http://kyleschen.com/2013/06/22/preferring-preference-over-buddha/ A few years ago when I was living in New Orleans a friend told me she had someone I just had to meet, a friend of hers who would be passing through the city for that single night, Kate Ver Ploeg. The next morning she was setting off to bike from New Orleans to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. We met, as is proper in New Orleans, over drinks that night.
Uryupinsk She was the sort of person who leaves a lasting impression: to call her adventurous might be doing disservice to her shocking fearlessness. She was leaving the next morning but she hadn’t even determined what road she was biking out on, or towards which town. She didn’t have a map. She wasn’t at all certain what route she would take anywhere – she was just willing to go, like the knights searching for the Holy Grail, “plunging into the forest where it was thickest.” I have found almost all Americans’ fears about America to be misplaced, but there is still one region where I retain some fear of being vulnerable to the cruelty of human beings, and that is the South. I now think this fear is misplaced, actually, and that bike travel in the South would offer no difficulty, but I say that after getting a lot of experience in every state in the South. She wasn’t worried about it at all.
I ended up giving her my Louisiana road atlas, and went through it with her pointing out the routes that I had noted were likely to be best for bikes (because New Orleans is surrounded by swamps, many roads are really long bridges, and terrible for biking – you want to follow the natural river-levees) and what might be the most interesting places to visit. She left the next morning. A couple of months later I got a postcard from her from Tennessee, thanking me for the atlas, and that was that.
I’ve been dreaming up my summer plans – Yellowstone, perhaps? – and I still can’t get out of my head what I want to be my next bike trip (I did a cross-country trip many years ago, and one along the Via Appia a few years ago): up the Mississippi from sea to source. This got me thinking about Miss Ver Ploeg.
Well, she’s been at it, I learn: here’s her 2012 blog about biking across Central Asia. The blog is quite personal and revealing, sometimes even uncomfortably so, which reminds me a bit of my own writing. It sounds like the trip was a bit of a disaster – the difficulties were of the sort that could not be overcome without much better advance planning. This is not a great surprise, but I hope it’s not going to stop her from doing more.
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