382-days on the road The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it. —James Baldwin
7-years ago I set out to ride across the US, stopping in each of the 48 contiguous states. My motorcycle sojourn wasn’t planned but inspired! In family conversation following Thanksgiving dinner 2013, I declared unprompted that I would take 12-to18-months to complete the solo sojourn
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I did it in 382 days.
The utterance took me and the family by surprise. No such thought had ever crossed my mind. But hearing it, I knew I had to do it. Why? The reason wasn’t immediately apparent. Inspired over the next two years the answer became clear. I had to slay fear.
It’s said, truth resides with the child within. Truth was the child-become-man still feared people. No longer the heart-racing anxiety of childhood, instead, a nagging trepidation haunted every encounter. As a teen I’d learned to disguise that dread. Now, while it may have never been apparent to others, that fear was constant.
On September 30, 2015, when I pulled out of my driveway on the city’s Southeast side bound for the open road, I threw down the gauntlet. 900-plus pounds of metal under me, my nerves on edge for what lie ahead, I quickly learned to compensate for the glaucoma-caused blindness in my left eye. First stop Cleveland to overnight with a friend.
A hundred miles east on Route 30, I met three itinerant Muslims at the Wyandot rest stop. On way from Chicago, they’d stopped at the Fort Wayne masjid on Oak Street near where I’d lived years ago. With the traditional greeting, we talked easily. They spoke of following the path of true Islam. I told them of making shahada in Brooklyn in my early 30s. The content and ease of that conversation fortified for me a spiritual intent and certainty that carried throughout the roadtrip. I rode hard to not be on the road after sunset. I didn’t always make it, and those times were harrowing. On average, I spent 9-to-12 hours a day in the saddle.
From Cleveland, I went home to New York, then swung south through the East Coast states to avoid autumn’s chill. I lodged with friends and the friends of friends until I reached Virginia. Throughout the South, Southwest, West Coast, and zigzagging through the central states, I couchsurfed. The glories of bedding down in strange places with people I did not know who were willing to open their homes and lives to a stranger healed me. I met fear head-on, and by the time I reached relatives in Arkansas in early August 2016, trepidation had dissipated to a mere sensation arising in the body. I overstood it.
Couchsurfing with strangers who I emailed a day or two before arrival opened my vulnerability. I had only been that open once before, walking off death row into a new world. My oldest son turned me on to the Couchsurfing network.
In unfamiliar geographical territory and psychological space for 11-months, I never had one dustup with anyone throughout that period. Encounters with strangers were warm, engaging, friendly. This during a domestic period of racial angst, political anxiety, and psychic turmoil. I stood on a balcony overlooking the Vegas strip and told an incredulous businessman that Donald Trump would be his next president.
Many conversations included the names of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott. I never bit my tongue about my disgust or distrust of America’s police state and corporate capitalist economic order. In many places, I received pushback. But those give-and-takes always were respectful and open-eared. We heard and listened to one another. In Biloxi with a retired Airforce colonel, Oklahoma with three generations of loyal Trump boosting Repulicans, and Wisconsin with liberals staging local protests. The talk was spirited and informed rooted in their everyday lives. Not domestic politics.
In Florida’s panhandle, I had the tensest moment of the trip. At midnight the woman who’d accepted my request to stay, threw open the bedroom door and said, “I want you to leave. Now!” I met her distress calmly gathered my gear dressed and left. In the driveway while loading Transporter, her husband approached and bid me follow him to an apartment at the back of the house. He often stayed there, he said, when she was off her meds, explaining that she was bipolar. He gave me tea, a warm bed and the safety of a locked door. In the morning I left feeling no ill-will, thankful for the experience.
Midafternoon 75 miles east of Biloxi, the sky turned black. Sheets of rain limited visibility to two car-lengths. At 35-40-mph, 18-wheelers whizzed by, blowing me like a feather. The five-mile dangercourse I rode to an exit seemed an eternity. The manager at the fastfood joint offered shelter. I waited for the storm to pass. It didn’t. Fortunately, a motel stood a few yards behind the restaurant. When the leather dried two days later, I went on into Biloxi.
Danger and discomfort also awaited motoring out of Idaho Falls. I saw a storm approaching and had just enough time to don rain gear before hail and icy rain swept over me. I rode the storm more than an hour before finding a rest stop. Folding up rain gear when the sun appeared, in Provo I stayed with a newly married Mormon couple.
From San Antonio, Texas, where a sister put me up for a night in her daughter’s bedroom, I rode into a light sprinkle in the Texas high country. Rain released the scent from the creosote bushes. That aroma remains with me, as does the low-slung beauty of the Texas hill country, the red rock of New Mexico, open sky of Wyoming, Black Hills of South Dakota, and the meditative majesty of southern California’s high desert, the peace of a quiet, community-built steamroom in the Wisconcin woods, and playing a miniature jenbé in Maine with a six-year-old and her father. On the road, I found an America I could respect.
When Transporter went down on I-10 in Arizona, a trucker stopped to bring her upright. State police and an ambulance followed within minutes. They all just wanted to know I was alright. In Colorado, a trucker going in the opposite direction u-turned, to come back to help me lift and steady the bike as I mounted. When fatigue overcame me in a parking lot in Missouri, three Hell’s Angels lifted Transporter, making sure my head was clear enough to safely go on my way. A Tuareg proverb says, God has created lands with lakes and bountiful rivers for man to live. And the wide deserts so that he can find his soul. Throughout the more than 24,000 miles I traveled during those 382 days, I found my own soul and that of America.
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