August 1980: College Station, Texas-Madison, Wisconsin
The longest and fastest (1100 miles in 11 days), and still the domestic gold standard. (Uruguay, January 1985, is tops.) It was supposed to be longer still - I really thought I was going to get as far as Newfoundland! The regular bump-bump of frost-heaved roads in Iowa gave me what I believe is called cyclist's palsy. It first manifested itself as a reduced ability to wipe my behind, and secondly manifested itself as a reduced ability to buckle my belt. But I managed. I never did seek treatment, and it went away, as most ailments do.
Best memory? Climbing steeply in Oklahoma, I watched a small car pass me in slow motion. A mother, a grandmother, and two little kids. They drove on, but not far: at the top of the incline, I saw them again, standing outside their parked car, applauding me. The mom offered me ice, which regrettably I couldn't carry. After saying all the encouraging things that could be said, they got back in their car, the little boy intoning, "So long, traveler!"
In October 2005 I was driving around Arkansas and near Fort Smith I looked south at the low rampart of the Ouachita Mountains. "I crossed those," I said to myself. I'd started so far south of them that you couldn't see them, and then I'd crossed them, and then I'd kept going so far north that you couldn't see them. Of how many self-propelled journeys can anyone say that?
May 1981: Sparta, New Jersey-Hereford, Maryland
One of those barely remembered trips. Here's what I do remember: (1) don't bivouac in a recently mowed alfalfa field, because the cut stems are sharp and will poke you, and (2) Maryland is certainly the most underrated state, beauty-wise.
March 1982: Houston-San Antonio, Texas
First time I bivouacked too close to railroad tracks when a freight train went by. Nothing will catapult you out of sleep like that, and by "nothing" I mean "not even being stung in the neck by a scorpion."
Another trip hard to remember now, though for the four years I went to school in San Antonio, I thought of it every time I took a bus between these two cities, which was often. The drive was strictly on the Interstate, but it didn't matter because I'd seen every town indicated on the exit signs. The only thing the bus ride showed me that the bicycle ride didn't was Woman Hollering Creek.
November 1985: San Antonio-Port Lavaca, Texas
A twenty-eighth birthday gift to myself. A cold front was supposed to come through, but it didn't, so I not only had warm clothing with no reason to wear it, but headwinds all the way. At the time I was pedaling 26 miles round-trip to graduate school, seven days a week, minus about six weeks of self-awarded vacation time, so I was - and remain - attentive to wind as few people other than sailors can be. Why all those trans-Texas rides in the middle of summer? Tailwinds.
May 1986: Lake City, Florida-Key Biscayne, Florida
Took the train from San Antonio to New Orleans, then the all-night bus to Florida. On the train, I read an amazing feature in the Houston Post, the first time I'd ever seen lusty criticism of the Soviet Union. Before and after this piece, the American pulp media ALWAYS treated the U.S.S.R. as an honorable peer. As for New Orleans, I stepped off a curb and sprained my ankle. Didn't affect the bicycle ride, though.
Despite William Least Heat Moon's assertion that the true milkshake doesn't exist east of the Mississippi, I had one in Florida. (Does anyone read Blue Highways anymore? Now THERE'S a 1980-give-or-take artifact.) In Palm Beach I had a hamburger so bad I reminded myself I'd come out of the Dominican Republic with some pesos and wished I'd had them with me now, to leave as a strange and disapproving "tip." (I never have done this.) In the Pompano Beach Winn-Dixie, I saw possibly the last Mallomars ever. In Miami I had cassava, which was offensive, in the mind as well as in the mouth - a civilization that eats ragweed pollen can't help but be mightier. North of Lake Okeechobee I got caught in a downpour; at day's end, I checked into a motel and laid out all my money on the bed, $1800 in cash, to dry it out.
This trip turned out to be a taste of Brazil, where I'd go bicycling in September. Not just the cassava, and the wet money too, but the just-barely-too-narrow, just-barely-too-heavily-trafficked roads. Well, in Brazil they were WAY too heavily trafficked. That Brazil ride (1200 miles, but it doesn't count because I took weekends off) was the most dangerous thing I've ever done.
February 1987: Houston-Austin-Port Aransas-Houston, Texas
Second time I bivouacked too close to railroad tracks when a freight train went by. (For the record, the third and I promise last time was on a day-and-a-half trip around Lubbock in 1989.)
May 1987: Anderson, South Carolina-Savannah, Georgia-Charleston-Anderson
The tour of Brazil had been quite a shock, but this trip put it in perspective. The poverty-drilled minds of northeastern Brazilians were intractable. People in bottomland South Carolina had almost exactly the same look. Disturbing, but it had the salutary effect of softening my opinion of Brazil.
April 1989: Shreveport, Louisiana-San Antonio, Texas
I'd bought a two-week Ameripass in South Carolina, gone up to Ottawa, come back south, and still had a couple of days left on the pass, so I took 'em as far as I could, which was Shreveport. Reassembled my bicycle and returned to Texas from there. Made sense at the time!
May 1995: Austin, Texas-Hidalgo, Texas
The first bicycle trip I took with no intention of camping out on roadsides, which is how I'd always thought it had to be. I've never looked back. Sleeping in a bed: I am there.
When I was a kid, I had a National Geographic map of the U.S. tacked to the wall in front of my desk. At eye level was the town of Encino, Texas. This was not the first time I'd actually visited the place (I'd passed through on a Trailways bus in 1982), but now, in the saddle, I could honestly claim it mine. This I did by mailing a letter from the post office. I can't recall, but if there was an "Encino Postmark" slot, I definitely put it in there.
September 1997: Shelby, Montana-Foremost, Alberta-Boissevain, Manitoba-Rugby, North Dakota-Minot, North Dakota
The idea was a Prairie Province crossing, and Amtrak facilitated it: the railway runs just south of the 49th, and I could get a ride back home practically anywhere. Except Rugby, as it turned out - the eastbound Empire Builder didn't stop there. Thus the extra leg to Minot. Rugby, by the way, is the geographical center of North America. I have also been to Chapada dos Guimarães, Mato Grosso, the geographical center of South America. The latter is far more scenic. But the former at least EXPLAINS why it is the center. That little concrete pyramid in Brazil had looked suspiciously mobile...
In Melita, Manitoba, which called itself "The Hub of the Southwest," as in southwest Manitoba, but really felt like southwestern North America, I dozed in a motel room and saw a TV show called This Hour Has 59 Minutes. One skit was an interview with Mrs. Salman Rushdie, who asserted that Mr. Salman Rushdie was a real tit man. I keep thinking I dreamed all this. Did it really happen? If it did, then like I said, Canada is NOT a parallel universe.
July 1998: Austin, Texas-Clovis, New Mexico
I had long had the idea that I could bicycle in every direction except west of the Austin-San Antonio axis. But I studied maps closely, and pieced together a route, and carried lots of water, and knew the wind would help me. The original goal was Santa Fe; I had to cut things short because of a job interview back in Austin; but the trip was a great proof-of-concept. I felt I'd "won the West." I also determined that Lubbock makes sense only when you bicycle to it, or perhaps reach it on horseback. If you motor to such a town, you just won't get it.
June 2000: Rochester, New York-Wyckoff, New Jersey
Actual in-the-saddle quote: "It's 47 degrees on Flag Day?" That was in Pennsylvania, which (now that I think of it) looked as melancholy this time as it had on that 1981 ride to Maryland. New Jersey, on the other hand, was just fine. I do not know why New Jerseyans speak of themselves and their state with both pity and scorn. And upstate New York? Maybe the most...antebellum place north of the Mason-Dixon. This land was a powerhouse of industry and invention, and the voluntary erosion of its reputation has gone on so long that it is easy to forget that it had a beginning, and that there was an epoch of energy before that beginning.
June 2001: Austin, Texas-Artesia, New Mexico
Possibly the most remote-feeling ride now, as it was my last before 9/11. (And let me state here that I am sick of talking about 9/11. This is not to say I will stop talking about it. It won't go away. In a better world, our enemies' next of kin would be talking endlessly of 9/12...but that opportunity has been lost.) Anyhow, I was merely trying to pedal to El Paso, but changed my plans in the teeth of fierce winds. Tarried a day in San Angelo, finding a replacement part. The cratered one I mailed to my dad, who enjoyed reminiscing about the metallurgy classes he took in college. There's something about guys who went through engineering school on the GI Bill in the late 1940's that we will never recover. Yet I feel that today's engineering students, though superficially unlike them in every way, will honor them. Engineers just aren't the loveless aristocrats that college students in general aspire to be.
June 2002: Anderson, South Carolina-Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
Despite what I intimated above, I enjoyed crossing SC by bicycle, and here I will say I enjoyed doing it a second time. In Lake City SC, a monument to an astronaut killed in the Challenger disaster. He was from that town.
July 2005: Austin, Texas-Springfield, Colorado
Unlike the other westward-ho trips, this one ended where I proposed it to end. The declared goal had been Colorado, and Springfield was the first town with regular bus service home. Not much to say about this trip other than that I had a certain Serbo-Croatian song playing in my head for most of it and that I liked actually seeing the Santa Fe Trail (the Cimarron Cutoff, more precisely). I might do the non-Serbo-Croatian part again, and again. I just don't get tired of crossing the Texas Panhandle on a bicycle. I love campaigning in clear space.
September 2006: Manchester, New Hampshire-Montreal, Quebec
See this.
August 2007: Nashville, Tennessee-Anderson, South Carolina
There is no sun more Civil War than the sun of Tennessee. Under it, I fell into a conversation with a motorcyclist, a fellow who had himself done great bicycling in the 1970's. He asked me about this ride. I described it as "duty and pleasure." He understood perfectly, even before I told him about my mother's 80th birthday, and some of the other personal responsibilities on both ends, none of which I will tell you about here because they do not belong on a website. Anyway, I felt supremely encouraged. A mile down the road, I made myself sit in shade for ten measured minutes, looking at a mountain and a meadow, and when I was done, I knew this would be a great trip.
A few minutes after that, a motorist pulled up and insisted I accept an icy bottle of water. He said he'd seen me three hours earlier.
What else? Chattanooga is like Lubbock in this way but no other: you have to bicycle to it. And it is NOT like Lubbock in this way and also many others: if you can't bicycle or ride a horse to it, you must walk to it. You just don't "get" the geography of the place unless you do it this way. And on the way to East Ellijay, Georgia, I got the most precise directions I've ever got, from a guy who looked like a weightlifter and had a Long Island accent, but a good Long Island accent. In East Ellijay itself, I finally figured out what was so strange about all these very new-looking towns in north Georgia: they killed the kudzu.
October 2008: Pensacola, Florida-Apalachicola-Blountsville-Marianna-Pensacola
Just before the '05 ride, a pretty girl asked me what I thought about while I was bicycling all these miles. "Pretty girls," I said, because I really had no idea. I should have answered, and it would have been fully truthful, "Flat tires." I certainly DON'T think about pretty girls in the saddle because that is a very inconvenient place to think about them, if you know what I mean and I think you do.
Anyway, for this ride, I did make notes (later, in motel rooms) of what I thought about. Some are trip-specific, some not, but if you want Idea Purity, brother you have come to the wrong website.
September 2009: Memphis, Tennessee-Cape Girardeau, Missouri
As with Pensacola, so with Memphis: I could drive to it in a day, then pull my bicycle out of the trunk. Memphis having plenty of downtown parking, I left my car there rather than at the airport, although the latter would have permitted me to say later, "I bicycled past Graceland." But never mind that. The real objective was to pedal in and out of Kentucky, the state I probably think about the least.
This visit was as short, and as agreeable, and as self-propelled, as my first one, in the summer of 1981. Then, I'd hitchhiked from West Virginia to Ohio, near the point where these two states and Kentucky meet. I walked in. I almost walked out, too, except right on the bridge back into West Virginia, two guys stopped and recruited me for a mission. They wanted to buy liquor in an establishment with a no-shirt-no-shoes-no-service policy, and as I had the first two, I might be able to gain the third on their behalf. But we got to the package store just a tick after closing time. They took this with model composure.
As for 2009, I found the crossing from Kentucky to Illinois decisive. Panicky blatting from truckers on the narrow wind-whipped bridge over the Ohio River told me that here, right HERE, was where the South stopped and the Midwest began. Safely landed in Illinois, I immediately saw a sign warning me off cigarette smuggling. Smuggling? This is a word that not even Brazilians would put in print on something you could see from a road. Then on into Cairo, the most astonishingly derelict town I have ever seen. It was as if, in between deciding to shatter Chechnya and announcing his decision, Stalin shipped in plenty of plywood and nails.