Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
readers wrote to express the absurdly wrong idea that all the climbing was behind me.
When I reached the Mississippi River at its source in northern Minnesota, a grocery
clerk made sure to inform me that I was closer to the finish than the start. In Minneapolis,
in Madison, and again in Chicago, the friends I met up with offered congratulations, as
if I were already taking a victory lap.
When I began my ride on July 20 in Astoria, the continent was sprawled enormously
in front of me, but from the outset what people (noncyclists, generally) always seemed to
be interested in was when it would be over: “How long's it going to take?”
I understand the impulse; it's a way of encapsulating an enterprise that doesn't
exactly fit in a capsule. After all, an endless journey is a little intimidating, a little
scary—Columbus sailing of over the flat edge of the world—but a journey that ends
you can put in your pocket.
Still, the actual day-by-day doing of the trip—the hours-at-a-time riding, the count-
less pedal strokes and huffing and puffing up hills or into the wind, not to mention the
daily deciding on a route, the finding of places to stay, the maintaining of the bike, and
the consuming of sufficient calories—has been so fraught with effort that I've never been
able to project convincingly and see myself any farther east than, say, the Holiday Inn
Express across the county.
This isn't to say I don't dream about crossing the George Washington Bridge with my
arms raised in triumph (and then putting away my bicycle for a winter's hibernation). I
do. But my visions aren't terribly persuasive; they generally engender despair, causing
me to sigh out loud and give of a lament for the long list of things that have ended and
things that I'll never do again. It makes me more than a little nervous to write about this
now, a few hundred miles from Manhattan. It may be easy to expect that someone who
has already pedaled well over three thousand miles can do three hundred or four hun-
dred more with his eyes closed, but I don't think so. In order to own those miles, I have
to expend my energy on them; in order to live those days, I have to work through all
their hours. I'm as daunted by the next four hundred miles as I was on Day 1 by the first
thirty-six hundred.
I've often told people—and I've said so here—that traveling by bicycle isn't the con-
templative, mind-meandering activity that it is generally presumed to be. Rather, it's
concentration-enhancing. When I'm cycling I tend to be focused on cycling, keeping a
close eye on the road, keeping tabs on the messages my bicycle and my body are sending
me. But one thing that
has
diverted me all across the country is the relationship between
