The first short piece of writing i’ve developed as part of the course in Narrative Non Fiction i’m currently studying at City University, based on this blog post from the US trip.
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The evening light was fading rapidly, so without much thought I threw my tent up on a scruffy patch of grass and quickly jumped back on my bike, following a dusty trail and a series of cobbled together signs to reach the headwaters.
A couple of miles later I emerged in an unassuming clearing which revealed the rivers humble beginning. The water was still and calm and a single guy was standing facing it, his hands folded behind his back. It was the kind of place where solitary reflection made sense.
In the centre of the clearing was a simple wooden monolith marking the spot and it read, in bright yellow, naively carved letters:
HERE 1475FT ABOVE THE OCEAN
THE MIGHTY MISSISSIPPI
BEGINS TO FLOW ON ITS WINDING WAY
2552 MILES
TO THE GULF OFMEXICO
I took some stepping stones over the water and, after a while, returned to my bike.
Heading back towards the camp I stopped at a beach, about twenty minutes of sunlight remaining. Quickly taking of my shirt before I had time to regret it, I edged out into the cold water and plunged, just briefly, underneath. Adjusting to the temperature I floated there for a while until I felt the days 65 miles I had cycled wash away from me.
Back on the beach I dried off, picked a few duck feathers off myself, and watched the sun sink behind the trees on the horizon. A pink glow remained in the sky, though the river had darkened now.
I’d felt in a detached state of mind all day, but the last hour had brought me sharply back into my surroundings. I was also acutely aware how hard it would be later on – back in the less poetic setting of my tent – to write about the evening in a way which didn’t feel soppy and contrived.
But I think I was starting to become aware that no matter how hard I tried to document this journey it would inevitably transform from something lived into a series of fuzzy recollections. Trying to capture everything was ultimately a futile exercise, and maybe just served as a distraction from the repetitive and at times tedious nature of cycling on your own across a country. At the same time, it gave me purpose and kept me going. It made me carefully watch how each day opened and closed in a way I rarely had before.
I was thinking about beginnings and endings a lot. The river – how it grew so big and travelled so far yet started from something small enough to paddle in.
Nobuyoshi Araki, a prolific Japanese photographer, once said that he felt able to capture someone’s past, present, and future all in one single image. That had always stuck with me, and I felt there was something in this moment – a piece in time more or less squarely in the middle of my trip, in the middle of America – where I was experiencing all three tenses at once.
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