A Man, A Plan

February 3, 2013

There's a town on the coast of Maine called Lubec. It's home to about 1,400 people, 98 percent of whom are white. Homes are affordable and property taxes are about average for the area. During World War II it sat at the center of the sardine canning industry. But the last cannery closed in 1977, and now they catch, process, and sell salmon, lobsters, shellfish, and sea cucumbers. They saw a few moments of national attention in 2001, because two of the 87 people on board the first airliner to crash into the World Trade Center on September 11 lived in Lubec. (They were in their eighties. It was their first time traveling on a commercial airplane.)

Winters in Lubec are cold and summers are mild. It rains all the time. The website for its chamber of commerce gives a list of things that the town doesn't have. These include movie theaters, shopping malls, fast food restaurants, and stop lights. It's the kind of place where the most popular local events are yoga classes, a tree pruning workshop, a small farmer's market, senior social bingo every third Thursday, and a monthly movie night at the Lubec Memorial Library on Water Street. It's a small, clean, quiet town with a photogenic lighthouse and a lot of older people. I'm guessing this describes a lot of places in Maine.

The thing that makes the town interesting to me has nothing to do with its history, its weather, or the accents that the people who live there may or may not have. Lubec, it turns out, sits at a more northeasterly point on the Atlantic coast than any other city, village, township, borough, hamlet, incorporated place, or metropolitan statistical area in the United States. When Canadians have had enough of America's arrogance and bad imported TV shows, a boat full or Mounties or whoever will motor with purpose from Grand Manan Island in New Brunswick, across the chop of the Quoddy Narrows, and take Lubec first.

It's well documented how much I enjoy a good bicycle ride between America's extreme geographical points. Having checked Key West, Florida and Neah Bay, Washington off that list in 2011, to the surprise of almost no one this trip finds its finish line on the shores of the Atlantic in Lubec, Maine. On the other end, I'm starting in Southern California in the city of Imperial Beach, not far from San Diego. There, along the border of Mexico, within pissing distance of the most expensive fence the world has ever known, I will say goodbye and adios to the Pacific.

Two years ago, near Neah Bay, at the end of 6,448 miles.

The trip starts with a two-day, ass-kicking ride up and over the mountains east of San Diego before pushing across California through the Imperial Valley, along the Salton Sea, and into the desert by way of Joshua Tree National Park. Arizona brings more hot, dry, brownish landscapes and the sprawl of the Phoenix metro area before giving way to high desert and small copper mining towns. Then it's on to New Mexico, the Apache, Gila, and Cibola National Forests, and higher elevations that bring with them the chance of late season snow.

Heading east from Roswell I start a long — and to be honest, probably too long — arc across the flatlands and gentle rolling hills of the Great Plains and Midwest. It will lead me out of New Mexico, through the panhandles of both Texas and Oklahoma, and then on through wide open sweeps of Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, and Iowa. If the winds and endless fields of yellow and green don't drive me to give up bicycle riding altogether, I'll head across most of Illinois and into Chicago. That's where I'll stop, catch a flight home, and take a week to make sure my wife and dog remember that I'm still alive. After the break it's on to more farming country in Indiana and Ohio, the steep and constant ups and downs of Western Pennsylvania, and then almost two weeks of wandering the back roads of upstate New York. In the northern part of New York I'll join the Adventure Cycling Association's Northern Tier route, which I'll ride on and off as May gives way to June and I grind through the foothills and mountains of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.

That's seventeen states and about 5,000 miles. It'll take just over three months to make it happen.

The hills outside of Spokane, Washington. What a lot of America looks like.

When I look down at my bike computer and see something like 5,000 on the odometer I'll feel like I've done something awesome. But I'm not the kind of bicycle rider that obsesses over numbers. I don't care about stats like average speed, heart rate, temperature range, altitude, or cadence. The last one is a thing you can actually measure. I had no idea until a few days ago. I was amazed to find out that people spend money on devices that count the number of pedal revolutions you make per minute. I always thought there were only three answers to that question — too few, too many, Western Kansas — and that, at least in the case of the first two, all you need to do with that information is shift, forget about it, and then go back to thinking about food or singing the lyrics to the same song for the fourteenth time in a row. Yeah, I know, not everyone is like me; different strokes for different folks and all that. I get it. My point is that I leave the cycle data spreadsheeting to guys who ride eight-pound carbon fiber bicycles while wearing shorts tight enough to show everyone the size, shape, and current position of their balls.

So it was out of character the other day when I decided to figure out how much climbing I'll have to do to travel from the edge of the Pacific Ocean to the crest of the mountains that rise directly to the east of it. Out of character, and maybe a mistake. The good news is that I get seven more or less flat miles to warm up after I leave the coast. The bad news is that during the next 70 miles, over two days, my route rises and falls over and over again for a total elevation gain of more than 8,700 feet. For all the pain, I think I top out somewhere around 4,100 feet. For the sake of comparison, I also figured out the elevation gain for the start of my last cross-country ride. In the entire length of Florida, from Key West to the border with Georgia, I didn't even crack 2,500 feet of climbing. And that was spread over two weeks and more than 600 miles.

Because that trip started later in the year, I had a lot of time to head outside and ride myself into shape. I even managed to find a break in the bad Seattle weather and fit in an overnight ride, fully loaded. I was also playing hockey two or three times a week. That's not the case now. Not only have I been out of hockey for a year, but so far in 2013 I've cranked out just over 90 miles, and most of those have come on the bicycle trainer. One more time for emphasis: I start on a cross-country ride in three weeks, I've pedaled less than a hundred miles this year, and I haven't yet climbed a long or steep hill. Yeesh.

This is all a long way of saying that the first two days will be tough, aggravating, and filled with exciting new combinations of curse words. I'm anxious, and not in the good way.

I also feel apprehensive writing about these plans. It seems that for every person who finishes a cross-country ride, someone else fails along the way. A few reasons come up over and over again: I was out of shape, I carried too much weight, I couldn't deal with the flat tires and broken spokes, bike riding isn't as easy or fun as those idiots online made it out to be. Others are more spectacular — disasters like a parent dying or a spouse ending up in the hospital, a tire blowout while speeding down a mountainside at forty miles per hour, or death at the hands and pickup truck of a drunk driver. Almost nothing in my life that I spend a long time planning turns out the way I expect. It feels arrogant to think that a scheme like this, with so many variables and unknowns, could unfold in the way I picture it while sitting at home, on the couch, as a dog sniffs one of my farts with great interest.

Yet I know that a story about riding across America on a bicycle isn't complete without trying to explain the ideas and hopes that have been kicking around the rooms and hallways of my brain for months. As anyone who's taken a long trip like this will tell you, one of the great joys of bicycle touring is that the journey begins months or even years before you start to crank. Through the planning, the preparation, and the anticipation, I've already imagined how the adventure might take shape. It's excitement in a pure form, removed from the harsh realities of the world outside. It lets me achieve great things without the knee pain, the busy and shoulderless highways, the longing for the people I love but haven't seen for months, and camping in the forest, alone, in the company of bears and wolves, inside a tiny tent that smells like a gas station bathroom.

It's the promise of what could be.

I know what stands in front of me. I know that I can control only a narrow slice of what's to come after I point my bike to the east and push the pedals for the first time. I want so much to start, to finish, and to experience wonderful things in between, but I know how little it can take to pitch those dreams over the handlebars. I know all of this. It leaks back into my head every couple of days. But then I think about the mountains of New Mexico, the grasslands of Kansas, and the rocky coastline of Lubec, Maine. I remember the fact that, for the second time in three years, I have the chance to travel with slow speed and thoughtfulness through the heart of the country I love. And then, every time, even if I try to fight it, my mouth stretches into a wide smile.

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