Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I've driven dozens of times, and I was able to imagine myself in a car on the highway
watching myself crossing over it on a bike.
“Who's that guy on a bicycle in the rain on the overpass?” I'd ask myself from behind
a windshield on the highway. Even in the rain I would be able to say: “Sure wish that
was me.”
Monday, October 3, Wooster, Ohio
Eighteen years ago, the ride from the Golden Gate Bridge to the George Washington
Bridge took seventy-five days. Yesterday was day seventy-five of my second transcontin-
ental trip, and the distance I have yet to travel from here to Manhattan—four hundred
seventy miles by car, probably another hundred on a bicyclist's more meandering
path—is one way to measure how I've aged. Another is that my knees are stiff and sore;
every morning I feel a little more like the Tin Man pleading squeakily for his oilcan.
(Okay, enough already with the
Oz
allusions. But thank you, L. Frank Baum.)
This is no surprise, of course. As a thirty-nine-year-old I was a more vigorous fellow
than I am at fifty-seven (fifty-eight in a month,
arrgh
), physically stronger and capable
of more sustained daily exertion. I was also more impatient. One thing I've noticed about
myself on this trip is that I'm in less of a hurry, with a greater propensity for stopping to
take pictures and to enjoy the scenery. I'm more willing to call it a day before I've pushed
myself to the brink of exhaustion. Counting days of, I averaged more than sixty miles
per day in 1993; this time it's under fifty. (The 1993 trip was forty-six hundred miles; so
far this one is thirty-four hundred.) As the years go faster, I'm slowing down: another
LCT.
Comparisons like these are taking up more room in my thinking lately. How many
ways are there to measure the passage of time? As I get closer to New York, which also
means closer to returning to the obituaries desk, I can't help thinking how nice it's been
for the past couple of months to wake up and think intensely only about the day ahead
of me and not the sum total of someone's life.
Obit writers differ from other reporters in a number of interesting ways. We don't
have to come up with story ideas, for one thing, and there aren't any follow-up stories,
for another. We're the only reporters who spend most of our time reporting on the past.
There is, after all, only one piece of news in an obituary, and it's the same news every
time. An obit begins at the end of the story.
All this sounds a bit glib, I know, but it's actually sort of profound, a whole other
imperative for a writer.
I arrived at the obits desk following a circuitous tour of more conventional journalist-
ic enterprises.
