From the very beginning our team has been shaped by tangible incompleteness. We were six people carrying the burdens (literally. Vincent’s bike was so heavy) and spirits of seven for the first week (covid part I), so even when Vincent returned, we were always fallaciously and forlornly seeking the phantom Spoke quarantining in a trampoline (one of many long stories). We have mentioned many times when the seven of us were huddled in a space together that we felt like there was a missing member (even when said space is a motel room meant for two).
Now we are down to five in person. Vincent is off beginning the first of eight amazing years of med school in Philly, and Katherine is remotely Spoking from Indianapolis (covid part II, I miss you dearly, Katherine). There is true emptiness around us. I fell asleep not to Vincent’s frantic searches for an empty room and woke up not to Katherine’s deflating sleeping pad. Instead of waiting for Vincent off the side of the road because he forgot to put on his helmet, or laughing with Katherine too hard and too long and way past bedtime, I found myself sitting blankly at various points today, feeling a little absent, a little lost.
The now too familiar sales pitch: “We are seven Stanford students biking across the U.S. and teaching STEAM along the way…” must now be modified to the odd and grating “six.” Two blogposts ago I mentioned that it is scary to miss these six strangers preemptively while we were still together, but now that we are truly separated, I feel so honored and so happy that I miss Vincent and Katherine. It is because they have made such an impact on my life here that I feel a little empty without them, it is because they have deeply and very chaotically bulldozed a spot in my heart that I am a little lost without them.
Perhaps because Vincent and Katherine weren’t here to keep us in line, perhaps because we were all tired and jostled by the unfamiliar pace of a city, somehow in a tea shop in downtown St. Louis, we decided to reroute the rest of the trip, entirely.
The news of Kentucky flooding has been laying heavy on our minds for a week or so now. We are wary of the uncertain road conditions but more so worried that our purpose to empower and educate would be more so an imposition and inconvenience to those we must inevitably encumber along the way. Asking for food and shelter from a community lacking exactly those things seems wrong.
So Aja and I within thirty minutes scraped together a mock route that would take us North instead of South, passing through a few more big cities that might offer more housing and more medical support. Over lunch the entire team discussed and agreed on the plan, and sitting (actually trapped by a thunderstorm, which Joel, ever meticulous, had warned us of ahead of time) in a coffee shop for four hours, we set out to realize it. It truly was all hands on deck, ten hands on laptops and phones, typing up multiple versions of each route and calling new schools and libraries we could teach at along the way. Like a well oiled machine, or more precisely a well-greased-not-squeaky-no-derailleur-issued chain, the five of us with much sprawling on tables and much laughter and caffeine, confirmed over 80 percent of housing and route planning. Again, like that ideal chain mentioned above, we worked as congruent and complementing links, seven links that is. I wondered both silently and aloud, “What would Vincent do?” as we edited version after version of routes to make sure they were (relatively) safe and (relatively) enjoyable. I repeatedly checked to see if the new route would bring us closer to Katherine when she ends her quarantine, and reminded myself to focus on potentials and positives like she would. So the seven of us, if not in person then in spirit, in one day will take on a whole new route.
goldfish katherine
dashing vincent
Yes, there is an emptiness, but there is also much fulfillment. The missing links are not so missing when the force and tension they used to exert have shaped us into the team we are today. I am not so scared as I am excited to ride into this unfamiliarity alongside my team.
new route
See you soon,
Sophia