Pedaling for Change: Choose The Bear Tour featured on 88.1 The Park

You're listening to the station focusing on the Plymouth-Canton community. This is Community Focus on 88.1 The Park. Good evening and welcome to Community Focus, where we talk to people of interest in our community.

I'm Claudia Fisher and our special guest is renowned adventurer and author Laura Killingbeck. Today we will be talking about her participation in orsa, choose the Bear Bike Tour across Michigan.

Laura: Okay, well, first of all, thank you so much for coming and doing this interview with me. Thanks so much for having me.

You've spent a lifetime living in nature and traveling the world as a writer. What called you to live this life?

Laura: Yeah, so my life has had a lot of different chapters. I grew up in suburban Rhode Island, and both of my parents were naturalists. So, they taught my brother and I at a very young age to really feel at home in nature.

When I was 18, I ended up packing a backpack and spending about a year hitchhiking around the US and Mexico. So that was kind of a crash course in just being out in the world, you know. Just camping out. And I had a lot of amazing experiences. And after that I went to college and then started doing a lot of long-distance bike trips.

So, biking alone around Iceland, from Alaska down to California around Costa Rica, Columbia, Ecuador, um, different places around the world. And I really have always just been drawn to spending quality time outdoors in nature. I feel like nature is one of my most important, if not the most important relationship of my life.

I feel like time in nature is an investment in just a sense of peace and wellbeing that I think a lot of people really crave now.

During many of your adventures, you lived off the grid. In an ultra-connected world, what is that kind of disconnection like?

Laura: Hmm, that's a really interesting question. Yeah, so for a lot of my journeys, I would spend months at a time either biking or hiking and usually cooking over a fire.

So, I have a little twig stove that I can light up using, just whatever twigs that I find, um, also filtering water from rivers or wherever I am and just spending time outside. I think that sense of connection is something that, for me, has evolved over time. It's interesting, people usually describe it as disconnecting because it's, it's disconnecting from kind of the structures of the human world and society, but it's also a really intense form of connecting to a different way of being.

I think in nature, I feel a sense of peace and calm. That really allows me to, I think, go on a lot of interior journeys. And kind of navigate anything that's come up in my life. Anything that I'm thinking about, relationships, the world itself from a lot of different perspectives that I might not have access to if I were kind of in the thick of it in the human world.

So, I've grown to really appreciate that time.

Do you have a favorite adventure you've been on or a place that you've lived on this journey?

Laura: Oh, wow. Uh, let's see. You know, one of the random journeys I did, well, yeah. One of the random journeys was actually the Florida Trail. So, I hiked a thousand miles across Florida, which went through a lot of swamps.

About a third of that trail is underwater, and I really loved that experience, because I was afraid, really scared of the water itself because it was full of snakes and alligators. And then there were also packs of wild boars that were running around, and so there were a lot of, uh, creatures all the time.

But I found that if I just moved slowly forward and just kept going, everything kind of worked out. The snakes didn't. You know, want to bite me. They just wanted to live their lives. The alligators, you know, had their own, I don't know, I don't know what the alligators were doing actually. Um, but it was just a magical journey.

And I think sometimes when you do things that scare you a little bit, but you also use your powers of discernment and stay safe. It can add to that sense of depth of an adventure.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, that's like crazy. You're better than me. I would've chickened out!

Laura: I dunno. I mean, I was terrified, honestly!

But it was like the more time I spent out there, the more I just kind of became part of the landscape and it ended up being one of my favorite journeys ever.

As your next adventure, you're cycling from the upper peninsula of Michigan to Detroit in partnership with orsa credit union™ as a part of the Choose the Bear Bike Tour.

Can you walk me through the process of how you came to partner with orsa and why you decided to make this trip?

Laura: Yeah, so orsa credit union™ is a For-Impact credit union serving Michigan, and for a long time now, they've also been working with a network of really incredible organizations throughout the state, around domestic violence and sexual assault.

One of the questions I'm most frequently asked… Aren’t you afraid to travel alone as a woman? And so I hear this question so often and I've had to think about it so much, that eventually I ended up writing a story about what it really means to me to be female in the world, to appreciate that you know, the world is a beautiful place and people are incredible.

Everywhere I've gone, I've really benefited from just this extraordinary kindness of strangers anywhere in the world that I've been. And at the same time, I've also had to learn to practice a lot of discernment. And like any woman, I've had to take a lot of measures, like kind of an extraordinary amount of measures to keep myself safe.

Especially given the kind of ever presence. Um, it's an ever a present sort of feeling that we have to protect ourselves from sexual assault. And you can see this anywhere you go, like when women are warned, you know, have your key in your hand before you go to your car and always cover your drink at the bar.

And there's all of these things that are kind of wrapped into our normal lives that are really messages to women saying you need to protect yourself from sexual assault. And this is something that I've spent a lot of time thinking about. Writing about. And now the journey that I'm going on this summer.

So, the Choose the Bear Tour, which is in partnership with orsa™. It kind of merges all of those things together. Starting in May, I'm going to bike from north to south across Michigan, kind of in a zigzag for eight weeks. And along the way I'm going to stop at our partners who are working with survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault.

And I'm going to have conversations with folks about the scope of gender-based violence, what it's like, what's happening in the state right now. And I'm going to be covering those stories in blogs as well as social media and in articles. And so, the goal of this journey is to really raise awareness of gender-based violence, domestic violence, sexual assault. And also financial abuse.

One of the aspects of abusive relationships is that there are really systems of control. When someone is in an abusive relationship, there is a system of control in place that's often escalating. And one of the building blocks of that control is economic and financial abuse.

When someone is controlling your finances or they're not letting you get a job or they're preventing you from getting to your job, or they're trashing your credit … there's all of these things that people can do to control someone economically.

And so orsa credit union™, in their work with all of these partners across the state, they realize that this was a really big part of abusive relationships.

And actually 99% of abusive relationships include some form of financial abuse or economic control. So, that's a really big highlight for this too. Highlighting that and really helping to advocate for survivors and help people understand kind of the structure of what's going on so that we can work to prevent gender-based violence, domestic abuse, sexual assault in the future.

Yeah, I mean, it's an amazing movement. Your words are so inspiring. How have you worked so far with Orsa Credit Union in preparation for the bike tour?

Laura: This has been an ongoing project that we've been working on for some time. We had been scheduled to start last year, but unfortunately my mom got sick and so I ended up delaying the trip by a year so I could be with her while she passed, and I'm very grateful for orsa for.

Letting me have that time. I think it's very rare in this world that you can kind of be like, okay, I have to take, you know, a year off to be with my mom. But they were right there with me in that process, which it just is incredible. And now we're relaunching the tour. So, at this point. I've been working with an incredible team.

There's a team at orsa™ that have been facilitating all these conversations and partnerships. They've been doing behind the scenes logistics. I think the big thing that's really struck me about the orsa™ team is the quality of relationship building.

I think that when you're doing any kind of social movement, it's really happening at the pace of relationship itself, and I've just noticed over and over again that they have been digging deep into that, and it's something that's helped me build a lot of trust with them as well.

As you've already sort of talked about the Choose the Bear Bike tour, it will also help raise awareness for survivors of domestic and economic abuse in Michigan, whose victims are overwhelmingly women.

As a woman, does the knowledge that this tour will help victims give it extra meaning for you?

Laura: I'm more excited about this journey than any other journey ever, because of the potential for impact and relationship and good quality conversations.

I think as a woman, you know. I just love being part of the world. I love, I, I love traveling. I love people, and I think it's so important for us as a society to listen. To women's stories and empathize with women's pain. It's something that as a society for a long time, we've struggled to do those two things, and I think they're crucial for us to really build the sense of safety that we want in the world.

We need to listen to women's stories and empathize with women's pain. I hope that this trip will facilitate those conversations. And orsa™ and the network of partners across Michigan are doing that. They're doing an incredible job creating that sense of safety for people who most need it.

What are some of your personal goals in making this trip, and how will you strive to achieve them for any journey?

Laura: My personal goal is always safety. I love exploring. I love seeing the edges of things, but ultimately, I want to stay safe and I want everyone I'm working with to stay safe.

That's what makes it fun. So, that's always the first goal and I think that that goal really extends to what I hope for the trip. What I hope the impact will be is really a sense of safety in the world, a sense of community, and really I hope that this is something men feel drawn to too. We often see this, you know, gender-based violence as a women's issue, but it's really not.

It's a human issue that we can all be part of solving, and especially men. Like we just welcome men to this conversation. We really need men to participate and understand that men are part of the solution to this.

When you think about making this trip, what route excites you the most?

Laura: Oh, wow! I mean, Michigan is a beautiful state, so I am excited for every part of it.

I am hoping to start with the Northwood route in northern Michigan, and which is a route that was mapped by bikepacking routes. And then I'm following other routes across the state, so trying to hit as much gravel in the backcountry as I can, but also bike paths, pavement, anything that gets me where I need to go.

I know you already talked about some of the things you'll be doing along the way, but on a more geographical perspective, do you have any like stopping points that you have planned out or where you can't along the way or stay in cities, things like that?

Laura: The route right now is kind of taking, it's almost like I'm commuting between domestic violence shelters, honestly, across the state.

I'm going to start in the UP and kind of crisscross the Upper Peninsula, visit different organizations along the way. Make my way down. I'll have to cross the Mackinaw Bridge somehow. Then we have a central stop in Gaylord. We have Lansing. We have Detroit as the end of the trip. So, it's really going to be a crisscrossing journey across the state from north to south.

How can people track your progress?

Laura: There is a website called ChooseTheBearTour.org that has all of the information about the trip. It has a place where you can donate to the Choose the Bear Fund™, which supports survivors. And it also has my social media, Instagram, and Facebook, which is @LauraKillingbeck.

I just wanted to say thank you so much for doing this interview with me. You've been listening to Community Focus. I'm Claudia Fisher, and our guest has been renowned adventurer and author Laura Killingbeck. We've been talking about her participation in orsa’s Choose the Bear Bike Tour across Michigan.