Weber - Life is a wheel: love, death, etc., and a bike ride across America

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For Andrew and Sharon Joseph, Rebecca and Julia Rohrer, Hayley Gibson, and Jacob Weber. Keep pedaling. Wear a helmet.

L ike you, Im growing old. Its harder to remember things, especially good things, the things I want to remember, not so much because my mind is diminishing (hold the jokes, okay?), but because they happened longer ago than they ever did before.

Days seem more alike than they used to, probably because there is an ever-mounting total of them and its hard to keep them distinct. This happens to everyone, I know, but I think its worse for people who work at a newspaper, as I do, because our work product greets us each day, steady as a metronome, with the date plastered across the top of the front page. Tick. Tick. Its relentlessMonday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc., week after week; July 9, July 10, July 11... 2010, 2011, 2012.... Egads. How long can this go on?

This week is my twenty-fifth anniversary at the New York Times . Twenty-five years! And, as it happens, for the last three of them Ive been writing obituaries. Every day, thinking about... well, you know.

So, heres what Im doing about it. Eighteen years ago this summer, I rode a bicycle, solo, across the United States and wrote about it for the newspaper. Starting next weekend, when I fly from New York to Portland, Oregon, and turn back around on two wheels, Ill be trying to do it again.

I say trying. This is not modest so much as careful, certainly a function of being fifty-seven, my age now, and not thirty-nine, as I was when I embarked the last time, blithely certain of myself and without any of the qualms that are now weighing down the saddlebags in my mind. In short, I had no concept of the length and arduousness of what lay in front of me. Every challengeclimbing the Rockies, for example, or persisting through the shadeless, sunbaked plains of South Dakota, or rattling over the cold-heave cracks along highways in Idaho and Minnesota that made riding a bike as comfortable as sliding down a miles-long washboard on my asswas essentially a surprise, and perseverance is, after all, easier for the poorly informed. This time I know exactly how hard Im going to be working. Does that make me nervous? Sure.

Excited, too. Among other things, assuming I do persevere, Ill be spending a summer and part of a fall largely outdoors, something New Yorkers in general (and obituary writers in particular) rarely get to do. But mostly itll be a chance to relivewell, maybe thats the wrong wordto revisit an adventure Id thought, at the time, was a once-only, last-chance, now-or-never thing.

I suppose I can conclude that Im younger than I thought Id be at this age. Still, a lot has happened since I last did this, and I expect the trip will give me the opportunity to mull things over. Experiential bookends like this encourage you to take stock, dont they? Add up the life details?

Off the top of my head, heres a quick summary: Both of my parents died. My brother had a son. I survived some bad episodes of depression and anxiety, but eventually ended twenty years of therapy and felt better for it. I moved to Chicago and back to New York. I spent four years as a theater critic. I wrote a booktwo, actually, if you count the short one for kids. Much to my surprise, I developed an affinity for country music. I traveled on a bicycle in Costa Rica, New Zealand, Italy, Ireland, France, and Vietnamwhere I was arrested and spent a night in jail. A handful of sincere and serious love affairs began and ended. I renovated my apartment. Twice.

So what do you think? How am I doing?

Partly because of my job, partly by inclination, Im far better traveled within the United States than outside it. Ive actually crossed the country a number of times by means other than a bicycle, the first time in 1973 as a hitchhiker, just for the hell of it, after Id dropped out of college. In 2006, while I was working on a book about umpires in professional baseball, I drove from Florida to Arizona during spring training and, when the major league teams (and the umpires) dispersed to start the season, back to New York. Not long ago, I went to a conference in California and, instead of flying back, I rented a car and retraced much of the bicycle route I took in 1993. One satisfying highlight: the Bates Motel, in Vale, Oregon, near the Idaho border, where I couldnt resist staying overnight back thenI even took a shower!was still there. (Need I explain to younger readers that a fictional Bates MotelAnthony Perkins, proprietorwas the scene of the crime in Alfred Hitchcocks Psycho ?) The cross-country trek has always appealed to me because as a New Yorker with a New Yorkers biasand even worse, a ManhattanitesI find much of America exotic.

After all, New York may be the nations greatest city, but it isnt representative. You dont need me to count the differences, but an especially pertinent one is that New York is a vertical place and America isnt. To travel on the ground from sea to sea is to have a prolonged encounter with its horizontality.

Even in a car, each crossing of a state border is a singular triumph because the passage through the previous state has been earned. At ground level you measure a states actual breadth with your tires, you roll over its topography and live in its weather. When you click past the far border, you put the experience of the state in your pocket for safekeeping and reference. Of course, crossing the country by bicycle is to feel these things in the extreme, and the absorption of long distances on the road has always felt, to me, like the qualifying exam for some enhanced form of citizenship. Even if you wanted to, you couldnt really avoid landmarks and cultural shrineson my last trip across I hit Yellowstone National Park; Little Big Horn; Devils Tower, the remarkable rock formation in Wyoming that was featured in Close Encounters of the Third Kind ; the Badlands; the Judy Garland museum in her hometown, Grand Rapids, Minnesota; De Smet, South Dakota, where Laura Ingalls Wilder spent her teenage years and set five books of her Little House series; Highway 61, the Minnesota highway along Lake Superior that inspired a Bob Dylan song; the Mt Shasta restaurant on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where much of the great Otto Preminger movie Anatomy of a Murder , the forerunner of so many courtroom thrillers, was filmed; Niagara Falls; the Finger Lakes; Cooperstown, New York, home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame & Museum on the shores of Lake Otsego, a.k.a. Glimmerglass, the region inhabited by James Fenimore Coopers Deerslayer; and Hyde Park, Franklin Roosevelts hometownnot to mention the Bates Motel.