Leon McCarron - The Road Headed West: A 6,000-Mile Cycling Odyssey through North America

Copyright Leon McCarron, 2014

Published by arrangement with Summersdale Publishers Ltd.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Summersdale Publishers

Cover photo credit by Leon McCarron

Map and illustrations by Diana Heaney

Permission to use excerpts from Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck, published by Penguin, copyright 2001, has been sought.

Print ISBN: 978-1-63220-644-2

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63220-812-5

To Mum, for always wholeheartedly encouraging and supporting my adventures in life, even when they seem remarkably silly.

To Grandpa Jack, for teaching me how to appreciate the outdoors, and for showing me what it means to be a true gentleman. I think you would have enjoyed this journey.

CONTENTS

AUTHORS NOTE

The following story has been written using a mixture of memories, journal entries, photographs and video footage. On occasion I have seen fit to change the names of people and places to provide anonymity. From time to time I have transposed an event from one geographical location to another to help with the narrative flow, and sometimes I have moved a character in time and space to do the same job. I have even, once or twice, combined the attributes of two or more people that I met, in the hope that the created composite character does justice to each of the original individual personalities and helps portray their impact on me, and my story, as clearly as possible.

There are two incidents in this book that I feel are of a particularly sensitive nature, and for these events I have muddied the waters of detail even further.

I hope you will forgive these liberties. There may also be a few downright mistakes in my recollections, and for those too I apologise. For better or worse, however, this is my story of spending a summer cycling across America, told as well and as accurately as I can tell it.

PROLOGUE

It seemed a terrible shame to meet my end in Iowa; I couldnt imagine anywhere more disappointing to die. If I were a betting man Id have reckoned on the most dangerous thing in this state being sheer boredom. Corn, beans, corn, beans a cow corn, beans the scenery hadnt changed for weeks and I was slowly dissolving into stimulation-deprived madness. The only other feature even remotely worthy of note was the headwinds, but even these were more nuisance than hazard. My current predicament, then attempting to escape through cornfields from a gun-toting alcohol-soaked rancher was not something I expected.

I squeezed the bike through a small gap left by the partially closed garage door and jumped on. Standing on the pedals my feet automatically began to pump rhythmically; by now an action as natural as breathing. Dirt and gravel groaned underneath the tyres and my luggage bumped along behind in counterpoint. I wasnt even midway on this journey across the USA by bicycle, and it seemed terribly unfair that such a (seemingly) harmless invitation to stay with a rancher could have gone so wrong. But wrong it had gone, drastically so a steady decline in civility had reached its lowest ebb when alcohol and madness were poorly mixed and I had been led to an outhouse full of guns. One was pointed at my head. Seconds after that Id panicked and pushed the owner of the gun into a shed, closing the heavy lock as he tumbled inside.

I was riding away now as hard as I could, the trailer that trundled along after the bike serving as a constant reminder of just how slow and vulnerable I was. Light had long since faded from the day but the moon picked out features here and there, hinting at a bigger world beyond my narrow vision. To my left and right flat cornfields extended for miles, broken only occasionally by a small clump of trees assembled around each homestead.

Looking over my shoulder, there appeared in the distance behind the inevitable headlights of a large truck, beams bouncing wildly. It was still a way away, but I knew already the details a grey Dodge Viper; inside a bald man with a goatee driving, peering into the darkness through eyes infused with a crate of Bud Light. He would be carrying at least one firearm, and until recently he had been lying on the floor of the shed into which I pushed him.

Ahead was the only possible route to freedom yet ironically, ridiculously, this direction promised something perhaps even more dangerous than a drunken rancher with a rifle disorder. Up ahead, stretching from dirt floor to brooding sky was a violently rotating tornado, the best part of half a mile wide. A deathly silence surrounded it. Like the crashing of a huge wave or the collapsing of a skyscraper, the movement seemed to happen in slow motion and I could only tell its true vigour by the way it decimated the landscape. The whole scene was ludicrous, like a Hollywood B-movie.

I thought briefly of how one day I might tell people about this and few would believe me. A group of trees swayed, snapped and were swallowed like twigs. Next a small lean-to for livestock crumbled, and this too was sucked up in a heap of corrugated iron and bricks. I was sure I saw sheep bleating their way into the abyss. A similar fate (with only slightly less bleating) was promised to me if I kept going, now just a mile away.

This was not what I had expected when I set out to cycle across America. In fact, I had actively hoped to avoid anything even remotely similar to this. I was a kid, barely twenty-three years old, off in search of adventure. Well, here it was, served American style big, brash, balls-out. As well as being afraid, a large part of me was annoyed my journey to this point had been full of the most wonderful people I could have hoped to meet, all going out of their way to be kind and hospitable. It seemed unfair that one boozed-up idiot could ruin that.

Despite it all, even despite the intense fear, there was an odd, hard-to-pin-down buzz about the scenario.

In a strange sense, I was feeling more alive than ever.

PART ONE BEGINNINGS

Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open road,

Healthy, free, the world before me,

The long brown path before me leading me wherever I choose.

Walt Whitman