Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Oddly enough, in the end I didn't ride it in the city very much, but for a couple
of summers I took it with me to the Hamptons, where I shared a house with several
friends—including Jan and her then-husband—and it quickly became my habit to es-
chew afternoons at the beach and ride twenty or thirty or forty miles, exploring the
largely untraveled back roads between Hampton Bays and Montauk. By today's lights
the bike was a tank, but it was during that time that the eureka moment occurred: you
could actually get somewhere on a bicycle. When you took your bike out for a ride, you
didn't necessarily have to turn around at some point and go home; you could just keep
going until you ended up someplace else. In 1987, I took my first multiday ride, from Sag
Harbor on Long Island to Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts. (Yes, there were a couple
of ferries involved.) And then I began searching for other suitable trips and bought a
more suitable bicycle, my first drop-bar road bike.
Discovering I could take it with me on a train, I rode from Savannah, Georgia, to
the Outer Banks of North Carolina; from Philadelphia to New York; from Boston to New
York; from Montreal to New York; from Bangor, Maine, to Middletown, Connecticut;
from Jackson, Mississippi, where my brother got married, to New Orleans; from my
apartment in Manhattan across the George Washington Bridge and down the length of
New Jersey to Cape May. Great fun, but small-potatoes rides, really. Then in the sum-
mer of 1993, the year I turned forty, I decided it was a now-or-never moment and set of
across the United States.
The editor of my baseball book said something to me once that I didn't pay much atten-
tion to at the time. This was a while ago, when I first had the idea for a cycling semi-
memoir and I was trying to convince him it would be worth publishing. I had told him
about a couple of my solo rides since the first cross-country trip: from Santa Fe over the
mountains to Tucson, where my parents were living, after I'd just had a big blowup with
Catherine; to Tucson again, this time from Phoenix, where for some reason I felt it was
worth it to schlep my bike on the plane from New York just to have a day's ride before
coping with my folks.
My editor said that in the topic I'd have to consider why I do this, why long-distance
cycling is my outlet of choice.
“Duh,” I said.
He ignored me. It sounded to him, he said, as if I ride out of defiance.
What am I defying? I asked him.
You tell me, he said. Time passing? The demands of the women in your life? Whatever
guilt you feel about your parents? The constraints of your job?
