Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
me, and at this stage of my life even profound. I wonder if missing fingers are relevant
to character. Did my unusual hand, a physical feature I was born with, mark me in some
way as distinctive? Watching my fingers skitter across the keyboard in the unique eight-
fingered way they do, I can answer yes to that.
Then there is the grander, more general question. Am I an ordinary guy? I think I am,
but is this something to be proud of or disappointed by?
Another feeling everyone has had, I think (or maybe not), is of not fitting in, of being
in a school or a group or an office, of being at a party or a dance or in a bar, and be-
ing unable to make contact with other people, feeling left out, not knowing the secret
password and being somehow excluded or cut off, like an unwanted runt from the herd.
Part of the agony of this sensation—for me, anyway—is the ambivalence that accrues to
it, the absolute inability to decide whether you want in or whether you're better off on
your own.
If only those people would open their ranks and accept me, you think, they'd discover
I'm just like them. But is that what I want? They're all so, I don't know, indistinguish-
able, and as a result not very interesting, so maybe I'm better off just hanging out here,
fending for myself, enjoying my own company, waiting for another opportunity in a
place where I'll feel more at home, among other people, more extraordinary people, with
whom I'd feel more ordinary. On the other hand, while I'm waiting, I'm just so lonely.
To put this another way, finding a context for yourself is one of life's great projects.
And this brings me to my cross-country bike rides—ample undertakings to be sure, but
hardly the sort of epic or frontier-crashing journeys that, by their Odysseus-like scope
or Lindberghesque daring, are compelling by definition and make readers want to read
about them. The origins of the modern bicycle date to the early nineteenth century, and
people have been riding across the United States on their bicycles for more than a cen-
tury, since the 1890s at least. Between 1894 and 1895, a Boston mother of three named
Annie Cohen Kopchovsky most likely became the first woman to cross the country on a
bicycle.
5
By now hundreds, maybe thousands, of people do it every year, and in fact, if you
want to know more about them, there's a website called
crazyguyonabike.com
that
serves as a forum for hundreds of bicycle diaries. The year after my first trip, a reporter
for the
Los Angeles Times
, David Lamb, wrote a book about his own cross-country ride
as a middle-aged man.
Over the Hills
it was called. Yuk yuk. Eighteen years ago, after my
first trip, I heard from dozens of people who congratulated me for completing a fine feat
but who wanted to let me know that their own trips were longer and faster and accom-
plished under much more difficult circumstances.
