Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
1
Everything Up to the Beginning
Sunday, July 10, 2011, New York City
L
ike you, I'm growing old. It's harder to remember things, especially good things, the
things I want to remember, not so much because my mind is diminishing (hold the jokes,
okay?), but because they happened longer ago than they ever did before.
Days seem more alike than they used to, probably because there is an ever-mounting
total of them and it's hard to keep them distinct. This happens to everyone, I know, but I
think it's worse for people who work at a newspaper, as I do, because our work product
greets us each day, steady as a metronome, with the date plastered across the top of the
front page.
Tick. Tick.
It's relentless—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc., week after
week; July 9, July 10, July 11 . . . 2010, 2011, 2012. . . . Egads. How long can this go on?
This week is my twenty-fifth anniversary at the
New York Times
. Twenty-five years!
And, as it happens, for the last three of them I've been writing obituaries. Every day,
thinking about . . . well, you know.
So, here's what I'm doing about it. Eighteen years ago this summer, I rode a bicycle,
solo, across the United States and wrote about it for the newspaper. Starting next week-
end, when I fly from New York to Portland, Oregon, and turn back around on two
wheels, I'll be trying to do it again.
I say “trying.” This is not modest so much as careful, certainly a function of being
fifty-seven, my age now, and not thirty-nine, as I was when I embarked the last time,
blithely certain of myself and without any of the qualms that are now weighing down
the saddlebags in my mind. In short, I had no concept of the length and arduousness of
what lay in front of me. Every challenge—climbing the Rockies, for example, or persist-
ing through the shadeless, sunbaked plains of South Dakota, or rattling over the cold-
heave cracks along highways in Idaho and Minnesota that made riding a bike as com-
