My Bicycle Trip from NYC to Seattle

Trips often have started for me as an idea that sounds good in a bar over a few ideas, which I talk about two or three times, and then start taking on a life of their own. After a short time, I’ve talked myself up like a cat climbing a tree and the only option is to jump. Often the process reaches such heroic proportions before I leave that I feel like if I don’t make it no one back home will ever speak to me again, which helps in overcoming the adversity that one normally encounters on the road.

I first started talking about going cross country with a friend on a motorcycle – he was going to ride in a side car – but then later in that same evening I started talking about using a bicycle, perhaps just misspeaking because of the beer, but by the end of the evening the concept had stuck. Everyone else I know forgot about this immediately, but it stayed in the back of my mind, and I would talk about this eventual trip over the next few years until my friends were sick of it. It seemed like one of those things that people always intend to do, and will always intend to do.

Early in 1998 however, I was quitting a job and I had no idea of what I wanted to do next. I was in terrible shape, and I wanted to quit smoking. And I still had this idea for a cross country bike ride. One weekend I got together with my friends out in the woods for one of our biannual Camp Dionysias. This was a tradition that had started as a retreat for our improv theater company prior to doing a run, but then as the theater company dissolved into a loose aggregation of friends we started widening the circle and it gradually became a long weekend of creativity and drugs in the woods. We’d rent some cabins in Croton Point State Park, and take some mushrooms and frolic in the woods and down by the banks of the Hudson River.

This particular weekend we did this early in the day, and myself and another friend decided that we hadn’t really been deranged enough the last time we’d done them, so we decided to do a double dose this time. To make a long story short, I ended up climbing down the cliff-like slope to the rivers edge as the sun was going down across the river, and as I looked out across the green mountains of the western shore and the cooling towers of the Indian Point nuclear power plant I thought I’ve got to get the hell out of here. I think I also heard a voice say “go west young man”, which some of my friends heard me repeating and giggling about later. By the end of the evening I was sitting on a log in the darkness as the river rose beneath it, starting and finishing a bottle of Jaegermeister with a friend and fancying myself as Hemingway, after which we climbed up and down the cliff several times and miraculously made it up to the cabins alive.

For some reason, this experience seemed as good an impetus as any to get my act together and finally do the bike ride. Over the next two months as I got everything together I would often have doubts about whether I was up for this, if it was a good idea, if I’d have enough money, but really I’d decided I had no choice, and once you do that, everything usually follows. That is really the secret to travel in a nutshell – never give yourself an out.

I went on the web, and found out that many other people had done this on their own, and in fact one old guy made a profession out of it and had all sorts of ideas for making paniers and tents and clothing, things halfway between the do it yourself stuff in Popular Mechanics and the do it yourself homey things in Better Homes and Gardens. I looked it all over and decided that I was going to do this trip one step better than my previous trip from Buffalo to New York.

When I was 20, back in 1991 I had the spur of the moment idea to ride my bike back from Buffalo to New York City. A spectacularly badly planned trip, which I made it through only by sheer stubbornness. That time I decided to use my bike messenger bag, which, though waterproof went over one shoulder and eventually started hitting a nerve every time I got back on the bike. I had all the wrong tools, and somehow got lucky had only one flat. I had no tent, and no camping gear other than a sleeping bag which was bungeed to my front handlebars. I had no suntan lotion and ended up getting heatstroke, which I didn’t even realize at the time. My bike had no gears – I’d figured that if I didn’t need them as a bike messenger, I wouldn’t need them to get back to NYC.

Naturally, the first few days were misery. I got to Rome, New York, and I lost my wallet swimming in a lake in my jean shorts. My aunt lent me $40 for the 2 days I figured it would take me to get back down to New York. I ended up sleeping in a park on a picnic table one night, and then the next I got stuck in Poughkeepsie, and all of the roads out of town turned into highways, so I couldn’t find my way out before dark and I ended up sleeping on the lawn of a church, figuring that if I got caught sleeping there with no ID I’d be less likely to get locked up.

Somehow, I made it home. It never rained, and along the way I’d had some beautiful moments, like cruising through the mountains in the Catskills for more than 20 miles without peddling at better than 40 miles an hour, right at sunset. After that experience, I had a strong faith that something in the universe looks after people who do crazy adventurous things, a faith that I’ve never been disappointed in. This time, however, I’d be thousands of miles from home, and there would be no help when things went wrong. (Or so I thought.)

The month after my vision, I spent preparing for my journey by going to Russia for my cousin’s wedding and drinking very heavily for 10 days. Thus fortified, I returned embalmed to the States to face the reality that my target date for departure was less than two weeks away, and I was still nowhere near ready. I couldn’t push the date back any further because it might snow in the Rockies and Cascades before I got there. So I had to pull it together quickly.

I gathered my gear and went for a test ride to my friend’s house in New Jersey. I had gone for some rides before to build up mileage, but this was the first one I was doing with all of the weight loaded onto the bike that I intended to bring with me. My route went through Queens to Manhattan over a bridge, then down the city streets to the ferry to Staten Island, then close to where the garbage dump is and over another bridge into New Jersey, and on a course through industrial wasteland roughly paralleling the New Jersey Turnpike. Delightful. The biggest moment of suspense came when I got to the Goethals Bridge to New Jersey. Here on what counts as one lane in the rest of America, two lanes of cars and heavy trucks thundered by at 70 miles and hour. When I carried my bike up the stairs to the walkway that runs next to the vehicle lanes I found that while the bridge had opened with a walkway, some asshole from the Port Authority had decided to close it so that they could leave equipment and road signs on it. Disregarding the sign that told me all about the rules I was breaking, I broke down the bags and tossed them over the fence that closed off the walkway. I then put the bike on my shoulder and climbed up on a concrete divider about four feet tall that the fence ran up to. I then slipped around the fence, briefly hanging myself and the bike over the right lane of the roadway and earning an angry honk from an 18 wheeler that missed me by a mere quarter mile. I knew there was no danger, but the driver had a pretty common reaction to the unexpected biker and freaked a little. He must have been the one who put the cops onto me.

I got most of the way over the bridge, and then I noticed people pulling into the right lane on the opposite side of the bridge. Then I saw something flashing. This was the kind of metal bridge where there is an arch, but there are all sorts of metal pillars everywhere, and I ducked behind one. Sure enough, it was a police car, and as he came up in the right lane he was trying to see from the other side of the highway if I was hiding somewhere. Once I spotted him first, he didn’t have a chance. I waited a few minutes, hoping they wouldn’t think to send another car, and the cop drove off, and I pedaled to freedom in New Jersey. I started to fade about 40 miles into the trip, and eventually my friend and his fiance came and got me in their minivan because darkness had fallen, and I was on the shoulder of a highway, and still five miles from their house. Not an auspicious prelude to my journey.

The following week was the day I was supposed to leave. I was not ready. My theory over that last week was “I’ll get ready when I get on the road.” So I had my last cigarette, checked my supply of nicotine gum and started pedaling. I put together my bags for the trip to Jersey, but I had never fully loaded up my bike – it now weighed about 60 pounds. I pushed off from the sidewalk in front of my dad’s place in Astoria, Queens. An hour later, at 129 St in Harlem, my chain broke. This was supposed to happen in a corn field. I wanted to at least be stranded somewhere scenic when this happened for the first time. I had just paid to have a new chain put on a few weeks before, so this wasn’t supposed to happen at all. I dug out my bag of tools, feeling like someone who runs away from home and doesn’t make it past the corner. I could still take the subway home.

The one thing that carried me though this situation, the thing that actually propelled me all the way to Seattle, was stubbornness. The nice name for this is perseverance, but really, once I start out doing something like this reason does not enter into it anymore. In a few hours I would really be in places where being stranded could mean a lot of walking or camping somewhere for the night, but I decided to jury rig the chain and get moving over the George Washington Bridge. I managed to reassemble it after pulling out a link and got the chain back on, my hands now coated with grease. I righted my bike with its 60 pounds of luggage, and started up the hill, waiting for the chain to come lose and send my crotch plummeting into the metal bar on the bike as the pedals suddenly spun free. But that didn’t happen… for two miles. When the chain broke again at 167 St, I did actually think about turning back, but part of me said that I must have just not put the pin all the way through the chain, and that when I fixed it this time, it would stay fixed. After all, it was new. So I reassembled the chain. It didn’t break again for over 200 miles, and when it did I spent another harrowing hour trying to get the chain going as it got shorter and shorter, and the next time I saw a bike store I got a new chain. Turns out that the old chain I had bought, that had come with the bike and seen thousands of miles, which had broken only once in its 20 years, was the right one for the bike. The new one I had bought was only supposed to be used with a special kind of gears, and when I told the mechanic that I had taken it 250 miles at this point after 3 break downs he was amazed. The moral of the story may be that new crap is worse than old quality. Also, the bicycle mechanics in NYC are as stupid and crooked as the car mechanics.

The end of day one saw me 75 miles away from home, not bad considering the load and the shape I was in. The only downside was that I hit my first mountain, and had to walk for mile or two up to Clarence Fawnstock State Park. I rolled into the park and started figuring out the routine that I would have for the next two months. First, was the tent. I had set it up a few times before to seam seal it, and to practice setting it up, but this was the first time I had ever spent any time in it. And I needed to spend time in it. The mosquitos simply loved my oh-so-fresh scent, combined with my natural ingredients bullshit insect repellent. When it comes to keeping away nature, I now look for whatever they’re still selling that is most closely related to plutonium. Have we dropped it on a country in Southeast Asia? Slather it on me. This natural stuff was useless. I cooked my veggie burgers – they tasted awful. In fact something about them seemed to attack the inside of my mouth. I vowed never to buy them again.

Finally I cleaned up my gear, and headed off to the shower. I had gone with the Dr Brauner’s all in one soap. Dr Brauner is a complete lunatic which is part of the appeal, but also in theory you can use his mild castillian liquid soap for dishes, shampoo, shower soap, toothpaste…. Dilute dilute! Damn right dilute. When you get that stuff on your dick it acts like Bengay. As a toothpaste it has this minty lye thing happening, and as for a shampoo, I forgot that before Johnson and Johnson shampoo used to mean tears… or blindness.

I settled down that night to write in my journal in my tent. The tent smelled new. So did the sleeping bag. I spent an hour trying to figure out how to use my candle lantern, hanging it from the ceiling of the tent. After fiddling with hanging it from different heights I eventually put it out and started using the mini-mag lite I had mounted on a headband. This became the only light I needed for the rest of the trip.

So the total change of lifestyle to one that was completely all natural and perfect and set me on the path to sainthood was dealt some death blows that it never recovered from. I didn’t start smoking again – I figured that would be a little too insane – but I went out and bought the strongest bug spray I could find, got some Dial liquid soap, and bought some pasta and sauce, but also had my first burger.

That first night I was exhausted but getting comfortable on the gravel still took a little time. I finally dropped off, starting to stiffen from all of the exercise. I tossed and turned, and my sleeping bag slid off of my Thermorest onto the gravel… my pillow was a sleeping bag cover stuffed with the tent bag and some dirty clothes, and it slid all over too. I woke up a few times not knowing where I was, and spent time feeling around for my flashlight. Finally morning arrived.

I cooked my first breakfast on the road – I had decided to try General Foods instant coffee, figuring that caffeine was a must, and milk was an impossibility, I might as well forget about anything real and just go right in for the prepared caffeine delivery beverage system, which turned out to be perfect for my needs. Oatmeal also turned out to be a keeper. I dragged myself around, reassembling all of my gear, not believing it could all go back on my bike. I took great care, partially because I was hoping to keep things organized still, and partly because I realized that every minute spent on this task was another one before my ass hit that seat. Finally I bungeed the tent and bag to the bike, put on my helmet, and planted myself on the seat. This wasn’t so bad, I thought. I wobbled my way out of the parking lot and coasted out onto 9D.

I was hoping to stop with a friend from high school who I had just found out lived in Albany. I had just done 75 miles, and was 114 miles away. The problem was whether I should take two days to get there and stop early both days, or pass through just for lunch on the second day and then keep going… or try to do it all in one day. 114 miles is a lot for me, and I only managed to get above 100 miles 6 times on the whole trip. Day 2 was not the smartest time for me to try.

A lot of people I’ve told about my trip said “Bet you had a lot of time to think.” Being on the subway is enough time to think. This trip was enough time to stop thinking. I thought I wanted time to myself to contemplate things in my life, but what I found by about Minnesota was that there were certain scripts of worries, hopes, personal platitudes, confrontations that had happened and or never would, that went round and round in my head every day, so a part of my reality that I never saw them as separate from myself. With nothing but road for 9 hours a day, these thoughts spun without resistance, until they went away. It’s hard to describe, but the zen place that I wanted to get to was on the other side of worrying and thinking, none of which could accomplish anything since the things I was thinking about were thousands of miles and months removed from me. Eventually, I stopped thinking about these things, and I stopped thinking about anything at all. I would see what was in front of me, and observe it without categorizing it, theorizing about it, relating to it… I just saw what was there.

Every time I got off of the bike I felt renewed.

Email 1 from the road....

I'm in Fargo (donchaknow) and I'm heading off tomorrow for the rest of North Dakota and Montana. I decided to lay low for today and let the severe thunderstorms pass.

Remember how I defied fate before... something to the effect that "Nothing can go wrong now! Hahahahahah!" See, this is all a clever plan on my part to provide myself with enough adversity to make this trip interesting.

So the part I had replaced in Chippewa Falls - the bottom bracket, the part between the pedals - went bad again 70 miles from where I had the new one put in. This is like needing a new engine for a car. It just doesn't happen. Except it did. Factory defect... sure. Or I'm cursed.

I ended up stuck in St Croix Falls - on the border between Minnesota and Wisconsin. I was about to set out for the nearest large town - I figured I might cycle 10 miles and have to walk the remaining 10 after the bike died - but I decided that blindly going off to the next town and not knowing if they had a bike shop was stupid, so I went into this crafts store and asked for a phone book. This guy talking to the proprietor asked me if I was having bike problems. Turns out, he runs a shop out of his house. The only one within 30 miles (the town I was heading for would have had nothing.) He says "If you want, we can take it back to my shop and find out what part it is and where to get it." Cool. So we walk 3 miles across the river, through another town, up a massive hill to his farmhouse and get the part out. Even the shop 30 miles away doesn't have it. The nearest place that does is on the other side of Minneapolis, an hour's drive away.

Steve (my benefactor) has narcolepsy. He can't drive. But he offers to let me drive his car down there. So we spend the rest of the day chasing this part down and fixing my bike. He offers me dinner with his family, and a place to crash. For which he asks $49 for putting the part in (it cost me $60 in Chippewa Falls.) I insisted he take more for gas, and his own time, and he settled on $60.

People out here are - well, nice doesn't really cover it.

Two days later I crossed the Mississippi River. I noticed on the map that there are not very many places to cross, so I picked a town that had a bridge on a secondary road. Got there, and there was a sign that said "Detour Route 115" and pointed south. I looked at the map and there was another bridge, 8 miles to the south. Worse yet, it was down a major road with heavy traffic and no shoulder, and it looked like it merged with a freeway at the end.

Not wanting to make a 16 mile detour, I decided to investigate how out the bridge was. Sometimes it just means that they're putting new pavement down. So I go into a bar up the road and see these two guys having a beer (it's 3pm) and I ask them about the bridge. One guy says "You'd have to be one crazy sumbitch to get over that now."

"The bridge is totally gone? I just want to take me , my bike and my gear across," I say.

"It's a complete rebuild. They're tearing the whole thing down." He starts telling me about the chaos the bridge has caused, the local traffic, how I might want to get going now because the next bridge is a ways... and then the other guy, who's been quiet until now puts down his beer and says gravely "I think he could do it."

"There is something left of the bridge?"

"Railroad trestle."

"Ok... what about the railroad?"

"Nah, closed until the fall. You could do it."

This reminds me of the puzzle of the two Cretans, one who always lies and one who tells the truth - it might be entertaining to them if I went for a little swim. So I ask the first guy "Well, do you think he'd do it?" Pointing to the quiet one.

"Sure, but he's nuts."

I get to the bridge - past the entrace to a military base for the Minnesota reserves and the "Minnesota Military History Museum", past all of the ominous orange "Bridge Out" signs, past heavy construction equipment and all of the construction big boys toys that were left out at the end of the day. And the bridge is there - the outer car lanes are gone, only the rusted supports 10 feet down show where they were, but the central railbed is there, spanning the Mississippi about 40 feet about the river. The Father of Waters is only about 100 yards across this far north, and this will save me an entire afternoon.This is definitely beginning to bring to mind "Huckleberry Finn" or "Stand By Me".

I go around the orange tape closing off the edge and look at a 3-4 foot gap between the dirt and the first rusty metal crosstie. Down below I can see the edge of the river, white water swirling around rocks. I step over and hoist the bike over the gap - a piece of rebar, the metal rods in concrete, slides into the pedal clip about a foot. Holding the 60 lbs of bike and gear suspended over the river I work it loose and get the bike onto the bridge.

I step carefully along the steel cross ties, bouncing the bike from one to another, until I reach a path of planks that goes to the other side, and I roll the bike along that. I step over the open gap from one span of bridge to another, and the bridge lets out an ominous creak. Nothing metal that weighs more that 100 tons should make noise when you step on it. But I'm more than halfway across, so I just step more quickly and carefully...

Out of nowhere comes a huge BOOM. I nearly drop the bike over the side. A flock of bats emerge from the bridge underneath the trestle. I freeze and look around. Everything seems intact. The bridge isn’t moving. Then 10 seconds later, another one. But the bridge seems to be fine. It's then I realize that someone is firing a cannon or a big gun of some kind back at that military base...

I manage to get the bike across to the other side, around a crane on the tracks, and over the gap to terra firma without further incident, resolving next time to take the scenic detour route.

This is probably going to be my last email before Seattle unless some of the Freemen in Montana offer to let me crash at their place.

See you all in a month.

Later,

Tim

==

Email 2 from the road....

For anyone who is wondering, I am in Havre, Montana, about halfway across the state.

Had my best day of biking ever 3 days ago - 148 miles. That was with the wind behind me - usually it's coming at me and that keeps me to an average of 70 a day. I should hit mountains in 2 days.

Lest I forget - again - thanks to Jim for the aerobars (they are a godsend) and Gina for the zattar.

No amusing anecdotes as of late, except for this....

Yesterday I arrived in Harlem Montana, where my bike map said there was camping. There was - behind the police station/"city hall" there was a small lawn with some trees, picnic tables, and some playground stuff. Surrounded by blocks of houses. A little strange, but it's a free place to camp, so I wasn't going to complain.

I checked it out with the policeman on duty (who was dead bolted into a little cubicle on the side of the building - you can never be too secure in Harlem. He was about 19 and looked a little startled by my knock on the door. "Uhm... people just put their stuff on the lawn back there." "Are there any shower facilities?" "Uhm... not that I know of." And he closed the door.

Well, I put up my tent, get dinner, do some laundry and finally get to sleep. As is normal for every city park in Montana, I was occasionally woken by the freight train going by on an hourly basis not more than 100 yards away. Not that big a deal.

Until 2:30am, when the automatic popup sprinkler system for the lawn goes off. These little bastards are embedded in the ground, and are nearly invisible even in the light of day when you're looking for them (as I found out this morning.) They are also powerful enough to have a range of about 40 feet, which gives you some idea of the amount of water they can put out. As luck would have it, I had planted my tent 6 inches away from one of them.

I wake up to what feels like a firehose hitting the side of the tent into my sleeping bag. I'm wet. "Hey... stop..." I kinda whine, trying to go back to sleep. It stops. It comes back. Now I'm soaked. Sleep is not a possibility, so I sit up. It stops. I'm puzzled. Then it comes around again. Looking out the other side of the tent I see the other sprinklers and figure out what has happened. I grab the top of the sprinkler through the fabric of the tent and hold it while I try to figure out what to do, all the while it's jetting gallons of water out across the grass into the street, and I'm sitting in the dark, soaked and in my underwear.

I'm still dazed and trying to piece it together for another minute or two. Finally, realizing that it probably is not going to stop on its own any time soon, I carefully one hand at a time put on a tshirt, shorts, and my maglite on a headband. Trying to get on my sneakers I lose my grip on the sprinkler through the fabric and it sprays me again. Screw the sneakers, I don't need 'em, I think. Now what?

After unzipping the door, I let it go and sprint outside, moving clockwise around the tent as the sprinkler does also, trying to dodge getting even more wet. But I'm in the line of fire of two of the others - this place is looking like a scene from "Singing in the Rain" - as I pull out all six tent pegs and grab the tent (which contains all of my bags and almost everything I have) and drag it 50 yards across the park. Getting out of range entirely is impossible without getting onto pavement, so I just turn it so that none of the windows face the streams of water.

As I crawl back into my now soggy bed, I'm thinking, yeah, you bastard, no shower facilities that I knew of either...

For the last few weeks I've been pondering what I should call my bike. This bike was used by my dad originally for anthropological fieldwork in Ireland, then by me to be a bike messenger in NYC, cycling from Buffalo to Toronto and back, Bflo, to NYC, all over eastern Pennsylvania...

While I've been on this trip, every part that could break has multiple times. Things that just never go wrong - wheels, bottom brackets, chains, a rear derailleur. After the last one I said "Well, the only things that can go wrong now are the frame and the handlebars." So when the frame cracked two days ago, I guess it should not have been a surprise. It wasn't really even a surprise that after the rear fork snapped through that there were cracks about to snap in two other places. It was mildly surprising that the handlebars were bent... I hadn't noticed that. The guy at the bike shop said "You really made it here from New York City on this?"

As insult added to injury, I was trying to figure out how long I'd been walking towards town and I noticed my watch had died.

I came up with a name for my former bike - Mir (after the Soviet built space station) because

1) Both are far beyond the original intended operational lifespan.

2) The original manufacturers have both gone out of business.

3) Both have a tendency to commit suicide at critical times, stranding you far from home.

4) Both will end their careers by being tossed into the Pacific Ocean.

I bought a new bike yesterday here in Kalispell Montana - I'm trying to think of what to call it before it's goes to, so if anyone has any ideas...

Only 600 mi to go.

Tim