“Rare predatory black bear” is the phrase July and I repeated most often to one another, laughing, during our nine-hundred-mile bike tour across Alaska and Canada. It had come from the mouth of an Alaskan park ranger. Our route would take us on the Cassiar Highway, one of the least populated roads in British Columbia, where we would certainly meet a bear or two.

“Do not,” the ranger told us, “try to outrun a bear. They might confuse you for prey. If you see one, stop and get off your bikes. Then, you have to talk to it. Talk to it until it understands you’re not a threat, or prey. Keep talking until it loses interest.”

“What do you say to a bear?” asked July.

“Anything,” said the ranger. “You’ll be fine, unless you run into the rare predatory black bear. In which case, you might be screwed.”

We began our trip that day. We had no choice but to walk our bikes, each loaded with fifty pounds of gear and food, about twenty miles up the mountain toward the White Mountain Pass. That evening, exhausted and swarmed by mammoth insects, we made camp just over the Yukon border, the sun still shining at midnight.

I was thirty-one, waist-deep in the quicksand of mental illness from which I would emerge years later to discover I had become middle-aged. I hadn’t gone on the trip because I thought it might cure me, but because I knew I would never go if I didn’t go then. I had missed certain things—trainhopping, for instance—while embracing others (voluntary homelessness, hitchhiking all over the country), and I knew that some windows disappear, not with age but with a closing of the mind. Accustomed to having booze with my morning tea, I was as shocked, that first day, at not having had a drink as I was by the mountain, the fatigue, and the creeping suspicion that we were in over our heads. We’d been city bike commuters for over a decade, but this was our first tour.

We woke the next morning sore, still tired, and with an acknowledgement of the potential absurdity of our situation. “Rare predatory bear,” July said, after I spilled piss down the front of my biking shorts. He had bought pStyles for the trip, and I would soak my shorts with pee for another week before I became fully used to pissing through a funnel. Using the device was a safety precaution—I didn’t want to know what would happen if I were caught with my pants down. July and I are both Appalachian transsexuals, and as such, we’ve learned to laugh at things that aren’t very funny.

July and I...