Summit Lake Dave
Not a bulldog nor a greyhound, a bit short and stumpy, greying hair slicked back from an elongated, leathered face, Dave doesn’t look athletic. Yet he is on the last leg of a grinding around-the-world bicycle trip when we meet him at the Summit Lake Campground in interior British Columbia in mid-July.
The bike shares his unlikely aspect – a leaden workhorse laden with metal boxes containing his belongings which weighs in at 300 pounds when he’s on it.
Dave carries three treasures.
1. A grizzly claw he’d found on a Canadian highway. “I’d like to show it to children so they can appreciate the animal. Wonder how he lost it – maybe a car side-swiped him?
2. A tiny plastic lizard secured with a bungie cord to the front fork: “I found this in a trash heap on a bridge in Panama while I was waiting to go through customs”.
3. A miniature iron man also lashed to the front: “A young girl in Thailand gave me this along with a letter in broken English that read “you seem like an Iron Man to me”.
He’d sold his business a few years before, fitted up his monstrosity of a bicycle and set out. On this final section, he peddled from Ushuaia, Argentina at the southern tip of South America. His last stop is Tuktoyaktut, an indigenous community jutting into the Arctic Ocean. He carries a Canadian flag. Whenever he encountered an indigenous community along his route, he asked a representative to sign it.
“Oh, the stories I heard”, he says “Sometimes they are a heavy burden – such heartbreaking things happen. I wasn’t expecting such a roller-coaster ride”.
He shakes his head.
“I want to present this flag to the indigenous elders at Tuk on September 30th – the Canadian day of Peace and Reconciliation”.
He mounts his bike. “I only hope somebody cares about what I’ve done”, he says as he begins the final 3,095 kilometer ride to Tuk.