MAP Across America

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Tallies and Finales

Hello again, a few months later, a few more experiences, a little more biking. Check out the updated photos!

Last week, I had the opportunity to revisit my AVODAH presentations. The interns at UW Hillel have meetings every week and occasionally bring in speakers from the community. I retold my story and this time, shared photos of the bicycle journey now completed.

I still feel as if there is much reflection to be had…but before we move on to new activities and the NEXT thing in life, I wanted to share a few final numbers with you from the journey:

3,176 miles of pavement, gravel and dirt crossed from D.C. to Newport Beach, CA

72 days crossing

14 states traversed

5 nights of paid lodging (i.e. 67 nights we stayed with friends and random hosts)

11,312 ft.  Highest elevation at Monarch Pass, CO

13 flat tires

16 planned speaking engagements in 9 different states

Over 300 people spoke to about AVODAH

Thank you for everything. I may continue to post as new reflections emerge, but for now, just remember, that ANYTHING is POSSIBLE!!! 🙂 Your next adventure is right around the corner. Try to continue being part of something that is greater, something that perpetuates the creation of positive action and energy.

Chao.

Another Great Article in Jew-ish.com

http://jew-ish.com/index.php?/stories/item/3797

 

Best quote from bathroom stall in Colorado

“Knowledge is the best gift because it is weightless.”

True, true, especially when every ounce counts. Anyone have any weightless knowledge to offer??

Appreciation

One of the most difficult aspects of having multitudes of random assistance and generosity is how to show your appreciation. Note to all of our random hosts out there: Please know that we could not have completed this journey without your help!

How can we show our appreciation and not feel like we are taking advantage of others?? More importantly, after an initial thank-you note, is there a way to maintain a sense of appreciation? Is it important to keep in contact with those who in an instant, and if only for an instant, offer their trust and goodwill?

Maybe  I should send nice, deep fried latkahs to all our hosts in the mail…:)

Rushing towards Instant Gratification

I want to expand upon the idea of instant gratification now that I finally finished reading “Desert Solitaire” by Edward Abbey, which in fact is a mandatory reading for those in the 4 cornered states.

Abbey describes in detail, Arches National Park, in SE Utah and the beauty of the silent landscape; about the sand and stone and lizards. About how things move slowly and how the tourist industry has rapidly led to exploitation of the landscape. More people=more pollution=faster deterioration

While biking, especially in the Southwest, I realized that

a. First and foremost, driving or flying would have been a lot faster

b. Time does not rush, it is humans that rush. Rushing through projects, activities, is solely a human concept. Things may move fast, it is not natural. Nothing, NOTHING, in nature, truly rushes, even water moving fast. In the SW USA, the arches, the grand canyon, the buttes, the mesas have taken hundreds of thousands of years to form. The grooves we see today were started by water flowing before humans were in this part of the world.

3. Even on a bike, I moved fast (at times)

We expect that everything moves at our pace, instant email, instant message, instant arrival, but it is not natural.

On another gratifying note, we expect to instantly be comfortable…If we are hot, we turn on the AC; cold, turn on the heat. This is not possible necessarily when you are outdoors, or indoors with no electricity.

Slllllllllllooooooooooooooooow down. Take time to realize how fast you are moving (especially while zipping down the highway!).

Bike songs

When you are sitting in the same position day after day, hour after hour, the only thing that can constantly move is your mouth. Hence, when you run out of things to say, there are a monumental amount of songs that you can adapt for your own experience. These are what I came up with, specifically when bored by corn, or exhausted in the Rocky Mountains:

 

Up on the mountains (Down by the bay)

Up on the mountains, where the aspen trees grow,

Back to my home, long way to go

and if I bike, bike, bike,

my mother would say, say, say

Are you ever going to get to west,

wearing your warm vest,

down hill all the way..

 

Going on a bike ride (bear hunt)

I’m goin’ on a bike ride, goin’ on a bike ride, I’m not afraid

I got my water bottle and my gloves and my bikes shoes too.

OH NO, here comes another MOUNTAIN.

Can’t go around it, can’t go through it, gotta go over it….

 

I’m goin’ on a bike ride, goin’ on a bike ride, I’m not afraid

I got my GPS and sun glasses and spare tires too.

OH NO, here comes another WIND STORM.

Can’t go around it, can’t go through it, gotta go over it….

 

I’m goin’ on a bike ride, goin’ on a bike ride, I’m not afraid

I got my rain jacket and tent and Cliff Bars too.

OH NO, here comes another SEMI TRUCK.

Can’t go around it, can’t go over it, gotta pull over and let it pass by….

 

I believe I can bike (fly)

I believe I can bike,

I believe I can pedal faster than a tyke

I think about it every moment past, present and future,

I believe I can touch the ocean tide

 

I believe I can bike,

I believe I can climb that pike

I think about it every moment past, present and future,

I believe I can’t survive a hunger strike

 

In addition to these GREAT songs, I also had a daily tribute to Julie Andrews, learned how to beat box the entire alphabet and recounted entire services. Just passing the time….:)

AVODAHcycle in the News

Apparently, many newspapers are small enough that they do not post articles online. How old fashion…:)

Hence, I have searched for a scanner, and settled on my phone with a camera to take pictures of the printed articles, which the reporters sent to my home. The first is actually a like to the SF Jewish Weekly from a few weeks ago. The second two are from the Omaha Jewish News and Red Rock News from Sedona, AZ. Enjoy!

http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/59881/cross-country-biker-recounts-many-peaks-of-fundraising-ride/

Small town Jewish America

One of the things I have had to come to terms with recently is that fact that most of America is not Jewish, and many people from small town America have never met a Jewish person before. It is quite ironic thinking back to the planning;  thinking about sleeping arraignments, telling myself and my travel mates that “we will just stay with the Jewish family in town.” Ha, I can laugh now, imagining ourselves looking at last names in the phone books wherever we happened to be at nightfall. We would still be looking in the phone books in some of the towns we slept in.

When fundraising, or when advocating for a cause or mission, it was important to figure out how to best “sell” your ideas in a way that relates to the individual. Why would the random passerby want to support us? Ever since the beginning of this trip, my travel mates have challenged me to devise a way to speak about AVODAH, describing the work in a more secular light, and focusing on the people served, rather than beginning with “AVODAH, the Jewish Service Corps…” . I have found that it tends to confuse people when trying to describe our journey in a few sentences. They hear the word Jewish and either immediately stop fully listening and instead, evoke any thoughts they have about Jewish people; or they think we are serving only Jewish people. Throughout the last few weeks, speaking with the locals in small towns of around 500, it has been a true journey to navigate individual responses and perceptions of ourselves.

Some people told me I was the first Jewish person they had ever met and thanked me for delivering the holy book. Most of all, I felt appreciated and appreciative for another truly religious experience after a year in AVODAH.

 

McDonalds

stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive, ah, ah, ah, stayin’ alive.

I FEEL GOOD – Whoa-oa-oa! I feel good, I knew that I would.

I have never  spent enough time in McDonald’s to realize how HAPPY a place it is. One morning, when camping across the street in the fairgrounds parking lot somewhere in Colorado, we went to McDonald’s in the morning to use the brush our teeth and grab some coffee. For under $10, JP got a coffee, two eggs, sausage, 3 buttermilk pancakes and hash browns. I got a yogurt parfait, hash browns and a tea. 

If the $1 menu doesn’t make you happy, the music surely will. The McDonald’s soundtrack is full of feel-good music and fun for all ages. They have a playground, free wi-fi, which we took advantage of multiple times even without purchasing food. You can fill your water bottles for free and if you really want a toy, all you have to do is smile and ask nicely (except for in San Francisco:  www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6A16PR20101102)

The other amazing thing we witnessed across America, was that McDonald’s was a place for elder people to congregate. At multiple stops, where we sat and used the internet for a few hours, white-haired men and women with canes and newspapers in tow would come and sit around the larger tables with their coffees and cream and chat. There was no other coffee shop in some towns and no other coffee which cost less than $5. Plus, there are cute little, laughing,  happy children to listen to and great music that suits their ears…why not have your meetings at MickyDees?

I am not writing this to promote McDonald’s in anyway. You can tell by my previous blog post about corn and soy in America.  I am simply saying they have a great marketing team.

ps. I forgot in my last blog to mention another thing about food: Food should be alive and should die, just like humans. McDonald’s burgers can last WEEKS without getting moldy…should we really be eating something that might never rot??

Tribute to Corn and Soy: FYI, this will be lengthy, almost as lengthy as the amounts of fields we biked through

I read the Omnivore’s Dilemma on this trip and recently saw Food INC. and am at the point where I feel both in utter awe of corn and soy and also disgusted to the point that I don’t know if there is anything I can eat. I should have written this post around Illinois, which by the way, I didn’t even associate with corn production prior to this trip. But now, after seeing at least one corn field in almost every state, I can look back, slightly more educated and tell you what I learned. The following is both from the book and firsthand accounts of farmers.

The industry of corn can be a microcosm for what is happening in many industries around the world. Basically, the # of corn ↑ and the # of farmers ↓, or the yield of corn increases and the number of farmers needed to produce the corn decreases. Why? Because of technology, and instruments which one person can control, which one corporation can control, which ultimately means less jobs. And for what? ABUNDANCE and production.

I will explain this further, and will touch upon this semi-incoherent chain as well: Population increases→ Corn production increases→ Chemicals in the production increase→ More humans means more meat→ Faster means of production→ More chemicals in the food we eat, both vegetable and animal→ Fewer jobs as production speeds up→ Humans eat food with more chemicals→ Humans pay more for vitamin enhanced products→ Fat, poor, unemployed America

Let me back up. Each year, with the growing population of humans, the amount of corn produced increases. The main way it increases, is not only by planting more stalks (and taking over the rainforests), but by ensuring that each stalk produces more cobs. And they way that happens is through the use of GMOs, genetically modified organisms. When a kernel is infused with additional genes, it becomes a new hybrid, growing fatter and quicker. This is an exponential catapult that keeps on increasing.

This process happens every year, and every year, farmers have to buy the newest hybrid. They are not forced to, but if they do not, they will not produce a crop that can compete with their neighbors’. They will not make a living if they don’t have top notch kernels. They will not be able to compete with market price. The American farmer is the only part of this entire chain of production that is not able to climb any sort of economic ladder. As more and more small farms are bought out by the huge agri-businesses, the small-town, independent farmers are not receiving their subsidies because they are no longer employed. Who gets the government subsidies then? The huge, megalomaniac big companies because they are now the ones producing the corn. Thanks gov!

One crop of corn will be 47% animal feed, 24% fuel, 6% processed food, 4% high fructose corn syrup (remember the farmer I met who produced HFCS?), and the rest is used elsewhere sparingly.

Notice where the largest quantity of corn goes: to feed animals. 32 pounds of corn feed will yield 4 POUNDS OF MEAT. Also in the manufacturing process, vitamins and minerals are released. Once the factories have the isolated corn particles, they have to add back all of the nutritional value that was lost…hence costing the consumer more.

The Omnivore’s Dilema, as Michael Pollan puts it, is that in America, with our melting pot fusion of culture and food, we have nothing to fall back on, we don’t know anymore what is healthy for us. We don’t know what we can eat, and sometimes, people develop eating disorders; eating too little or sometimes too much. We had a solution for those who overeat ho. If people started feeling glutinous by buying two servings, McDonald’s and 7-11 created the supersize. The purpose of allowing people to buy more allowed them to feel like it was normal to consume 42 ounces of soda.

Another aspect is that food production has changed from an ecological loop, into a factory and is now almost entirely powered by fossil fuels. We (the American farmers) use chemical fertilizers to ensure that no natural bugs pollute the crops. These are primarily nitrogen infused insect killers based on poisons that were initially manufactured for warfare (Omnivore’s Dilemma). The fertilizer is also full of these poisons…here’s how: Approximately 70% of the corn and soy produced in the US goes to feed the animals that we eat, pigs, cattle, chickens. The animals eat and produce manure which is transformed back into fertilizer. Pretty straightforward, huh? ( This can be seen at: http://www.uq.edu.au/_School_Science_Lessons/6.65.3.GIF and http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/6/26/191251/537 and http://www.chem.info/Articles/2010/07/Alternative-Energy-Food-AND-Fuel/)

To end things for now, I will end with something else Pollan mentions in Omnivore’s Dilemma. Humans are the only species that will eat anything, except for rats. The only difference though, is that humans have the ability to build a body of knowledge which can tell us what is healthy for our bodies. We are what we eat. So choose wisely.