Guardian Angels, Side Quests, and Coastal Redwoods

A 24 hour saga of modern survival, stubbornness, and questionable legality

This is the fourth in a series of stories and essays from the Pacific Coast Adventure Cycling Route—a 2000-mile bike ride from Canada to Mexico. If you’d like to support Dressing Like a Kangaroo, consider sharing this post with someone who loves a side quest.

I was contorted into the negative space of my bike, confined to the walls of a dusty Subaru Outback. My hips were situated in the triangle of the bike frame, and crook of my left knee was propped on the handlebars. My shoulder was pinned against the rear driver's side door and my left arm had pins and needles. There was just enough space for the two of us: myself and my bike, which I’d named Pepper.

I cursed at Pepper for its rigidity. The tension was boiling over and I was disproportionately upset with the inanimate object tied to my hip. I pressed my cheek against the window and carefully interrogated the world that zipped past. Striations of asphalt grey spotted with white and orange, blurring past at seventy miles per hour.

The car took an unexpected turn. My stomach dropped. Pepper shifted its seat into my ribcage. I tried to stay focused on the contour of the road, but my mind buoyed in and out of hypnotic thoughts and memories. I thought about my mom, and I thought regrettably about what she would think if I told her too much.

“How’s the search going?” She texted a few hours earlier, but I didn’t want to respond until I had good news.

I was born on August 23rd, right on the cusp of Leo and Virgo. If I’d been born a day earlier I’d be impulsive and reactive, and a day later I would be burdened by practicalities. I don’t usually subscribe to astrology, but by some act of the starts, I am a chaotic blend of the two. Impulsive, but heavy under the weight of the details.

My birthday, depending on the state you’re in, is also the cut off between classes in school. I wonder if the bureaucracy consulted astrology when making that decision, or if by happenstance bureaucracy and mystical thinking are one and the same. As a result, I was corralled into a school class with peers a year, or even two, older than I.

I can picture the terror on my Mom’s face when my friends started getting their drivers’ licenses. She thought she was still a few long years out from having recon with her favorite child hurling down a highway at the hands of a teenager. I was just 13 when my friends started driving, and only 14 when they did so legally.

“Wear your seatbelt!” She’d yell every time I left the house.

“I will!” I yelled in retort. I couldn’t help but sound insincere in everything I said at that age.

“I’m serious!” She scolded.

Needless to say, there was no discussion of seatbelts when I was stuffed into the back of a mid-size SUV at the age of 23. The band phish was jamming loud over the speakers. The blonde one kept one hand on the steering wheel while he turned back to face me. His shoulder length matted hair swooped across the cabin.

I held my breathe, wishing and nearly breaking into prayer, that he would keep his eyes on the road. “You smoke?” He extended a joint toward me that he’d just rolled before starting the car. He glanced back at the road to ensure it was still there, and then back at me. “I’m alright,” I said with a sharp exhale, “thanks though."

Another man, with shiny walnut colored hair, sat in the passenger seat head-banging to the music. He lit the joint and rolled down his window. The smoke made me lightheaded in the backseat.

California State Route 254 is a narrow, two lane highway. Occasionally, just one and a half lanes. It snakes its way through the understory of ancient coastal redwoods that are about the width of a car and the weight of a cargo ship. If you wanted to wrap your car around a Coastal Redwood, you’d have to be driving a limousine. Otherwise, as roadway obstacles, these giants are the equivalent of a brick wall, or an apartment building.

I’m not the first to realize this metaphor. In 1910, forester Henry McLeod carved the interior of a 2,500 year old stump into a 300 square foot house: The Eternal Treehouse. I had recurring dreams as I cycled, of taking shelter in a huge tree hollow, laying on a bed of moss. As I biked down this road yesterday, I found pixies and fairies fluttering through the ferns in my mind, and taking shelter under the caps of fungal bodies. The redwoods have built a force field not unlike having a roof over your head. I felt grounded. And, for a single day, I felt like I was a part of the mystical landscape.

This morning, however, I was fixated on the fact that The Eternal Treehouse was now a gift shop. And, that people had actually lived here once, before it was a park. They were a part of the magic. A magic that was carved into and driven over again and again, violently corralled into camps far away. All of this, so that people with my same impulses could pretend, for a day, to be a part of the magic too.

My mind was rattled into violent places as the car rounded another turn at a jarring speed. The redwoods cracked at the sides of the pavement like icebreaker ships in the arctic. I felt brief moments of weightlessness as the suspension overcame gravity and we launched off of hidden roots under the roadway. Then, my head would slam against the cage of the car, and we’d be back solidly on pavement.

I glanced down at my watch. It was a quarter past noon. The situation was not as dire as it could have been. I had set an internal timer of 24 hours, starting the previous afternoon at 4 o’clock. That’s about how much food I had left: 3 tortillas, half a jar of peanut butter, a few scoops of jelly, and two protein bars. Besides the stress eating I had done in my tent this morning, I wasn’t very hungry. I thought I might be able to extend my timer through dinner tonight. And if the search wasn’t complete by then, I’d have to text my mom back.

The blonde one, driving, turned back towards me again. "Is it scary biking down this road?" As he spoke, a group of three cyclists blurred into and out of view, briefly part of my roadside striations. He continued, "These cyclists are always biking in the damn road, they're going to get hit one of these days." In the manner he was driving, it sounded like a threat.

"It's pretty annoying," the walnut-haired man chimed in. I thought for a brief moment that they were self aware, but quickly lost hope.

"Yeah, it's pretty scary,” I said, “there's not much of a shoulder here." I took a moment to weigh my next words, "and there are some pretty reckless drivers."

The blonde one laughed, "I bet. Those fucking tourists don't know how to drive an RV. They’re always running into shit." We sat silently for a while after that. Just nodding our heads to a wavering keyboard solo that seemed to last several minutes.

"Wait stop!" I yelled.

The car careened into the gravel shoulder. It was about an hour past noon. We'd stopped at a grocery store about half an hour ago where the walnut-haired one, who I now knew was named Josh, grabbed a bag of chips and a koozied beverage who's contents I did not interrogate, because as I was learning: ignorance is bliss. Once we were stopped in the shoulder, I popped my door and rag-dolled out into the road, my legs were asleep. I stumbled back a hundred feet on the road and looked down at a piece of orange plastic. It was one of those reflective road studs—cat's eyes—that line the highway for night time visibility. For some reason this one had jumped out at me. I kicked it over into the shoulder and ran back to the car: "Nope."

On occasion, I will make a dramatic effort to minimize my possessions. Though it had its own motivations, I was realizing this project I was working on was partially obscuring another cycle of ridding myself of possessions. The idea was, that for six months I would bike down the coast of the Pacific and hike back on the crest of the mountains. I sold my van to fund the trek, donated two bags of clothing, sold my climbing gear, and threw what little furniture I had out on the curb with a taped sign that read, "FREE".

It's not because I am particularly drawn to the aesthetic, or intrapersonal morals of minimalism, though I find both intriguing by consequence. Because our actions drive our beliefs. But, mostly, it's because I have a frustrating knack for hiding things from myself. I place things between the seats of the car, or under the chair at the restaurant I've left an hour ago, or on the back of the toilette in a public restroom. I only truly know where my things are when they are in my hands, or tied directly to my person.

I should have tied more things to my body. I should have all of my belongings tied to my body, by little strings tangled and trialing behind me as I move. That is my idealized form of minimalism. Literally weighed down by my collection of things. The organization of my bike bags was the closest I would get, though apparently not close enough.

I had a waterproof bag which was strapped to the back of my seat and carried my sleep gear. I had a frame bag strapped into the negative space of the frame which held most of my food, and a bigger bag strapped to the handlebars which held my tent. A small bag hung on the inside of my handlebars and held things that I might want to grab quickly: My sunglasses, phone, a snack, and usually, my wallet.

Though at the moment, I was racking my brain for the last time I saw my wallet. I thought, when I got it, that the bright orange exterior was a positive quality. If it ever got lost, or when it inevitably was lost, I thought I would easily be able to find a bright orange square amongst the infinite other colors and shapes that the world is composed of. There is one exception. If I ever happened to drop it on the side of a highway studded every 30 feet with bright orange cat’s eyes.

I used my wallet to buy a candy bar 57 miles down the winding redwood tunnel. That was the last place I knew I had it, but there were now so many miles of open highway, and roughly 10,000 pocket-sized orange squares, between us.

I tried not to think about the possibility that out of all the little orange squares, my wallet may not even be one of them. It could have been grabbed by a passerby, or tossed into the brush by a speeding vehicle. Or, maybe I entirely misremembered what I had done with it, and it was sitting in a different pocket than usual. Like I said, if it's not in my hand, I'm as good as guessing. It was like finding a needle in a haystack, only the haystack may just be a haystack, and the needle might have been swooped into a blackbird's nest a mile away.

When I had first realized it was missing I thought about racing toward San Francisco, two hundred miles away. I had friends in the city and I could replace most the contents of my wallet. I was planning on buying groceries the next day though, and without my wallet I was allotted one PB&J per 70 miles between me and San Francisco. Not a viable option. Stubbornly, I also had a hundred dollars cash that I couldn't, in good conscience, leave rotting on the side of the road.

That lonely hundred dollars laying on the side of the road weighed on my mind. I had been relentlessly frugal for the past month while traveling through Washington and Oregon. Most of my calories came from cheap peanut butter, the kind with nasty preservatives and oils that are known to clog your arteries.

My brain split into different timelines where I could have invested that money in my own wellbeing. In one timeline, I stayed at a motel for $80 in central Washington instead of sleeping on the side of the train tracks, my gear caked in mud, tires flattened by blackberry brambles. There was another timeline where I had simply gone to a restaurant to eat once every few days. It physically pained me to think that I was in the worst of all of these timelines, where I had simply lost the money.

We stopped for me to look at least a dozen road studs that were misplaced or seemingly suspicious. Josh and Alex, the blonde one, the owner of the car, were jamming out to extended instrumental solos and meandering improvisational jams the entire time.

Every once in a while, the recorded tape from a live show they had attended would make the queue. They'd wait excitedly for the moments where the live performance deviated from the studio recording, and they'd tell me all about how special it was to be there and how they barely remembered it.

They had an infectious positivity, maybe brought on by whatever they had been smoking. Regardless, the two of them seemed more and more miraculous to me as the hours passed. Eventually, the anxiety that I had carried just sort of melted away, and I was bought in to whatever it was that these two were up to. They had played a sufficient amount of psychedelic rock and filled the car with enough smoke that the whole thing seemed like a silly game, we laughed each time I picked up another cat's eye.

Josh and Alex kept referring to this game as a "side quest," as if we were in a video game. The redwoods must have thought it was such a circus going on below. I even ran back to the car waving the orange plastic in the air one time like I'd found my wallet, they hung out the window and cheered. "Best road stud I've found so far!" I got back in the car and we kept driving.

It took us three hours or more to cover the length of the Avenue of the Giants with all the stops we took. As we drew nearer to the end of the road the game felt more and more hysterically vain. I realized that despite my initial misgivings about these two, the walnut-haired guy and the blonde one had spent their entire afternoon engaging in a fruitless side quest. Despite our many differences, I was extremely grateful. I knew I wouldn't have done the same. Or, only when the stars aligned, and I was feeling a little more impulsive and a little less practical.

"No fuckin' way!" Alex yelled and swerved the car over a lane of traffic into the opposite shoulder. At this point I trusted him, and his acrobatic driving. Just in front of us lay the last orange square on the road. They watched through the windshield as I picked up my wallet and threw my hands into the air. Side quest complete. I grabbed my bike out of the back and gave them each fifty bucks. They hesitated, I insisted.

“Go see a Phish show for me,” I said. An offer they could not refuse.

They pulled away and disappeared back into the redwood canopy, fairies of sorts. It’s more confounding for me to believe that they were real, when the simple explanation is that they were apparitions sent to teach me a lesson. I’d love to believe that my guardian angels are two dudes who follow Phish on tour in their Subaru Outback.

I had desperately wanted all of it to go away this morning, so I could get back on my bike. I had been diligently averaging fifty miles per day, to stick to my predetermined schedule. But, it was now mid-afternoon and all I’d done was dig myself into a 30 mile hole. Yet, all I felt was relief.

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