W

July 22. Virginia Beach VA.
We satisfy ritual requirement by dipping
our front wheels in the Atlantic.
Photo courtesy of some nice people from
Quebec City.






Wind. Wind trumps grade. I have never met a bicyclist who doesn’t agree that it’s easier to pump up a hill than it is to ride against the wind. I have been blown off the road by a crosswind; I have been stopped cold by a sudden gust of headwind; in fairness, I have also been blown along the road, spinning merrily in a sweet, sweet tailwind. But when we’re talking wind, it’s headwind we mean. A lot of the agony is mental. Headwinds used to make me crazy. However, several years ago, I underwent one of the premiere attitude adjustments of my life. Now I can usually accept a headwind as just another fact of the road, like pavement, grade, sunshine, or rain (see Attitude Change). I was severely tested several times on the trip, though. Leaving Shoshoni WY on our 100-mile ride to Casper, we were challenged by an east wind I estimated at 15-20 mph. I could not ride faster than 7 mph against it. Greg, who had got pretty far ahead, waited for me and suggested I draft him for a while. (“Drafting” occurs when you ride close to the rear tire of the bike in front of you, in the eddy created in the wind.) Drafting him was a good thing to do; I was able to keep up at a speed of 9.5-10mph. At 7mph, we would have been fifteen hours on the road to Casper. Luckily, the wind moderated and shifted to the side later in the afternoon. A week later, in “them hills around Lewellen” NE, I came as close as I ever have to my prior wind-borne lunacy. But we made it to Ogallala, and I have to believe I’m better for being tested. You know—“anything that doesn’t kill me only makes me stronger.” Um-hmm.
Many people think that riding west to east across the country maximizes tailwinds since they are riding in the same direction as the prevailing winds. Experts and experienced bikers know better. The prevailing winds do their prevailing at 30,000 feet of altitude. Down on the surface of the earth, landscapes significantly influence wind direction, mountains and valleys chief among them. There is a saying on the road: “If you get lost just turn into the wind.” Then you’ll be headed the right way. We thought for a while that the prevailing wind myth was a reality. For nine straight days across most of Oregon and southern Idaho we enjoyed tailwinds. We were enjoying a tailwind again as we turned east from the Tetons in Wyoming. As I mentioned above (see Cyclists, Long-distance ), just outside Dubois we met two young cyclists from upstate New York who were on the verge of abandoning their trip. The wind had been in their faces for more than a week, and after this day they had just about had it. We assured them that wind direction is not permanent and that a fair wind would rise for them before long. Unfortunately for us, it did. Not ten minutes after we left the two young men, the wind shifted. It stayed shifted for eight straight riding days, and was in our faces across the rest of Wyoming and more than half of Nebraska. It’s worth telling that story again just to highlight the cussedness of wind. But, on the whole, our experience supports the experts. Of the 35 days when the wind was a significant factor in our progress, nineteen were days with tailwind and sixteen were days with headwind. The rest of the time the breezes were negligible, no more than 5-7 mph from any direction. I should mention that the truth of the “easy East, windy West” phrase was borne out on our trip. After we crossed the Missouri River, the wind exceeded 10 mph on only one day.

Weight. A few incurable meliorists have asked me about my trip. One variation on their general query concerning how I am better for having done it is “What did you learn on your cross-country ride?” If I were to have my wits about me in the face of such a question, I’d say that I learned an awful lot about convenience stores. I do not frequent them in my normal life, but I could not have cycled from coast to coast without them. In a little over seven weeks, we must have been in a hundred convenience stores. So my experience is pretty broad. I know what they sell, and it’s all pretty appalling. Candies, chips, Twinkie-type confections, jerky are all staples. Soft drink machines dispense drinks in awesome cups—the smallest is generally 22 oz., 10 oz larger than a regular can of pop, and the largest is way too big for me to carry. If you’re ready for lunch, most places will sell you a large hot dog or corn dog or piece of pizza, and you can have your choice from a large assortment of ice cream goodies for dessert. Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of stunningly overweight people in convenient stores. I have read for years about Obese America, but life with Mary has kept the epidemic somewhat distant, even abstract. No more. It is all too evident when you hop from convenience store to convenience store across the broad midsection of America. Eastern Oregon, however, takes the cake when it comes to obesity. I don’t know what is so special about life in that hardscrabble land, but whatever it is it puts on the pounds.
Speaking of putting on pounds, I gained six on the ride while Greg lost ten. I don’t know how he did it. He ate constantly, grazing the goodies he had lined up in his handlebar bag, taking his “carb booster” at the end of each day’s ride, and eating three or four squares a day to anchor his diet. I didn’t snack much while pedaling. My handlebar bag was not suitable for service as a trough; my snacks were tucked away in my jersey pockets or the rear bags and, so, forgettable. But I always ate as heartily as he did at mealtimes and snack breaks at convenience stores along the way. He must have the metabolism of a bird. I, like most of my fellow Americans, surely don’t.








X








Xenophobia. Though I may have looked like an alien with my tight black lycra shorts, outlandish Arizona flag jersey, helmet and shades, I always felt like myself. ”Myself,” of course, is the exceedingly normal, 97% inoffensive Iowan. Most people treated me like myself and engaged easily in pleasant conversations. Some people, however, treated me like an alien, which for “myself,” is always a problem. In Brogan OR, we filled our plates at a most unusual convenience store spread (see Food) and went out to an attached carport/patio to eat. There were five or six men out there, eating and talking. Not one of them acknowledged our presence the whole time we were there. There was nothing unusual about them. They ranged in age from mid-thirties to about seventy; they were talking about local things—weather, hay crops, prices. (The youngest of them was also the most obese person we saw in eastern Oregon. His T-shirt had no prayer of covering the considerable personal property between the shirt’s bottom and the top of his unbelted pants.) I had another such experience after Greg and I parted for our separate Fourth of July breaks. I had been riding an hour or so from Keosaqua on a most pleasant back road that crossed and recrossed the DesMoines River and wound through the picturesque hills that Grant Wood painted around Bentonsport IA. I was feeling pretty good about being an Iowan after suffering some existential anxiety because of the condition of the highway we’d been riding since crossing the Missouri. I was also a little hungry and, therefore, delighted to see the little café on the other side of the bridge that crosses the DesMoines as you enter Farmington IA from the west. The apparent seating capacity of the place was 10, and all the seats were stools around the L-shaped counter. Six of the stools were occupied by older men having their breakfasts and talking. I said hello to the company and plopped down on a vacant stool. They continued talking and never once looked at me or said anything to me. I’d have thought that they’d stare a little, even if they didn’t have anything to say. I felt a little strange to “myself,” being unrecognized by my own kind! I don’t know what it is about these groups of old men. “Xenophobia” meets my alphabetic requirement, though I’m not convinced it’s a good explanation. But it’s good enough, I guess. When I imagine their response if one of their local buddies showed up looking as I did, I might think their silence was an act of kindness.



Y






Yesteryears. When I was a child, Sunday afternoon was the time for a drive over the country roads to visit relatives who lived in the small towns around Keokuk. I have early memories of motoring over what seemed an eternity on country roads to visit Aunt Nellie and Uncle Chester, who lived on a farm near Argyle. Great-uncle Prior and his family lived out by Montrose, the Welches over in “West K,” and some family related to the Browns and Welches by skeins of kinship only Aunt Flossie understood, who lived across the river (Mississippi) near Hamilton. On these drives we’d pass through little rural towns—Mooar, Powdertown, St. Francisville—and we always loved slowing down in Summitville, about five miles north of Keokuk, to view the two-story clapboarded house where my father was born during the period my grandfather was superintendendent of the County Farm across the road. In my adolescence, the inhabitants of those little towns would stream into the grocery store where I worked for their week’s provisions and, on Saturday nights, after the store closed, my buddies and I would pile in Duck’s car and we’d careen down country roads to small town square dances in our constant questing for girls. My first driving date, after I finally got my driver’s license and an uncertain claim on the family car, was to a dance at Sutter, small in size but large in legend, over in Illinois. Who I was, and who I am, is bound up with the reality of those little towns. As a result, there was an elegiac tone to our trip. We rode through more than a hundred of those little towns on our way across the country. Most of them were sad little vestiges of their former days: motels made over into cheap little apartments for the rural poor or left to subside into the weed patches and paint flakes that surrounded them; short little main streets looking more like used plywood lots than centers of local commerce. Strangely, my sense of this was less to do with disgust at sight of decay than a sort of sad wonder at my own lost childhood, a mournful twinge at that warp in time which left me disjoined from my own early life. That same feeling was with me as I toured my hometown, probably for the last time, on the Fourth of July. I suppose it is entirely appropriate for one of my years, and it certainly suits my temperament. My sentiments of mortality are not so much bleak or anxious as forlorn. So it goes.


Z

Ziggy’s. We were a little downcast when we rode into the Amber Inn in Bliss ID on the 10th of June. The restaurant across the road from the motel was shut down and boarded up. The only place to eat was the convenience store. When we wound our way down the quarter-mile drive for some supper, we were ecstatic. Not only did Ziggy’s offer the usual convenience store fare, and then some, for 24 hours a day, but there was a little restaurant at the far end which offered decent meals and great pie. Bliss, indeed! Tasty pie and alphabetic necessity require me to nominate Ziggy’s as the Premier Convenience Store we patronized on our trip. If you ever get to Bliss, make a pie stop at Ziggy’s.

AFTERWORD


Any long journey can become a pilgrimage, especially when we make it under our own power. The same movements, when they are repeated day after day and embedded in a routine that’s almost a ritual, become meditative. Consequently, there’s a contemplative, even spiritual, dimension to biking across the continent—Zen with pedals. The entries in the alphabetical account of the trip deal with many different things, but there are just a few themes that thread through them. Age is chief among them. Growing old is the most exciting thing I do these days. Having advanced to the threshold of old age, I am feeling new sensations, seeing new facets of myself and the world, discovering my thoughts turning into uncharted territories. There is no time warp when you plant your rear on a bicycle saddle; your sensations, insights and thoughts remain. Hills, wind, and, yes, even lots of convenience stores don’t change that.

Biking through all those small towns and, especially my hometown of Keokuk, was a powerful experience. The best word I could find to describe my response was “forlorn.” There is in that word a pervading sense of being lost, which is just how I felt. I think one always feels twinges of displacement as one moves from one stage of life to another. Moving into old age, we’re far more likely to experience change as loss because we’re actually falling apart. We lose physical abilities, height, and a fair measure of our mental agility. I saw on the trip that we also lose our world. The small towns I knew are no more. The places of my childhood are gone. The gutters, where we shot marbles, collected nightcrawlers and built dams after rains, pushed toy cars on their fabulous journeys, have all disappeared under the postwar glut of automobiles. Who I am at any moment is really how I am living with others in the material and natural world. In this ecological view of things, the loss of world means a loss of self. They go together. The drama of aging is largely about how we do justice to our losses—the material world and earth and self we knew. Serious stuff.

Fortunately, we are trained up to accept the loss of the world simply by living in a culture of change which puts a positive spin on loss. Buck Rogers is our prophet. Lucky, too, are those of us who mellow out with age; no need to assert our disappearing selves as much. Blessed, as well, are those who go on long bicycle trips and relearn important life lessons. Almost thirty years ago, a sojourn at Mt. Angel Abbey, in Oregon, taught me how to live more in the moment and flow of things. I was one of those people who depend on organizing people and things in projects that have a scheduled end. Monastic life showed me how people can live by the bell—when it rings they put down what they’re doing and do something else—with accomplishment and integrity. They simply live as fully as they can in the moment and give themselves to the flow of living. And that’s exactly what a long-distance bike trip is about. Virginia Beach is not just a ride to the store; it’s more like an impossible dream. So you just take it a day at a time and live in the moment, whether it’s a daunting headwind, a hot, steep climb, or a corn dog at some godforsaken little store. There’s no way to live the destination before you arrive. So enjoy the trip. Lance Armstrong had it right when he reminded us: “It’s not about the bike.”