Close your eyes and picture someone who has traversed multiple continents by bicycle.

See them pedal slowly across the stark expanse of parched Wyoming oil fields, and watch their bicycle inch along hairpin turns as it climbs through the Himalayas.

Imagine how strong a body must be to do these things, and then ask yourself: What does this body look like?

You probably didn’t envision someone who looks like Mary Ann Thomas.

As a self-described brown queer daughter of Indian immigrants, Thomas is an author, bicycle tourist and travel nurse on a journey to question and challenge stereotypes of who is allowed to belong in the outdoors.

Thomas’s family is from the Kerala region of Southern India, but she grew up in New Jersey.

“I always felt like a misfit,” she confided in a phone interview. “Being brown put me at odds with America — being the person I am didn’t fit with expectations of gender, and being queer didn’t belong within my family.”

In 2014, Thomas quit her job and cycled 6,600 miles — most of them alone — across the United States and Canada.

The experience gave her a deeper understanding of what it means to be an American, and she traveled through places where no one had ever seen a person on a bicycle who looked like her.

She was heartened to be met with profound generosity but was surprised to discover that when she returned to New York City, it no longer felt like home.

“I found it had changed,” she describes on her website. “I had changed. Biking had led me to remote roads through forests and farms. New York City is anything but remote. I suddenly saw that there were people everywhere. Not only is there an onslaught of humans, smells, noise, lights and traffic, but there’s social interaction required at every turn. There are people to politely smile for at work, strangers to butt up against on the subway, catcalls to be sidestepped, and racist, homophobic questions to be avoided. The city, while it gives me so much, also requires so much from me.”

In response to this feeling of being overwhelmed, Thomas moved to Alaska, where she explored a landscape of incomprehensible scale while contemplating what home now meant.

She found herself drawn to India, to her roots in the region her family was from. “I was afraid to bike across India,” Thomas explained. “My family told me, ‘White people can travel in India, but you can’t. Men can travel in India, but you can’t.’”

Thomas is someone who hears the words “you can’t” as a challenge, so in 2017, she teamed up with her friend Daniel Baylis and began planning. With Baylis contributing a skillset as a photographer and writer and Thomas providing the mechanical skills for working on their bikes, they embarked on a four-month trip that would carry them from the Himalayas all the way down to the southern tip of the Indian continent.

During their time on the road, the odd platonic pairing of a white man and a brown woman inspired many conversations and many struggles — including as they passed through regions where they were turned away from every hotel because their presence together was seen as immoral.

“Biking across India was a journey to understand my origins,” Thomas explained, “but I was riding through cultures, lands and languages I didn’t understand. India contains a multitude of cultures, and the religions shift with the landscape: every 100km, it’s a new country.”

After returning from their trip, Thomas co-authored "Asking for Elephants", a chapbook of essays about their journey, paired with Baylis’s vibrant photographs.

She is three months into a storytelling book tour that has crisscrossed the continental United States — and Alaska — and she recently came through Port Townsend to share her travels and her voice.

“I want to tell the story of an immigrant kid using bicycle travel to learn where she belongs,” Thomas said. “I am taking the very long way home.”