Looking for Signs
by Jacquie Phelan

If you're ever driving down the road and see a cyclist riding along with her left arm outstretched, thumb up, lamely trying to hitch a ride, consider picking that person (probably me) up. I don't know if other people do this, hitching while riding, but I think of it as 'multi-modal transportation'. Standing on a corner next to my bike feels too passive. I like to show some initiative, short of actually pedaling over the damn mountain. Yeah, I'm sure it sounds odd ("why doesn't she just ride?" or drive?"), but I usually discover how late or how tired I am AFTER a few miles of riding. By then, I'm out on the road, committed, and I hate turning back.

I always appreciate it when folks like you stop to pick me up. I end up explaining myself a bit ("Thanks tons. No, there's nothing the matter with the bike, I just wanted to give myself a rest"), then offering to do some housework ("Can I stash those empty beer bottles in the flatbed?"), after which it's time to settle in with a pleasantry or two ("Never mind about the debris... How do you work the seat belt?"). I'll even admit I ride a bike and hitch because I'm too chicken to drive a car. However, I'm never too chicken to climb into someone else's car, nor am I afraid to let strangers climb into my mind. You meet the most amazing people that way.

It's weird, though, to get in a car after riding. Suddenly, the signs all look the same. Rectangles and octagons that say nothing more inspiring than 'exit' or 'stop'. A cyclist's signs are more hidden, more varied. A book can be a sign, lying face-down in the dust. Pennies are a perennial sign of good luck. (So I'm superstitious. In today's confusing world, it's comforting to follow orders like "see a penny, pick it up"). When I road raced, it was clear that raw strength took a back seat to luck -- well, savvy -- in determining the outcome, so I performed my warm-up ritual with my head down, searching for copper. If I could find just one penny, the race was mine. My erstwhile boyfriend Gary understood magical thinking, and surreptitiously dropped a penny or two around the race registration table. I won races and decided that the biker's world is full of signs that Car People cannot see. If one is willing to look for them and cleverly interpret them, a path opens up, even if the destination remains a mystery several bends up the road. Allowing that a symbol might crash now and then, pedal on; new ones pop up regularly.

Lots of my bicycle friends share my furtive habit of stopping to pick up interesting pavement jetsam . It's easy to do when you're crawling into a 20mph headwind and you'd like to rest for a second, erect, while all around weeds cover sideways and debris blows past. Henry Kingman, record holder along with John Stamstad in the trans-Australia dirt race, is often tempted, headwind or no, to stop and read the pages he discovers on the roadside.

I trust that reading material was scarce in the Outback, but now that he's returned to civilization, Henry makes found literature his forte. He calls is 'bibliomancy', the art of divining signs from books. Once, while trying to decide whether to do a 'moderate' 150-miler or an all-out 24-hour marathon (I think he was preparing for Paris-Brest-Paris, a 750-mile jaunt), a moldy book beckoned from the verge. "It was a collection of existential writers, open on the Nietzsche passage about Man and Superman, how the Superman knows his limits -- so I decided on the shorter route. Just a month ago, before I was going to Southeast Asia, I found a Bible on the road. The part that it opened on was where Jesus had just fed the multitudes with the two loaves of bread and a single fish, and crossed the water, urging his followers not to follow just because he'd fed them, but because they believed. I decided my trip had better be more than simple tourism." No, Henry didn't evangelize up and down Vietnam. He probably picked up pamphlets in an unreadable language, biking up the North-South highway.

Kay Ryan, the nimble-minded Fairfax poet, collects combs she finds on the roadside. Well, she doesn't actually stop and pick them up, but she stores her find away, upstairs in the virtual cabinet of the poet's brain, a veritable museum of kitsch and cool. Toothsome words like 'persiflage' and pocket combs missing some teeth. Such things are perfect for teasing meanings out of everyday experience. Recently she recalled the crucial moment that it struck her that she should spend her life at the writing desk.

"I was 30 years old and crossing the United States by bicycle, which gave me lots of time to think about things. I was in the Rockies, in Colorado, climbing a pass. I'd been riding for what seemed forever, when I noticed that I seemed to be in a special state. It felt like I could do anything, know anything, be anything. The universe was in perfect harmony. It was funny because there were all these people passing me in cars. Normally I'd be deriding them; poor slobs in their cars while I'm on my bike using leg power. Instead, I heard myself thinking, "There are all kinds of ways to get up a mountain." I realized that this would be the time to ask my Big Question: Should I write? And the answer came back. Do you like it? That was 20 years ago.

"I write every morning, and in the evenings teach basic English at a community college. For a long time, I strained with all my might to get a magazine like 'The New Yorker' simply to reply to my queries, and yet I knew there would come a time -- probably would come a time -- when all the little holes would line up and some linchpin would slip through the mechanism effortlessly, though I'd spent so much effort forcing it before."

I learned somewhere that when you hear voices in your head or discern personal meanings out of random events and objects, you're schizophrenic. Or a poet. Susan Stormer, a psychologist I met at Wombat Camp, informed me that the technical term for this pattern of thinking is 'ideas of reference'. I gather it means everything refers back to the perceiver and was placed there to tell the person something vitally important. Friends of mine who take care of a manic depressive woman tell me that when the Gulf War broke out, their client blamed herself. "In 1991," they said, "the psych wards were packed with people who felt personally responsible for the hostilities. Who believed they'd failed in their mission to avert the insanity of war."

I've got a soft spot for the crazy and the creative. The folks that stop and pick things (and people) up. We wander about the Earth, choosing this path or that, and hope we read the signs right.