My odometer plodded upward as I pedaled through San Francisco, Monterrey, Big Sur, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura. Miles drifted by along with seaweed and dangerously overconfident RV drivers.
The Pacific Coast bike route follows Highway 1 from Canada to Mexico, meandering though farmland, suburbs and seaside bluffs. The directions are simple: Keep the Pacific on the passenger side and keep the handlebars pointed south.
Just weeks after buying a Novara Safari touring bike off of Craigslist from a somewhat hapless librarian, I started my journey at Fisherman’s Wharf near the Golden Gate Bridge. San Francisco to Malibu by bicycle: That was the goal.
In the following days I camped among the Redwoods, zoomed down the slopes of Big Sur (41 mph was my top speed, if interested), ate bad Mexican food at a liquor store that boasted “the world’s most popular disposable hookah” with a group of Mormon travelers, hitchhiked when I ran out of spare tubes, watched elephant seals bellow at each other to stake out beach territory and listened through a layer of vinyl as a rogue raccoon ate my $7 almonds.
I camped in a state park every night of my 11-day tour. Five days in, I couldn’t remember a shower without a coin slot. After six days, one day without protein bars was unimaginable. By seven, I breathed in Gatorade like air.
As I rounded the bend and saw the Malibu city signpost, I realized that I had not yet seen water so blue, beaches so white or an atmosphere with so rich an aesthetic as Malibu, Calif. As a (somewhat) native Michigander, I wholly underestimated the sense of familiarity and comfort I would feel in such a Babylon of Botox.
But as I entered the final stretch and saw the panorama of color that is Malibu, the exhilaration I felt was not just relief after a 422-mile, Ibuprofen-fueled trek down the coast. It was a strange conglomeration of familiarity and the knowledge that I had found a home on shifting sand.
Pepperdine shouldn’t be allowed to happen. It’s a geographic and cultural house of cards. It is rooted in conservatism in a suburb of Hollywood and tanning salons. It is sketched from an arid, asymmetrical, combustible precipice that straddles a fault line and is slowly eroding into the sea.
And yet it plays host to an eclectic mix of students, faculty and locals who come for the views and stay for the … well, the views. For all of its drama and oddity and conflict of culture, this place is our own. It has an atmosphere that I missed and welcomed like a kooky friend from summer camp.
Pepperdine is dramatic, bizarre, lonely, bureaucratic and vain. It is beautiful, bountiful, benevolent, sincere, remarkable and true. It is not a destination but a set of wheels, constantly moving.
What a time to be a Wave.
As published in the Aug. 26, 2013 issue of the Pepperdine Graphic.
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Follow Nate Barton on Twitter: @TheNateBarton
