The time I tried to bike across the US and met an angel

In 2007 I was finishing up the Vilar arts management fellowship at The Kennedy Center and blatantly disregarded the advice of our mentor Michael Kaiser who said whatever you do, don’t leave here and go take a backpacking trip, get straight to work.

I didn’t backpack, I bicycled. I don’t remember where the idea came from or why I thought it was a good one, but somehow I convinced Jeremy that what we should do is get a couple of long haul bikes and some bike maps and bike along the Underground Railroad Trail, but backwards, from Niagara, NY to Alabama. In August.

We acquired all the stuff, panniers, trailers, camping gear, bike wear, water backpacks, cookstoves, gloves, sunglasses. This was before sat nav was a thing, no cell phones, no chargers. We didn’t even have a speaker.

Did I mention I had never long haul biked anywhere. Never even biked more than ten miles. I don’t know why it seemed like a good idea. I like a challenge?

But we had fun. For two weeks, we biked across NY and Pennsylvania and Ohio and camped and stayed in a couple of funny bicycle friendly B&Bs. We met so many nice people, everyone wanted to talk to us as we bumbled our bike loads into various roadside restaurants and campgrounds.

It was fun until it wasn’t. As we crossed the state line into Kentucky, the temperature went up and it stayed there. And it turned out the green lines on the maps we were following didn’t mean tree lined, they meant flat.

Suddenly we were waking up at 6AM to get the bulk of our riding done before noon so we could hunker down in some shade. We booked one night into an America’s Best Value for $59 a night, well above our allotted budget but it was just so hot. The next day was forecast to be full sun and 97 degrees. We wanted to get up early and pedal to the next stop, a fifty mile ride.

So, okay. We load up the water containers, and fill up our camelbacks and head off, and it’s hot before we even start. Really hot and we’re pedaling in straight 90 degrees and no shade and it’s brutal and we’re pedaling and then I started to feel a little dizzy and stopped my bike short and sort of fell off it into the swale on the side of the road, but not before Jeremy crashed into the back of me. I turned around just as a truck goes whizzing past his head where he had fallen. The truck horn blared as it swerved out of the way of him.

We sort of sat there for a moment before he said wow, your color is really bad, and he poured some of the last of our water on my head and neck and we looked around at the middle of nowhere we were in, twenty miles in either direction of a town and honestly didn’t know what to do.

At that moment a pick up truck slowed down before stopping and reversing back to us. An old man leaned out and asked if we were okay. I was pretty overheated and couldn’t say much. Jeremy told him we were in a pretty tough spot. The man offered to put our bikes and trailer in the back of his truck and drive us to the next town and make sure we got checked in to a hotel.

He blasted the air conditioning and said he stopped because he couldn’t imagine what any dang fool would be doing stopped out on the side of the road like we were. He drove us to the first hotel but he didn’t like that they didn’t have a pool because he wanted me to get my body as cool as quickly as possible and drove us to three hotels before we found one and then he helped us check in so I could go change directly and get in the pool.

I never got his name. His number. Nothing. All I know is I do believe we met an angel in a pick up truck that day in Kentucky. And there’s nothing anyone could say to change that.

We bailed on the rest of our bike trip and rented a Uhaul to get our bikes down to our southern destination where we sat on the beach and considered ourselves lucky.