempted, and it's made for a wonderful, fulfilling life!! ;-)
OH, AND CONGRATS ON GETTING THE ARTICLE PUBLISHED! A big step. I also got one published recently, thanks to Aidan. In "Field Ethos". He insisted I submit it. I did, then forgot all about it. 4-6 months later, I got a recent email from the editor requesting a head shot, bio etc. So, we are the famous Nolan authors it now appears! Cheers, UFO
Hey, I wrote an entire tome, and it AUTO-deleted it... Too wordy? Too snarky? OMG...I just can't do it all again..! I enjoyed it and ended in inviting you to chat re: past glories, over cocktails at Fairview this summer... Cheers UFO (Uncle Franny Oversea...)
More great stuff! I love the reflection at the end and couldn't agree more: you don't have to be good at something to really enjoy it!!!! Looking forward to seeing you again soon!!!!