What Has Happened to Truth?

A recent blog by Timothy Egan of the New York Times (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/timothy-egan/) asked serious questions about why so many people in our country are choosing to believe lies about President Obama, particularly that he is a Muslim, and that he is not a citizen. He lays a considerable amount of the blame at the feet of certain media personalities and institutions.

It certainly appears to be true that some media figures regularly engage in deliberate deception, and that many members of the public are believing them. Perhaps more disturbing, however, is that the political figures who stand to benefit from these lies are, for the most part, refusing to repudiate them. They seem quite willing to stand silent or, in some cases, encourage and even repeat the falsehoods. By doing so, they are forfeiting any claim to character and honor that they otherwise may have had.

This lack of truthfulness by politicians is certainly not limited to members of any political party. Just look at virtually any political campaign and watch for all the ways that candidates and their campaigns seek to hide their opinions and positions in vague generalities, and how they bend over backwards to distort the positions and records of their opponents.

Soon after his inauguration, President Obama had a one-on-one interview with Matt Lauer. Matt asked him if he could see his Blackberry, which President Obama had reportedly been loath to give up. The President said he didn’t have it with him, and just then it rang. He grinned and looked embarrassed. What did he have to gain by this falsehood? Was it just habitual?

What has happened to truth in public discourse? Sometimes it seems like we live in a world in which people will say anything that they think will advance their cause or protect them from harm, without any regard for whether it is really true. The most egregious offenders may be people who make their living in politics, but some media figures seem determined to catch up. Deceptiveness by the media is perhaps more disturbing than when it comes from politicians, because the news media is established for the purpose of providing objective information to the public. When the media is deliberately untruthful, it is being destructive of its principal role in society, and therefore being destructive of itself.

Let’s consider that any effort to be deliberately deceptive is a lie. If you speak, or don’t speak, with the purpose of misleading others, that is lying. Probably the great majority of us learned as children that lying is bad. I hope that the great majority of parents are still teaching their children that. But what do children observe in their parents, and what do we observe in the world around us?

Do you remember the world before “spin” meant providing an interpretation of a speech or an event that was intended to mislead the public? If you think about it, the word “spin” is itself a lie, because it is a seemingly benign term for a pernicious activity. Political spin is now an accepted activity, and the media report it faithfully.

I’m not a person who requires answering all questions truthfully, in all times and places. It’s not infrequent that I will tell someone that I am choosing not to answer a question. Often that’s because answering the question would betray an expressed or implied confidence. Saying that we are declining to answer a question is not being deceptive. But I think we need to consider that when we are deliberately untruthful to another person, we are disrupting and destroying our relationship with that person, because that relationship now has dishonesty as part of its basis. Fundamentally, when we are untruthful, we are diminishing ourselves. Our honor has suffered, and we are also separating ourselves from the truth of the world around us.
I don’t believe that there ever was a world where truth-telling was rigorously honored and practiced, but I do think that it has suffered dramatically in my lifetime. Can the world be put on a track toward restoring truthfulness in private and public discourse? I think so, if 1) more of us accept it as important and practice it in our own lives, and 2) more of us call attention to untruthfulness by others, most especially if we would stand to benefit by the lies. Unless we move in this direction, we are all condemned to live in a world where we cannot trust anyone around us, and where we fundamentally cannot respect ourselves. That is a miserable existence, indeed.

A Recap

As time passes for all of us, it will be easy to forget what the trip really was. It may become just “a coast-to-coast bike ride,” rather than the reality of pedaling ourselves on our bicycles across every foot of this expansive continent. So here’s a recap, state by state.

California
Across San Francisco in a rare May rain, from breakers to bay

Up, up, and up the very step Oakland hills and through East Bay hills and valleys – an early test of legs

Across the Central Valley and up into the Sierra foothills

Up, up, and up the Sierra Nevada, cresting over 8,000 feet three times, then plunging for miles down into

Nevada
Through ranch and farm country, Carson City and Fallon, then into the desert and over more than a dozen mountain ranges, all with long and broad valleys between, often lush with grasses and wildflowers, others with sagebrush

Utah
A 97-mile day of desert, then ag and pasture and a mountain range

Across metropolitan Salt Lake City

Wind and hail

More mountain ranges, desperately cold and wet in the rain and snow

Beautiful ag land along a large lake, and across a corner of

Idaho
More rich farm and ranch land, up and over a mountain range and into

Wyoming
Ag land, then the gorgeous Snake River canyon (where we rendezvoused with Ralph Hughes and his arents) and into Jackson Hole

Past the awe-inspiring Grand Tetons

Yellowstone, with rain, hail, snow, ice, elk, bison, climbs, the Continental Divide, spectacular mountains and valleys. The ride over Dunraven pass and through the Lamar Valley was one of my favorite days of the trip.

Montana
The Beartooth Highway up to almost 11,000 feet, then plunging down to Red Lodge – another tough and spectacular day

A near miss (2 miles) by a tornado while we holed up in our campground in Billings

Several days of the Great Plains, never flat, and at first interspersed with ranges of foothills

North Dakota
Six more days of the Great Plains, with winds every day up to 30 mph – never at our back – some of our toughest prolonged riding of the trip

Far more lakes and ponds than I would have dreamed, tucked into every large and small valley in the very green rolling plains

Minnesota
One day of the Great Plains, then into the North Woods for three days, with numerous lakes, evoking lots of childhood memories of Michigan and Wisconsin

Lake Itasca, the source of the Mississippi

Wisconsin
More days of woods and lakes, including a layover day with my brother at Teal Lake, a favorite childhood haunt

Michigan
More days of woods, some farm land, with Lake Michigan making increasingly frequent and prolonged appearances

A layover day in St. Ignace, my boyhood home, including a newspaper interview

Crossing the high International Bridge

Ontario
Have I mentioned woods and lakes, with some ag land? Eight more rolling days of it, including Algonquin Provincial Park

Highway 17 was hands down the least safe road for bicycling we encountered in over 4,000 miles of riding – terribly narrow shoulders and lots of big trucks

Two days in the rich Ottawa and St. Lawrence Valleys – prosperous farms and many pretty small towns

Quebec
Suburban Montreal, then farmland and rolling woods and lakes for two more days

Working on my French

Vermont
A whole ten minutes of it, through Canaan and across the Connecticut River and into

New Hampshire
The Appalachians got serious, with several steep and fairly prolonged climbs for a couple of days, including over Dixville Notch

Joined by my other brother and his family for our last two days

Maine
Rolling woods, farms, and small towns, leading to Portland and the beautiful Atlantic

A wonderful reception at the finish, followed by lobster on the wharf

There is far more that I could say about each state, but these are the main images that will stay with me. Along the way we learned that 70-mile days are pretty routine, 80+ mile days can be strung together, riding in the rain can be OK as long as it’s warm, and that friendships can be cemented and community formed and celebrated while we’re living for a purpose.

What’s next? Hard to say. Kathy and I will be staying in Michigan for a week , then returning to California for perhaps a month before moving to Michigan. Rich and Cindy and Ginger stopped here in Paw Paw last night and now are driving their new truck back to California, via some family visiting in Nebraska. For now, however, this should be the final chapter of this blog. Thanks for reading!

Reflections, Part 2

Here are some more things I’m thinking about, two days after finishing.

I didn’t have a specific cause that I was raising funds for, which left me feeling a bit self-indulgent – like I was doing the ride just for me. So I sort of adopted the Ride Against Hunger that Rich was doing, and that helped. So please, if you haven’t already, donate to the food banks that Rich is supporting, or to a food bank in your local area, and let Rich know at richowlman@gmail.com.

I do know that even if it was self-indulgent, it was definitely a journey of self-discovery, and that’s good.

Whether it was self-indulgence, self-discovery, or raising money for a cause, I am very aware that we were able to do this ride because we live a life of privilege. How else could we have afforded to take ten weeks to do this? It’s one more way that our lives are so different from the lives of the people who desperately need the food banks that Rich is supporting.

I do know that our ride was very inspiring to a lot of people, and that’s good. Wherever we went, people would learn that two guys in their mid-60s were doing this, and they would get a light in their eyes and see possibilities.

Tomorrow (or within the next day or so, depending on connectivity), some final thoughts.

Reflections, Part 1

Yesterday in Portland, Maine, Rich Fowler and I completed our coast-to-coast bike trip. It was the moment that had been our goal since we started in San Francisco on May 27. The finish was a wonderful moment of joy and triumph, and a great celebration of friendship and family, but it did not come without mixed feelings. At one point in the immediate aftermath Rich said to me, “Hey buddy, we don’t have to ride tomorrow.” I said, “That’s true, but it’s also true that we don’t get to ride tomorrow.”

I am a counter. Like “The Count” on Sesame Street, I love to count things. It is just something I do, pretty much automatically. So every day I would find myself counting down the miles – “22 miles down, 48 to go,” etc. I often had to distract myself to keep from doing it every mile. I did the same thing with the days – “40 days down, 18 to go.” In this way I always had some focus on the end of the ride, each day and the whole thing. Each day was tiring, of course, but seldom exhausting. The discomfort on my rear end did progress throughout each day, but was certainly within manageable limits, especially with the breaks we took every ten miles. So to a certain extent the daily countdowns prevented me from being “in the moment,” really appreciating what I was doing right then.

So what was I doing “right then?” I was doing several things, all of which added up to a wonderful whole. I was pedaling my marvelous machine, so efficient and so well-fitted to my body, propelling it up and down hills and easily over the flat areas. I was immersed in nature, ranging from dense forests to craggy mountains to lakes and rivers to pasture to cropland, always with birdsong and occasionally with deer, elk, and other animals. I was riding with Rich, almost always trading the lead every mile, often wordlessly. Sometimes not a word was said for miles; at other times we engaged in serious conversation or banter, always getting to know each other better and deepening our friendship. We were constant companions, relying on each other’s help and encouragement, depending on the other’s presence. Finally, we were in the midst of an epic journey, moving daily under our own power across this great continent.

All of those things are now finished, and I will miss them. As much as we have been successful in reaching our goal, it’s very true that we don’t get to do those things anymore.

More reflections to come in future days.

Riding Day 57 - Yes, we made it!

Just a short blog tonight. Rich and I arrived at the Atlantic Ocean today around 1:30 p.m. after riding 74 miles from Hanover. We were greeted by Kathy, Cindy, my brother Bill, his wife Janis, and their children Rachel and Andrew, as well as several other interested and enthusiastic onlookers who were captured by the moment.

The finish was perfectly placed -- we ended the ride on a dedicated bike trail, where it entered a public boat ramp, so we weren't competng with traffic. The last half-mile or so was right along stunning Portland Harbor, with brilliant blue sky and water, and sailboats scudding about. We did the requisite dipping of our wheels in the ocean, hugged and cried a bit, and later all went out for a lobster feast outdoors on a wharf.

It's now late, and there is far too much to feel and think about and process than I can deal with right now. Thanks so much to all of my readers for your interest and support. Stay tuned in the coming days!

Riding Day 56 - Epicness

Just 50 miles today, from Colebrook, New Hampshire, to Hanover, Maine. It was great to have a short day, finished by lunch, but we certainly paid for it on the climbs. There were three of them, each a few miles long, and each with some sections at 6% or steeper. They gave us no real problems, but we were definitely in our lowest gears for some of the time.

Some of the highlights of the ride included:
· The coolest morning we’ve had in quite awhile – just 46 degrees. Definitely a morning for long sleeves, tights, and long gloves.
· Entering Maine, our 13th and final state (plus two provinces)
· Going over the 4,000-mile mark for the whole trip
· Seeing our first sign for Portland
· Riding over the Dixville Notch, with a beautiful lake near the top on the north side, and an initial drop on the south side that was so steep, I couldn’t even see the road until I was at the summit. Dixville Notch is famous for being the first place to cast presidential primary ballots. Voters gather to vote at the stroke of midnight on primary day.

So we set up camp before lunch, and then had a leisurely afternoon of blogging, napping, route planning, etc. Looks like we’re all set for tomorrow!

I realized the other day that I was using the word “epic” in my mind when thinking about this ride. I don’t know if it truly qualifies as epic (Who decides that, anyway?), but it definitely feels that way. When I think about riding 6 days a week for more than 9 weeks, about going more than 4,000 miles, about starting in San Francisco in the rain, riding over the Sierras, across the Nevada ranges and the Rockies, up and over Beartooth Pass, through rain and snow and hail and wind, traversing major parts of 11 states and two provinces, plus minor parts of two more states, it feels pretty epic to me. That’s interesting, because I haven’t done much in my life that I would count as epic. Rather, I have long pursued balance, trying to cultivate many aspects of myself in my activities, but resultantly not having a major focus on any single thing for an extended period of time. This is different. I’m not sure how much epic stuff I’ll do in the future, but I’m enjoying how it feels.

Riding Day 55 - Back in the US of A

A 93 mile day today, our second longest of the trip, took us from Granby, Quebec, to Colebrook, New Hampshire. I was very apprehensive about this day, because it was so long and also involved some of the most sustained climbing since Beartooth Pass. We were pleased to discover that the climbing was nowhere near as daunting as I feared, and another tailwind helped considerably, so we finished before 3:00, tired but still feeling good. It was good to get back to the USA after 12 nights in Canada, although we enjoyed our time there. (Those of us with less French certainly enjoyed Quebec less than the others.) We entered the US in Vermont, but were there only about 10 minutes before moving on to New Hampshire. 14 miles later, mostly riding along the picturesque Connecticut River, we were at our campground. We're in the northern end of the beautiful White Mountains, and our campground enjoys a commanding view to the south and east.

Waiting at the campground were my brother, Bill, his wife, Janis, and their children, Rachel (pictured with Ginger) and Andrew. They have come up from their home outside of Boston in order to be with us for the last couple of days of the ride. It is a wonderful gesture that I really appreciate. When we finish, we now know that someone will be there to help us celebrate!