Day Fourteen, Part One: The Part Where Kyle Digresses
Apologies for the day late post — service was too poor on Okracoke Island to post anything. Restored now. — Kyle posting on Lizzie’s phone
8AM: Midgett’s campground sleep worsened by fear of “hundreds of mosquitos” Lizzie saw bushing the tent, plus feverish dreams of improbable animal attacks.
Jaunt the beach before thoughts of biking, frothy waves hurl up over feet, later calves, surge to stilted houses then subside. Sandpipers play with waves — amusing precision with which they dodge incoming waves, beating out by mere inch or two, always bobbing to gobble invisible critters from the backrush. Lizzie and I talk through some budding tension around expectations and goals for the trip, which deviate between us naturally but somewhat pointedly. Two weeks in I’m feeling too comfortable with 40 mile rides and camping routine. I want more flexibility and autonomy to leave the preplanned path, for example to ditch campgrounds and sleep under stars on remote beaches outside towns; or take half day to kitesurf. Lizzie not necessarily opposed but thinks I should be more comfortable living in the moment without needing to constantly challenge or yearn for more. We’re both right, in our own ways, and such conversations are vitally important for us to stay connected and negotiate through our differences.
Let me offer another word about my feelings and desires. This adventure is about challenging myself — I’m pushing myself to go beyond the routine, to discover unexplored possibilities and potentials cloaked underneath my ritualized cosmopolitan existence. It’s not about ‘escape’ — nor a masculine desire to encounter ‘danger’ and persevere — it’s about uncovering a deeper connection between what’s around and what’s inside.
What’s inside isn’t always pretty. The trauma of school-age ostracization I encountered as a child, maybe we all face, created a disposition in me to notice the ugly thorns of life readily and forcefully. Without intervention, my mind draws the world in a dismal direction. To find the prettier parts requires outward pushing and inward digging. Happiness, for me, is not a natural happenstance. And I see what Lizzie is saying. A sunnier disposition could become more natural, if I allowed it to be, if I weren’t so trenchantly critical, self-critical, even, of my experiences.
But happiness isn’t ultimately what I’m after. There’s another part of experience I’m trying to awaken. One I don’t fully understand but can just barely adumbrate. It’s the part where innermost experience is also ‘social’, where the remote groundswell of private desire pools into otherness, indeed is others.
As a child, I recall so badly wanting human attention that I would debase myself to attain it. But what I sometimes found — it’s impossible to qualify or quantify how often — was a mutilated form of attention that doubled over into humiliation or rejection. This treatment confused and ashamed me, but I never stopped to deal directly with the source of that confusion or estrangement.
What is it about human beings that makes us so cruel to one another? In what ways am I cruel to others? What fundamental societal changes are required to bear a humanity which eradicates the tendency to dominate, to violate, to aggress?
Something tells me that the answer to these questions does not result from ‘easing up.’ These questions, that’s the focus of this trip. Why shouldn’t it consume the focus of the rest of my life? What could be more important than this? I’m asking in all seriousness…
