St. Anthony and Buddha Bike Through the Desert

Lately I have been, as my mom used to say, up to my eyeballs in alligators. All of my writing time has been focused on the upcoming release of my novel, which at the same time exciting and overwhelming. So even though I missed my Monday deadline this week, I thought I would post this essay, first published in SportLiterate a few years ago, which tells the story of the bike trip that sparked the novel.

Thanks for checking in! I will be working on new material in the coming weeks and restarting the podcast later this month.

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Mile 976 feels like pedaling through syrup, despite the flat terrain. We are surrounded by miles-wide swaths of rice and soybeans and cotton. If these crops could leach water from the saturated air, irrigation would be unnecessary. But they can’t. They are needy plants that have domesticated the farmers here, wooing humans to feed and fertilize and water them in exchange for the promise of cash crops.  Somewhere beneath what passes for landscape in Eastern Arkansas—literally flatter than a pancake, when compared at scale—the once mighty Ogalala Aquifer barely trickles, depleted by unrelenting demands on its resources.

My team of cyclists can relate. God, can we.

A few lengths in front of me, Starr reaches up to massage her injured shoulder. Of the seventeen college students who began this trip with me, she’s the only female biker left, and she is determined to last as least as long as the men. Beside her, Kris flexes his hands, still peeling from a nasty sunburn he got in the Chihuahuan Desert of New Mexico along Miles 185-242. To protect them, he wore mule gloves while he rode for nearly a week.

“There,” he says.

He points down the long, straight road. Two miles beyond, just above the tops of century-old oaks, I can make out the ivory-colored water tower for Harrisburg, AR. On the other side of that tower will be the Food Giant, a local grocery store whose sign reads BEER – GUNS – AMMO. But we are in the market for less aggressive commodities—shade and air conditioning and fuel for the twelve-year-old pickup that serves as our sag wagon. I check the bank clock as we pass. 9:30am already. This last break will be mercilessly short. We need to make it home before noon, when the heat will be enough to warp the plastic shields on our helmets.

Greg, our lead rider, passes a green road sign on his right. He extends his arm to make sure we see it, then points forward with an imaginary sword to signal the charge.

Jonesboro       27.

“What’s our mile count?” Starr asks.

I chafe at the question, albeit silently. This is the longest and most complicated Bike Trip I’ve ever planned. I want it to be more than an accomplishment to the five who will finish the entire course. I want this trek to mean something, although I realize now is not the time to meditate on just what that might be. When your crotch feels like you’ve spent three weeks straddling a jackhammer, serenity is hard to come by.

A semi whizzes by, its wake knocking us sideways. I pour tepid water over my neck, trying to snap back to the reality of the road. I’ve managed to keep these riders safe across four states, and I don’t want to lose focus so close to home. I need to bring them back whole, if somewhat battered. We’re from a small town. I know their mothers.

“Mile count?” Starr says again.

I check the odometer for what feels like the millionth time today. “Nine-seven-eight.”

“So we’ll make a thousand?”

“Yes.”

“Sweet.”

In the distance, Greg sits up straight. He locks his fingers together over his helmet and coasts toward the water tower. His back is killing him, I know. Then again, all of us bear the marks of pilgrimage on our bodies. We have become well acquainted with that special kind of agony reserved for distance cyclists—that unremitting soreness, that cellular-level exhaustion.

As the appointed spiritual guide, I feel as though I should draw enlightenment from our misery. I should be able to offer a framework to the others so that our pain makes sense. Barring that, I should at least elevate the suffering so that it feels heroic. But despite three weeks of engaging the problem of pain, I am nowhere near an answer. All I can do is affirm what we feel. Life is suffering. This first Noble Truth of Buddhism is as frustrating as it is incontrovertible.

Still. We’re on the road, and have been for twenty-three days and nearly a thousand miles. Long enough that we’re ready to be home. Not long enough to forget where we started.

Launch point: Albuquerque, NM. It’s a much bigger city—population 556,495—than we normally tackle on Bike Trip, but the city is an incidental rather than an objective. It matters only because it is the gateway to the desert.

“Circle up!” Dave barks.

Dave, my co-leader, is a bald and bearded vagabond with a gentle intensity that makes him part mom, part drill sergeant—and the undisputed soul of Bike Trip. Dave founded the tour ten years ago with a simple concept: travel by bicycle from town to town, stopping every forty miles or so to volunteer in the community and spend the night at a church affiliated with our religious tribe. Serving our neighbors is at the core of Dave’s bike trip philosophy, which I find both noble and naïve. He doesn’t say out loud that college students on bicycles can save the world. But, deep down, he believes they can.

I have my doubts. Thirteen years of working as a religious professional has dented my belief in God and obliterated my faith in church.

Dave habors no such doubts. He is a hero to our riders—their Iron Man, their Captain America. They only believe in themselves so far as they believe in Dave.

He prays us out of our morning stupor, right up through to his sharp Amen!

“Let’s go!” he says.

At Mile 2, we have our first casualty.

Josh, who missed Bike Trip last year due to a broken collarbone, doesn’t notice a red light until too late. He locks down his front brakes and endo’s over the handlebars, cracking his left shoulder against the blacktop. We wave traffic into the other lane, get him to the side and wait on Dave, who is bringing up the rear—bird-dogging, he calls it. Josh tries to move his arm and cries out in pain. A second later, he bends over to vomit. When he stands back up, he is pale and wobbly. Dave sits him up on a rock, makes him follow his finger with his eyes. He lifts Josh’s wrist. Presses here and there. “He’s done.”

Dave and I glance at one another, but we already know the plan. He will nurse Josh to the ER for x-rays. I’ll take Dave’s place in back of the pack. We ride on.

Another three miles and the remnant is out of the city, climbing up into the desert along Highway 333. It’s only a two-lane, but the shoulders are good, and most of the traffic is above us on I-40. To our left, South Sandia Peak rises in stark splendor. We’d love to ride to the top, but the clouds hang too low, and our lungs burn from the cold. Instead we settle on a break at a touristy shop in Tijeras. It’s a lesson in humility, and also in transience.

According to tradition, St. Anthony the Great is the father of all Christian monks. He wasn’t the first ascetic to seek a deeper spirituality through the isolation and deprivation. He was, however, the first to take his search into the desert, which so willingly supplied the hardships he courted. This, coupled with legends of his personal piety, made Anthony the most venerated of the desert fathers—the example for all those who would submit to the desert in search of enlightenment.

I find his legacy both inspiring and suspicious.

Thanks to Athanasius of Alexandria—the Father of All Monks’ biggest and most influential fan—much has been made of Anthony’s righteous suffering. Like Job, the biblical hero persecuted for his virtue, Anthony made an enemy of the devil through his faithfulness to God. Though tempted by visions of lust and tortured by boredom, Anthony held firm.

Compared with my fair-weather piety, Anthony truly was a saint.

Still, I can’t help but think that he—and every other saint, for that matter—gets too much credit. Surely those we have canonized aren’t the only ones to deny themselves in search of holiness. Surely others have emptied the resources of their bodies in quests for spiritual awakening, only to die for lack of anyone to rescue them. Mere effort rarely ends in veneration. For that, a would-be saint needs a reputation, along with adherents and admirers to do a bit of promotional work. Without Athanasius to write his biography, who would Anthony be? Just another lunatic in the desert. Just another sack of bones, picked clean and bleaching in the sun.

Dave gives us the rundown on Josh’s condition in the church kitchen.

“Grade 2 sprain. X-rays negative. No concussion,” Dave says with a sigh. “No biking for Josh for four to six weeks. He’ll have to move to support crew.”

Greg and Starr offer sympathetic groans. Support crew is to our bikers what disciples are to saints. Like the ancient monks who brought food and carried away excrement from cells, support crew does the menial tasks to allow the cyclists more time and energy for their own, loftier pursuits. They cook meals and fill water bottles and set up service projects and pack luggage.

In a sense, they are unsung heroes.

Viewed another way, they are just enablers.

Across the dining room, Josh is struggling to fill his air mattress with his one good arm. Miss Vicki, our support-crew captain and surrogate grandmother, stirs the spaghetti and pulls the first loaf of garlic bread from the oven. She hands out slices to those of us gathered by the stove. She fusses over our damp jerseys, clucks her tongue and warns that we’ll catch cold. Shakes her head in pity as she watches Josh.

“That poor boy,” she keeps saying.

Josh isn’t saying much of anything, except for the occasional whimper when he moves the shoulder the wrong way. He knows what’s in store for him—a seat on the van with a group he would not voluntarily hang out with in his free time. This year’s support crew includes set of twins with some undefined developmental disability, who randomly break into show tunes during long silences; a twenty-five-year-old student, still a junior, who has to be reminded to shower; two young women who are friendly and helpful, but too shy to maintain a conversation for more than a few minutes. None of these is a natural kindred to Josh.

For a disciple in training, however, it’s good practice. After all, the great spiritual masters have always had a soft spot for the poor and forgotten, have always preached an inverse logic. Give if you want to receive. Empty yourself if you want to be filled. Embrace your weakness if you want to be strong.

Josh has his air mattress sufficiently inflated. He unrolls his sleeping bag and bites down on one corner. With his good hand, he pulls the zipper halfway down, then spreads it out over the mattress.

“He’ll be all right,” Dave says.

We agree, offering quiet sympathies to one another on Josh’s behalf. We are sincere in our compassion, but not entirely honest. No one speaks aloud the darker feelings we all harbor.

Better him than me.

Three hours’ ride from Albuquerque, civilization ends. We have climbed onto the western edge of the Llano Estacado, the Staked Plain. This immense and desolate plateau receives only fourteen inches of precipitation each year, thanks to the rain shadow cast by the Sierra Madre Oriental. To the west, we can still barely make out the Sandias at the lip of the horizon. In every other direction, a vast, empty swath opens, broken only by a last-chance town that claims 240 residents. It’s only functioning business—Willard Cantina and Café—is now all that separates us from the desert proper. When we pull to a stop outside it, all we hear is wind.

Inside, the cantina is empty except for a bartender and a waitress. The cyclists order soft drinks and appetizers—garlic bread and fried mushrooms and plates of nachos. I can already tell that we’re going to regret our gluttony the moment we get back on the bikes, but no matter. This is our first oasis, and we can’t stop ourselves from partaking. Dave and I choose a table near the back door while our bikers line the bar.

“How do you suppose a place like this stays open?” I ask. “Surely the locals can’t sustain it.”

“Must be on some sort of motorcycle route.”

“We haven’t seen any motorcycles since Albuquerque.”

Dave shrugs, but doesn’t answer.

All at once, the walls feel like they’re closing in, the way they do when I’m alone in my office, where day after day I watch my career disintegrate. My best and most responsible students—Kris, Greg, Ashante, Starr, and a handful of others—will all graduate and move on in the coming months, and what will I have left? Bills the church can’t pay and a salary I might not be able to draw. A leaky, asbestos-filled building populated by oddballs and outcasts.

My bishop thinks I should fire my congregation. I argue with him that my tiny band of misfits is every bit as valuable in the eyes of God as the richest, handsomest church members in the richest, handsomest church in our district.

“I don’t think we can waste time with a plan that clearly is not working,” he answers.

Here in the cantina, when I should be enjoying the break and getting ready for the next ride, I’m thinking about that conversation. Worrying if my job is safe, and worse. Wondering if God feels the same way my bishop does.

We pay the check and mount up and push off with the sun at our backs. Willard’s remaining three blocks are nothing but crumbled adobe and burned out filling stations. It is the first of many ghost towns we will ride through in this desert, each one a monument to failure. Hollowed out buildings. Cemeteries without flowers. No one there to mark the shame of death.

When I google Willard Cantina and Café later this summer as I tell my story to a friend, I’ll discover that it is permanently closed.

Midway through his life, Anthony took up residence in an abandoned Roman fort further south along the Nile. For twenty years, he walled himself off from the outside world, neither leaving nor allowing anyone to enter his cell. He communicated only via a small crevice in the fort, through which he received provisions from and offered advice to his disciples. At times, packs of wild animals—lions and wolves and scorpions—appeared before him, snarling and drooling, ready to tear him apart. But St. Anthony recognized these beasts as nothing more than phantasms sent by the devil to plague him. At his laughter, the beasts disappeared.

We bikers are not so joyful through our torments. In the morning, we ride out into cold that sears our lungs. By noon, the sun scorches our skin. Trains blow their horns in greeting, scaring us nearly off our bikes. Double-trailer semis pass us at 90 mph, almost blowing us off the road with their wind shears. Our bodies ache—the bikers’ from exertion, support crew’s from being cramped up in the sag wagon. The dry air irritates our eyes and chaps our lips. When I blow my nose, I find the tissue filled with clots of dried blood.

It doesn’t help that our accommodations have grown more Spartan further into the desert. We sleep in tiny schoolhouses and one-room churches. Since none of them have proper showers, we take bird-baths in the restroom sinks. Our biking jerseys stiffen overnight. The inside of the sag wagon smells like mushrooms.

We ride on.

At a water break at Mile 176, a gust of wind blows the pickup door closed on Josh’s hand. He cries out loudly enough that we can hear him over the passing train. Thankfully, no bones are broken, although his knuckles will turn blue and yellow in the days to come.

I’ve come to respect Josh more and more since his injury at Mile 2. He doesn’t pity himself, at least not out loud. Instead, he soldiers on in his new, less glamorous role on support crew. He’s learned to spread peanut butter and make coolers full of sports drink with one hand. When the bikers pull over for a rest, he’s the first one out of the sag wagon to offer encouragement. He might very well have the sweetest spirit among us, which, if we believe the stories of Job and St. Anthony, explains why he suffers the most.

The Buddhist understanding of suffering is more egalitarian than what I find in the stories of my own faith tradition. Christian legends speak of suffering as a refining fire, a test. Those who experience hardship should be thankful, because they have been deemed worthy of examination. The task of the saint is to hold fast against temptation and bear up under travails, following the example of Christ.

The Buddha, on the other hand, recognized suffering not as an imposition on would-be saints, but as a simple fact of human experience, woven into the fabric of an imperfect and impermanent world. The culprits of suffering are not devils intent on warping our souls. Rather, our own desires are to blame for the suffering we endure.

As we roll through the miles of desert, the Buddha’s teachings begin to make more sense. The endless land and sky, both of which seemed so beautiful two hundred miles ago, now feel threatening and oppressive. I wish this trip were over, that I were back among crops and trees, downtowns and subdivisions. I long for climate control and television, for a setting in which I don’t feel personally responsible for the petty behaviors of my whiny, self-possessed group. To be honest, I also long to hide from my own whiny self-possession, which seems to be on display more and more as Bike Trip wears on.

I wonder what it would be like to accept life as it comes to me rather than to try to control it. To do my work and deposit my pay without regard to arbitrary definitions of success and failure, whether my colleague’s or my culture’s or my bishop’s or my own. To empty myself of desires so that I might receive with joy whatever the road brings.

To judge not, and thereby not be judged.

At Mile 242, we finally reach Eastern New Mexico University in Portales. For the first time since Albuquerque, we have plenty of floor space to spread out, and a big enough kitchen for Miss Vicki and the support crew to cook a proper meal. We have a TV and high speed internet. And, of course, showers. Thanks to a few creature comforts and a scheduled day off on Sunday, all our petty rivalries are forgotten.

Just in time to split up.

This has been the plan from the beginning. Of our initial group of seventeen, a third need to get back to start summer jobs and internships. Another third have no plans in particular, but are not cut out to be away from home for more than a few days. Only five of us—me, Greg, Starr, Kris, and Ashante—will stay behind with the bikes, the pickup, and the sag trailer. From this point forward, we are our own support crew.

On Sunday morning, we all help load up the fifteen-passenger van and gather for the customary hugs and tears and farewells. I silently call the roll of those who are leaving us. Miss Vicki. Josh. The show-tune singing twins. The twenty-five-year-old junior, who today is wearing a shirt that reads “I is a kolludge stoodunt.” A half dozen others whose help and humor and contributions to Bike Trip I’ve taken for granted until this very moment.

After the obligatory prayer of parting, Dave pulls me aside.

“Well, guy,” he says. “Seven hundred miles to go. You ready for this?”

“Does it matter?” I answer.

Dave considers this. Smiles. “The road is the road is the road, I guess. Ride on.”

He whoops a goodbye to the rest of the crew and climbs in the driver’s seat. Fifty yards and one right turn later, the van disappears behind the ENMU science hall. We are on our own.

The difference between loneliness and exile—between Anthony’s seclusion and Job’s exclusion—is choice. A monk chooses the wilderness. Embraces the empty space, the boredom and the despair. An exile, on the other hand, does not choose the exile, whether from ostracism or disease or failure. It is forced upon him or her.

A monk walks away. An exile is abandoned.

The next day, our small crew arises with new energy. We will once again bike out into emptiness, only this time buoyed by the promise of a new state. At Mile 252, we’ll cross into Texas. It’s an arbitrary border, but it will feel like progress.

Kris’s hands are scorched from the last ride, but Dave has bequeathed him his work gloves to cover them, and we’ve picked up a fresh bottle of aloe on our shopping run. A day of rest has done Starr’s sore feet a world of good, and Ashante has enough caffeine in her cooler to keep her awake at the wheel of the sag wagon. Greg is in high spirits, having emerged from the desert with new clarity about the vocation he will pursue and the woman he is engaged to marry. For a hundred yards, all seems right with the world.

And then we hit the goatheads.

Pastor Shane, our host at ENMU, had warned us about these nasty dried thorns that collect along the shoulders of Highway. Although not a threat to vehicle tires, goatheads are hell on bicycles. In seven miles, we have six flats. When we get off the bikes to patch the inner tubes, the thorns lodge in the soles of our shoes. We have to stand on the asphalt and pick them out with pliers before we get back on the pedals.

Although it’s more of a risk, we decide to ride closer to the centerline, where passing cars have already picked up or blown away most of the thorns. For a while the strategy seems to be working. But at Mile 264, we hear the tell-tale hiss of spewing air. I check my own tires, and then glace at the riders in front of me. Greg has already found the leak. His front tire is down to the rim. Before anyone else can speak, he dismounts. Flicks a goathead from the rubber. Picks up the bike and heaves it into the ditch. With hands raised to heaven, he then offers perhaps the most honest prayer I have ever heard.

“You have got to be shitting me!”

But no one is shitting us—not God, not the universe. This is how things go when you live as part of this world, when you occupy a body and move through time. Life is suffering. The real question is how to respond to that reality.

It’s absurd to think that we have come so far only to be derailed from our path by penny-sized thorns. Perhaps just as absurd to be upset about it. Might as well follow the example of saints. St. Anthony happily taunted his demonic tormenters. Statues of the Buddha often picture him smiling, sometimes even chuckling. The saints had a counterintuitive strategy for confronting suffering—to drain its power through mockery. To pray and swear and, most important of all, laugh.

We reach the Food Giant at Mile 979, cross the parking lot and ditch the bikes and collapse in the grassy area along the north side of the parking lot. Too late, Greg warns of chiggers, but the heat and humidity have ironed us into our spots. We rest beneath the giant oaks, guzzle water and talk about our plans for the next few days—mostly involving couches and junk food and television binges. Greg takes off his jersey and wrings out a tiny stream of sweat. We all laugh.

Even this close to home, however, my thoughts have not left the desert. They continue to cycle through our sufferings, to pick through the pieces of my broken career, looking for a way to make peace with it all. I am not so righteous as Anthony. Neither am I so resigned to the human condition as Buddha. I’m just a guy on a bike, searching for whatever truth I can catch up to.

One of which is this: I cannot change the conditions of my existence. I can choose to submit to their rules, or I can choose to die trying. While the latter may seem heroic, it’s death all the same.

The people among whom I live are determined that it should not be so. My culture’s mission is to control and subdue the natural world, to exploit its resources in the ironic quest to wall out the context of our being. And if the seas turn toxic and species die out and aquifers run dry as the deserts expand? If light shows and praise bands gather thousands of congregants, yet leave our souls withered and fruitless? This we cannot consider. The fear of personal failure—economic and otherwise—is too strong for us to waste precious time contemplating how warped our definitions of success might be, or how high the price to meet them.

We are not born for this futility. It is programmed into us. Rather, we are born into mystery, and our spirits long to come out of hiding—to humbly assent to being part of a dangerous yet magnificent world.

As we ride into Jonesboro, traffic zooms around us. Lines of cars on the way to meetings and dental appointments and kids’ soccer games. Digital clocks warning drivers that they are late or soon to be late. Anxious men and women, squirming in their cushioned seats, cooled by air conditioning systems as they listen to their digital playlists, sequestered by and captive to an illusory atmosphere.

On our bicycles, we are getting broiled. The sun blisters our already leathered necks. Sweat covers us head to toe, drips from beneath our helmets and stings our eyes. As the clock tower of the university comes into view, the odometer on my bike crosses 1000 miles.

We ride on.