In August of 1994, after having dropped out of the University of Illinois for the second and last time, I was living with my brother Mike and his family in a small town in northwestern Illinois, working as an apprentice in his one-man furniture-making business. Because I was a half-aloof half-shy burgundy-haired suburban intellectual indie-rocker guy, I had very little in common with the town-folk in my age bracket, many of whom had already gotten married, some of whom had already been divorced, some of whom were missing teeth. As a result, it was difficult for me to make friends, and I filled my free time with daily hours-long bike rides out in the surrounding countryside.

I hadn’t had many opportunities to escape the heartland when I was a teenager, and I longed to see what kind of mysteries lay beyond the corn-encrusted horizon. My first airplane trip was a college visit to Deep Springs in California when I was 17, and that trip was only the second time I’d ever been west of the Mississippi. I’d quit school in part because I felt woefully underexperienced in ways that no amount of schooling could remedy, and as the summer progressed my urge to get out of familiar surroundings and go somewhere new, anywhere, intensified until my bones hummed. Some in my family dismissed it as “wanderlust,” a temporary condition that occasionally afflicts post-adolescents until they get some sense, but from my point of view it simply could not be ignored. I decided to buy a van with my $600 in savings and travel the country a bit in order to figure out just what the hell I should do with my life. A friend of mine had hopped a freight train to New Orleans a year before and was living there with his girlfriend, so I decided it would be a convenient first leg of my open-ended journey to drive down to visit him for a while.

It soon became obvious that $600 was not going to buy me a road-worthy vehicle of any kind, let alone one of the cargo-hauling variety. A fixer-upper was out of the question, as I wouldn’t even have known how to change an air filter at the time. A couple of years later, when I finally was able to buy an old van, I had to ask my girlfriend, who had taken auto shop class in high school, how to change the oil.

What’s a young man without a van to do? Having no idea at the time that my character would soon enough come to be dominated by vanhood, I began exploring alternative transportation options. After doing some math, I calculated that with a little training I could ride my bike from northwestern Illinois to New Orleans in just over two weeks. That $600 would be more than enough to buy a tent and a decent bicycle. Suddenly, to my mother’s despair, the plan started coming together. In a nod to her healthy stockpile of tears, I agreed to delay my departure date until after her birthday in September.

One day amid the endless late-August seas of dry shoe-brown corn stalks, however, a gentle old man driving a maroon four-door sedan was a bit too nervous about crossing the yellow line when he passed the cyclist riding back into town near sunset after a long day, and the low loud dull thud with no warning knocked him from his bike and rolled him off the hood, rolled him along the pavement for many more feet in an incomprehensible blur of pain and whirlwinded asphalt and sky until he came to rest on his back blinking silently upward. Above him there was now nothing but the sky—the lofty sky, not clear yet still immeasurably lofty, chrome blue with charcoal clouds gliding slowly across it. He turned his head to notice the sedan’s brake lights glowing red in the dusk, and heard the long dry creak of the screen door on the nearest farmhouse opening and shutting and opening again as a group of voices gathered and began to frame the sky in a circle of concerned questions.

The ambulance arrived quickly, and there ensued a cursory interview about the order of events (“Well, . . . I was pedaling and then it hurt a lot and then I was lying on the ground in pretty much this exact position. There was a big blur in the middle somewhere.”) in which it didn’t seem appropriate to mention that right before the thud I had been thinking about how the cyclist sometimes doesn’t even notice that he has hit his ideal cadence, in which his breathing and pedaling slide seamlessly into lockstep gear-like rhythm, and how, when the rhythm of that cadence exactly matches the beat of, in this case, the first Don Caballero record, and in the descending darkness the horizon unrolls itself into the long slick black tongue of asphalt stretching out before him, the cyclist can easily believe that the song and the ride and the dusk and life itself will march endlessly on in this undeviating rhythm until the stars flicker and are snuffed out.

It ended up, after a couple of days in the hospital, several X-rays, and an MRI that I had fractured a vertebra in the middle of my back and ruptured a disk just above where it joins the pelvis. Despite my lack of helmet or padding of any kind, I had not a single external injury but a big scrape on the back of my calf. It obviously could have been a lot worse, but this strange turn of events nonetheless killed my plans for self-discovery by means of transcontinental recklessness. I instead tried my hand at self-discovery by means of lying in bed and being depressed for a couple of months. My brother was nice enough to carve me a cane, and I moped around his house with cane in hand wearing a hospital-white back brace that kept my back hyperextended and my chest thrust out in a mock display of machismo for the next eight weeks.

One year later, when the insurance company finally settled and my lawyer took his third, I bought the 1985 red and silver GMC van with a fully gray-and-green shag-carpeted interior that had belonged to my uncle who had died the previous summer. I spent much more than I should have on installing a stereo and a huge amplifier and speakers, and the first thing I did was to drive with a friend to Glacier National Park in Montana. We parked the van in gas station parking lots and on residential streets and slept on a mattress which fit perfectly between the wheel wells in the back. Throughout the trip we kept a log of all the diners we’d stopped in, how much their coffee had cost, the size of the mugs, and whether the waitress had called us “hon” or not.

A couple of years later, after the new bike I bought to replace the one that had been destroyed in the accident had been stolen out of the back of the van one night and pawned for crack money while it was parked in front of my loft on 23rd Street in Chicago, which forced me to buy yet another bike because my job as a bike messenger, one of the five or more disposable jobs I had that year, made me dependent on that bike for my income, at least for the month or so that I held the job, until riding all day in the September rains, in combination with a sub-par work ethic and a diffused sense of being owed something, made me unable to do it anymore; a couple of years later, like I said, I brushed a gallon of black enamel house paint onto that van and drove straight down the black-tongued highway, stopping neither for sunset nor sunrise nor anything else except coffee and fuel toward my new home in New Mexico. People sometimes glance nervously upward at you when you pull up next to them at a stoplight in a black van. Sometimes it’s obvious that they’re not looking. The wrong kind of girls look at you more steadily and a lot more often, even if you’re not wearing sunglasses.

Eventually, after having served as my band’s tour van, after driving to New Mexico and back a few times and a couple of trips to the Pacific and one to the Atlantic, after acquiring a lot of rust and a few dents and after most of the interior electrical stuff had ceased to function at all, that van also ceased to be a van, in the sense that it would no longer go anywhere, and was towed from the parking lot of a community rec center in Santa Fe, never to be seen by me again.

My back, which healed surprisingly well within a few months of the accident, hurts almost daily now in the place where the disk ruptured. Three mornings before we were supposed to get on a train to go spend three weeks of our Christmas break in Berlin with C.’s entire nuclear family, I felt a certain gooey slipping sensation at the base of my spine while I was tying my shoe, and the accompanying pain grew slowly over the next 24 hours until the following morning, when I found myself completely unable to get out of bed. I remained in bed in fact for three days, except for a trip to the doctor’s office, and I was able to make the trip to Berlin in the end thanks only to prescription pain-killers and anti-inflammatories. The pain is much better now, but I have to be very when I run to catch trams, very careful about what position I sleep in, or else I find it difficult to sit or stand for any length of time the following day without enduring a throbbing ache that says that the fluid-filled sac that used to so devotedly and lovingly cushion my fifth lumbar and first sacral vertebrae from each other has been reduced to the consistency of a medium-rare cheeseburger.

Nonetheless, today I went for a long and glorious two-hour bike ride in the obliquely-angled late-afternoon sun among the soft rolling wheat fields and vineyards of southern Moravia, a ride which in my present state of spinal unhealth is an achievement of which I am proud. Although the seat on this bike is the wrong shape and makes my prostate go numb after half an hour, and although I have to treat my back gingerly now and cannot make the same powerful pedal strokes I used to, and although I now often use the brakes to control my speed when arcing down curving hillside roads between blurred wheat fields and the flickering patchwork shadows of trees because I am nervous about flying out of control and hurting my back in a fall, still: Nothing compares to the cyclist’s joy at breathing the immortal air under the invincible sun.

Today’s ride was on a bike trail that runs from Brno all the way down to the Austrian border. (Actually, it’s called the South Moravian Vineyard Trail, or something similar, which I think is so named because in the summertime you are encouraged to punctuate your ride through the hillsides and small villages with pit stops at pubs featuring locally produced wines.) Today I made it about one-third of the way to the border. Once things calm down at the university and C. goes to Scotland for two weeks, I plan on riding all the way there one day.

It’s silly, I know, but I always feel like a giant when I put in an afternoon on my bicycle and find, after returning home all sweaty and shaky-kneed, that my afternoon’s pedaling traces out a tiny but visible arc on a globe. Find the Czech Republic on one, and find Brno in the southeast. Imagine the line between Brno and Vienna to the south, and picture me pedaling there on roads too tiny to see among the wheat fields in the late afternoon sun. Regardless of whether my desire to catch a glimpse of what lies beyond the strip malls and mulch circles of suburban Illinois can be dismissed with anything so simple as an abstract noun, that’s where I am.

'Cause like a picture she was laying there
And moonlight dancing off her hair
She woke up and took me by the hand
She's gonna love me in my Chevy van
And that's all right with me (Sammy Kershaw)

i am so so sorry that you wrote such a pretty bit of prose and i am sitting here with dubious seventies lyrics doing an airbrush dance in my head, but then, that's why i'm so much fun, right? no matter what it is, i can trivialize it for you wholesale.

seriously, this was fun. you dashing half aloof half shy suburban intellectual indie rocker guy, you.