Books that Bang: Bicycling Beyond the Divide

Bicycling Beyond the Divide: Two Journeys into the West
Daryl Farmer
University of Nebraska Press (2008)
311 pages with maps
ISBN: 978-0803220348


Since returning from my "epic" Pgh to DC bike journey, I've been intrigued by long distance cyclo-touring. Who could not be intrigued by such a fascinating endeavor? Cyclo-touring involves a supreme challenge of mind and body, it involves discovery of what you're made of as well as what creation is made of. But most of all, it is hard. And hard is good because hard causes the body and the spirit to strengthen for the other hard things in life.


Not surprisingly, there are many bike touring memoirs out. Daryl Farmer's book about two odysseys across the Great Divide seemed a good place to start. I found this book to be fully engrossing, mesmerizing. What's unique about it is, first, it's a tale of two cross-west bicycle rides: the first when the author was twenty year old kid, and the second, twenty years later, when he is a college professor. So the title Bicycling Beyond the Divide, has a literal sense of his actually riding across the Western states two times, but it has a lyrical sense of his riding beyond the divide separating his youth from his adulthood. 


These two elements worked together nicely, both in concept and execution. The result was that it has that universal appeal of something most of us mid-agers can relate to: an introspective comparison of the youthful period of our lives, full of brashness and bravado, against the more seasoned, know-better time of our lives, where the brashness and bravado has been sanded down by decades of experience. 


The second aspect that made this work unique is that it's a biking book, which is common, but it's written by a writer first and a bicyclist second. Other bike books that I have read, such as Bob Roll's Bobke II: The Continuing Misadventures of Bob Roll and Joe Parkin's A Dog in a Hat: An American Bike Racer's Story of Mud, Drugs, Blood, Betrayal, and Beauty in Belgium are by bike riders/racers first and writers second. Both Roll's and Parkin's books are fantastic, gritty, authentic reads, and I endorse them as required volumes in the bicycling canon. 


But, their writing is not as lyrical, as alliterative, as didactic, as poetic as Farmer's. His work is more like literature than memoir. And for that it stands out as an examplar of a fascinating topic written in a beautiful way. Here's an example of what I mean, Farmer describing the Nevada desert:

I had always remembered  this desert as a desolate, forlorn place, but now I saw beauty in its stability and solitude, believed that there was no such thing as the 'middle of nowhere,' that everywhere was a somewhere full of the life that suited it. Had I been in a car, shielded from the intricacies of its beauty, this stretch of road might have been boring. But by bicycle it felt alive." (p.293).

But don't miss the point about Farmer: he is a bicyclist, and an amazing one at that. He circumnavigated the western half of the continent in 1985 when he was twenty. Alone. I don't know any twenty-year-old who is physically or mentally able to accomplish such a feat. And then he did the same thing, on the same bike, and nearly the same route, in 2005, twenty years later. He is a bike rider of high order. Although, his aim was not just a bike ride: 

The goal was neither adventure nor fitness, though if those became by-products, fine. What I wanted was not only to see the West but to experience it--to feel its changing day-to-day moods, to see its geography in terms not of pockets of beauty but of a continuous and changing landscape. And more than that, I wanted to be a part of it, to lend my own respiration to the air. (p.3).

And his route suited that aim--it was a western route. He didn't just ride from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Instead, he rode "the West." He pedaled from Colorado Springs, his hometown, westward through Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, through Washington (with a side trip to Vancouver, Canada), south along the coast through Oregon, through California as far south as SF/Yosemite, then eastward through Nevada, Utah (with excursion into Arizona). It's like a dream trip for me, personally, because I have such unfulfilled desire for the West.


Along the way, Farmer paints a deep, sometimes profound, sometimes whimsical, sometimes comical, but always penetrating picture of the before and the after. How the towns looked in '85 and how they look in '05, the changes to the landscape, the diners that faded or disappeared, the things that never changed, the people. He goes beyond the before and after and he describes the poignant moments that emerge on a solitary endeavor, as do on any trip like this one. There's also fantastic western dialogue that Farmer overhears or participates in as he's sitting in some cantina or bar eating dinner.


Consider this passage:

Unlike mud season in a ski resort town, Friday night in a cowboy town, and no matter the size of the crowd, it's going to be lively.
A young woman sat between two men at the other side of the bar.
'What time we brandin' Sunday?' she asked one of the men.
'I don't know,' he said, 'Early.''Well, what time?' she asked.'Why you gotta know right now?' he said.'I need to know to what extent to pace myself,' she said, nodding toward her beer. Cowboy logic. (p.27)

There are many instances of special people that he encountered over the miles. For instance, my favorite vignette is the story of Winnefred, an elderly woman in Washington, who with her husband Dick, had driven past Farmer out on the road twenty years earlier, and insisted that he join them for the evening. They were an amazing couple, and twenty years later, Farmer visited her again. Dick had died since his last visit, but Winnefred remained a regal, wise, and touching soul.


And then there is the story of when his bike was stolen as he passed through Oregon (yes, stolen as he slept in a tent--which is how he overnighted on most evenings). Imagine losing your bike halfway through a summer-long bicycle trip, and on the bike was all of your belongings for the trip. 


When he awoke in Oregon to find his bike gone, he knew no one, had nothing. But in his near desperate state, he remembered Randy and his wife Carolyn, whom he had met while camping in Montana a month or so earlier. In Montana, Randy walked up to Farmer's campsite and gave him food ("We couldn't eat until your needs were taken care of," Randy told Farmer) then prayed for him, and told Farmer to call him when he got to Coos Bay, Oregon, where they lived. Coos Bay was the same area where his bike was stolen several hundred miles and a month later. So with his bike gone and with nowhere else to turn, he remembered Randy, and called him. What follows is an astonishing account of a grace-filled life where love and kindness and joy abound. (pgs. 107-8; 217-28). I won't spoil by revealing the outcome...


In the end, Farmer's book is not only about a bicycle trip through the West. Yes, it absolutely provides a satisfying bicycle travelogue. But it's also about human nature, about the passage of time, about growing up, about the good and the bad. In short it is a bicycling book that chronicles life and our sometimes hard but always memorable ride through it.