21. Bicycle Ride—The Continental Divide
Three months into the cross-country bicycle trek, I pulled off the road west of Walden, Colorado. I was stuck. The problem was not so much the physical journey. True, I was towing additional weight because towns were farther apart and because Nunatak was no longer a pup. But my leg muscles were rock solid from the miles in Massachusetts, New York, the southern tip of Canada, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Colorado, and I felt confident I could ride to the coast.
The problem was more the inner journey. The more I thought about Rama, the more I understood. The more I understood, the more I wanted to write. If I wrote, I might publish. If I published, I would betray Rama. If I didn't publish, I would betray those whom I might have warned. I thought, "Damned if I do, damned if I don't." I became emotionally exhausted. I decided to end the bike trip, return to school, and take a break from the past.
But I still wanted to believe that Rama was a powerful incarnation and that I was an advanced soul of sorts. I did not yet understand that only when I checked my desire to soar, like Icarus, too close to the sun would the impasse disappear, and I would accept who Rama was and who he was not.
That night on a bed of wildflowers, I petted the husky and gazed at the canopy of stars. A warm breeze carried the scent of pine. I felt at peace. I was proud and relieved that I had used my rational side to alter the course of my bike trip when my world was in need of balance. I looked forward to hitchhiking west with the dog. I looked forward to school. I took slow, deep breaths and listened to the silence of the valley. My thoughts ebbed into a sea of calm. Flecks of starlight grew brilliant and close. I felt complete. I lost awareness of the passing of time. Suddenly, I realized I had been meditating. I felt surprised. I had not consciously meditated since leaving Rama one year before. Yet the state of mind felt oddly familiar, and I tried to understand why.
I thought about the meaning of meditation. To meditate, I supposed, was to concentrate and reflect on thoughts, images, or phenomena. It was to work in a garden or stand in a subway and listen to currents of the mind. It was to lose track of time completely, absorbed in memories of a friend. It was to gaze down the highway of light where the sun lit into the sea. There were as many ways to meditate, it seemed, as there were facets on the jewel of the human condition.
It occurred to me that I had meditated on the first day of the bike trip at Walden Pond. I had become immersed in watching waves rise and fall and in listening to them lap the shore. Their pattern suggested a rhythm unlike any I had followed. When a friend asked which route I would take, I smiled. My plan was to follow the setting sun.
Now, stretched out on a sleeping bag in northern Colorado, I realized that I had started and ended the bike trip in spontaneous meditation. I recalled other times during the journey that I had meditated. I gazed, for instance, at the bands of bright color which arched from drenched cow fields to the luminous Wisconsin sky. I gazed at the blur of the Minnesota pavement when the wind was strong and at my tail. I pondered an encounter with a young, six-pack-carrying Native American who, when I mentioned the spirit of South Dakota's land, told me he had sold his for a bundle of cash. I contemplated an encounter with a Vietnam veteran in Rapid City who said his death was near and whose shirt read, "AGENT ORANGE KILLS." I meditated on the meaning of a bumper sticker in Wyoming that read, "MY OTHER CAR IS A HORSE." I reflected on Nuna's response when I encouraged her to help pull the rig. The nearly full-grown husky had sat down and scratched her ear.
The primary focus of the bike trip meditations, though, had been on my years with Rama. I had meditated, for instance, on the LSD trips. During the intense rush of the drug, my acquired knowledge of myself and of the world around me peeled away like layers of an onion. It was as if I saw the world through the eyes of a child. Hours later, as the effects of the acid began to wear off, it was as if I saw the world through the eyes of a young man whose self-confidence had not yet been shaken. Rama, who observed me during each trip, mostly let me re-form the layers which made up "me" on my own. The next wave of subjects in his chemical experiments would not be as fortunate (see Epilogue).
I meditated during the bike trip on how, over the years, Rama flipped between "caretaker personalities" more frequently and how, starting in 1984, the flipping grew sudden and extreme. This unnerving phenomenon could be seen in the stages of his LSD trip. Perhaps, inadvertently, he had designed a multi-leveled, persona-flipping program of "sophisticated spirituality" to mask advanced symptoms of schizophrenia.