#49. TESSA HULLS - “Someone with a gallery showing of their art.”
In March, Tessa Hulls broke up with her boyfriend in Seattle. With no immediate future plans and nothing holding her to the city anymore, she took off on her pink and white bike to cross the country she’d been born in but never really seen.
Starting in San Diego, she skirted the Mexican border, went through Texas and Alabama and turned up to New York, stopping for a week to visit with friends here. On average, she bikes 90 miles a day.
“I’ve got this horrendous glove tan,” she says, shaking her wrists at me.
Tessa is originally from Northern California, where Mary Schmich warned to “live just once, but to leave before it makes you soft.” Tessa doesn’t seem soft, which I’ll get to in a bit. She attended UCLA for a year, but hated it and transferred to Reed College in Portland to study art. As a kid, she tells me, she was always drawing.
“Growing up, I was pretty isolated because I had no friends that lived within 20 miles of me,” she says. “I did a lot of hiking and I read my way through the public library. I drew. I knew I could always entertain myself with a piece of paper.”
