Cross Country: A 3,700-Mile Run to Explore Unseen America

By Rickey Gates

In 2017, professional runner Rickey Gates ran 3,700 miles across the continental United States with just a small backpack and an anthropologist's curiosity to discover the divided America in which we live.

In the book Cross Country, Gates documents this epic experience from South Carolina to San Francisco, sharing first-person essays, interviews, and over 200 photographs of the ordinary and extraordinary people and places he saw along the way.

While Gates delivers unparalleled insight into the extreme athletic and mental challenge of this transcontinental run, running is not the core focus of Cross Country—it is a story of the remarkable people across the United States who we would otherwise never meet.

• A photographic travelogue that follows along Rickey Gates's run across the country, and the individuals who live in it
• Filled with portraits, landscapes, and collages of towns and communities that most people have never seen
• From South Carolina to San Francisco, the five-month-long run covers 3,700 miles of hiking trails, rivers, and roads.

Gates slept in the rain, carried meager possessions on his back, ran through the night, endured mental and physical challenges, and survived on a staple of gas station hot dogs and Pop Tarts.

Delivering a patchwork portrait of America, Gates's captivating story captures the spirit of our country—that grit, determination, and compassion are qualities that can unite us all.

• Perfect book for runners, hikers, and lovers of the outdoors, as well as fans of travelogues, photography, and photo-journalism
• A great pick for those who loved Humans of New York by Brandon Stanton, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey by Rinker Buck, and A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson.
• A unique perspective of the United States

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chronicle Books Digital
• Release date: Apr 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781452181608

Rickey Gates

Rickey Gates is a professional runner. He has run in races on all seven continents and has traveled to 47 countries. He lives between Aspen, Colorado and Oakland, California with his partner Liz and a motorcycle dubbed the Freedom Machine.

Book preview

THE BEGINNING

This story starts off on a beach, sad and lonely.

I think that this is how I wanted it to start. Or this is just how it has to start. My wishes no longer have any bearing on this precise moment. I have only my actions and their consequences to thank or to blame now.

I barely set foot in the water—enough to wet the sole of my shoe, but not enough to actually get my feet wet. I hate the beach. I hate wet shoes. And more than both of those, I hate wet beach sand in my shoes. But, if I’m going to run across the country, from sea to shining sea, as I’ve so boldly proclaimed, this is where it must begin—my shoes sinking into the sand at Folly Beach, South Carolina, where the town’s welcome sign informed me that this is The Edge of America. Folly.

I stood there, sinking slowly into the sand with the far-reaching Atlantic Ocean spread out before me. Behind me is America. All of it. Unsure if that sprawling mass of people and earth was pushing me away or pulling me in, I did what I thought I was supposed to do and reviewed the life events and thought processes that brought me here.

FIVE MONTHS EARLIER I woke up with a hangover and Donald Trump as our newly elected president. Both were painful and real. Only twelve hours earlier, Liz and I were prematurely and erroneously celebrating the first female president’s historic win at Plan B—a gay bar in downtown Madison, Wisconsin, where Liz was in her final year of a three-year MFA program and I was figuring out ways to continue avoiding ever getting a real job. With balloons and streamers and clownish Trump piñatas to be busted open when victory was announced, it was meant to be one of the better election night parties in a town that prides itself for its progressive politics. But as the night dragged on, one state after another informed us not only that Hillary Clinton was not going to be the first female president but that we really didn’t know the country that surrounded us. Shock, anger, sadness, and confusion began to reign, and Liz and I found ourselves to be the only two people dancing. It was all we could do as the piñatas remained intact. We went home as Wisconsin was being called for Trump.

I was managing my depression rather poorly. I neither bothered to conceal it nor did I make any effort to get to the bottom of my sadness. Maybe Madison was to blame, and Liz and her graduate school ambitions that had kept me here. Maybe it was the idea that my country and neighbors voted for something so obviously wretched and disgusting. Deep down though, I knew that Madison, Liz, Clinton, and Trump would not have solved any of my problems. I would have still only seen what Wisconsin wasn’t rather than what it was. I would have still resented Liz for dragging us here. I would have still been thirty-six years old, aging out of a niche sport, where I was barely making enough money to pay my half of the rent.

I shuffled from the bedroom into the living room where, just beyond the front windows, the morning traffic was well underway, rattling the thin, old glass. I stood before a display case mounted on the opposite wall containing evidence of my life’s ambitions over the past fifteen years. Two hundred and eight little jam jars of dirt and sand lined the shelves, each meticulously labeled with the place where I had collected them. The lot of them spanned seven continents and over thirty countries.

MALLORCA, MADEIRA, MCMURDO Repetition has long been at the center of my own personal awareness. To collect and catalog the earth that I’ve encountered from my travels around the world is to give it life beyond the brief moment I tread upon it.

LAGO GREY, PLAYA ESCONDIDA, MONT VENTOUX From the initial moment of realizing a new location to selecting the dirt to transporting it across land and ocean to the labeling and displaying of the collection, the project created its own form of meditative nostalgia for a place and the person I was at that moment.

THE RIVER THAMES, THE AMAZON, THE NILE As both record and shrine to a former life of wanderlust and curiosity, my collection of dirt sat before me, reminding me of all the places where I would have rather been. Absent from the shelf was the one place where I actually was. Whatever. It was outside.

SKAALA, SORRENTO, SAN SEBASTIAN My hangover and I continued on to my desk where a stack of race numbers sat, awaiting inspiration. Dating back over twenty years, the bibs invoked a life of races on all seven continents. As with my collection of dirt, they served as a reminder of the person I was during certain moments in my life—the skinny high school kid trying to break eighteen minutes in the 5K, the waiter trying to make the US Mountain Running Team, the dishwasher at the South Pole competing in the 2.2-mile Race Around the World, or a barely sponsored athlete trying desperately to remain relevant.

8/19/12: GRINTOVEC, SLOVENIA 12 kilometers (2,000 meters of climbing). 1st. 1:12:47.

8/7/13: CANADIAN DEATH RACE, ALBERTA 125 kilometers. 1st. 12:07:40. Course record.

9/12/11: WORLD MOUNTAIN RUNNING CHAMPIONSHIPS, SIERRE, SWITZERLAND 12 kilometers. 11th place. 47:19.

From alongside the pile of bibs, I pulled a small notebook closer and opened it. For the past month, every day since I announced that I would be running across the country, I committed myself to one drawing per day—specifically, a map of the contiguous United States done from memory. The repetition and routine forced me to reckon with my lack of understanding and knowledge of the country I call home. The number of states varied from less than forty to over sixty. The Four Corners sometimes only contained three; Cape Cod, the Chesapeake Bay, and Puget Sound were routinely eliminated. Florida was all sorts of different dangles. Missouri and Indiana frequently disappeared. In one map, Texas dominated over half the country.

Following a night filled with television images of red and blue electoral maps, I was confident that I would put together one of my more accurate maps, but also fairly certain that knowing the shape of the country meant little in terms of actually understanding the country. I flipped to the next blank page and set the point of my pen down on the top left corner. It traveled down the Washington and Oregon coast, bulging out along the central coast of California and down to