Dionysus on a Bike

by Justin Marquis

It’s our first rest day on the bike odyssey after 5 straight days of biking 50 to 70 miles a day and a 9-day visit to our old stomping grounds in and around Cincinnati. I know why I chose to go on the bike tour, but I had no idea what to expect on it.

When I bike all day, there isn’t much time to think about anything other than the experience of the trail, pushing through fatigue, eating enough calories, and figuring out where you’re going to spend the night. During breaks I read. The first book I’ve read that I traded for on the tour was awful, setting up the next book I’m reading to be good if only in comparison.

One of the many reasons I’m out here is for my physical health. I have lofty aspirations to live differently and meditatively, but I also just want my body to be well. After 5 years of living in one of the most polluted zip codes in the United States in an apartment that, through neglect by its owners, was filled with mold and lead contamination, my body needed a change.

I’ll spare you the details of my health ordeals over the last three and a half years, but being out here pushing my body, I wanted to eat as much fruit as possible. It’s hydrating, refreshing, and full of good fiber. What I didn’t anticipate was how difficult fresh fruit would be to find on the Ohio to Erie trail. There are towns with grocery stores, but they are few and far between, and often the grocery store is up a hill far from the bike trail.

Biking long distances, it’s always a sacrifice to go off the route for anything, especially if you don’t absolutely have to. How was I going to get enough fruit without going an unacceptable distance out of my way? It wasn’t a huge worry, but it was important enough that the thought of grapes and apples crossed my mind frequently among all the other things to think about on the trail.

Then the raspberries came, 20 miles east of London, Ohio, and they haven’t stopped since.

I love raspberries. I grew up with wild black raspberries growing in my backyard. They are full of seeds, but when they are sweet, there is nothing quite like them. In the Chicago area they don’t get ripe until the first week of July, so I was not expecting them, but in Southern and Central Ohio they were already ripe in abundance, their first flush, in the third week of June. I was delighted. I ate them whenever I wanted them as they lined at least 30% of the trail.

I still don’t know what I’m going to get out of this bike tour. It is still a pilgrimage and a protest and a preparation for the work that follows. What I have seen so far is that there are unexpected gifts that the trail gives, like unlimited amounts of my favorite wild fruit, fully ripened, just when I needed those calories.

It’s difficult for me to call these things, like raspberries on the trail, gifts. Providence, the world, fate, the will of God, or however you want to conceive of things, they give gifts and curses seemingly without justice and without purpose. At the same time, I am joyful at a handful of wild raspberries in the hot sun from the saddle of my bike. I’m lucky or blessed or something.

Joy and pleasure and peace are different on the road. There’s the weariness of being weeks and weeks away from my own bed and day after day of pushing my body. I’m grateful for raspberries. It seems trite and small and without meaning in the midst of *gestures around* everything, but for me, right now, it’s enough. Now if the next book I receive is a bit better, I’ll be set!