Forms

There are good ways to balance the riding and the sitting. You can stop at good places. Good places may be good people, but good places are sometimes a good safe spot for the tent with water and electricity nearby and a good view from the tent window of mountains or a lake or river. It could be good girls too. Goodness has many forms. It doesn't last for so long, but other times it lasts longer. So you stay with the goodness--maybe a good fuck, a good view of mountains, or a good quiet place for doing some writing under a canopy of old pines. Then, when the goodness sours, you go back on the road.

This is a fine form of life, but it is best to have a project to give your days unity. There are projects of sitting which are the things you are writing. There are projects of travel which you use a bicycle for. See, you are trying to get somewhere. You are going places. That is the project that gives the days their unity. You pick a somewhere and you go to it. But you can stay a few days or weeks maybe along the way. There is no immediate need to get to a place and there is goodness along the way that may keep you. This is a way of travel I am beginning to enjoy.

Diego and I are camping at this fine, free campground as I have said. At night we have great feasts of grilled steaks and chorizos and very good and cheap wine made in San Juan or Mendoza. We have our tents up under an old forest of pines which in Spanish we call "el pinar". The pine needles make for a soft forest bed to sleep upon. During the day we work on our bikes, the wind blows high in the pines, and sometimes I do a little writing. There are good mountains to look out at over the canal that brings the glacier waters down to feed the vineyards.

Its been a good place but this goodness has run its course and we will go apart today. Diego will leave for Mendoza and a girl and I will leave the campground to return to the city of San Juan, also for a girl. That is how travelers with projects travel. There are moments of unity, where things and people and places come together. It need not be a great reason, but the project is what provides the unity and it is good. The aimless wandering can be dispiriting. That is to be resisted. One must fashion of his days a project.