May 26th, 2001 – this was the morning the three of us – Tim, Chuck and myself – said goodbye to family and friends and started west on our bicycles; there was 4,000-some miles between us and the Pacific - and none of us had the first idea what we were in for. The 55 days that followed hold too much to even attempt to break down into a few paragraphs – if I had to sum up the experience in a few words, I would say, “it was the most beautiful and difficult experience of my life” – but only the first three days of it are relevant to this story:

Hurricane Alice was stirring up some of the strangest and most-severe weather the mid-west had seen in decades, we spent our first night camping in a muddy strip of trees running behind an unfinished subdivision about 50 miles south of our starting-point, unknown to us at the time, there were several tornado watches and warnings in our area all through out the night.

We weren’t more than four miles into our second day when something unexpected happened, something that changed everything; Chuck stopped his bike in the middle of the road, let it fall carelessly to the ground, and sat, Indian-style, on the yellow line, not talking, just staring silently ahead. When we approached him – without looking up at either of us, Chuck flatly stated he was “going home”. It was a side of Chuck I’d never seen before – and, I’ve always believed, it was the beginning of the end for our friendship.

Chuck didn’t turn around that morning – after a heated argument – we continued on in silence, the next several days consisted of constant rain and continuous threats from Chuck of quitting. One night, in private, Tim told me I shouldn’t expect Chuck to ever have the endurance for filmmaking – a part of me wanted to believe that was a harsh statement, but in the back of my mind, I feared Tim was right. Days later, Chuck would go home due to a knee-injury.



For me, the bike trip symbolized a test: in my mind, I saw the challenge of riding across the country, and the challenge of making a film, as one in the same, both required a kind of “stubborn-determination”. In a strange way, at the end of every exhausting day, I felt stronger as a filmmaker – maybe ‘confident’ is a more fitting word, but in any case – after thousands upon thousands of endless miles, Tim and I reached our destination; the Golden Gate Bridge, it was the most enlightening moment of my life – a powerful emotion I’ll never be able to fully explain… and one that I was eager to experience in filmmaking.