The American Cross

Introduction Between 1995 and today, I have loved the freedom and exhilaration of doing long solo trips on my twenty-one speed Cannondale bicycle. The longest trip was from San Francisco to Boston, a 3,097-mile trip that I did in four legs. My second longest trip was from Miami, Florida, to Penn Yan, New York (1,800 miles), which I did in two legs. I also bicycled from Decatur, Illinois, to Argyle, Texas, hence the title of this book, The American Cross. While I have always owned a bike, I didn’t take too many long rides until the spring of 1995. That winter, while visiting my friend, Richard Weir, who was pastor of the Mountain Rise UCC Church in Rochester, he began to tell me about the long rides he had done. Before the evening ended, we had made plans to bike to Boston for our twenty fifth class reunion at Andover Newton Theological School. As it turned out, I made the trip alone. From Penn Yan it was a four-day trip, the first leg of my trans-American sojourn. As I contemplated writing this book, it dawned on me that one of the advantages of travel logs like Travels with Charlie (John Steinbeck) or Homer’s Odyssey is that the trip itself provides the framework for the book. This book is a little more complex in that it is a mix of spiritual, philosophical, and emotional elements sharing the pages with action, humor, and profiles of very interesting people. I suppose that almost every author hopes their book will take the world by storm, but my aims are more modest. Advancing age has played a role in deciding to set pen to paper. Recently I ran across my old trumpet and decided to attempt some songs I remember, only to find that somewhere along the line my dexterity has abandoned me. Two of my fingers (the middle and ring fingers on my right hand) no longer operate independently. Given that my writings will probably run into similar strictures, my literary efforts are aimed at a more well-bounded target. In fact, I would be happy to know that my grandchildren were aware of some of my adventures. So I set about committing my escapades to paper. Despite the availability of a broad range of electronic media, a book with numbered pages has an enduring quality that it at least takes up shelf space and invites potential readers to take a look. In some way a book becomes the presence of the author across the years—a kind of paper immortality. My wife and I are not strangers to adventure. Nancy and I have hiked long sections of the Appalachian Trail. We owned and flew our own airplane. In 2013, we joined our daughter, Christina, and her friend for a seven-day hike on a primitive trail down the Grand Canyon. Scuba diving, mountain climbing, skiing, and trips to Hawaii, Africa, the Middle East, numerous islands in the Caribbean, Panama, St. Luci, Australia, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and the Bahamas have kept life exciting. Nancy made it possible for me to do many of the long bike trips; in fact, she would often ask when we might take “a normal vacation.” Our usual plan was that she would drive me to the beginning of the trip and meet me at the end. Sometimes we would meet along the way, but usually she was many miles away on her own adventure. Naturally, getting ready for such trips requires a lot of hours on the bike. Fortunately, my preparation for my first trip was aided by the presence of Keuka Lake, which lies near at hand. Also, Art Kirk, at that time president of Keuka College, was preparing to ride with a group from California to New Jersey. So, we trained together and made several laps around Keuka Lake (forty-three miles) and Seneca Lake (eighty-five miles). Those times were special and we remain friends. For the first leg of the trip (Penn Yan to Boston) I rode my old Schwinn Varsity. It was a steel-frame bike that weighed forty-two pounds without packs. I mistakenly took it for granted that heavier meant stronger. After the trip to Boston that bike was so worn out that I replaced it with a new Cannondale. At half the weight and with eleven more gears (twenty-one all together), it had all the qualities I could imagine in a touring bike—can you fall in love with a bicycle? That bike became like an extension of myself. My bike even had something of a ritualistic blessing conferred upon it. My secretary typed up a three-by-five-inch index card to put on my map case. It had a portion of Psalm 139:5 (KJV): “Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me.” I needed to know that even along the busy, narrow, poorly shouldered highways that God had “set a hedge around me” (Job 1:10 KJV). Through heat, cold, wind, and storm, I have felt God’s hand around me. When one travels extended distances on a bicycle, it doesn’t take too long to figure out that bicyclists and nonbicyclists speak a different language. For example, when it is almost nightfall and storm clouds are gathering, “not too far” means maybe two miles to a biker, but to a nonbiker it means twenty miles over a big hill with the possibility that the prospective motel might have closed last year. For the most part people are just curious about what a biker is doing. When you are traveling alone, people seem to assume that you are raising money for some charity or supporting some cause, a kind of Forrest Gump on wheels. If you have read this far, you are getting the idea that long-distance cycling is a different world from the one normal people live in. After all, why else would anyone give up riding in air-conditioned comfort, risking life and limb duking it out with eighteen wheelers, sweating out hills, and possibly getting to the end of the day without a place to stay? When Jesus said, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head” (Luke 9:58 NRSV) do you suppose Jesus was talking about first-century bikers?