Issue 161: What Happens After Bikes… Is More Bike

When a downward spiral found him jobless, homeless, but still riding a bike, David decided to ride himself back into his life.

Words and Photography David “The Gnome” Herbold

Hey, this feature looks even better when viewed viaPocketmags; you get the full graphic designed layout on your device FOR FREE! It’s not quite as beautiful as the paper magazine but it’s better than a basic webpage.

There were a few flashes of consciousness throughout the episode. They lasted for days. It would build like a wave over weeks and then crest and crash over days in bursts of insane, rageful behaviour. The devastation started weeks before through various public conflicts with bartenders and patrons as I’d drink through routine evenings on the town.

It peaked with the hard walk off from the job, a rage-quit. The rationalisations built over past weeks, even months, of regular heavy drinking and self-loathing, validated the action. The only thing keeping me in a mortgage in Flagstaff, Arizona, was now gone. That was the aberration: a flash of white comes across my eyes like the opening sequence of an Incredible Hulk episode. The stressed clenched fist of rage in my chest. Everything that I used in order to fight for wins within the peloton? It’s now manifest as this. It has always manifested as this. This is not about the bike. And then the snap: irresistible, like the final 250 metres of a sprint. Full volition. Full gas: the smashing of the laptop. The fury exposed. Some kind of “fuck you” to my boss. All rationalised as valid actions in my mind. Tech job done and gone.

And then the possessions I had amassed were sent down the Camino nightly. The antiques, eventually the car. All the furniture, really. Everything. I just put it on the kerb and it got absorbed by Sunnyside in minutes. Surreptitious as hell, they’d come out of nowhere, grab the dresser like moving men, and haul off into the night. And I had a swift old cyclist friend-turned-realtor hock the place in a matter of days. It was the most tragic collapse of my life and I did it myself. It devastated my entire existence from my abandonment of my son to giving away everything I owned. It was absolute hell directed from my mind into fruition. I am lucky to be here. There was no intervention. It was a personal fight. A white man has no value in a state of utter collapse. I always think of Scott Miller when I consider my luck like that. #IYKYK

Everything but the bikes

I kept my bikes. I stashed them. At worst, they would be good fodder they’d find later on, and hopefully, they would find a good home. Then I boarded the train for Baja, Mexico, without a plan but to continue riding south until I found a ditch to lay down in. It never came to that, obviously. From Flagstaff, I got as far as the cartel paradise of Mazatlán before confirming that if I’m going to breathe – a hope inspired by Baja itself – then I was going to work/fight for this life. I was in a trench and I only saw one path until then. At that point it was completely apparent that if I was going to not kill myself, then the alternative was, ironically, to fight to live. This was a sea change as my sojourn progressed.

I pummelled myself across the rock and sand every day for 2,000+ miles as if each day was an individual race, not months of touring. Fifty to ninety miles per day on a loaded mid-fat touring sled. The riding that I did was bliss and gruelling and just what I’d asked for. There was a baseline of grief. I had just ridden away from Flagstaff and the pain of my losses there created a pit of despair in my gut that I would pedal with throughout my journey. It exists within me today and it is essential. This was a good thing. This was the part where I tapped back in. I pulled the plug and returned from Mexico.

Back, burnt and burning with purpose

When I returned from Baja I had the bikes, some clothing, a box of keepsakes and a few pictures – evidence of what was. In what became the beginning of recovery, I would realise that I needed to become less abstract. I had no skill set beyond the tech work I’d been doing for the past years. I had nothing but bike shop experience as a backup; a thing I did for years throughout my racing career. It was clearer than ever that work would be my cathartic act. And even more, it was clear that I could control how that work is applied to the world so that I can feel less sad. That was the primary realisation I came to in Baja. That by devoting once again to the bicycle, I could at least gain a foothold and start clawing back into the living world. In this way, I am pronouncing a dedication to a vocation about bicycles. This is what I am willing to labour over after some self-discovery in the middle of the desert. And, in saying that, I am saying that there are boundaries to what I will do. This is a practice and it requires daily vigilance to remain authentic in the face of endless demand. This in sum crushed me, and put me into a fiercely destructive bipolar pattern over the decades, until that final crash that was only five years ago, which is what woke me up.

All these years as a cyclist and this is a fundamental restraint I practice because of it. To live small and simple. This aids my survival and this is therapy as well. It is not perfect but it is exactly what I should be doing. I should aim to remain in the realm of bicycles for my working life and much of my private life. I have been nothing but about bikes for my life and so I am simply letting that truth flourish again in my later years. After two decades of competition that kept this pattern in hiding, I would spend the following years furiously trying to discard bicycles for more money –a plan of failure, given what I am. In realisation of this overextension of my cognitive capabilities, I am instead investing the same vigour in shop life as I did as a pro cyclist. This is how it began…

What’s the opposite of the Arizona desert?

Upon return from Baja, I picked up my first shop job in Sedona working for Mike Raney at Thunder Mountain Bikes. This would be my first effort to step back into the pit and I am forever grateful to Mike and Thunder Mountain Bikes for that opportunity. It is my favourite shop besides where I work now, and it didn’t work out because I needed a place to live. Sedona has an issue with housing for its impoverished service workers, as with anywhere I suppose. And so I cracked after sweating my ass off in the van on the back lot for a summer. There is also the new stigma – a new aversion to setting foot in Flagstaff because of my exit. Cue new job opportunity. Cue new life entirely.

My life is run by polarity and in that, everything has been eccentric. So after Baja and while there was an interlude in Sedona, Alaska appeared on the horizon. It was a simple thing. A seasonal job ad on a bike trade website, housing included. Consider me on the clock! I applied and not only was I going to get the job, I was probably the only one who applied. Going from Baja and the southwest to Alaska was bipolar in physical form and the experience has been as well, from winter to summer. This fact of life makes it very easy to continually acknowledge my true self. My whole being which includes this little rageful beast that will forever live in me because he is me, is attuned to the extreme nature of Alaska. I live a bipolar life from the inside out, well managed, atoning and gaining strength. This is proverbial to me.

Fresh starts and frozen muck

I’ll be coming into my third season working in Alaska this year. I am in command of collaboration in what is more than a bike shop. It is a company. I am its operator. It is about bicycles. We funnel thousands of guests through this city on bicycles every summer. I am proud of what I advocate for and I enjoy the labour of what I do. After my 30+ years of bicycles, I absolutely love talking bikes with custies, educating, and doing deep dive work on typically external-cabled bikes! So, this is one story of what happens to bikes after bikes.

With the extreme polarity of the seasons and daylight here, I will have the opportunity to maintain a seasonal life, living in the southwest for the winter months sometimes when the bicycle work here freezes up… wait. I know. Yes, there is fat biking and tons of winter cycling in the Interior, but this is Southeast Alaska. A rain forest where it rains and rains all year long, with intermissions of snow in the winter. SEAK (Southeast Alaska) can never be a winter cycling destination. It is half-frozen muck much of the time. The selection is limited. It’s hard enough riding in the summer here.

So now that I am here, I meditate on the path that I have travelled. I listen to the nuance of the monster that I can become. I sit with him and I direct new ways of thinking with him. A kind of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. I can identify him. I work through what is helpful and what is harmful in my mind’s creative flow. I learn to speak with myself in a loving way. I slow down. He is me. He is my Jungian shadow. I reach out to him. He has been suffering through my entire life. It is good and it is hard to do this but this is what forgiveness looks like. If only I could have done this so many, many years ago.

Forwards, always forwards

Lastly, there is also intent, if I can speak to moving forward. I want and need it to be known that my experience was life-changing, if that isn’t obvious, and in that I am consciously, daily, living in atonement for my life. What I mean is, there is an effort required to live, and I know for a fact that for many of my fellow sufferers of similar disposition, there is a lack that remains in them tethering advancement in the understandings of their own life and in this, so begins suffering.

There must be intent in order to assimilate. To assimilate all your self is the goal. You will never discard your shadow self. You can only integrate their disposition, speak softly and with responsibility for what can happen when one lets the world eat them. Instead, you must become the authority and you must maintain that presence. It does not happen through sloth. This is the work of living.