Looking for Adventure on the Ride of His Life

Get a bicycle. You will not regret it if you live. --Mark Twain

*

Across my map of Virginia an orange line marks the route, from the Potomac to the Tennessee border. I have followed that crooked line for five days and 250 miles until now; with the road ahead disappearing into dark mountains, the body has lost the will to pedal on.

My destination--the pier at Santa Monica--seems an unspeakable distance in miles and spirit, alone on a bicycle, averaging 10 m.p.h., my worldly possessions packed in four saddlebags strapped over the wheels. Wanting no more head winds or hard climbs, I have sought refuge for the night at a $31 motel in the Appalachian foothills.

“Don’t worry about hauling your bike into the room,” the manager says. “We’re tearing out the carpet and redecorating next week anyway.”

The mountains that have followed me down the Shenandoah, through Civil War battlefields and way-station towns, roll westward in ocean-blue layers. In these last moments of summer, they hide valleys of corn and hay that men in bib overalls cut and pile high, leaving barren, naked fields in their wake.

I share the morning road now with big yellow buses that rumble over the passes, carrying children back to school, and I stop often at produce stands that suddenly appear on deserted stretches of road. “These are the last peaches you’ll see this season, that I guarantee,” said a man holding vigil over Highway 11. I’m sure he was right. The days have turned cool and shorter and another summer--my 54th--is slipping away.

My friends back home in Alexandria, outside Washington, D.C., reacted with knowing chuckles when I came up with this half-baked notion to bicycle across America, especially since I am neither a jock nor a cycling zealot and couldn’t imagine living without my daily ration of cigarettes, whiskey and junk food.

“Ah, I see,” they’d commiserate. “Midlife crisis, eh? Don’t worry. It happens to everyone. It’ll pass.”

True, I had grown weary of putting the trash out on Tuesday nights and worrying whether my IRA was growing fast enough, but I really wasn’t in crisis at all. I’d awakened to middle age with hardly a whimper, as content as I’d ever been. What I understood, though, was this: Contentment leads to predictability and predictability to restlessness. I needed an outrageous challenge to prove--to myself, I suppose--that I am not destined to be a nine-to-fiver whose eventual idea of adventure would be a weekend in Ocean City, Md., or a walk around the neighborhood golf course.

And so, instead of going to work on the Friday before Labor Day, I got on my bicycle--a Trek 520 designed for touring--and started pedaling for California. Despite my best intentions, I left having done shamefully little training and with no real certainty where I was headed after Woodbridge, a couple of hours down the road. The America I envisioned in my mind’s eye was flat, with a wind that always blew at your back.

Somewhere along Route 3 outside Chancelorsville, amid the tangled thickets where Gen. Stonewall Jackson had been mortally wounded 131 years earlier, a 16-year-old girl named Becky and her brother had set up a makeshift shop and were doing a brisk business selling secondhand tires. Becky thought it wonderful that I was leaving home and said she, too, would be gone the day she turned 18.

“My mama says I can do it, as long as my man is loving and tender,” Becky told me. “My fiance, he’s all of that, and the day I turn 18, the very day, I’m joining him in Oklahoma and we’re getting married. The only problem is, he’s got a big car that’s a real gas guzzler and he says he’s giving it to me and keeping the pickup.”

I asked Becky what she liked about Oklahoma, and she said: “It ain’t here.”

She called out, “Y’all have a safe journey” as I pedaled off, the long empty road ahead, and I left Becky with her tires and her dreams, not yet old enough to know how easy it is to move on nor wise enough to understand that sometimes the best part of moving on is coming home again.

Off and Pedaling

Times staff writer David Lamb is biking across the country. He left his home in Alexandria, Va., on Sept. 2 en route to Santa Moncia.