Rumination on Three Experiences All Together, Set Right Now

If you were to ask me, I would say that repetition of an activity (such as a two-week bike tour of any region of the west) takes on a new set of interesting expectations which might be associated with the number on a timeline of experience at which it falls within the repetitive sequence. This last bike tour was our third-in-a-row longish bike tour during the summer in the West. Two years ago was the “Coast Bike Trip” which included the two-week trek from Tillamook, OR by bike and then time in San Francisco, and then two weeks climbing in Yosemite National Park. Last year, in addition to a week biking over the North Cascades, we spent two weeks cycling from Sacramento to Lake Tahoe, climbed at Lover’s Leap, then down the east side of California to Mono Lake and over the Sierras at Tioga Pass and down into Yosemite again. It seems that, in my experience of them, these first and second trips both had distinctive and unique characteristic qualities resulting out of their relationships to each other (and each other's absences). This result also seems to me to be a kind of mutual interdependence of all of the experiences on each other in my mind, which, I have found, has also profoundly affected and shaped how I have thought about our last trip through the Washington Cascades east and west from Seattle to Portland before, during, and subsequent to its forward movement. It is, in some ways, like a number: three. Within three it will be situated and so it already explodes with the potential energy being produced by four, resonates with the boom of two, one… but it is also hard for me; I struggle. What was this in and of itself alone? Is that window impossible and problematic from the start? In many ways, yes. I have pictures; those must serve as some kind of quick solution: I see reality there for me, served up on a platter no room for regret. There it is, just as it was, no? But the transformation of the telling is a step I want to think about a little bit more. Because, though it happens lovely, yes, a story told is a place that is frozen forever lovely and unlovely like that, so others can see it that way. How you yourself want to tell it to you, yourself and to those others forever. Just like that we are making choices alone and together, determining the tones and significances of sounds that will fill now.