Dionysus on a Bike

Why I ride by Justin Marquis

Starting sometime around June 1, 2025, I, along with my partner, am embarking on a year-plus long bike tour of North America, starting in Cincinnati, Ohio, the city where I first fell in love with long-distance bike exploration.

This ride is born out of a love of bicycles and seeing cities and the spaces between cities at a human pace from angles and vantagepoints we don’t usually see those spaces. Bicycles have been healing to me in so many ways, spiritually, emotionally, and physically. In many ways, this trip, long planned, is a continuation of bicycles journeys I have taken before–Amsterdam, Netherlands to Munster, Germany; Pittsburgh to Washington DC, Minneapolis to Chicago, and Cincinnati to Cleveland. The first leg of this journey is Cincinnati to Montreal, a partial repetition of a route across Ohio that I have taken before. In this post I want to lay out some of the multitude of reasons I am taking this journey.

10 years ago I left a career in academic philosophy, teaching at American University in DC. I was adrift, without direction, vocation, or even a sense of how I would continue to earn a living. It was in those years of feeling lost that I discovered that spending time and energy on a trail in the saddle of a bike could provide the conditions and the space to discover myself again, regain direction, and heal from the disappointments and the loss of the life I had envisioned for myself as a professor of philosophy.

Now that I have long healed from that disappointment and loss, I am ready to experience that same journey of self-discovery and time to meditate and explore the country from a place of well-being and health. While this bike trip is many things to me, more things I can enumerate here, I see it primarily as a space and time to create, a protest, a pilgrimage, and ultimately as a journey of continued self-discovery.

For the last four years I have been building a business rehabbing vintage bikes, for the last three years I have worked as the office administrator of Irving Park Lutheran Church, and for the last two years I have worked as a library associate at Chicago Public Library. Each of these ways of earning the money I need to make rent, feed myself, and earn my keep in Capitalism has been a refreshing alternative to working for a private company that seeks to make a profit on the labor of others. Instead, I have been able to either work for myself or work for institutions that are centered on other aims than the accumulation of wealth. They are institutions that provide for the needs of others.

Juggling three jobs has been a challenge, and I haven’t had a lot of time or energy leftover for my own projects. For awhile I thought that at least I would be able to save up to buy a house and build a life for me and my partner here in the city. Working and not spending on anything other than necessities, I saved, what is for me, a substantial sum. Then I ran the numbers, and I realized that what was for me a substantial sum would never be enough to afford a house here in Chicago. That realization that settling down was out of reach opened up new possibilities, as I gave up on the idea of owning a home. One of those new possibilities is time off of all work to go on this bicycle tour.

In the process of working for Irving Park Lutheran Church, I have returned to a life of Christian faith. While this return to the church, to a life of faith, and to the Sacrament is welcome, I maintain the suspicion of someone who has seen the worst side of American Christianity, the side that enables oppression and exploitation, the side that dehumanizes queer people, and enforces norms of conformity and closed-mindedness. (You can read about my journey leaving “evangelical” fundamentalist Christianity here). Having seen two radically different sides of American Christianity, I am eager to see more. I want to experience Word and Sacrament across this country. I want to see all the ways Christians have managed to follow Jesus’s example of love and welcome for all in a country where those values are truly in short supply.

To this end, each Sunday I will be worshiping and sharing communion with congregations in whatever town I happen to be passing through. I will seek out those churches that accept and affirm queer people and relationships, work against injustice, have an open communion table, and are open to theological diversity. Primarily these will be churches in full communion with my own church, the ELCA, a church where I am exploring a call to Word and Sacrament ministry and the seminary training that precedes ordained ministry.

This sacred pilgrimage is connected to another type of pilgrimage. Even though we have defiled the land with capitalism, colonialism, genocide, and slavery, the land itself is still sacred. I want to see this land for the holiness that is still there, meditate in awe and gratitude for its beauty and diversity, and maybe see what could possibly rise out of the ashes of this decaying world. This journey to the sacred spaces of America on the saddle of a bike begins with a stop at Fort Ancient, a centuries old indigenous festival grounds outside Cincinnati on the Little Miami River. It is a holy place, a place that speaks of the time before European colonists displaced and killed those whose land this was. From there we will head to Chillicothe further into the middle of Ohio, a place frequented by one of my American heroes, Tecumseh and where the Midwestern mound building culture created some of its monumental earth works. I will meditate in these places in gratitude for the beauty of the earth and in sorrow for what we have made of it.

Here is where pilgrimage and the sacred leads to protest. As a member of the working class, the primary power I have is withholding my labor. While we face the continued rise of the dehumanizing effects of Capital combined with militarism, oligarchy, and totalitarianism, I am taking as long of a break as I can from contributing to the labor pool. A sacred and defiant “No” to the forces that are anti-life as an affirmation of life, a Holy yes to life.

Withholding my labor, sharing bread in gratitude, and meditating on the beauty of a land we are actively destroying from the saddle of my bike will come with more free time than I have had in years, perhaps more free time than I have ever had. Though much of my time will be spent pedaling the miles away, I also intend to use this time to create. I have much to explore about what I believe and how what I believe relates to my politics and my vision of community and a better world. I intend to trade books with people I meet along the way and so read widely and unexpectedly. From my experiences, from mediating on what I read, what I talk to people about along the way, and from the space of peace that biking affords me, I plan to write about my experiences and about what I learn. Some of that will make it onto this blog.

Today we take too little time to learn, grown, and create ourselves anew or find ourselves, lost as we are in work and the worries and cares of surviving late-capitalism. By creating out of this pilgrimage and protest, living off of my bicycle, I hope to discover more about myself. By seeing the country from the vantagepoint of a bicycle saddle, I hope to see the beauty in what remains of the land, document that, and maybe move you, my readers, to feel a desire to do the same for yourselves.