Maka Riding with Ghosts

1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-1-908646-15-6
Verlag: Eye Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 0, 288 Seiten

Reihe: Eye Classics

Gwen Maka, a forty-something Englishwoman, was told by everyone that her dream was impossible. Gwen's solo ride takes us across the deserts and vanished Indian trails of the American West, over the snow-peaked Rocky Mountains, down Mexico's Baja coast and finally into the sub-tropics of Central America. Her journey is intertwined with the legends of past events; as she rides through unwordly landscapes, the ghosts of the American Indians and pioneers who shaped the Americas travel with her. Riding with Ghosts is Gwen's frank but never too serious account of her epic 7,500 mile cycling tour. She handles exhaustion, climatic extremes, lechers and a permanently saddle-sore bum in a gutsy, hilarious way. Her journey is a testimony to the power of determination.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Maka, Gwen

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

I really didn’t know it would be like this! As I sweated and cursed my way up the never ending hill which culminated in the Loup Loup Pass I wondered how on earth it was that in a lifetime of cycling I had managed to reach the age of forty-five without learning that cycling uphill could feasibly kill you.

And in all these years why didn’t I know that wind wasn’t only something that gently swayed the tree tops, but was really a malicious and vindictive spirit whose sole reason for being was to hurl me under the wheels of any passing articulated lorry or sling me into the deepest muddiest roadside ditch, and whose buffeting blasts could quickly reduce my world to a swirling maelstrom of humourless hell?

After all, since being a child I had often seen cyclists loaded down with luggage, pootling leisurely up steep hills without breaking a sweat, even having the energy to wave at me as we passed by in the car, so I already knew how easy this bike malarky was! How envious I’d been of them when they erected their cosy little tents next to my parent’s caravan, and lit their cute little cookers as they sat on the soft green grass and watched the burning sun go down. I would watch them jealously, embarrassed by my indoor luxury. I mean, cycling tourists always had fun, didn’t they?

So it was that for years I’d been longing to set off on my own Grand Tour; it was something that I knew was going to happen day. I just had no idea how or when or where. And as my parents refused to go abroad (‘there’s plenty to see in this country’) and as I was always financially challenged, I was thirty-four before I finally got beyond Britain’s shores on a bus to Brussels for a weekend demo.

For many years the travelling idea got stuck in the cobwebs of daily survival; I was a single mother trying to juggle what had to be done without the means to do it. I remember thinking of life as a hurdle race — I would just get over one hurdle when I had to prepare for the next one, which I knew was just around the corner!

Then, one day, as I returned from the supermarket on my bike, laden down with six precariously wobbling carrier bags of food for my three teenage sons, an idea began sneaking into my mind. It was like a virus which had lain dormant for years, and suddenly it burst forth into a fully fledged outbreak….

I would go cycling!

Why did it take so long for such an obvious idea to form? Why hadn’t I thought of this before? So convinced was I by this revelation that over the next few months I bought four Carradice panniers, a beautiful silver Dawes bicycle, and booked myself onto a Teaching English as a Foreign Language course — I thought it might come in handy. The panniers went into the waiting room of my airing cupboard, the TEFL was done in my summer holidays, and the bike was stolen twelve months later.

After my children had more or less left home and my little dog Flossie was no more, I decided it was time to use my TEFL skills to see a bit of the world and hopefully raise some cash for my ‘one day’ cycling trip — wherever that may be. Sticking a pin in a map to make the decision of where to go it landed on Turkey, so I left work, jumped on a ferry and after a month arrived in Istanbul. Once there I thumbed the local yellow pages, knocked on doors and soon found work teaching English to spoilt little rich kids and polite attentive big kids and settled into a happily chaotic life in that addictive metropolis.

In the end it was Justin who was the catalyst. My days were floating dreamily by in the smoky haze of non-descript cafes and drifting conversations with a variety of carpet seller friends — lazy conversations dominated by petty gossip; the perpetual elusive carpet sale; how to get home at midnight on fifty pence; which tourists wanted the weed; and always, always, the lack of money. Heady stuff!

The reason it is his fault is because one mellow, yellow day he turned up at my current hostel on his bike. Justin, I should mention, is one of the untamed of the twentieth century — a truly natural traveller; a meanderer on the planet who is vaguely circling the world, but with diversions that are long and fascinating. He arrived from Russia complete with donations of three large glass jars of bottled preserves, several pounds of potatoes and piles of butter — all the heaviest things you can imagine — determined to defy those dedicated lightweight cyclists who decimate everything from toothbrushes to gear levers in order to reduce their weight as much as possible without personal physical amputation. He argued that as he wasn’t carrying it, it was no problem. I was to discover that this was not a logical statement.

With financial considerations taking top priority we decided to share a room for the winter. The result was a fourth floor room with huge corner windows which fully encompassed the magnificent vista of the Blue Mosque, like a glorious three-dimensional Walt Disney screen. This scene flooded our senses daily, and for the remaining months we constantly had to remind ourselves that we were not living in a fairy grotto, or in the white witch’s wonderland.

One hot afternoon Justin was out and I picked up his mini world atlas. Of course, it was obvious, I would cycle from Seattle to Panama. A quick decision.

And yet, not really so quick. Ten years earlier I had visited the United States where I had spent six weeks in my tent, studying development on the Rosebud and Pine Ridge Sioux reservations of South Dakota — the homes of the Brule and Oglala Sioux. This trip was undertaken with a staggering combination of ignorance,stupidity and such a lack of funds that the Greyhound ticket seller in New York got fed up with me asking,

“How much is it to go to x, or y or z?”

“Where do you actually to go?” he eventually asked.

When I told him, he just gave me a ticket and said,

“Just give me what you’ve got.”

Following a combination of camping, hitch-hiking, starving and a whacking dose of luck, I left America very much thinner but also very much wiser. I had gained a greater understanding of the harsh realities of life on the reservations, of land distribution, social problems, education, intra-tribe conflicts, etc.

I was also wiser about my own survival. Things such as how to return the seventeen hundred miles to New York in three days with only four dollars; how to live with my own company; learning that I never again wanted to travel with a dependence on others — I needed my own transport; learning how to take unavoidable risks and accept the possible consequences; to be adaptable, to trust my hunches.

But the most overwhelming emotion I left with was a powerful confirmation that my previous imaginings of ‘how America was’ were correct. It felt how I thought it would feel but even more so, because no written words can express the magic which hovers over those wonderful wide open rolling plains, nor can they convey the vibes of the past which shimmer in the golden air and permeate the land.

And most importantly, I discovered that when travelling alone, and in dire straits, an internalised need really does become an external reality, just as the philosopher Karl Jung said — I believe the word he used was synchronicity. Thus when things get tough, the niches for survival open up, like another dimension. You learn to ‘live between the lines’, to see them, so not only do things turn up just when you need them, but you begin to feel almost an instinct about any situation.

I remember one night camping in my tiny tent on the open prairie outside Rosebud village.

I was hungry, lonely and a little depressed. It was evening, and the sky filled the world — so huge and so blue. I went to the brow of a nearby hill and watched as from the west an enormous fluffy cloud came floating through the blue — a thunderhead. It was a great billowing mass, and within it a magical thing happened — as the lightning flashed and thunder crashed that cloud flickered on and off like a bright light in a white tent.

It was a revelation for me, who had never before seen a storm contained within a single cloud, surrounded by a clear sky. In Europe a lightning storm means low grey clouds that smother your head, the lightning comes from an unidentified source, and the world is enclosed in a fierce, murky onslaught of darkness and close horizons. But that evening on the Rosebud nothing happened in the clear blueness of the sky beyond that South Dakotan cloud, and it drifted sedately on its way across the heavens — all the energy and the drama remaining within itself.

I found some wild choke cherry, lit a fire and cooked them. I made a cup of tea and continued my reading of and read of how, more than a hundred years before, the medicine man Black Elk had also camped on the Rosebud at a time when he was unhappy about the fate of his people, the Sioux. I read of how he went to the brow of a nearby hill, and as he sat there a thunderhead passed, and thunder crashed and lightning flashed within it. As he watched the great cloud pass he felt at peace once more and knew what he must do.

Some would call this coincidence. I call it synchronicity.

Yes, in those lands everything felt alive — the land, its history, its rocks, the people who have passed through. A vibrant tactile thing emanates from the earth and wraps itself around you, draws you safely...