Dionysus on a Bike

by Justin Marquis

You can see pictures from the tour here.

In May 2020, less than two months into the COVID-19 pandemic, my companion and I did our first bike tour together, a 300 mile ride across Ohio from Cincinnati to Cleveland. We were told to avoid physical contact with others to avoid spreading the virus, and we thought what better way to spend our unexpected time off work while maintaining distance from others than on the bike trails that cross the state where we were living at the time. That bike ride was a surreal experience and a life-changing one. While crossing the state, George Floyd was murdered by a cop in Minneapolis, and the protests and civil unrest that called for justice and systemic change erupted while we were in Amish country in the middle of Ohio, a place seemingly untouched by police violence or the outpouring of anger and grief in resistance to that violence.

The bike trails gave us solitude and separation from the chaotic and terrible nature of our nation and culture in a state of lockdown, threatened by upheaval, and full of oppressed and marginalized people crying out for justice. When we decided to put our possessions into storage and set out on the bike trails again, this summer for 5 months instead of a week, the surreal feeling of separating ourselves from a chaotic nation crying out for justice returned. Instead of the pandemic with its natural, microscopic cause and a cry for the end of police brutality caused by a particular murder, our nation is faced with a terrible new cause for cries of justice. The systemic violence and oppressive inequality of late capitalism have metastasized with some of the worst traits of American culture to give rise to a version of fascism remarkable for its stupidity and its cruelty. Just as this power is rising and occupying our home city, Chicago, we decided to leave and seek the relative solitude of the trails.

The 2500 bicycle miles we put in over 5 months and 5 states was one of the most difficult and rewarding things I have ever done. Being in nature with the beauty of the birds and trees far away from the noisy, polluted city was a joyful, meditative, and healing experience. This joy was combined with the stressful focus on finding a place to sleep each night, usually a tent, and finding enough food and water to fuel the journey. The whole time I’m joyfully overcoming this entirely manageable and natural set of challenges with my beloved companion by my side, the fact of fascism’s brutal reign taking shape across our country overhangs it all.

The many-faceted joy of the bike trail was a melancholy joy, and the growth from overcoming challenges was growth tinged in a sadness that a times feels hopeless. Being without a roof over one’s head or a bed of one’s own for so many months, reminded me of our need for one another. The best moments on the trail were the fleeting moments when we were able to forget that virtually all value in our culture is based entirely on monetary exchange instead of the waning virtues of hospitality, generosity, and welcome. The most disappointing thing about our 5 months on the road is that no strangers invited us to stay with them, and the only strangers who opened their homes were fellow cyclists from warmshowers.com, a community intentionally built around cyclists hosting each other on tour. Too few were the meals shared with strangers. Again, they were a few, lunches after church on Sunday, weed brownies and Unibroue beers with a retired couple around a campfire, and a community potluck that had been running for 20 years in the queer neighborhood of Rochester, New York. The friends who let us sleep on a spare bed and the strangers who fed us and shared meals with us reminded me that we need each other. It is in those times we share what we have to help each other and spend time with one another that what make journeys, like this one, worthwhile.

The myth of American individualism is a false one and dangerous. It makes us think that what we have, we gained through our own effort and that each person deserves all they possess. The fact is that every human accomplishment and possession is a communal effort. We can seek relative independence from the manipulative control of others, but even if we have no lord or master (though who of us doesn’t?), we absolutely and at all times depend on each other. The automobile that takes you where you want to go without waiting for anyone else’s schedule is bought with a thousand human lives and could take another at a moment’s notice. The home you own or rent could be lost at any moment, and was, in any case, built by others, a whole community of people. The wages that secure your food are a whole community’s investment in the flow of the goods and services that make our lives possible and sometimes pleasurable. Nothing brings these essential truths out of hiding like getting on your bike and living with what you can carry on it for months on end, depending on what and who you find on the trails.

I cannot recommend more leaving the main roads and ditching your car for a bike to see the country from bike trails. The combination of time in nature with the birds, mammals, plants, and other creatures combined with a unique perspective on cities available only from the saddle of a bicycle is both a learning experience and beautiful. Now that our bike adventure is done, I miss being out on the trails. Biking all day, the food tastes that much better even if it is simple, and sleep comes easy when you exert yourself all day. I miss the rush of seeing a hawk fly above the path with a snake struggling in its claws or a Great Heron at the water’s edge majestically reminding me that birds are dinosaurs. However, I cannot bring myself to write for my readers a travelogue of the journey (though I will post some more photos soon). The bitter side of this bittersweet bike trip that reminded me of our interdependence is that we live in a civil society and culture that forgets our need for each other. That forgetfulness is manifesting itself in the people of my city Chicago facing an occupation by a masked police force that kidnaps people off the streets. Ignoring our need for and dependence on each other has led to a powerful oppressive ruling class cutting off food benefits for the poorest and most in need, just as the weather turns cold and Thanksgiving approaches. Overcoming a culture that ignores our need for each other and fighting the fascist oppression this culture has enabled is going to be a collective effort, and it is one I turn my time and thoughts to now.

Ditch your car for a bike; it will change your life. Remember that you and all you have is the product of a whole society of interdependence. And finally, while those in power exploit with violence and corruption, withhold your labor from them as much as possible. Side with the hungry and feed each other and those in need. Finding joy in our connection with nature and with each other outside of their systems of control, which can be facilitated by bikes, is revolutionary and the first step to resistance and creating a new world out of the ashes of the old.