Disillusioned and drained after dancing for a living became too much, Laura Killingbeck packed up her bike and bought a one-way ticket to Alaska. Cycling and the outdoors brought her true solitude. In those she encountered, she found generosity, kindness, and what she needed most: human connection and community.
By then I’d stripped in a half dozen clubs, and dancing on stage seemed like a great deal: I got paid to wear glitter and twirl around! Each night was an absurd festival of human desire, raw and unfiltered. It was more interesting than working as a waitress; more bluntly educational than many of my college classes. I planned to use my earnings to become a mountaineer and then build a small homestead. At night when I glued on my eyelashes in the dressing room mirror, I saw myself as a subversive beatnik success story.
After a few days, I crossed the Canadian border and continued into the Yukon. The trees here were smaller and windswept, and the forest seemed to go on forever in all directions. Bears ambled by on the roadside, and I sang to them as I passed. Days turned into weeks, the Yukon became British Columbia, and slowly I dissolved into the joy of flow. Every pedal stroke became part of the rhythm of breath and motion. Every thought and feeling became transient, like the sky. I cried a lot as I rode, often from gratitude, and these tears seemed to cleanse me from the inside out. It didn’t matter what I looked like out here or what anyone thought of me. I was free to fall apart, and inside that dissolution, for fleeting moments, I felt whole.
My body was useful in a way that finally made sense. In that moment I understood: Joy was its own form of power.
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