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Back in Beijing most of Jiangshan’s customers are nouveaux riche who buy Patagonia jackets and Swiss army watches as status symbols to wear on the streets of Beijing, or on touring vacations to Guilin or Yunnan where they tiptoe along the trails in designer shoes.

After the stress of the past twenty-four hours I welcome the surprise of vast nature. There are probably some pretty little villages in the hills here. What if I left the motorcycle behind for a few days, put on my hiking boots and tried to find them?

Not on my first day out.

Or can I?

I’m lost already, much too early in the trip. And my plans are vague. The general idea to cross China from east to west, heading south through Sichuan and Yunnan is just a sketch. I now realize the roads are not as mapped, and that I have some hardcore dirt riding ahead of me. If the bike holds up, and I can get to the south, how will I get back? That’s the part I can never figure out when I look at the maps. The coasts are too crowded and the interior impossibly mountainous.

Sitting by the rushing river against the high coppery cliffs provides an anchor. There will always be the force of nature. If the human face of China is impermeable, threatening, nature renews and relaxes. Confronting foreign nature has always been more comfortable to me than confronting foreign cities, and today’s ride promises spectacular scenery.

Suddenly I can’t wait to get back on the road. Who cares which road? I need only head generally west. And when I hit a barrier, south, then when I reach my destination, north.

But first is a ritual that will be repeated each morning.

Back in the parking lot I unlock the motorcycle cover and fold it up into a big red duffel bag. Nothing had been touched. I’d been told that the Chinese are scrupulously honest. The more generous claimed it was an innate trait; the less generous claim it’s because there are so many tattletales around and the penalties are so harsh.

I try to open the trunk with as little noise as possible but every creak and bang echoes from the walls of the enclosed compound. I stand still in the stark yellow sunlight on the stark yellow dirt, and listen, but no one stirs.

First, the spokes. Sure enough, a lot are already broken from the deep potholes I’d hit the night before. The asphalt had ended abruptly several times and I’d ridden miles of dirt before the road was paved again. No road hazards were marked so I’d gone careening off the edges a few times.

I squat in the dirt and begin work as the sun’s rays rise over the mountain.

With a pair of needle-nosed piers, I pull the broken spokes from their seats in the wheel. Seven of the long ones are broken but all of the short ones are intact. I stop in astonishment. The day before, when we’d finished replacing three spokes that had broken on my bike, Jiangshan handed me all of the extras in his toolkit as a parting gift. His spokes were made of steel and not the cheap aluminum that I had packed in my kit. Lee translated his message, eloquently presented with a small bow: “Seven is an auspicious number, and I predict you will break no more than seven during your trip.”

With seven of them broken on the first day out, it would be a miracle.

I take each end of a spoke and bend it slightly, maneuver it around a cross-spoke, then bend it back straight, pressing both ends into the threaded nipples sunk into the wheel. The nipples depress slightly into the wheels for this purpose. They’re threaded, and when I twist the spoke it catches the thread. It takes some work with a pair of pliers to thread each spoke in all the way, until the nipple pops back out again when it’s seated. Now it’s only a matter of banging the spoke straight. Easy enough, if you aren’t too attached to the definition of “straight.”

The sun beats down hard on the compound. It is difficult working bent over so low to the ground, forcing the spoke rods into the nipples with the tip of the needle-nose pliers. I sit back on my heels and spot one of the girls walking across the compound. Her hair is a rats-nest of black tangles