*Photo courtesy of the incredibly awesome Doug Black.*

south america, or, where do you go when the journey’s over?

2020

I hop on the hostel bike and gingerly walk it across the drainage ditch. Standing in the breakdown lane, I straddle it and start pedaling. It’s a chilly gray morning, Cotopaxi rises up in the distance, and the hostel llama — she has big dreadlocks and long eyelashes, and her name is Bonita — looks at me with bland caution. With this, I have ridden a bike on eight continents. It turns out for all the planning and preparation, it’s just another bike ride. Like the conclusion of any journey, it’s underwhelming in the moment. Because it’s not about getting there, it’s about the getting there.

“How does it feel?”

I turn to Doug and smile.

⇴

“How do you want to die?” Doug asked me.

I looked at him agog and burst out laughing. “Dude, do you realize that we met on Tinder, it’s our second time hanging out, you drove me out to this remote bike path — in your cargo van — and you just asked me, ‘How do you want to die?’”

After he finished laughing, he said, “In my defense, you were the one who asked me when was the last time I pooped my pants.”

Meet Doug. If you’re anything like me, the first thing you’ll notice is how good-looking he is. Like, way hotter than his pictures. He’s also a world traveler, a guitarist/writer/artist, he single-handedly built out a cargo van to live in, and he always has a crust of stale bread in his pocket, in case he comes across any hungry-looking songbirds. And get this — he’s a bike mechanic.

How embarrassing, I thought. He’s way out of my league.

Anyone else do mental gymnastics to try to convince themselves they don’t deserve the things they want? In this case, I rationalized our first date — a two-hour conversation in a diner — as Doug killing time until traffic eased up. And when he invited me on a 30-mile bike ride along the Delaware & Raritan Canal, I assumed it was because he didn’t have any friends who like biking.

I assumed the bike mechanic didn’t have any friends who like biking.

Despite all the mental gymnastics, somewhere along the way on that bike ride — maybe when we read each other’s tarot, or when we sang that Neutral Milk Hotel song together, or realized we’d accidentally biked 20 extra miles and hadn’t even noticed — I had to admit that this might be a more-than-just-friends scenario. We ended the trip with the promise to get together for a hike. On that hike, sitting on a cliff overlooking a modest Pennsylvania valley, he said, “I’m really falling for you.”

“Wow,” I breathed. “Yeah, me too.”

We shared a shy glance and one shy kiss. Six months later, here we are in South America.

“How does it feel?” he asks.

Man I hope we get married and I don’t die! I think.

“Pretty damn good!” I say.