In June 1974, the author (left) and his brother, Joel, are about to depart on their first
bicycling trip from their home in Grand Rapids, Ohio, to South Dakota and back.
Two teens' bike trips across the Heartland recalled:
You never forget how, but sometimes you forget why
by Jeffrey Yeager In the summer of 1974, at the audacious ages of 18 and 16, my brother and I took off on our Raleigh 10-speeds to explore the American road. With the Allman Brothers "Ramblin' Man" playing on the eight-track in our minds, the world was ours to devour.
To say that we considered ourselves invincible is an understatement. Our young minds were crammed only
with notions of high adventure, rowdy times and pubescent fantasies. The flame that was ignited by that first 3,200-mile sojourn from our Ohio home to the Black Hills of South Dakota and back again would burn for many years to come.
On summer vacations throughout high school and college we individually and together bicycled nearly 30,000 miles, crossing the Great Plains 11 times, and eventually cycling the length of the Continental Divide
from Mexico to Canada, among other feats. We experienced the impetuous '70s firsthand, roaming the open road based more on which way the wind was blowing than on any set itinerary. Those were heady times, and those road trips changed our lives forever or at least launched us into adulthood.
But coming of age in the 1970s struck us as anything but exciting at the time. We regretted having missed
out on the 1960s and felt that ours was simply an in-between decade lacking the flare of the '60s and with emerging trends like disco unlikely to have legs going into the '80s. It struck us that in the 1960s things were happening all around you, but by the '70s you needed to go out and make things happen or risk Thoreau's curse: "a life of quiet desperation."
So each summer we loaded up our pannier bags, confident in our ability to live on a budget of just $3 per
day, and cycled off across the farm fields of Ohio, leaning into the pedals as we pushed west toward the Mississippi and eventually toward the shadowy blue outlines of the Rockies on the distant horizon.
That first trip to South Dakota made us realize that travel is really more about the process of getting somewhere than the destination itself. And that's why we fell in love with bicycle travel and why, to this day,
all other types of vacations seem somehow unfulfilling. It was the days we spent cycling across the Midwest rather than passing through in the middle of the night as on family vacations by car that we came to appreciate travel itself.
Adventures we had and lessons we learned. There was the dusty pool hall in South Dakota where we shared whisky straight out of a bottle with decedents of American Indians who fought in the first battle of
Wounded Knee in 1890, and who themselves clashed in the second battle of Wounded Knee only a year before our trip.
And I still love telling the story of sleeping under the stars on a golf course in St. Cloud, Minnesota waking at dawn to a sensation best described as having all of your internal organs simultaneously rupture in a massive but oddly painless hemorrhage. It seems the automatic sprinklers popped out of the ground and
turned on at dawn, including the one hidden under my abdomen as I slept peacefully on my stomach.
Under the heading of "young and stupid," I cringe when I think about the moonlit night we attempted to bicycle across the Mackinac Bridge despite multiple warning signs prohibiting pedestrians and nonmotorized vehicles. Stubborn in our resolve to bicycle every inch of the trip (and bolstered by having downed several
cold Grain Belt beers in a Mackinaw City tavern), we pedaled out into the darkness after last call.
The streets were empty, and equal parts alcohol and adrenaline coursed through our veins. We sprinted up the entrance ramp to the the five-mile-long suspension bridge that arches out over the Straits of Mackinac and began what was a surprisingly steep climb, the connecting point between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron.
"This isn't going to be easy," I thought to myself, "but what an adventure!"
And then I saw something like an act out of Cirque du Soleil. As my brother rode a bike's length ahead of me, his rear wheel and pannier bags lifted into the air, somersaulting as if in slow motion, rotating completely over the handlebars. He was thrown clear of the tangle, and I squeezed hard on the breaks to stop just short of the wreckage.
"What am I looking at?" I remember thinking for the longest time.
Suddenly the night was no longer quiet, the streets no longer empty. A state patrolman appeared out of nowhere, his sirens and flashers interrupting the night.
"You know, bikes aren't allowed on the bridge," he said. "There are these big expansion joints, you know, too wide for a bicycle tire. Well, I guess you found that out."
With a smirk he added, "It's a good thing you boys weren't drinking, cause you might have really hurt yourselves," motioning to my brother with a major case of road rash across his forehead. He loaded our bikes in his squad car and kindly dropped us off on the far side of the bridge.
By the time we arrived back home that summer, we were already planning our next tour. We decided to hit
the road a day or two after school let out for the summer, and if we had our way we would return home the evening before the next school year began.
And then in the 1980s we had careers to start and families to plan, and gradually the years passed and our bicycles remained unridden, hanging from hooks in the garage, like hams hung aging in a smokehouse. I don't regret a single year that passed without getting back in the saddle, as marvelous things happened
during those years as well. I met my extraordinary wife of 22 years (we actually met at a bicycle touring workshop I was teaching in 1979), and I've watched my brother raise three wonderful children, including two young sons (also two years apart) who might someday sally forth together with the same spirit of adventure that struck their father and uncle so many years earlier.
No, all of the years since the highway called for the last time have been rewarding and unforgettable in their
own right and I wouldn't change them if I could. But I always remember the countless conversations we had with old men on park benches during those summers of our youth:
"You'd better do this kind of thing while you're young, 'cause when you're grow'd up, you'll never be able to do it again," they'd say.
"Yeah," we'd think. "We're never going to be trapped in that kind of life. We'll never give up on ourselves and give in to The System."
It's true you never forget how to ride a bicycle. But sometimes you forget why.
Last June, almost 30 years to the day since the start of that first bicycle trip, I left my well-paid job as a well-paid fund-raiser for a Washington, D.C., think tank to embark on a new business venture. I can't say I instinctively knew how to make the transition. But the day I resigned I felt a powerful urge to go on a bicycle trip. And I did.
Jeffrey A. Yeager spent 24 years working in senior management positions with national nonprofit organizations before becoming a free-lance writer, public speaker and consultant in 2004. Yeager was dubbed "The Ultimate Cheapskate" by the NBC Today Show, where he periodically appears as a guest. He currently lives in southern Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C., with his wife, Denise.
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