America, Going About Its Business Without Fuss

An AP reporter took off for three months on A bicycle built for seeing America:

More than the beauty of the land, the openness of strangers impresses the transcontinental bicyclist. Police officers escort you to the town park for a free night of camping. People take you in, feed you and give you water. They save you from heat stroke and worry that the headless horsemen of Appalachian lore and the Skin Walkers, evil spirits of the southwestern desert, will get you.
"Take my truck," Carla Weatherly pleads, serving coffee at the Main Book Co. bookstore and coffeehouse in Cortez, Colo. "Drive to Flagstaff and leave it there somewhere safe. I'll come get it."

She had just told a stranger to drive her pickup five hours into Arizona and somehow she would retrieve it someday. She did not want to see me going through the heat, isolation and ghostly dangers of the Indian lands.

Her offer was so generous it had to be refused. But America is full of people like Carla.

It's full of dreamers, too.
...
At Whitesville, Kentucky, near the Indiana line, the terrain abruptly changes. The rollercoaster hills turn gentle. Union County, the last chunk of Kentucky before the Ohio River, is spectacular.

Soybeans and corn everywhere. A farmer pulls up in a pickup, then a neighbor pulls up in his truck on the other side of the road. I stand on the yellow line between them. "I don't like to travel," the farmer says. "I like to know where the sun comes up and where it goes down every day."

I'm with you, friend, but I loved this story.

Categories: bicycle, cross-country, America