I Have to Be Here Now (Video)

Words and video by Michael Ortiz, photos by Jerod Foster

My life was changed forever when I received a bike for my undergraduate graduation. I had a purple bike from a couple of Christmases back as a kid and rode it fewer times than I have fingers on one hand. My dad tried to get me to ride without training wheels for so long, but I was always reluctant to let go of safety. I’m trying to point out that I wasn’t formally introduced to bikes until I needed one for Creative Media Industries Adventure Media. I didn’t quite know what they were, what they could do, or how riding them could make me feel.

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I rushed home from the bike shop feeling resolute that I was the luckiest master’s student in the entire town of Lubbock, Texas. When I tried to ride my bike for the first time, I was met with what felt like an endless gravity check. My roommates came out to check on how it was going, and I worriedly assured them that it was great. On the last attempt to ride, I nudged a lever below my right handle, the gears clicked, and balance ensued, defeating Newtown’s laws of gravity.

Adventure Media, a college bikepacking program, starts like a stew. Class credit is the one ingredient holding everyone together. Sophie Morris, a senior Natural Resources Management major; Katherine Sperry, a senior Mechanical Engineering major; and William Davidson, a junior Creative Media Industries major, are just a few ambitious ingredients among the flavor matrix. Throw in a couple of Saturday classes for training and one overnighter at Caprock Canyons State Park in the Texas Panhandle, and you have yourself one recipe for Adventure Media. Every year, an assortment of students come together to create a documentary and develop transferable market skills.

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I Have to Be Here Now is an adventure documentary exploring the relationship between Type II recreational activity and student mental health. Headed by Kinsey Gwinn, a Mass Communication major, and me, we followed 14 students on a journey through the Billy the Kid and Smokey the Bear route in New Mexico’s Lincoln National Forest. After being informed that about 30% of university students deal with some form of mental health issue and seek resources for it, we developed a documentary that used bikepacking as the vehicle to explore this relationship. Coming from a combination of Smokey Bear and Lubbock’s terra firma, Smokey & The Flatlanders was born, and on March 12th, 2022, 14 intrepid souls departed from Texas Tech University in two transit vehicles, willingly giving up their precious spring break to document the journey.

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I still remember exactly what it felt like—the first moment stepping into the world of bikepacking—full of trepidation because I, much like everyone else in the class, had never interacted with anything like this before. As I bounded forward, leaving the safety of a motorized vehicle behind, gravel and road crunched beneath my tires, a chorus of reassuring warm hissing that I hadn’t broken anything yet. The singing of cars in the distance and the crashing of howling wind as I met the ground below glided so naturally over the music of my bike that it felt like a wave of exhilaration, so delighted to have me there. We biked to a nearby road that would eventually lead to Hale Road, where we started cycling uphill. I spun my pedals uphill for what felt like hours but was closer to minutes because I was still in the same spot when I looked up.

It’s such an overwhelming feeling to be introduced to something completely new. Your first time swimming, your first time driving, or your first time experiencing snow. I didn’t know what bikepacking had in store for me, but honestly, I didn’t care. This was enough on its own. I fell in love with bikepacking right here on this road. I jumped off the bike to catch my breath, cycled, and then jumped off again to congratulate those passing me. Then I’d hop back on to repeat the process again. Each action flowed effortlessly into the next, accompanied by addictively satisfying support from my peers. Nearly two years after our trip, this is still one of the best-feeling loops I’ve experienced.

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The class shines the most in their capacity to care for each other in this unceasing loop. How unabashedly everyone cheers for your continued trek across Devils Canyon ever more rapidly in your ascent. Maybe that’s why our pace across New Mexico remarkably mirrors it. Every passing day feels like it’s tumbling over faster than the last but never yielding its composure. The Flatlanders take every opportunity possible to remind you of the heights you’re capable of soaring to and push you for doubting that you can. Of the bravery, naivety, hilarity, and ingenuity composing our will to continue, kindness remained the best quality of which we were capable. And there’s no better group capable of invoking this depth of passion than Smokey & The Flatlanders, a hodgepodge of strangers.

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Earlier, I mentioned that one of the core inspirations for creating I Have to Be Here Now was the statistical mental health issue among college students. Grades, relationships, and expectations can influence our daily routine, which can result in a vignette enveloping the corners of our eyes with a direct sight pointing toward our perceived goal. Bikepacking removes that vignette with its long stretches of dirt roads and open skies beckoning you to draw your own conclusions, and it puts you back to your fundamentals. We can only move and look around with the fundamentals. The ballast of our ever-changing identity is right here before us, letting us view the world. I think this is the heart of why bikepacking was the perfect vehicle to explore mental health. It simultaneously demonstrates mastery in the expression of momentum and haste, then continually beckons you to slow down and admire where you are—to look back on how far you’ve come.

Natalie Rychener, a Biology major, found the self-confidence to not live in the shadow of her sister because she was here biking through White Mountain Wilderness, somewhere only she could have brought herself. Logan Whiteman, a Creative Media Industries major, found that time away in solitude helped him appreciate his time with others and push himself out of his introverted tendencies. Erin Digiacamo, a freshman Creative Media Industries major, gained a second family.

It’s important to realize that Type II fun, at its core, is about personal growth. It sets “stretch goals” intending to look to something bigger than yourself, and, as a result, you become a better person because of it. The goals are never intended to be easy but should strike a balance between fun and challenging. Snow, mental fortitude, fatigue, and using the restroom outdoors were some of the challenges that preoccupied our minds. In truth, I was more worried about falling since I never did grasp changing gears.

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As we sat with full bellies of chicken fajitas and the journey behind us at Midtown Mountain, I think we all realized the challenges preoccupying our minds were just that—challenges—waiting for us to overcome them. Smokey & The Flatlanders are capable of unequaled care for each other, but we care very little for challenges. Whether imposed through prudence, malice, ignorance, anxiety, depression, or grief, the shattering of our preconceived self was inevitable. We were evolving with every mile pedaled, whether we realized it or not.

I, directly and indirectly, attribute my friends, relationships, career, and coping mechanisms to Smokey & The Flatlanders. Whenever I’m feeling lonely, I hop on the bike and, for a little while, it doesn’t matter that I am alone because I’m transported back to New Mexico’s Rio Bonito chocolate chip pancake morning. When we lost Adeola Omologa, a senior Civil Engineering major, we all came together to collectively cycle, run, or walk over 193.8 miles despite going our separate ways. We didn’t need to talk much, but for a while, we weren’t ourselves. We were Smokey & The Flatlanders coming together once more to celebrate the life of Ade and remember his ever-cheerful smile.

Documentaries are like home movies in that way. The people who are not here anymore or the people we lost touch with. Some of them are always inside the things they showed us or the things we did together. The people we used to bikepack with and how they laughed. No matter how lonely, anxious, or sad I can sometimes feel, whenever I look back at I Have to Be Here Now, a wave of warmth comes to me like a record full of hopeful greetings. In the words of Gemma Folsom, a junior Creative Media Industries major, “I won’t be here tomorrow, so I have to be here now.” On the precipitous for every tomorrow, I’ve turned to this beautiful documentary that I was so lucky to be a part of to help remind me that there is still much left of today. I owe every second of joy and comfort from it to a bike, frame bag, and everyone who brought them to me.

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So, thank you to everyone on the Smokey & The Flatlanders trip for exposing me to the incredible world of bikepacking. Usually, here is where I’d go on to explain the logistics of filming a bikepacking documentary and how it’d propel my career to work on more significant documentary projects, but that’s not why I’m here. Documentaries are built to live on for thousands of years, and it’s easy to perceive the contents of documentaries as tombstones. Still, I prefer to think about documentaries as gateways, not to what our hearts sounded like but what works of art delved within them. If anyone ever beckoned for a piece of media from which they can reverse-engineer our tastes and faults, our joys and losses, and most importantly, our loves, I would send them I Have to Be Here Now. This documentary was supposed to come out a year ago, but I was busy learning how to shift gears.

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