Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
This spring, on the cycling tour in Provence during which Jan and I fell in love, one
of our guides was a slender, banjo-playing Breton named Gwendal who idolized Clint
Eastwood and had a similarly wry, implacable demeanor. He had spent the previous
winter—winter!—crossing Siberia on a bicycle in the snow. By himself. Siberia. Next
February, Gwendal said, he would go to Sweden. I asked him why. I think what I actually
said was: “Why the fuck?” “I want to cross the Arctic Circle on a bicycle in winter,” he
said with a shrug.
Over three weeks every July, the Tour de France guys race more than two thousand
miles through the Alps and the Pyrenees, often in gulps of more than a hundred miles
a day, averaging about twenty-five miles per hour. This kills me, and whether they're
juicing or not, it's still amazing. An
average
of 25 miles per hour! Occasionally I get going
that fast on a long downhill. It hasn't escaped me that as I begin my long, slow journey,
this year's Tour is coming to its end.
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But forget about them: Jure Robic, a soldier in the Slovenian army, was the five-time
winner of something called the Race Across America, in which leading riders make it
from sea to sea in less than nine days. During one race, Robic set the world record for
distance cycled in twenty-four hours: 518.7 miles. Extraordinary. (My personal record is
138 miles in fifteen hours.) As it happened, last fall, Robic was careening downhill on
a training ride near his home in Slovenia when he ran smack into an oncoming car and
was killed. I wrote his obituary.
In such company my poor little rides don't bear mentioning. And yet here I am men-
tioning them—writing about them at length, in fact—because in the context of men and
women who wouldn't contemplate such a journey they are arguably distinguishing feats.
I didn't realize it at the time, but I can see now that yes, my first transcontinental ride in
1993 was an act of some conceit, a bold project I conceived simply because I imagined I
could do it and then wear it like a notch on my belt. I don't doubt for a second that I was
partly (wholly?) motivated by self-elevation, by wanting to feel extraordinary among my
millions of ordinary peers.
In my final piece for the
Times
about that ride, I wrote that there are two kinds of
people, those who understand such a journey and those who don't. People who don't,
I said, wanted to know why I would do such a thing, what the point was, their idea
being that it was an immense effort in pursuit of an essentially intangible reward; after
all, what would I get out of it but a sense of completion? I'd cross the George Washing-
ton Bridge, ride my bike to my apartment door, and, with great relief, stop riding. That
being the case, one of my relatives said to me, I could just as well stay home and bang
my head against the wall, and when I stopped I'd feel the same thing.
