To Shake the Sleeping Self : A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia; and a Quest for a Life with No Regret by Jedidiah Jenkins
Much more than a bike ride or even an escape, this fast paced book reveals revaluations of human emotions interspersed with political, religious, and personal relationships. Wonderfully done and presented in a fascinating way that made it worthy of more than five stars.
Excerpts:
The pace of biking, even these few days in, was having the intended effect: time crawled. Days were eternal. When it would rain, it rained forever. When the sun came out, it would be hot forever. I was a kid again. It was incredible, too, to watch the land change in slow motion. Riding a bicycle gives the land a realistic scale. You notice every seam and crease. The distances between towns and farms and the height of hills, and the way a road will follow a river or instead cut straight over a hill you experience it all viscerally. You feel it all fitting together.
With the Internet connecting us all, the rest of the world feels closer, less alien. But I think that’s only true in our minds. The Internet does not bring Argentina one inch closer to me than before. That’s part of why I craved this trip. Knowledge alone is like an unearned memory, mostly forgotten. Just facts and two-dimensional images. I wanted to physically discover the world, the old-fashioned way. To cross over mountains to see what was on the other side. To hear languages I’d never heard. To take the photographs from National Geographic and put them out in the weather of human imagination.
You could say I was saved from misdirection by not being too handsome or too talented or too ambitious.
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