Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
stuck in his craw. So he returned at some point and bought the place, planning to put
her out of work. She was gone by the time he got there, he said, but when I met him he
said he was still hoping she'd apply for a job.
He did acknowledge that he liked the idea of owning a place that already had his name
on it. He moved his family in; that was the population: six. After I ate in his café—I'm
pretty sure it was pancakes—he gave me a souvenir: the rattle off a rattlesnake that had
bitten him two years earlier. I still have it.
I didn't stop in Riley on my recent drive through the area, so I don't know if Rich
Riley is still there. The café and post office are. One addition is a billboard just beyond
them, reading:
WHOA! YOU JUST MISSED RILEY!
Bicycling makes you wonder about places like these in a way you wouldn't otherwise.
When you drive through a place, the windshield is a barrier against its reality, the speed
of the car a defense against memory. Hemingway, of all people, once made that point: “It
is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best,” he wrote, “since
you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they
actually are, while in a motorcar only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such
accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bi-
cycle.”
On a bike, the same thought crosses my mind often as I go through a town, mundane
but nonetheless mind-boggling. All the time I've been living my life in New York City,
people have been going about their business here, living theirs.
The options in the world! The size of this country and what's in it!
New Yorkers tend to think of Americans elsewhere as provincial, but we have a hard
time recognizing our own provinciality. That's something else I learned on my previous
cross-country ride. We share the country but not much else. It's amazing, isn't it, how so
many of us can have a collective experience and see it differently? To put it another way,
Americans may disagree about what it is that makes the country we share so fabulous,
but we do seem to agree on its fabulousness.
I embark this time with a little less delight and a little more concern over all this. We
are a more polarized populace now, with hostility hovering as our default national emo-
tion.
The big political issue in June 1993 was gays in the military. The official Don't Ask,
Don't Tell policy was enacted just a few months later. Now, of course, it seems just about
bothers anyone—except maybe a jilted lover—that anyone else wants to marry someone
