Westward Ha!: Bicycling Cross-Country with My Two Sons

By Calvin Hight Allen

Dad was having a mid-life crisis. His teenage sons wanted to avoid summer jobs. The solution? Ride across America on bicycles. They set out from the east coast in June, loaded down and looking for adventure. They rode straight into the Appalachian Mountains, and into the hottest summer in recorded history. Sure, the pioneers struggled with starvation, disease, and wilderness. But did they have to pedal a loaded bike all day against the wind, wash in the sheriffs bathroom, and camp in 90 degree heat on the courthouse square surrounded by jacked-up Chevies?

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 25, 2001
• ISBN: 9781469768601

Calvin Hight Allen

Calvin H. Allen is still happily married to Maria Fire, although she tried to kill him by encouraging him to bike cross-country with their teenage sons. Calvin is a professional writer and amateur bicyclist.

Book preview

Contents

1

Not what I meant

2

Remembrance of things crashed.

3

Gearing up

4

12 ways of licking at a blackbird

5

Why I swim at the PO

6

School of hard Knox

7

How to cook frozen heads

8

You can’t miss it

9

Store, what is it good for?

10

My old Kentucky home

11

Bye bye Belinda

12

You can’t get there from here

13

Noah’s motel

14

Big wheels keep on rolling

15

We had a good home but we left

16

Got those outhouse blues

17

There’s pain in them thar hills

18

Big Momma’s restaurant

19

Noah and his two bikes

20

At the tone, it will be 98 degrees…

21

You outside the law, boys

22

A sudden U turn

23

We’re talking sequel

1

Not what I meant

I never intended to spend the summer of 1998 bicycling across America with my two teenage sons.

You may remember that summer. More than 100 people died from the heat, without even getting near a bicycle.

In hindsight, I had been slipping, crumbling really, toward mid-life tomfoolery for a while.

First, my father died in January, meaning, among many other things, that I was next.

Next, I stayed on for months at a job I hated. In order to prevent my head from exploding, I quit my job as a reporter on April Fool’s day. I didn’t have another job waiting, but we had a little money saved up, so I wasn’t worried at first. After all, one rich man in 10 has a satisfied mind, right?

Soon I felt out of place at home. You’d think I would’ve been happy not working in Asheville, NC, a great tourist town on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. But happiness seems to be an inside job. My 19year-old son Zach was either asleep or at work. My 16-year-old son Isaac spent his days in high school, and my wife Maria was spending all her time writing.

I found myself alone, surrounded with the uneasy feeling that not only could I not save the world, but also that the world could do just fine without me.

Which raised an unsettling question: why bother living?

Years of sports had worn out my knees, and so I was no longer a basketball player, a runner, or a hiker. My kids were hardly ever home, and therefore I was no longer a father. My wife suddenly seemed perfectly content to hole up in the basement for hours at a time, and thus I was no longer a husband. I had quit my job and was no longer a productive human being.

I was a slug in the garden of life.

And so I was not in my most rational state of mind when my wife and I drove west one county to Hot Springs in mid April to soak in the mineral baths.

We had reserved one of the most secluded tubs, because Maria was leaving in a few days to go to a Romance-writing retreat in Minnesota for the entire month of May. The opportunities for lovemaking were ticking away like the tub timer.

You ought to take some time off before you start your next job, Maria purred, gliding across the pool like a mermaid.

Uh huh, I murmured in my deepest voice, pressing a manly thigh (the only substantial muscle on my rail-like body) against her piscine body.

What are some things you’ve always wanted to do in life? she cooed, nibbling my ear.

Uh, lessee, I stalled, trying to force some blood to my brain. I dunno. Travel, write a novel, win the lottery, ride my bike cross-country.

That’s a great idea, she said, licking my shoulder. A cross-country bike trip would be perfect for you and the boys. You could have some time with Zach before he goes off to college. And Isaac needs to be doing something in the summer besides cruising around town all night.

I slid closer to her.Uh,darling,I always imagined riding cross-country with adult friends—in the fall, I said. Summers can be brutal.

She leaned against the tub, the water splashing around her provocatively. But the boys can’t go in the fall; they’ve got school. And if you guys left in June, I’d have more time to work on my book. She pressed her naked body against me.

I wanted to protest, I really did, but no blood was flowing to the parts of my brain that construct arguments. So Yes, I’ll take my 19-and 16year-old sons on a cross-country trip starting in June, giving my loving wife an extra two or three months of uninterrupted writing time while her family wheels across the flaming prairie like something out of Ezekial.

I see now that the bike trip was a last-ditch effort to convince myself that I still deserved groceries.

A man in a hot-tub suffering from mid-life frenzy was in no condition to be deciding whether to ride a heavily laden bicycle through melting asphalt with two adolescents for weeks or possibly months.

After the glow of the hot tub faded, and early realization of my promise sank in, I held out hope that the boys would not agree to be saddled with a bike trip with their old man.

My sons were not exactly nuts about cycling. In fact they didn’t ride—or even own—bikes. Zach’s idea of exercise was to pump iron in an air conditioned gym. He had graduated from high school last summer and decided to take a year off to find himself. He found himself in bed most days, buried under piles of dirty clothes, and cruising in his car with his pals most nights. We had to start charging him rent to get him to find a job.

Isaac, a sophomore in high school, had just turned 16. His life was consumed by school, driving, and his girl friend.

The boys and I had biked together exactly once, about a year before. I borrowed a couple of bikes from friends and we rode about 50 miles to the same spa where Maria would later seduce me into the Tour de Heatstroke. The boys did pretty well the first 30 miles, until we got to Doggett Mountain, a steep and relentless four-mile hill. I left them behind, rode to the top, and lay down to nap until they arrived. An old man in a pick-up woke me up when he pulled over beside me.

You all right?

Fine. Just waiting for my two sons to catch up.

All right, then.

He drove off. I dozed off again, until finally the boys appeared, pushing their bikes.

Some old man in a pick-up gave us grief, said Isaac.

What’d he say?

He said, ‘You boys ought to be ashamed of yourself. Your old man lyin’ up there asleep, and here you are walking.’

It took us all day to ride those 50 miles, and we were sore for days afterwards, so I figured they wouldn’t be interested in a much longer and harder ride.

Wrong.

I’ll go, said Zach. When Maria sold him on the idea, I was not there, so I have to take their word that she didn’t offer him an Outkast CD to sweeten the deal. At the time, his excitement struck me as merely curious. Only much later, too-many-miles-down-the-road-to-come-back later, would I find out that the main reason he wanted to go was to avoid getting a job. Ominously, Zach paid Miss Kitty $50 to tattoo his right shoulder with a snake eating its tail, thus forming a wheel, the heart of a bicycle.

Come to think of it, why didn’t I just get a tattoo as my mid-life crisis. Engrave a little rose on my shoulder like a permanent bruises because, life’s over, might as well mutilate myself, maybe pick up a biker chick down at the pool room.

After Zach signed up for the trip, he ruthlessly shamed his brother Isaac into coming along, by calling him girly-mon until pride forced him to agree. (Rule #1 of cross-country biking: Never talk a reluctant participant into joining you on an expedition to misery when you will be in their company 24/7.)

By the end of April, it was looking like I couldn’t wiggle out of this.

I consoled myself with rationalizations. I really had always wanted to ride cross country. (Why hadn’t I done it in 1976, the year Bikecentennial charted the first well-established cross-country route, and while I was racing bicycles, and in the best shape of my life? Why did I have to wait until my body was falling apart and my mind with it?)

Since ’76, the original Bikecentennial route had evolved into a well-established bike trail traveled by hundreds of cross-country cyclists. Other cross-country routes were available as well, with well-marked maps to guide the novice tourist.

The only reason that I lived to record our adventures is that I was no novice. I had been riding a bicycle since the 1950s. I still remembered my first bike ride at age six, coasting down a small hill, wobbling unsteadily, and then pedaling freely, feeling the wind in my face and the exhilarating freedom of covering ground quickly under my own power. The wheel was as magical for me as it must have seemed to that first Sumerian who rolled it down a small hill 3,000 years before Christ. I rode to grammar school and all over town until junior high and high school, where biking was not cool. By college, cycling was hip again, and I began riding sporadically. Starting in 1975, I began to ride 30 to 100 miles at a clip, and raced in 1976, the year I should have ridden across the country.

By 1998, 40 years after my first magical ride, I could still ride 30 to 50 miles on a Saturday, if I took the right drugs and stretched for hours before leaving. On the other hand, I seemed to ride less with each passing year, slipping fearfully toward flabby. I knew I was in condition to ride into the next county, maybe, but not into the next time zone, and definitely the next coast would be a stretch.

But this trip would change all that, said my mid-life logic. After all, it was still April. The boys and I had all of May to train. Surely we would work ourselves into top condition along the way, and by tour’s end, would possess the sturdy oaken thighs of long-distance cyclists.

I also wanted to spend more time with my two sons. Now that they were teenagers hanging out with their girl friends and school buddies, I didn’t see much of them. When they did stop by the house for food, wheels, or money, our conversations usually went something like this:

(Teen enters house, flops on sofa.)

Hiya, Son.

Head slowly turns in my direction. Hey.

Whatcha been doing?

Nothing.

What you got planned?

Nothing.

Where you going tonight?

Nowhere.

Who you going out with?

Nobody.

OK, then. Have fun.

Uh huh.

(Teen leaves.)

This trip would be our chance to change all that. Together, we would bike over the generation gap, holding each others’ arms aloft in victory.

I started getting nervous when Maria and the boys told all our friends that we were riding bicycles to the Pacific Ocean. I tried to plant some seeds of reality:

You know, it’s a long way out west, and we’ve only got about two months.

You know, we might not make it all the way to the Pacific.

My goal is to ride until I’m not having fun anymore. If I’m not having fun, I’ll come home.

But hedging doesn’t sound nearly as sexy as bound for the Pacific Ocean, so pretty soon I was telling the world that I was heading for the Left Coast under my own power. This was cemented by being printed in the neighborhood newsletter, splashed across the worldwide web, and spread throughout the community grapevine.

Most of my women friends seemed to like the father-son angle. Ooh, that’s so wonderful, was the typical refrain. A true bonding experience! It’ll be something you’ll always remember.

So is a hemorrhoid operation, I thought to myself. (Only later did I read that, due to the constant pressure of a bike seat against the lower regions, hemorrhoids are one of the hazards of long bike rides.)

But what I said was, Yes, it’s something I’ve always wanted to do. And I’ve lost touch with the boys recently, ever since they started drooping their pants and speaking rap.

Men who heard about our trip saw it as macho, which I kind of liked. You lucky stiff, they said. Out on the open road, mano a mano with truck drivers every day, while I’m stuck here sweating out a living.

And I thought, air conditioning. You’ll be sitting in a comfortable chair in air conditioning, while I’m hunched over a melting bike in the hot sun.

But I took a deep, manly breath and said, Yeah, it’s a real man’s adventure, that’s for sure.

By the end of April, it was settled: The wheeligans and I would spend our summer riding bikes 4,000 miles to the Pacific.

Then I started talking to people who had actually ridden across the country and realized this trip would not be about father-son bonding, noble adventures, or even riding bikes. It would be an ultra-endurance descent into the fiery bowels of Hell.

2

Remembrance of things crashed.

As April turned into May, I started worrying about riding on the high ways of America with two teenagers.

I remembered how many accidents I had while I was a young rider.

My first 10-speed bike was only two days old when I had my first crash. Riding impatiently behind a slow-moving car in a parking lot in Chapel Hill, I decided to pass on the right—just as the woman turned right in front of me. I skidded into the right rear of her car, and grabbed onto the door handle to keep from falling under the rear wheel. She dragged me for a dozen parking spaces before she noticed me clinging to the door handle, dragging my bike behind me.

During graduate school, I started riding longer distances. I didn’t wear a helmet, because I thought they were not manly enough, and they looked like a turtle on top of my head. One summer, my buddy Will and I were riding from Rocky Mount to Chapel Hill. A few miles outside of Wake Forest, a flatbed truck carrying hogsheads came up behind us on a hill. At the crest of the hill, just as the truck was passing us, a car met us in the other lane. The trucker moved back into the right lane, forcing me off the road, into a ditch, and over my handlebars. I tumbled a little and tapped my head lightly against a clay bank. Darkness descended for a few seconds, and then the world started spinning. I had to sit in the ditch for several minutes before I could stand up. I bought a turtle shell and strapped it on soon after I got home.

Reading up on touring, I learned that head injuries kill almost all the cyclists who die in crashes. If you don’t die, you may still get headaches, dizziness, loss of coordination, temporary loss of memory, convulsions, vomiting, foaming at the mouth, and unconsciousness. Maybe death’s not so bad after all.

A couple of years after I bought my first helmet, I raced in the Tour de Moore, a 100-mile road race held in Southern Pines, NC. There were more than 100 racers, and this was my first time racing in a large pack. Hiding from the wind behind dozens of riders, I was sucked along at speeds faster than I had ever felt. It was thrilling, but full of hidden dangers. Just before the pack got to a turn, I looked down to put my water bottle back in its holder. When I looked up, I was about to ram into the bikes that had suddenly slowed in front of me. I grabbed my front brakes, which sent me flying over my handlebars. I landed hard on my head and back, breaking my helmet, spraining my thumb and knocking the wind out of me. I skidded along the pavement, peeling all the skin off my right butt cheek, spine and shoulders. Dozens of riders went down with me, causing a huge pile-up. Riders behind us skidded and crashed into us as we lay on the asphalt. In seconds, everyone jumped back on their bikes and took off again. Dazed, I jumped back on my bike and sprinted after them, bleeding and bruised. After 30 miles, tired and discouraged, I stopped at the women’s finish line and waited for Maria to race over and take me home.

My helmet saved my life, but would my sons be as lucky if they crashed? I needed assurance that teenagers could survive a trip like this.

Early in May, I called my old cycling buddies, Jim White and Belinda Thomas, two very strong riders who had ridden from Virginia to Oregon back in the ‘70s.

The boys and I are going to ride cross country this summer, I informed Jim excitedly.

There was a noticeable pause.

I thought you had a bum knee.

As long as I take plenty of drugs, it doesn’t hurt.

He laughed. Maybe you should buy stock in some of those drugs companies before you leave. That might offset the money you’ll be spending on their products.

Very funny. You think we can make it?

Another overly long silence. "Have y’all been riding any?

I’ve been riding some on the weekends. I didn’t bother to tell him that my last ride was several weeks ago.

I don’t know, Jim said. We were riding quite a bit before we did it, and it was still hard as hell. Quite a lot of work, in fact. And we were in our twenties.

Hmm, I thought. Jim’s a strong rider. Hard for him would be cement for us.

To help me discourage the boys from this foolishness, as Jim called our plans, he brought over the first weekend in May his slide show of his cross-country trip. I was dismayed to see that these young studs looked tired even in the early photos.I thought we’d never get across Virginia, Jim said, showing a picture of his riding companion lying prostrate in the tall weeds beside a two-lane blacktop.

It got worse. (Click) A photo of a bloody cyclist lying in a heap in a ditch. Here’s where a pit bull ripped a hunk of meat out of Steve’s thigh and dragged him off his bike, Jim said. The boys and I glanced at each other. Pit bulls!

(Click) A picture of a bewildered Steve rising algae-covered from a pond. Damn logging truck ran us off the road, and there was no shoulder. Logging trucks!

(Click) A Spandex-covered thigh sticking out of a writhing mound of bugs. Killer grasshoppers in east Colorado. Killer hoppers!

(Click) A bear as big as a Volkswagen dragging off a saddlebag into the darkness. I told Steve the bears would get our food if we didn’t hang it up. Bears!

Jim was not the only cyclist with horror stories. Everybody seemed to have a story about a line of cyclists flattened by a semi, cyclists flying over their handlebars after hitting a drain grate, jiggling with convulsions from heat stroke or getting beaned by a tire iron in remote areas where good ‘ol boys married their close kin and used cyclists for target practice.

I got to West Texas in April, and what with El Nino and all, the winds were so bad that I just couldn’t ride at all, said a cycling pal who had just returned from a West-to-East tour. I tried to give up and pay somebody to carry me out of there, but they said the wind was too bad for driving. One gust picked up an RV and threw it over the guardrail like a scrap of tinfoil. I wouldn’t recommend my trip to anyone.

Others nodded knowingly and predicted that it was not the bicycling itself that would get us, but the combination of camping, traffic and heat. The first couple weeks you’re in agony from sore muscles, so you don’t really notice the fatigue, said one rider who had retired after attempting his transcontinental tour. It’s too hot to sleep, so you don’t recover at night, and having motorists buzz right by you over and over sort of gradually wears you down. But it’s the heat that really gets you.

The heat. I read a book about a group of cyclists touring India. After days of suffocating heat and humidity, they flew into rages at innocent bystanders when things went wrong. Some heat-inflicted cyclists rip off their clothes and run naked down the highway. Others ride off cliffs after hallucinating a turn onto a side road that never existed. Some boil over with rage, bludgeon their companions with a pump, and ride off into the distance to shrivel and die.

Touring books warned of the dangers of hypothermia as well. A sweaty cyclist riding up into the cool hills may think he is headed for refreshment, but when a sudden thunderstorm brings cold rains that chill him quickly to the bone, he may take off his helmet to catch the baseball-sized hail falling all around him, or he may try to ride his bike backward down a mountainside.

It only took a little reading about other peoples’ tours to realize how vulnerable cyclists are to the dangers of the world. I had visions of truckers hopped up on amphetamines, swerving their big rigs to squash us like possums before continuing on their way with a chuckle. I imagined teen hoodlums forcing us off steep, narrow roads with their jacked-up pickup trucks. Cyclists could be flattened by vehicles, melted by the heat, vaporized by lightning, drowned by flash floods, buffeted by winds and jailed by beady eyed lawmen.

I knew about cops with an attitude. I was riding to Atlantic Beach in the mid-70’s, sporting long hair and a full beard. Tired of being forced off the road by motorists, and having heard from my law student wife that bikes enjoyed the full rights to the road, I decided to ride the whole trip in the middle of the right lane. Make motorists pass me like they would a regular old car. The plan worked fairly well