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.