I got a late start from Ashland, and was done riding by 3:30, electing to camp at a picturesque (and free) campground in Mineral rather than push on any further.
Mineral proved to be a pleasant little town. After making camp, I walked down the main street, bought a beer, and observed the Boy Scouts holding a meeting in the local church.
Although Anthony started after I did on this day, he eventually passed me, and I assumed he would continue on to Charlottesville, but about 6:30 in the evening, he rolled in, as I was heated my canned lasagne dinner. He became a bit more sociable as we shared a few beers. Thankfully, the predicted rain never materialized.
Some of the older folk I met at the local country store cast a cloud over my day with their dire predictions. One old mountain man in particular had cautioned:
“It’s dangerous, doing what you’re doing, a young fellow like you, not even 21.”
“But I’m 23,” I protested.
“Oh … well … you’ll never make it over those mountains,” he grumbled.
Another, a woman, wanted to know what I’d “be” when I quit riding, a question that I thought I had avoided for the time being. My answer was evasive, but she nevertheless assured me that her “prayers would be with me,” as she glanced heavenward. “Only a miracle can save this wayward soul,” she seemed to be thinking. I felt doomed.
This was a 50-mile day. The first 10 miles were spent traversing the width of Charles City, which I discovered was a county, not a city per se.
As these early miles felt uneventful, even dreary, and left me with few notable memories of tidewater Virginia, perhaps this is a good time to describe my gear.
In 1980, before the Chinese had cornered the market, the Japanese still made mass-production, high-value bicycles. Fuji was one such brand. According to wikipedia, quoting from Richard’s Bicycle Book, “Fuji played a part in the cycling boom of the 1970s. It introduced the first successful mass-production 12-speed bicycle in the mid-1970s, using a redesigned rear axle to minimize spoke dish to maintain wheel strength. “
I had no idea what “spoke dish” was, but I liked the look of the 12-speed Fuji Royale that I saw at Jay’s Bike Shop in Princeton, NJ. I don’t remember the sale price, but I’m sure it was no more than a few hundred dollars. Mine was white, not blue like the one in the photo below.
Aside from the few notable exceptions when didn’t have to camp, I was on my own when it came to where and how to spend the nights. I carried a lightweight sleeping bag which provided sufficient warmth for all but a few of the chillier nights in Colorado and Wyoming.
As protection from bugs and rain, I bought a two-man tent, so tiny and confining that I was essentially sleeping in an orange nylon coffin. I don’t know how a second person could have fit into such a small space, but for my purposes it was perfect.
This type of tent is known as a “bivy sack,” and deserves a picture as well. Mine was orange rather than grey, but was otherwise almost identical to this REI model. This one is actually $16 cheaper, at $149, than the one I bought 40 years ago.
I ended up camping with Anthony again, though we had not seen each other during our day’s ride. I was happy to discover that the campground, populated mostly by RVs, had hot showers. I was very tired, and collapsed early in the evening.
Although I was unfamiliar with Virginia and Kentucky, the first two states I would cross, I carried with me the Northerner’s stereotypical picture of the South: sumptuous plantation-style living alongside squalid survival, both extremes peopled with beings whose bodies, minds, and tongues ran at half-speed.
At first, infected by the ambient laxity and slowed by my body’s initial resistance to the tests it was suddenly facing, I moved along at a very moderate pace, about 50 miles per day. Dreamily I pedaled through the heat, past plantations and faux plantations, my head filled with visions of sitting on the veranda sipping mint juleps with Colonel Sanders. The historic triangle formed by Jamestown, Yorktown, and Williamsburg has become so canonized as the birthplace of our nation that squalid poverty has little chance for survival. It was perhaps because of that lack of socioeconomic diversity that I found the area relatively uninteresting …. even squalid poverty has more warmth than the unreal primness of these restored landmarks.
I felt that I was arriving in the real South when, late in the day, I passed a humble home fenced in by tobacco fields. Anachronistic disco music spouted from huge speakers on the front porch while two young black men, each dressed in white shirt and tie, nodded gravely to me as I pass.
This moment of contact was but the first of many times that I felt gratitude to Bikecentennial’s map-makers for making the trail “rural by design,” as they professed to have done. Later in my trip, when I was traversing the west, where all roads lead to farm or ranch land and towns are few, it was easier to avoid overdeveloped areas, but for now I was especially glad to have an insider’s look at the land, while being routed along the network of county and state roads, some of which are not even shown on road maps.
It was not long before I met other cyclists. Relying on guidebook information, I aimed to end my second day in Charles City, VA. The “city” consisted of a disheveled campground and a general store. I walk my bike down a rutted road to the camping area after paying my $2 camping fee at the store. Three other cyclists, a man and two women, have already arrived and pitched tents on a grassy swatch. Feeling like a belated interloper, but wanting company, I join them, and the exchange of pleasantries is enough to make me feel less lonely.
The male, Anthony, and I were destined to cross paths frequently at the ends of our early days. A rather taciturn fellow, he revealed that he was from Detroit, and had recently graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in Physics. The two women were from California, aiming to get as far west as they could by the middle of August, when they needed to return to work. Anthony, like me, was bound for Oregon, no matter how long it took. There was little talk, and we all retired early, apparently still fired by the disciplined desire to take this trip seriously and do things right, with no time for idle chatter.
My first days on the road were spent acclimating myself both to a new way of life … essentially that of the vagabond ….and to an unfamiliar means of long distance travel. While both changes presented their challenges, it was the daily work of bike riding that had the most immediate effects. I had ridden a bicycle since childhood, but never this consistently, or constantly, and never while encumbered with panniers, a front handlebar bag, tent, ground cloth, sleeping bag and foam pad. My first few practice rides before the trip had been disconcerting and awkward. The additional weight behind my seat seemed at risk of pitching me to one side or the other, and I was confronted with fears of falling that I never experienced since the first early moments learning to ride.
I decided that the only way to get used to touring was to do it. Within a month the added weight, balanced properly, gave me a feeling of security, and an unloaded bike felt as flighty and unmanageable as a loaded one had at first. As I went whizzing down long hills, I was propelled to new and exciting rates of speed.
Being a runner, I had fancied myself in decent physical shape, but daily riding, for up to 10 hours per day, remade my body in new and unexpected ways. The process of adaption occurred quickly and with some discomfort. Tight, sore upper thighs, aching wrists and hands (from the constant pressure against the handlebars), chafed buttocks and inner thighs (from an over-firm seat), blistered feet (from running shoes rubbing against toe clips) were a few of the early complaints. Soon, however, I either stopped noticing these irritants, or they disappeared as my body became accustomed to the daily grind. Rewards came in the form of a dark tan, and the new bulge in my thighs which a companion christened “the hill-climbing muscle.”
I rode about 45 miles today, of which at least 20 did not afford any westward progress — it encompassed the roundtrip from Williamsburg to the official “starting line” in Jamestown, and back to Williamsburg. I did not want to get all the way to Oregon without having ridden the entire coast-to-coast route!
By the time I disembarked at the deserted bus station, my mother’s prediction seemed increasingly likely … I would start, but, ignominiously, not finish the trip. All signs were pointing to the downside as I began to lose my nerve. The girl on the bus I had been trying to chat up had the brain of a hummingbird and cared nothing for my daring. Furthermore, if no one cared about my success or failure except me, was that really enough of a cheering section?
Miraculously, my bike seemed to assemble itself on the station lawn, with little help from my twitching fingers, and I wobbled off toward town with the half-pitying cheers of a local youngster who had heard my story resounding in my ears like the applause of thousands. I could do this! Maybe.
Little riding was done this first day. I decided there was no need for heroics at this point; simply getting underway was enough of an accomplishment.
What I would discover about our country and about myself was of secondary importance. The first priority was to get away from where I was. Only a year out of college, I felt as though I had dead-ended — doing a job I didn’t enjoy in an area I didn’t like, with no idea of what would give me more pleasure. The solution seemed to be to leave, to go far away, and then, maybe, come back and think again.
I preferred to think of it as a direct attack on the problem rather than a quitter’s way out, and I ultimately found some soulmates on the road who thought similarly. Neither idle vacationers nor habitual wanderers, we dealt with personal crises or transitions by pedaling for 10 hours a day and facing real, immediate problems rather than existential ones. How far to the next town? Why is my bike making that funny noise? Where will I sleep tonight?
Those minor daily headaches — which seem like major headaches when encountered for the first time — I fully expected. Determined not to be caught completely unprepared for the myriad challenges ahead, I read bike repair manuals, shopped for the most trouble-free bike, bought a good (but light) tent to keep me dry, and worried incessantly for weeks.
Having a cousin who had successfully done the trip was some consolation. If she — a girl! — had completed the journey, surely I could too I reasoned chauvinistically. No matter that she had traveled west to east, helped along by the prevailing winds, while I was traveling in the opposite direction. No matter that she traveled with a friend. I had always considered myself something of a loner anyway.
It was a comfort, if less romantic, to realize that I was not a trailblazer. Not only had the feat been done before, but a designated coast-to-coast bike route had existed since 1976. The summer of that years saw the inauguration of the Bikecentennial TransAmerica Trail, the product of a prodigious bit of map-making by the staff of Bikecentennial, a Missoula, Montana-based group of bike touring buffs.
The discovery of these maps sealed the deal when I was considering the various vehicles (car? motorcycle? hitching? bicycle?) for escaping my predictable life. I liked the idea of hedging off a bit of the uncertainty with the Bikecentennial maps and trail guides, which provided extensive information about services and conditions along the route. “The Walpole Wiz,” a musician turned psychology student from Boston, my companion for part of the trip, said that he always “felt better” when we followed the map, and I knew what he meant.
The map books told us, and we believed, that sometime, not so far in the future, if we followed the directions and rode our 70 or 80 miles per day, we would reach our Mecca, when the Pacific Ocean rushed up to lap at our steaming tires.
The rewards were few at first. I was nervous about setting out on this trip solo, as exciting as the prospects were. It was fun saying dramatic good-byes to my family and to the friend I stopped to see in Washington, D.C., to bathe in their encouragement and relish their incredulity, but that was over soon enough, and the inspiring narrative I envisioned was reduced to the everyday, as I sat looking out the window of a Greyhound bus on a sticky June day, enroute to Williamsburg, VA.
