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Elizabeth McGowan - Outpedaling the Big C: My Healing Cycle Across America

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Elizabeth McGowan Outpedaling the Big C: My Healing Cycle Across America

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Proceed as the way opens is how William Least Heat-Moon put it in his book, River Horse. The line becomes a sort of mantra for Pulitzer Prize-winner Elizabeth McGowan, a melanoma survivor. Having been given a five-year clean bill of health, McGowan decides to bicycle all 4,000 or so miles from Americas west to east coast. For her, there are multiple reasons for the exhausting trip. She wants to help other melanoma victims, and sets out to use her many miles to raise funds for cancer research in southeastern Wisconsin, where she was treated.

She also wants to better understand her late father, who died of melanoma at the age of 44, when Elizabeth was just fifteen. She rides through small towns and places that she visited as a kid with her dad, mom, and siblings. Her long, nearly 90-day cycling trip across the U.S. continent not only showcases people affected by cancer and more than willing to help promote cancer research, but it personally brings McGowan closer to her father.

Recalling him at different places and times during his short life, she begins to realize that she owes directly to him the ease with which she meets people across her long transcontinental route. She comes to see that, like her father, she is funny, and has the dedication and resilience needed to take on and complete major projects. At the end of her bicycle ride, McGowans mother shows her, for the first time, letters about her father received after his untimely death. They open her eyes to the fact that she, too, can move through life with gusto whenever she makes sure that the way opens.

Outpedaling the Big C is an anything-but-typical, exhilarating journey story revealing how immersion in the natural world is a balm for the wounded.

Elizabeth McGowan: author's other books


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OUTPEDALING THE BIG C Pulitzer Prize Winner ELIZABETH MCGOWAN Copyright - photo 1

OUTPEDALING
THE BIG C

Pulitzer Prize Winner ELIZABETH MCGOWAN Copyright Elizabeth McGowan 2020 All - photo 2

Pulitzer Prize Winner

ELIZABETH MCGOWAN

Copyright Elizabeth McGowan, 2020.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by electronic means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote passages in a review.

Cover Design and Photography, Interior Design, and Photo Insert Design by Dani Williams

Author Photo by David Watkins

Many Insert Photos taken by Marny A. Malin

978-1-61088-514-0 (HC)

978-1-61088-515-7 (PB)

978-1-61088-516-4 (e-book)

978-1-61088-517-1 (PDF)

Outpedaling the Big C My Healing Cycle Across America - image 3

Published by Bancroft Press: Books that Enlighten

410-358-0658

P.O. Box 65360, Baltimore, MD 21209

www.bancroftpress.com

Printed in the United States of America

OUTPEDALING
THE BIG C

MY HEALING CYCLE ACROSS AMERICA

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1
THE WAY WEST: What Have I Bitten Off?

CHAPTER 2
OREGON: Dipping into the Pacific

CHAPTER 3
The Intergenerational Beast

CHAPTER 4
OREGON: Resounding Shots

CHAPTER 5
Testing, Testing: That Guinea Pig Feeling

CHAPTER 6
OREGON: Banged Up in MonmouthAgain

CHAPTER 7
Capturing That Smile

CHAPTER 8
OREGON: The Ultimate Yogi

CHAPTER 9
The Gift of the Country

CHAPTER 10
EASTERN OREGON: An Easy-Bake Oven

CHAPTER 11
Bonding Over Baseball

CHAPTER 12
IDAHO: Taming Whats Wild

CHAPTER 13
The Relentless Stalker

CHAPTER 14
IDAHO: Lost and Found

CHAPTER 15
An Empty Ambulance

CHAPTER 16
MONTANA: Where Theres Smoke, Theres Fire

CHAPTER 17
Yellowstone Never Disappoints

CHAPTER 18
WYOMING: Buttes and Bathtub Rings

CHAPTER 19
Choosing My Next Poison

CHAPTER 20
NORTHERN COLORADO: Opulence and Natural Riches

CHAPTER 21
You Call This a Cure?

CHAPTER 22
EASTERN COLORADO: From the Rockies to the Grain Range

CHAPTER 23
Georgia On My Mind

CHAPTER 24
WESTERN KANSAS: More Than Wheat and Meat

CHAPTER 25
Boots on the Ground

CHAPTER 26
EASTERN KANSAS: Never-ending Kindness

CHAPTER 27
Back With a Vengeance

CHAPTER 28
MISSOURI: An Ozarkian Odyssey, Oh My!

CHAPTER 29
Excising Invasives

CHAPTER 30
ILLINOIS: The Big Muddy, Free Pie, and a Ferry Ride

CHAPTER 31
What Fueled His Fire?

CHAPTER 32
WESTERN KENTUCKY: Lincoln and the Salt of the Earth

CHAPTER 33
No Time for Goodbye

CHAPTER 34
APPALACHIA: Hallelujah Night in the Bible Belt

CHAPTER 35
My Guide to Agency

CHAPTER 36
WESTERN VIRGINIA: Sniffing the AtlanticAlmost

CHAPTER 37
Oceans and Flags

CHAPTER 38
EASTERN VIRGINIA: Pedaling Toward Victory

To Don,
whose unwavering faith in me sometimes feels undeserved.
And to my father,
who I wish could read these words now that I know him so much better.

Absorbing a cancer diagnosis from a doctor feels the same as tumbling to the ground from a bicycle, smacking the unforgiving asphalt. Its scary and hurts like hell. You can choose to lie there in a dejected heap, waiting until an eighteen-wheeler squashes you into roadkill. Or, you can pick yourself up and get on with living. I chose to climb back on the bike.

I n the spring of 2000, I was thirty-nine and had reached a major milestone: five consecutive years of cancer-free living. My oncologist in Wisconsin had just given me a clean bill of health after an exhausting eleven-year escapade with an insidious type of cancer called melanoma. Most people know melanoma as a skin cancer that can be tamed if caught early enough. What they dont know is how deadly it can be once it penetrates the skin. It will kill 7,230 men and women nationwide in 2019, according to the latest estimate from the American Cancer Society. More than 96,480 new melanomas will have been diagnosed that same year.

For years, I had been toying with the idea of cycling solo from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean. Now, I had a legitimate excuse. But I wanted my transcontinental journey to be more meaningful than simply checking off an item on a bucket list. I envisioned my undertaking as a fundraiser for cancer research in southeastern Wisconsin, where medical specialists at Waukesha Memorial Hospital had labored so diligently to keep me alive.

My ride was also about resilience. I wanted people to see that it is possible to survive the frightening plunge into the black hole of cancer and emerge with renewed physical and mental vigor. That meant being forthright and adept enough to talk about cancer in small-town diners, corner stores, health clinics, campgrounds, and peoples houses as I explored new territory. For a few shining moments, I wanted to galvanize folks across a horizontal sliver of this glorious, sublime, complicated, and often frustrating country that we all call home.

Why would an ordinary recreational cyclist bother to devote an extraordinary effort to engaging in daily conversations about this disease? As corny as it might sound, I believe that most people want to be part of the greater good. Sometimes you have to be the one who holds the door ajar. Deep down, we all know that nobody gets out of here alive. But I think most of us have the urge to make our stay, however brief, somewhat memorable.

Another reason I was inspired to pedal coast-to-coast was to pay tribute to the spirit of my father, Ronald McGowan. I wanted that time on the bike to give me the courage to delve into the pain of his death twenty-four years earlier. Melanoma, the same type of cancer that had wrapped its voracious tentacles around my skin, lymph system, lungs, liver, and abdomen, had dogged my father for decades. It devoured him whole in October 1976, a month after he turned forty-four. I was just fifteen. When I received my first melanoma diagnosis as a new college graduate, was it any wonder I figured his fate was mine too?

My route included several places where my father and I had spent time together. I wanted my journey to be cathartic so I could understand the complex person I believed he was. My childhood memories seemed too one-dimensional and superficial. I remembered his charm, quick temper, dedication to teaching, and how he minimized being consumed by a disease with no cure. I wanted to expose the connective tissue that bound those disparate pieces. This pursuit would allow me to seek my own truths about my father because I realized that I could never know who I was if I didnt know him. What surprised me is how my journey also let me dig deeply into my grief over his death, deep sorrow I was hardly aware I had been lugging around since high school.

I named my cross-country endeavor Heals on Wheels because the rhyme was catchy and the title was succinct. As my plan took shape, everything seemed perfectly aligned. I had my health, the luxury of time, and the proverbialand mandatoryfire in my belly. Every cell in my body was itching to go. Before I could settle into the next stage of my lifewhatever that might beI absolutely had to ride that bike. I outfitted my bike, fleshed out a fundraising proposal, and settled on a sensible west-to-east route.

Then, I started pedaling.

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