Recycling

I will not seek any great groaning glaciers on this trip, or climb pink granite peaks, or camp along an Ozark  Highlands trail, or sleep on deep snow hoping to scale Mt. Shasta.  No, I’ll head east on a bicycle, hoping to cross the desert before it gets too hot, and  meet Illinois after all the icicles have fallen from eves. 

After biking across America, from Virginia to Los Angeles in 2007, then halfway across Canada in 2009, then across the USA again on a southern route in 2013 and 2014, I feel ready to start again.  Call it “Recycling,” if you wish, but I'm excited.

I remember Jackrabbit Trading Post,
Route 66, Joseph City, AZ

Route 66, the “Mother Road” in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, brought Dust Bowl refugees to California in the thirties.  And again in WWII they came for jobs in our war plants, where my Aunt Vera died.  And this war baby remembers riding in a ’49 Plymouth past Jack Rabbit Trading Post.    

This is not a logical trip, for  bicycling close to cars is never sensible.  They are always dangerous.  But I’ve gained confidence over many rides, and feel ready to do it again for a sentimental journey.  That third grade attitude still prevails over reason.  

I remember gas stations like this,
 and they say a few of them still exist

I will ride alone and unsupported, and some say, with courage.  But they are wrong; it’s shear necessity—a need to do something adventurous.  

I chose Route 66 for its history, its culture, and because the train ride home from Chicago sounds pleasant.  I’ll visit campsites of those dust-bowl pioneers and the motor courts of post-war migrants to California in the fifties, and places where I, as a child, went on summer vacations.  

So, with nostalgia, anticipation, and a sense of danger, I will set off on April 5 from Pasadena, arriving in Chicago about June 15.  Please join me in some way, commenting here on the blog or by email.  I welcome your thoughts and poems.  But, of course, you can ask to be removed from this list, if it’s all too much.

“You may be saying ‘She wanders the world in full circles and comes back two months later’

I always eat with strangers

The hours pass and time turns to wood.

There is a hero inside you, bigger than you are.  

      Jackie Chou—from her chapbook of March, 2017