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

A note on the chapter titles: Though The Appalachians, The River, and The Ozarks all technically exist in the South, the author has given them their own chapters due to their distinct terrains and cultures.
Names of some of the subjects have been changed per their request.

Copyright 2020 by Rickey Gates.
Photographs 2020 by Rickey Gates.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

ISBN 978-1-4521-8088-5 (hc)
ISBN 978-1-4521-8160-8 (epub,mobi)

Design by Jon H. Glick.

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To Lizfor giving me something to run toward.

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 waterenough 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 Im going to run across the country, from sea to shining sea, as Ive so boldly proclaimed, this is where it must beginmy shoes sinking into the sand at Folly Beach, South Carolina, where the towns 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 presidents historic win at Plan Ba 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 piatas 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 didnt 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 piatas 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 wasnt 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 lifes 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 Ive 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 lifethe 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 dayspecifically, 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.