Why?

Why am I taking this bike trip?

For some time I’ve had the itch to travel slowly and quietly across the country. I’ve flown across it, driven across it, and, at the tail-end of the era when such was common, hitch-hiked across it. I would like to go over this land once again, to see and feel it a bit more closely, a bit more attentively, a bit more reverently.

I like to have times of solitude.

I see patterned, rhythmic movement of the body as a wonderful gift, especially when it is outdoors.

The end of July, the daughter of a cousin is getting married in an orchard at the foot of Mount Hood, Oregon. Terri is a spark of joy with a gift for encouraging and challenging those around her. She loves the outdoors and for several years has worked for Mt. Hood Kiwanis Camp, which “offer[s] children and adults with disabilities an opportunity to leave behind their routine lives and taste the freedom of the outdoors - to go beyond limits that they, and others, have set for them, with a variety of mental and physical challenges to enjoy the outdoors.” Terri’s husband-to-be strikes us as one with whom she—and the rest of the clan, thank goodness—can be very happy. It somehow seems right to be biking to their wedding. It seems to have potential for extending a personal journey into a lechayyim toast for this couple.

Terri’s father is another reason I am taking this trip. Roger once biked across the country. He did so after losing the gift of patterned, rhythmic movement. When in his mid-forties, he was paralyzed from the neck down with diving bends. After spending eight hours daily in a decompression chamber for a month and a half, he was able to progress from a wheel chair to, with the help of his brother Brad, a bike:

Brad showed up every day and walked beside me, holding me up, as I tried to keep my feet on the pedals. Since I had almost no sensory feeling in my feet, keeping my feet on the pedals was very difficult. After a week or two, I could ride around the parking lot, but couldn’t get off the bike. Brad would wait patiently by my apartment until I came around the building, catch the bike, and help me off. Later I learned to steer onto the lawn, slow down, stop exactly in front of the bushes that were piled high with mulch. Then I’d simply fall over on my left side. Still later, I was gaining enough coordination to stop next to a high curb and catch my weight with my left foot.  From Roger's 'It's Not About The Bike'.

Roger gradually increased his distances until, a few years after the accident, he celebrated nearly full recovery by biking across the country in eight weeks. His doing so fifteen years ago was probably the beginning of my itch to make a similar journey.

I have recently reread his write-up of the trip and been sobered by the obstacles that one can face along the way. If I don’t make it, I will appreciate all the more the feats of Roger—and of others like him who have been paralyzed, in one way or another, and regained life-affirming movement. If I do make it, may I be all the more ready to support someone else struggling to move ahead.

Why I am blogging about this trip?
When my work use to take me away from home for two to three weeks at a time, I would write stories and poems for my children as well as news. Having switched to a sedentary job and my children now young adults, I have written much less and told fewer stories. However, they wish that I keep them informed of this trip—and have facebooked my starting out on it so that others too have expressed an interest in following it.

They have said that their dad is going to bike across America. I have suggested that they revise to “…is on a bike trip” (if I just manage Tybee Island to Savannah, that’s still a pretty cool trip), or at most “is going on a interstate bike trip”. But there have been no retractions, no nuancing. They are more confident than myself that I will make it to the other side of the country. Well, friends, let us see.