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Local, Ride Global
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George Christensen spends the winter as a
bike messenger and the rest of the year touring the world on two wheels.
By Jeffrey Felshman
Chicago
Reader, November 24, 2006
George Christensen, a 55-year-old bike messenger, likes to set
challenges for himself. In 1975 he sat through every inning of every
game in the bleachers at Wrigley Field. In 1991 he made 73 deliveries
in one day, a record for Chicago bike messengers at the time. Last
spring he attended 70 movies in 12 days.
But of all his serial obsessions, one stands out. Any bicycling
enthusiast might take one long trip of 5,000 or more miles. Some take
two or three. Christensen has taken 15. He's also done at least one
1,000-mile tour every year since 1977 and more 300-to-500-mile trips
than he can count. At this point, he says, "It takes several days of
jogging the memory to shake them all out." Since 1989 he's been a
messenger with Cannonball, now called Dynamex. He works only in the
winter-he says there are fewer pedestrians to contend with and the
money's better because fewer messengers are working-and the rest of the
year he tours. He says sometimes on a frigid January morning a downtown
office worker will ask sympathetically if he's all right. He isn't
insulted. He knows you don't see many white-haired bicycle messengers,
especially in the winter. "If I tell them a little bit about myself,"
he says, "they're relieved." Then it's his turn to feel sorry for them.
"I feel like I'm out there riding around the Loop asserting my freedom,
going by buses with all these people that are comatose and people
sleepwalking down the sidewalks. And I'm intensely alive out there,
alert and sensitive to every little stimuli."
Christensen could have been one of them. He grew up in comfortable
circumstances in north-suburban Glenview, where his father was a
trader, his mother a homemaker. As a 12-year-old he bet his younger
sister he'd never get married. Realizing he'd have to die to collect,
he bet her instead that he wouldn't be married at 40. On his 40th
birthday his sister sent him a dollar.
As a kid he was always saving his allowance for something, but didn't
know what. He wanted a better bike than the one-speed his parents gave
all their kids but wouldn't spend his money on the Schwinn Varsity
ten-speed he coveted. "My brother, who's two years younger than me, he
bought the Schwinn Varsity," he says.
George Christensen
Christensen at Machu Picchu in 1989; on a camel in Morocco in 1996;
with Didi Senft, aka the Devil of the Tour de France, in 2005
He also understood early on how limiting full-time work can be. His
family took a vacation once a year. "Everyplace we went I always liked
it and wanted to go back," he says. "But you can't do that when you
have just one vacation a year like my parents did."
Christensen graduated from Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism
in 1973, then got a job as an administrative assistant for a trucking
firm. He says everyone seemed to be working toward retirement, so he
decided to save his money and retire at the end of the year. He saved
$10,000, which he figured he could stretch to last five years. But he
had friends who owned small businesses, and they kept asking him to do
odd jobs for them-deliveries, painting, bookkeeping. Still, he took the
winter off and went skiing.
He was also getting serious about biking. "It combines a lot of things
I like to do," he says. "I like to travel, I like to be outdoors, I
like to be physically active." In 1977 he took his first cross-country
trip, from Virginia to Oregon, and by the time he got to Kentucky he
was ready to quit. He was on a ten-speed with skinny tires, and one or
the other would blow out two or three times a day. In Lexington he
discovered thicker tires and decided he could keep going. "There's a
certain amount of suffering to touring," he says. "You've got to
endure."
Since then he's biked up the "world's most dangerous road" (a one-lane
mountain path in Bolivia), across "America's loneliest highway"
(Nevada's Highway 50) three times, and over various "highways from
hell," including some in Cambodia. In 1984 he cycled across New Zealand
and Australia, including the Nullarbor Plain, a 750-mile stretch of
treeless desert. In 1986 he rode 900 miles from Chicago to New Orleans
in mid-January, hoping to get into the Super Bowl. He couldn't get a
ticket and wound up watching the game in a bar. Afterward he headed off
to Mexico. In 1989 he rode 7,000 miles in South America, from Medellin,
Colombia, to Tierra del Fuego. Along the way he crossed Chile's Atacama
Desert. "It was headwinds that hold for 3,000 miles," he says. "It was
the first trip I'd done where I thought, jeez, this is one I don't want
to do again. I'm not enjoying this." But he's proud that he made it.
Fifteen years ago Christensen read a Roger Ebert column about the
Telluride film festival and decided to go. He began working at the
festival the following year and has gone back for a month every year
since, usually as the head of its shipping department. Now film
festivals are part of his cycling itinerary, and he's been to fests in,
among other places, Rotterdam, Berlin, and Sodankyla, Finland. "As a
cyclist I'm an endurance athlete, and when I go to film festivals I'm
an endurance filmgoer," he says. "I am sort of obsessional about both."
Yet after he went to Cannes this year, where he watched the 70 films in
12 days, he didn't see another movie for two months.
"There's a Greek saying that you shouldn't do anything to excess,
although Blake says that by going to extremes, that's how you learn,"
he says. But then he adds, "There's a Japanese saying about climbing
Mount Fuji-that's sort of a rite of passage for them. 'He who doesn't
climb Mount Fuji is a fool, but he who climbs it more than once is an
even greater fool.'"
Christensen usually tours alone, though he sometimes rides with a
friend. For many years he took trips to Mexico with his girlfriend,
Chrissy Daly. "Chrissy and I spent all or parts of a dozen or so
winters in the small fishing village of Puerto Escondido," he says. "We
drove down a couple times. I also biked down and met up with her
several times. She died of cancer two years ago. Last winter I took her
ashes to Puerto Escondido and sprinkled them on our favorite beach."
When he's touring Christensen rides his Trek 18-speed an average of 12
hours a day, two hours on the bike and one hour off. He usually rides
90 to 100 miles each day, eating nuts and energy bars almost
continuously. His panniers weigh 50 pounds, and among the things inside
are a tent, sleeping bag, one change of clothes, tools and parts, and a
can opener. He took a stove on his first cross-country trip but hasn't
since. "I discovered you need extra water for cooking and cleaning," he
says. Occasionally he'll eat in a restaurant if he can find one that's
cheap enough, but most of the time he shops in local stores for items
such as peanut butter and bread or baked beans, which he eats straight
from the can. One time in rural Cuba he and a friend couldn't find a
store that accepted anything besides ration cards. They waited outside
a store trying to find someone who'd take American dollars for
something to eat, but nobody would. They ate their emergency
rations-peanut butter out of the jar-until they reached a city.
He says he's never had trouble finding a place to camp. "The one great
lesson I've learned, the one true axiom, is there's always a camp spot
awaiting you," he says. "Something is going to turn up."
For years Christensen never took more than a few snapshots on his
trips. "I didn't wish to be preoccupied with looking for photos and be
just another schmuck with a camera taking pictures that others only
feign to have interest in," he says. But in 1991 he was headed to India
and Nepal, and his friends persuaded him to take slide film. He liked
the results. "It's the difference between a toenail and a full body
shot," he says. Four years ago Richard Houk of the DePaul Geographic
Society invited him to speak about the Nepal trip. "He gave a great
program," says Houk. "In fact, he's done two programs. The other one
dealt with Indochina." Its focus was his 2002 trip through Thailand and
Vietnam.
In a typical year Christensen rides about 8,500 miles-3,500 as a
messenger and 5,000 as a tourist. This year he figures he'll top 11,500
miles. He biked the 600 miles from Paris to Cannes, then spent a month
cycling through eastern Europe. On the way back he rode ahead of the
racers in the first and last stages of the Tour de France, his third
Tour in three years. The racers and their bikes are sometimes taken in
vans to the next stage, but Christensen says he couldn't accept a ride.
"Once you start doing that," he says, "you're always tempted." In mid-
September he left for Japan, biking across the northern part of the
country before returning to Chicago on October 29.
As the miles pile up, Christensen sometimes wonders when he'll have to
slow down. But he still puts in as many miles every day as he did when
he was in his 20s, and he doesn't want to quit. "I've seen an awful lot
of the world," he says, "but there's still an awful lot more out
there." In October he rode his bike to the Mount Fuji trailhead at
7,800 feet, where he set up camp even though it's not permitted. The
next morning it was cold and raining, but he headed up the trail, which
was closed for the season. He made it to 10,000 feet, 2,385 feet short
of the summit, before being turned back by driving snow. Would he try a
second time? "If the opportunity came along I wouldn't mind going back
and doing the lower half of the country," he says. "And since Fuji's
south of Tokyo, Fuji would be there to pluck again."
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