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Cyber-
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THE SAND IS COOL, almost the texture
of talcum powder, as I walk along the beach in the predawn light. I
step over a beached jellyfish, then another, and another. Their opaque
bodies lie folded over upon themselves, pushed by waves and picked at
by seagulls.
I'm bored. Extremely bored. Florida is full of snowbirds. There are no students, no children, no young people camping. Only large motor homes equipped with air conditioners and televisions powered by noisy generators. They've migrated here from Ohio, Minnesota, the Dakotas, New England... and here they will stay until spring. Because my stretch of beach requires a 15-minute walk from the road, I am alone. Blissfully, painfully alone. There are times in every journey when going home is an overwhelmingly attractive idea. I remember having felt this way on my bicycle in Africa. It was somewhere in Guinea-Bissau, I think, 100 miles to a road and 400 miles to an airport. Going home was definitely not an option. So I got over it, as I will later, in Mississippi, or Louisiana. Soon. I hope. The rising sun turned the sand on my stretch of beach the color of butter. I picked up my pace a little, avoiding stranded jellyfish and sand crab holes. It was a lot of work to walk in the sinking wet sand. In fact, since North Carolina the whole trip had seemed a lot of work, and for the first time I started to wonder why I was really doing it. My answer to myself and others has been consistently bright and cheerful. "Curiosity," I say. "Because I've traveled overseas and neglected America." As I walked I knew it wasn't quite the whole truth. I listed the other excuses, the easy answers: a break from technical writing, escape from the end of a difficult relationship, maybe even an avoidance of becoming involved in another one. But I knew this list wasn't complete. And I considered that the real reason may be buried somewhere too deep for even me to know. Realizing this, I wondered if I even want to wonder, because I know that if I wonder hard enough the answer might just come to me. The sun moved behind a thick white puff of cloud, sending orange filaments into the sky, like the tendrils of a large blind animal feeling its way into an open space. I didn't want the sun to come out. I wanted to prolong the soft morning dawn. But the sun burst through, dripping orange like a wound. THE DAY BEFORE, I'd stopped in a Pensacola bookstore thinking I'd trade my copies of Emerson's Essays and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for something not so heavy and thoughtful. But I saw Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and thought of Jeff in Glacier National Park, who had been reading it when I met him there. I bought it and some magazines, and asked the sales clerk about beaches. "I'd go to Fort Pickens," she said. "It's pristine, and empty. But keep checking the progress of that hurricane." She let me connect to the bookstore phone line to get my email. Then I rode south across two bridges and made a sharp right turn onto a dead-end peninsula. All the hurricane evacuation route signs pointed in the opposite direction. The road divides two expensive stretches of real estate: one facing the calm of the bay between the peninsula and the mainland, the other facing the open Gulf Sea. The houses, built in elaborate styles to the taste of their wealthy owners, were crawling with construction workers. If not for them, the area would have felt like an expensive ghost town. The manicured gardens that belonged there had been obliterated by sand, broken windows were covered in plywood, roof tiles and shingles littered the yards. This is what a hurricane does. The air parted thickly as I cut through humidity so palpable that the noise of the Beast's engine was baffled. Still, I attracted the attention of every bored roofer along the five-mile stretch of residential excess. I waved the whole way, feeling like I was leading a parade. The last five-mile stretch is designated park land, the only buildings an abandoned fort, a museum, and some ranger stations where I was told again that a hurricane might be coming this way. "You're going east?" I was asked. "I'd try to outrun it if I were you," they told me. "But enjoy yourself for a day or two. We'll let you know if it's going to hit any earlier." I CHOSE A CAMPSITE as far away from motor home generators as possible, set up my tent under a group of tall pine trees where the sunshine wouldn't add to the discomfort of the wet air, and took out the Powerbook to look at the email I'd collected in Pensacola. My hands hurt. Since North Carolina I'd been riding nonstop. Because the Ural was behaving so well, I wasn't taking many breaks -- only for gas and meals, and the past few mornings I had wakened with my fingers curled painfully in a clawing position. I wondered if I had arthritis, brought on by the constant pressure, or if I just needed more water and salt. This weather was so hot, maybe it was lack of salt. I stretched my fingers and punched the mailbox icon. My first message was from Jeff, the man I'd camped with in Glacier National Park. I met him before all my problems with the Ural started. Consequently he was the last person I interacted with who was unrelated to the mechanics of the Beast. I'd often marveled about the immediacy of our friendship -- our ability to cut through all the bullshit and just be honest friends up front. I knew it had a lot to do with the situation of traveling, but I also thought that we would have been friends if I'd met him in the course of everyday life.
And here I was with Atlas Shrugged in my pack, and realizing that we must have indeed passed very, very close in North Dakota, since I had broken down so much there. What a surprise it would have been to meet him on the road. Maybe Ken would have put us both up. Strange thought. While I read my email, one after another of the campers came over to say hi. They glanced at the PowerBook and shrugged, excusing themselves for not knowing more about it, and then wanted to talk about the Ural. I keep getting letters from people who have Urals, who want Urals, and who are curious about Urals. I'd been corresponding with a man in Italy about his recent purchase:
At the campground I was interrupted again by a couple who wanted to know if the Beast was a Triumph. The man had remembered Triumphs in World War II, when he'd been stationed in Britain. In every other campground the Powerbook had been the main attraction. But here, where most of the campers remembered World War II, the Beast was the only star. They marveled over the simplicity of her design, and shook their heads over the mystery of today's plug-and-play engines. The Ural they could get a handle on. It was something that they could understand. It is this simplicity of design that had drawn me to the Ural -- and the self-sufficiency of it. If it broke down I could fix it myself, or take it to any competent mechanic, of any kind of engine at all, for repairs, unlike modern machines that require the attention of a specialist. I think I am part of the last generation to enjoy the possibility of such mechanical self-sufficiency. Living in Silicon Valley the past 20 years, I have witnessed the cutting edge of technology: the evolution of equipment that is smaller, more complicated, and more specialized with each passing month. I have not been able to keep up with it all, and have had to specialize myself, in certain technologies, in order to survive in my field. I don't believe it is possible any more to be a generalist. In the technological fields I have seen the status-shift from those who design hardware to those who design software to those who design communications systems. Nobody is hard-wired into any kind of job at all any more. We're all going freelance with our specialties, and hire out other specialists to do what we can't. It is a bit frightening, but isn't it really the perfect society, where each depends upon the other? Still, somewhere inside, I long for self-sufficiency and independence. In the campground I am the only person who knows anything about computers, and it comes to me that my particular place in my culture is dealing with this transition from self-sufficiency and independence to specialization and dependence. Am I part of the last generation to be comfortable with a World War II machine and this magical, modular box of parts that sends my messages through cyberspace? There will always be antique buffs, but in real life I think that we are relying more and more on each other. Our borders are dissolving in front of our eyes. Some of us are handling it well. Others aren't. ON THE BEACH the next day I read more of Atlas Shrugged, and paged through some magazines. A section in NPQ discussed "The Soul of Cyberspace," and reading it, I was thinking that France isn't handling things very well these days. America's predecessor as the world's top dog, France has been distributing the Minitel as an option with all phones for years now. They could claim to be the pioneers of the idea of access to information for everyone, and embrace the Internet as a French idea. Instead, the country balks at it as a destroyer of culture, because it is not controlled within its own borders, as is the Minitel. In a recent interview, Jack Lang, France's Minister of Culture under Mittérand, who has accused America of "cultural imperialism," argued that the freedom that exists today is not a healthy thing.
In sharp contrast is George Yeo, Singapore's Minister for Information and the Arts. His title alone is a clue to the attitude of his country toward culture and technology:
I find the contrast between the two perspectives fascinating, and comparable to the generational transition to which every person is subject in the course of a lifetime. France is acting like an old man who tells his son to get a haircut. Don't they know that culture is transitional, and affected by many influences outside its borders? The Beatles influenced music all over the world. No one screamed that a culture would be ruined. They only maybe didn't like the noise. The next day I also heard from the man who gave me a ride to White River when the Beast broke down in Canada.
And I heard from Vera, my first real cyberfriend. Vera contacted me early in my trip, and we've formed a real connection based on our mutual love of travel and our similar careers in technical writing. I didn't get to visit her in New York as I would have liked, because I had to cut off New England due to lack of time. But still, we keep up. She's been expecting a baby, and I'd been wondering if it happened yet.
I also got some mail from Australia. It has astounded me how far-reaching this medium is, and how easy it is to connect with people of like minds who are willing to share their adventures.
I had to laugh about the Yamaha, remembering how I felt in Canada. I had really been ready for the trusty old thing but I'm glad I held out. The Beast has been running so well now that I'm convinced that the electrical problem was a fluke, and the cylinder crack was a one-in-a-million metal defect. I just thank God I didn't get a Harley or a Goldwing, or something else so specialized and complicated to repair. Besides, despite the fact that I occasionally kicked her tires in a temper tantrum, the Queen Beast and I are friends now. I mean, I can agree with the couple on the Harley in Idaho who told me so: She's the coolest bike on the road. THE HURRICANE REMAINED off the coast of Florida, so I got to stay and let my hands recover a bit. Between reading and snorkeling and visiting with the World War II veterans in the campground, I was depressed. It was the low point of my trip. I knew it at the time, and though I tried to reason it out, it remained the low point. The beach -- however beautiful the weather and however warm the water -- is no place to be alone for any length of time. It's just the kind of thing to make you lonely, and I was. This was the first time during my trip that I have felt such loneliness. I wondered if I would have felt this way if I hadn't met Michael before I left, if there hadn't been an object for my attention. I do strive for self-sufficiency and independence, but maybe I take it a bit too far. I'm learning on this trip -- after all, what had I been doing if not depending on others for help and companionship?
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