Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
After all, New York may be the nation's greatest city, but it isn't representative. You
don't need me to count the differences, but an especially pertinent one is that New York
is a vertical place and America isn't. To travel on the ground from sea to sea is to have a
prolonged encounter with its horizontality.
Even in a car, each crossing of a state border is a singular triumph because the passage
through the previous state has been earned. At ground level you measure a state's actual
breadth with your tires, you roll over its topography and live in its weather. When you
click past the far border, you put the experience of the state in your pocket for safe-
keeping and reference. Of course, crossing the country by bicycle is to feel these things
in the extreme, and the absorption of long distances on the road has always felt, to me,
like the qualifying exam for some enhanced form of citizenship. Even if you wanted to,
you couldn't really avoid landmarks and cultural shrines—on my last trip across I hit
Yellowstone National Park; Little Big Horn; Devil's Tower, the remarkable rock forma-
tion in Wyoming that was featured in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
; the Badlands;
the Judy Garland museum in her hometown, Grand Rapids, Minnesota; De Smet, South
Dakota, where Laura Ingalls Wilder spent her teenage years and set ive topics of her
Little House series; Highway 61, the Minnesota highway along Lake Superior that in-
spired a Bob Dylan song; the Mt Shasta restaurant on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan,
where much of the great Otto Preminger movie
Anatomy of a Murder
, the forerunner of
so many courtroom thrillers, was filmed; Niagara Falls; the Finger Lakes; Cooperstown,
New York, home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame & Museum on the shores of Lake
Otsego, a.k.a. Glimmerglass, the region inhabited by James Fenimore Cooper's Deerslay-
er; and Hyde Park, Franklin Roosevelt's hometown—not to mention the Bates Motel.
An impressive list, right? I haven't considered before the string-of-signifiers aspect of
these long rides. But it's true, you pedal and pedal and every now and then—more often
than that, really, intermittently and unexpectedly—you find yourself in a place where
something has happened, something of interest beyond itself, that has made a distinct
mark in history or geography or culture, that helps describe the country, the known
world, in some small but crucial way. Connect the dots on a bike ride the way I did then,
the way I'm looking forward to doing again in the coming weeks, and you feel like the
owner of a tiny, private slice of it all.
Partly for that reason, one of the strongest lingering memories of my last trip was how
it fired up my patriotic instinct. You can't gobble up the nation, mile by mile on your
own power, without assimilating a sense of its greatness.
You can't pass through the Badlands on a bike in ninety-five-degree heat, for example,
and not feel some sense of proprietorship: you're proud of yourself and proud of the
place, too. It really is a weird landscape—the Badlands, I mean—like another planet
