Shifting Gears

Elaine K. Miller

"To accept the challenge of the road is to take a journey inside yourself." (1)

I think about the cross-country bike tour and reflect on the long ago places where this journey might have started. I think of bikes in my childhood.

I am nine years old and we live in Teaneck, New Jersey. We are shaped by the war years -- Victory gardens, stamping tin cans, rationing. In the spirit of these times, my father has worked very hard on my birthday gift. The bike is an old one, lovingly re-conditioned, with sparkling chrome and shiny black paint, a thin-tire girl’s bike. My father’s pride in his work is clear. I know it is a gift of love, and yet …. I want a red fat-tire boy’s bike, the kind my younger brother will get as a birthday gift just one year later. My black, thin-tire girl’s bike could not possibly lend itself to the kind of showy abandon I envision.

Years later, feeling expansive in California, I get myself a red fat-tire bike, but I soon realize its limitations.

And many years later, more knowledgeable and having begun some serious biking, I get a purple thin-tire bike, the one that will take me across the country.

Much attention has been paid to the subject of women and bicycling, from the early days of warning against it as both inappropriate and dangerous to women's physical and moral well being -- not to mention the good of society at large, to contemporary commentary on the psychological obstacles women typically must battle when they approach not only bicycling, but any sport at all. A turn of the century writer captures all too well the early sentiments widely shared:

"... chief of all the dangers attending this new development of feminine freedom is the intoxication which comes with unfettered liberty." (2)

More contemporary commentary has offered the analysis that women have traditionally been socialized to regard our bodies as something to be looked at, rather than instruments through which we achieve our own aims, characterizing our “social existence as the object of the gaze of another…” (3)

With the weight of such cultural baggage one might wonder how in the world forty women over the age of fifty ever took on this challenge. Yes, we made all of the jokes among ourselves -- "40 women over 50, filling public space in spandex,” “meals on wheels” as we fought exhaustion at the end of a hard day, vultures circling overhead, and “we’re lucky, they’ll always stop to help a gray-haired lady.” But none of that really mattered. I suspect the turn of the century writer got it right in identifying the irresistible attraction -- "the intoxication that comes with unfettered liberty."

During the Spring Semester 1998 I had a sabbatical leave from the State University of New York, College at Brockport, where I am a professor of Spanish and Women’s Studies. I had two plans for my leave -- to complete a video project for which I had been granted the sabbatical, and then to take off on what all the literature calls “the adventure of a life time,” and “a life-changing experience” -- a cross-country bicycle trip. I had long thought of doing such a trip, but in truth the thought was more a fantasy -- safely packaged away as "wouldn't it be great...." Then one day the brochure landed on my desk, forwarded to me by my friend, colleague, and biking companion Marilyn. "I think this is what you've been looking for" said the stickee note attached to it. A cross-country bike tour for women over fifty.

The organization was called WomanTours, a company then seven years into leading bicycle tours for women. It was started by Gloria Smith, who had left a career in landscape architecture to carry out the dream of “ spending most of her waking time on a bicycle, somewhere in the world. ” This was the company's first cross-country tour and Gloria, a breast cancer survivor, had joined up with the National Breast Cancer Coalition Fund (NBCCF) to make it a breast cancer benefit. At the end of the trip, the sponsorships for the forty women participants would exceed $44,000.

We were organized into two groups, which traveled two days apart. I was in the second group - sixteen riders and three staff -- a cook/driver, a tour leader/bike mechanic/sweep rider, and an assistant -- assigned to whatever duties the first two needed assistance with. This cast of characters, however, was not fixed. It fluctuated. We began with fifteen riders and ended up with sixteen; and of the three staff members, only one would still be in place by the end of the trip. Nevertheless, due to admirable flexibility and the tapping of hidden talents, the group managed the changes very well.

In an orientation meeting the day before our departure from San Diego, each woman described how she had heard about the trip and why she decided to do it. Anna’s story delighted the group, provoking laughter of both affection and recognition: "I was reading the paper and saw a small announcement about WomanTours,” she began. “I turned to my husband and said, 'Listen to this, a cross-country bike tour for women over fifty; I qualify.' And he replied ‘Oh sure, so now I suppose you're going to want to get a bike.'"

My biking companions' faces and their bikes are engraved in my mind. And I believe I could still identify each of them by their butts on the bike seats in front of me: from Marcia -- the youngest, age fifty, to Sally - the oldest, age seventy two. On the days when we weren’t wearing the WomanTours shirt, the biking outfits personalized each of us, revealing individual tastes across the whole spectrum – flashy, conservative, sassy, modest, old and broken in, bright and new. As for me, I have always been attentive to my older sister’s advice: “never let your outfit outshine your skill level.”

We dipped our rear tires in the Pacific Ocean at San Diego, California at 5:30 am on March 17th, and we rode over the sand into the Atlantic Ocean at St. Augustine, Florida at 1 pm on May 8 th: 3100 miles; 54 days; 114 flat tires; 5,832,000 calories consumed (an estimate). Was it significant that my calculator fell off the handlebars and disappeared in the surf that very first morning? I did not replace it until New Mexico.

A more detailed statistical picture includes also: four crashes (none with serious injury, and only one involving a car); seventeen falls; two major bike breakdowns, one of them the bottom bracket on my own bike; two bikes knocked off the top of the van when the driver absentmindedly drove it into a car wash; and one dog bite episode, which then required that Barbara, the victim, be administered rabies shots by Jo, the nurse in the group, for much of the remainder of the trip.

The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay is reported to have remarked "It is simply not true that life is one damn thing after another; it's the same damn thing over and over." Having come across this quote while devouring newspapers on one of our once-a-week rest days, I was amused at how it captured an essence of the trip. Indeed, a peculiar charm of the trip was the sameness of the routine -- eat, ride, eat, ride, eat, sleep; drink water, fix some flats, see some sights; eat, ride, eat, ride, eat, sleep; eat enough to sustain physical effort, stay either warm enough, cool enough, or dry enough. Same clothes, same food - but a sameness of routine that rolled across 3100 miles of a changing scene.

We rode together, we rode alone. We rode in large groups, small groups, pairs, trios. We kept pace, stopped out, caught up, fell behind ... , spread out over the day's route. But whatever the spread, and whatever the space of the accidental or intentional wandering, an invisible cocoon seemed to surround us, expanding and contracting to contain us all, growing odd appendages to gather us up and, finally, by day's end, deliver us all to the same pinpoint spot on the map.

As I reflect on my preparations for the trip, I am surprised to have to acknowledge a curious lack of serious attention to several practical matters. I think it was somewhat squeezed out by the enthrallment I felt over the psychological adventure. I knew I could ride far, if not always fast, so that did not concern me. And I did take care to get the clothing I would need for the varieties of weather we would pass through.

However, I paid only minimal attention to other critical issues. I took along a borrowed tent that I had never attempted to pitch and a borrowed air mattress of uncertain size, which I had never inflated. Most shocking of all (and I know WomanTours would agree), I had never fixed a flat tire. I was lucky, though. The consequences were not grave; they even lent some humor to our first night out at a campsite when I discovered that the air mattress almost filled the entire tent, leaving my nose just inches from the top. And I hoped to finesse my sketchy sense of how to fix a flat by managing to stay ahead of Pat, Vera, and Donna, the group of three friends who were known to have this expertise and to be kind enough to share it.

The plan failed, however, before we reached the California border, when I awakened to a flat rear tire in the motel room (where we usually kept our bikes). This meant that the group of three would leave ahead of me. Again, I was lucky; Carmelita, my roommate for that night (the group had agreed we would rotate roommates), talked me through the repair, intervening only to head off egregious mistakes. Armed with this success, I actually almost looked forward to the next flat – which came that very day. We had joked about “shoulders to cry on,” the roadside scene of an upturned wheel-less bike, dangling chain, scattered contents of a rack pack, tools, tubes, and greasy hands. The shoulders now looked more like places to demonstrate my new skill. I would have many more opportunities to do that.

When people ask about the trip, it seems they are looking not only for the highlights, but also the daily routines and practical concerns. Often the curiosity is very basic. A woman approached me after a talk that I had done on the trip to ask me, sotto voce, “a personal question: didn’t the bike seats make you quite sore?” “Yes,” I said. “That is how I learned about A & D Ointment.”

To describe a “typical day,” I will draw together a composite one, with some details to go with the geography of the moment. We would awaken and check our bikes, “listening to our tires” for that barely audible hiss that meant a tiny leak would catch up to us at some point during the day. Breakfast, prepared in the cook shack at the front end of the trailer that carried our luggage was a “sit-down” meal on motel parking lot curbs. We would recall the instruction that if we had turned right off the road to go into the motel, we must turn right to resume the next morning. If, on the other hand, we had camped the night before, we would recall the last night’s conversations, voices floating out from the tents registering aches and pains and reflections on “just why we were doing this.”

It was always a special moment when we pedaled off each morning with fresh energy, having prepared by reviewing the route, guessing at likely spots to stop for good coffee, snacks, restrooms, and sites to see, and loading our rack packs with P B & J sandwiches, energy bars and bananas. The sandwiches had a way of surfacing days later from the depths of our packs flat as pancakes; and on a broiling hot day in Texas, we were told by two cyclists who finally caught up with us that they knew they were getting closer because the banana peels along the roadside were getting fresher.

The sight of the van at the half-way mark was always a special moment, indeed thrilling on days of searing heat, numbing cold, drenching rainstorms, or high winds (which reached 70 miles per hour one day in Texas). Though entirely predictable, because we were all on the same route, it nevertheless seemed somehow magical that we would actually meet up in the vast space of the unfamiliar terrain we were covering. The van driver had many functions, all of which had to be carefully coordinated – shopping for food, preparing the meals, watching and stopping for anyone in serious need of assistance, waiting for all to have had lunch, and, because the van was carrying our luggage, reaching the night’s stopping spot ahead of all of us.

We had several very fast riders, so this was often a challenge. Given the need for precise orchestration of all of these functions, we knew there was no flagging down the van for frivolities, not for unloading the weight of heavy clothing we had taken off as the day heated up, nor for requesting to root through the piled up luggage to retrieve warmer clothing if we had miscalculated the weather conditions. Somewhere in Arizona we initiated a new procedure; we each carried with us a length of orange construction site tape that we could tie to our helmets to signal the van driver about a serious need for assistance. That had the added advantage of not having to take our hands off the handlebars to tap our helmets – the traditional signal for distress.

We developed other on-the-road strategies, too: cooling off in the western states by wading fully clothed into the shallow mountain streams that crisscrossed our route, consuming vast servings of ice cream and root beer to boost energy, and, on the coldest days, warming our hands under restroom dryers and downing tall cups of flavored coffee from convenient store machines. In the desert, with no services for interminable stretches, we would form a human circle at the side of the road around riders who needed a “pit stop,” hoping to create the impression that the event was simple bike repair. An especially distressing moment was coming up on someone off her bike, staring at the map, and greeting you with “You know what…” -- a standard lead in to long discussions about whether we might be off route. We would leave each other messages at obscure turning spots, once using the lipstick that our companion Mary Dawn always had with her. And we laughed at the sheer basic-ness of it as we checked where our shadows fell on the road -- behind us in the morning, in front of us in the afternoon.

We did serious sightseeing at every chance we got, and the group that I rode with (the groups coalesced mainly around speed preference and inclination to explore) was unfailingly the last one in for the night. We were dubbed “the lollygaggers.” The routine at the end of the day was to retrieve our luggage from the van, check the posted list of roommates for the night, get luggage and bike to the room (always hoping it would be on the first floor of the building), and fall onto the bed for a moment. Then – a strategy many of us adopted to deal with grungy biking clothes, take off only our shoes and walk into the shower. Laundered clothing of all kinds quickly appeared on balcony railings, bushes and shrubs, and any other objects that lent themselves to the objective of having dry clothes by morning. A final special pleasure in the evening was finding we had mail for us at the front desk. I had wonderfully loyal correspondents, which my companions noticed early on in the trip; and I believe I was the only one to get a chocolate bunny for Easter, sent to me by my sister from Illinois.

Evenings would bring, first, a map session to chart the next day’s route, and then another “sit-down” meal – dinner on a motel or hotel parking lot curb, on a log around a campsite, or less frequently (when the cook was due a rest) at a nearby restaurant. Humble as the parking lot circumstances were, some of the settings, especially in the western states, were spectacular, with panoramic views of the cities spread out below us. The parking lot ambience that we created with candles, lanterns, and mood music was apparently so enticing that on more than one occasion, other motel guests approached us asking to buy dinner. We would sit in the dusk, sharing stories from the day – the disasters and the delights, the flats, falls, and missed turns, and the comic exchanges with people along the way. Occasionally, someone would announce with certainty that she was too tired to ride the next day and would be going in the van, only to reappear on her bike in the morning. We marveled at the amazing capacity of the body to restore itself.

I think the wonder and delight at the changing physical scene made us want to move through it on our own wheels, not those of the van. Our companion Nadean, whose “wheels” were a recumbent bike, captured it well:

“I hadn’t realized there were so many different hues of green in the deserts, or grays, or blues in the sky. I didn’t know the wildflowers jostled and crowded into one another in a strip hundreds of miles wide and a thousand miles long across Texas. I have an entire picture album in my head filled with blooming cacti in California, fences covered by wild grape and honeysuckle in Louisiana, and moss-covered trees in Florida. My pictures move along in full color, with birds singing it up on the soundstrip.”

My own mental album adds this: the snow-covered passes through the Rocky Mountains, the dramatic buttes and mesas of Arizona and New Mexico, the small dusty towns straight out of the Hollywood Westerns, and the steaming rice fields and sultry swamps of Mississippi and Louisiana.

The scenery is one large part of the story; the exchanges with people along the way are another. They were predictable and surprising, poignant and funny. Here are some of the most memorable, in the geographical order of our route across the southern United States.

“ Did y ’ all just divorce your husbands? ” he asks.

We are at one of our very first stops, a small group of us in a general store on a back road in the California foothills, on the way to our campsite for the night at Potrero State Park. Feeling giddy and expansive with the excitement of an adventure just begun, someone has told the storeowner about our trip. “ So did y ’ all just divorce your husbands? ” is his comment, delivered less like a question than a judgment. It is marked by a distinct uneasiness. “ Well, some of us did, but that was long ago, ” comes the rejoinder from a disembodied voice in an adjacent aisle. For just a moment, in the exchange of fleeting glances, I can feel in the group the temptation to take on the question in its serious dimensions. But the pull of the road is stronger and we exit smiling.

“ Hey, the guy I just passed back there has a flat. ”

The dusty pickup truck has slowed down and pulled up alongside us on a highway in New Mexico, and the driver yells this news to us through the passenger-side window. “ Oh, OK, ” we say, deciding he has mistakenly assumed “ the guy back there ” is with our group. But the mistake is a different one. We discover this later when Barb, our tour leader, has fixed the flat and caught up to us again. It ’ s a different, but entirely predictable mistake. True, bike outfits, helmets and sunglasses do lend an androgynous appearance, but that only reinforces an already existing mindset: it is “ guys ” who do these things. We move on from our dismay, deciding that there may be advantages out on the open road to being taken for guys. We ride on, each with her own reflections on the difficult negotiation of principles and practicalities.

"Where y'all goin'?"

The questioner is seated alone at a table near us in the Gage Hotel in Alpine, the tiny Central Texas desert town where we've taken a one-day rest stop. We're having breakfast.

His blue eyes stand out in a tanned face. Steel gray hair, jeans and denim shirt. A construction crew boss, directing the moving of a church to a location one block away to better incorporate it into the historic preservation area of the town.

"Where y'all goin'?" is his question, delivered in casually friendly style.

"Florida," we say.

He smiles indulgently, signaling us that he's enjoying the playfulness.

"No, really ...," he smiles genuinely.

"Really," we say.

"Well, but where'd you start from?" he ventures cautiously, head leaned forward, furrowed brow.

"California," we say.

Several seconds of intent gaze. And then,

"Well, dang," he says.

We all laugh together. He with surprise and delight at what he has just heard; we with delight in ourselves and affection for Texas .

"Well, dang," we say to each other at every discovery of the trip.

"Don't y'all have jobs?" she asks.

The speaker is the clerk in the roadside market we've stopped at along our route through rural Louisiana. We've parked our bikes outside leaned up against the wall, and filed in in one continuous line like a row of ants to the aisle with the Little Debbies, Fig Newtons, Milky Ways and Peanut Butter Cups. (No combination of fat, sugar and carbohydrates can be too much for our extravagant appetites.) We turn our attention to the questioner, who is actually on her second question. The first one, "where y'all ridin'to?" we have answered, never breaking pace on our way to the sweetie aisle. "Florida -- we started in California."

"Well ... don't y'all have jobs?" she repeats.

The question is so much more interesting than the answers we piece together.

“No way, no way. Aren’t you scared?”

A middle-aged woman entering a convenient store on the road we are taking through the little square of Alabama that touches the Gulf Coast has noticed us doing our usual snacking and resting, seated on the parking lot curb. She has remarked that it’s a beautiful day for a little bike ride. She is stunned and stops dead in her tracks when we tell her of our trip. “Do you mean scared of the traffic?” asks Barb. “Well, that, but also all of the psycho types out there,” she says. We make a joke – that “no, because they’re all in the group with us.” But her question stays with me and I reflect consciously, for the first time, that no, I have not been scared.

“Mercy, mercy.”

We are somewhere between De Funiak Springs and the Lake Seminole campground in the Florida panhandle. A game warden has approached to talk with us as we rest, elbows on the railing of a rickety bridge over a small creek, and we have told him of our trip. “Mercy, mercy,” he says, and walks on. Having grown more pensive as we near the end of the trip, we linger a moment in silence under the spell of those murmured words. “Mercy,” we had surprised ourselves and others as well. “Mercy,” we had arrived safely. “Mercy, mercy,” where would we go from here…

Nadean, attempting to pin down an elusive quality of the experience, wrote the following:

“I'm not yet sure how hard the trip was, because it seemed so curiously easy at the same time. I know we laughed every day, laughed a lot, and I have no idea what was so funny. I still can't explain how it was that every afternoon at the end of the ride, we got off the bikes, sweaty, dirty faced, tired, aching, sometimes wet and cold, and announced with very satisfied smiles to no one in particular. "That was a great ride!"

The trip was about many different things for the women who took it. The challenge was both physical and psychological. In my own view, and perhaps that of others, it was also social. A key delight was breaking rules, -- rules mostly unwritten but known and lived nevertheless. To borrow pop culture parlance, we "colored outside the lines" and we "went over the line" -- not just the state lines, county lines, highway center lines and map lines that marked our physical course across the continent, but the social lines that had shaped, contained and constrained the lives that we brought to that moment.

That is why we laughed. I smile now, just thinking about it.

Notes:

(1) Connie Carpenter, in Winning Women. Quotations on Sports, Health and Fitness. Compiled by Beth Mendy Conny. Peter Pauper Press, 1993.

(2) Cited in North American Review, 1895.

(3) One example of this kind of analysis is Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Indiana Univ. Press, 1990.

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