Discovering America

Yes, I know it's been done before, but in a sense we all have to discover America for ourselves don't we?  Despite being commodified by its economy, controlled by its politics and swamped by its cultural output, most of us don't really know the place or the people. I certainly don't.  I've been jolted out of my assumptions and stereotypes almost every time I've met an American, only to slide lazily back into them when I let my guard down. So, why not explore the place by traversing it from east to west, around 7,000 kilometres, by bicycle? "Why not poke yourself in the eye with a burnt stick?" I hear some of you say.

America has always meant "overland journey" to me.  I first read John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley when I was in high school.  Steinbeck set out in 1960 with his standard poodle, Charley, in a pickup truck with a camper cabin on the back, to discover America for himself.  He was 58 at the time - a year younger than I am now.  From his home in Sag Harbour, New York, he drove thousands of miles through New England, the mid-west, the Rockies, California, the desert, the Deep South, appraising the landscape, the history, the social issues.  This was a travelogue ahead of its time: strident and unabashedly political.  Steinbeck was deeply shocked by the racist actions of white southerners, but generally enamoured of the oddballs and frontier types he met in the west, and overawed by the landscapes of Montana, the Pacific Northwest and the great deserts.  He made the great American outdoors live for me, and at the age of 15, I was hooked.  The seeds of this journey were sown way back then.

Simon Schama's brilliant history, The American Future, was a recent revelation. Schama follows significant American families through the generations, giving a personal twist to wars, crises and political movements.  At every stage, he links historical events to current affairs and future possibilities. Tim Flannery's ecological history of North America, The Eternal Frontier, helped to prepare me for the environmental experience and the complexities of Native American societies.  (I sort of knew there was more to the American Indian thing than galloping over the prairie hunting buffalo, but I had no idea of the complexity and diversity of pre-Columbian America before I read this.)  Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent gave me a foretaste of small-town America - highly relevant because my tour, along the TransAmerica Trail, avoids the major cities and highways in favour of  rural byways and small to medium-sized communities.  (The largest town along the route has a population of 160,000.)  Martin Fletcher's Almost Heaven: Travels Through the Backwoods of America offers a scarier vision than Bryson's whimsical and nostalgic tour, but Fletcher is English, and he did deliberately seek out the weird stuff.  Truman Capote's In Cold Blood might be set in the late 1950s, but has the rural Kansas it depicts really changed all that much?  Stay tuned and I'll let you know by the end of June.

The best appetite-whetter by far though was Don Watson's American Journeys.  Roaming the continent on Amtrak trains, and taking to a car when the railway options are exhausted, Watson explores America through conversations with academics and train conductors, politicians and storekeepers.  His beautiful., balanced prose and constant positive approach - always looking for what's progressive and good, but eloquently savaging the negative and bad - make this book a joy.  It's an Australian perspective too, which helps, and it's recent - published just before Obama was elected.

So much for the pre-reading: now for the logistics.  The Trans-America Trail isn't really a trail at all - it's a cycle route across the continent that avoids heavily trafficked roads and big cities in the interests of safe and pleasant riding. It doesn't avoid hills though, winding through the Appalachians, the Ozarks and the Rockies. An American Bicentennial project in 1976, the Trail starts in Yorktown, Virginia, picking up Revolutionary War and Civil War battlefields in its eastern sections, traversing the Great Plains through Missouri and Kansas, and roughly following the Oregon Trail of the wagon trains in its western half.  It touches on Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Tetons, crosses the Continental Divide at 11,500 feet in Colorado, and meanders up the Oregon coast to Astoria, just south of the Washington State border. The total distance of the Trail proper is 6,700 kilometres.  I'll be joining it at Charlottesville, Virginia, about 300 km from the start in Yorktown, but detouring from Florence, Oregon, south to San Francisco, so I expect to ride at least 7,000 km.

It hasn't really been a good start.  British Airways cancelled my flight from London to Washington because of a cabin crew strike, and re-booked me on Air France.  I wish they hadn't done that.  The Air France ground staff at Heathrow put on an exemplary show of rudeness and indifference, refusing to honour BA's conditions of carriage which would have allowed me to take my bike as excess baggage, paying only a small excess weight charge.  Instead they charged me 80 Euros without so much as a rueful smile or a hint of regret, and when I arrived in Washington - no bike.  The AF Washington ground staff had been trained in the same gulag: they told me the bike had been offloaded in Paris and might, just possibly, arrive late the next day.  Again, no apology or regret - just a sniffy implication that it was all my fault for presuming to transport a bicycle in the first place.  This bastardry condemned me to two nights in a fairly expensive hotel in the drab and soulless airport precinct of Dulles International, where my only entertainment has been wandering up to the drab and soulless mall for a drab and soulless (and tasteless) pizza and a bottle of Jacob's Creek Cab Sav.  They had the temerity to sell that to me at half the price I would have paid in Australia.  How rude is that!

However, I have already discovered something wonderful about America - bumper stickers and number plate slogans.  Today I saw a sticker with the silhouette of a stag on it, and the words, "You gotta kill it before you can grill it."  This could be interpreted as a pro-hunting slogan I suppose, but I prefer to regard it as simply educational.  A kind of public service information announcement for those of us who don't know esoteric stuff about where our food comes from.  The same car (an SUV you'll be surprised to hear) had both a National Rifle Association sticker and the number plate slogan, "In God We Trust".  I really am in America.