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PrintFor your extended reading pleasure, we offer the entire, unexpurgated, fully unabridged version of Franklin Toker's life-affirming journey on a bike.
Dr. Toker is a professor of the history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. His books include "Fallingwater Rising" and the forthcoming "Pittsburgh: A New Portrait," from University of Pittsburgh Press. He can be reached through his Web site, www.franklintoker.com
I call upon Thomas Jefferson, who assembled his books under the categories of memory, reason, and imagination; and I entreat those categories to help me report how I bicycled 328 miles on trails from Pittsburgh to Washington, D.C. And not merely to report, but to reason why I did such a thing, and to tell me how to use this transformative episode to shape the rest of my life.
I start with memory, though I call on it at an inauspicious time and place. It is 11:35 on Tuesday morning, May 20, 2008. I am buying summer tires in Banksville, a not particularly gracious suburb of Pittsburgh. Senator John McCain, looking old, is on the television in Firestone's client waiting area, pandering to an audience in Florida via Comcast News.
I want to declare to the whole world that I have just cycled from Pittsburgh to Washington, but three tired men waiting for tires in a tire store make an unpromising audience. Still, I know in my heart that I am not the man I was a week ago. For one thing, I am still constantly going to the bathroom, a habit you get on the trail where you are obliged to drink water and electrolytes nonstop, and males require nothing more to get rid of it than a tree or some bushes.
At the bathroom here (I remind myself to go inside the building, not behind it), I look down instinctively to see the color of my urine: if too yellow, I am not drinking enough. Then I look in the mirror and see the regular Frank, not the fierce Frank of the biking cap and helmet.
I have to accept my new life in a post-heroic mode, since the trip was the most heroic thing I have done in my 64 years. It is not yet half a day since my return from Washington at 1:30 this morning. Ellen left the house for work around 6:30; Jeffrey was just getting to sleep at that hour, but drove Ellen to work. Maxwell lovingly called at 9:15 to congratulate me on my achievement, and his wake-up call started my day. On the breakfast table were various notes from Ellen over the past five days. One said "tires," so in my brain-dead state today seemed the perfect moment to do something banal like taking the snowtires off.
I feel almost as though the trip is still on, the way people walking out of a movie theater imagine they are walking through the film they just saw. Driving to Firestone's this morning, two unusual things happened. I drove down Murray Avenue and turned on the radio as I started the ramp to I-376 West. The music was not identified, but I knew it was one of Bach's Brandenberg Concertos played on the Moog synthesizer. That is the record I asked Paul Tichauer to bring with him when he visited me in Siena in 1968. I turned up the volume and imagined that the weird sounds were sounding a triumph.
Then a second augury. I drove over the Fort Pitt Bridge and through the Fort Pitt tubes, then took the exit to Banksville Road. A little blue car, a Sentra I think, cut me off. The car then pulled ahead of me for half a block, and turned into the Eat'n Park Restaurant. So I think: This idiot nearly caused a crash to save himself four seconds, and then he goes to eat?
Biking to DC gave me plenty of time to think about life's values. How many of these thoughts I will carry through life I cannot tell, but already my life is shaping into Before DC and After DC.
Here are the facts. In the five days between Thursday May 15 and Monday 19, inclusive, I bicycled 328 miles from Pittsburgh to Washington, DC, replicating in reverse George Washington's exploratory trip to the Forks of the Ohio -- what is today Pittsburgh -- in 1753. Washington actually started a bit farther east, at Alexandria or Mt. Vernon, and he pushed on fifteen miles farther west, to the literal point where the Monongahela and Allegheny conjoin to form the Ohio River. Those last (for us first) miles we also avoided because it would have taken us hours to navigate city streets where the trail has not been laid yet. When the trail is complete, and certain detours eliminated, the route will encompass 335 miles: 150 miles of trail in Pennsylvania and 185 miles of canal towpath in Maryland.
This was the hardest short-term task of my life (running the Florence Cathedral excavations was my hardest long-term effort).
We began as eight cyclists, but two of the group cancelled the night before we left, leaving six of us to bicycle the first four days. But on night four, with seventy-three miles left to Washington, two more companions resigned, unwilling to put up with the pain and the tedium. So only four of us pulled into Georgetown on the final afternoon.
The Pittsburgh-to-Washington adventure began on April 8 with a planning meeting at the home of my friend Zarky Rudavsky, who had done the trail with his daughter Aliza the year before. We were seven middle-aged guys around the dining-room table. Zarky, Edward Moravitz, and Paul Munro had biked a 300-mile trip in Israel's Negev desert in 2006. I knew Paul from University of Pittsburgh faculty meetings (he teaches in information science), but Ed was a new and engaging face. He was signing up also for his son-in-law Andrew Tomasi, and everyone was cheered to learn that Drew was an emergency-room physician. This inspired me to invite along my own son-in-law, Carl Summers, Sarah Augusta's husband, but that conflicted with Carl's new job and their move to Springfield.
Also at the meeting was Jan Firewicz, who I have known since 1976 as the expert contractor we used time and again as we rebuilt our house. Jan is a fine and careful bike rider, and he was signing up also for his nephew Jason. In the end Jan and Jason were the ones who cancelled on the eve of our departure: Jan's doctor did not want him subjecting himself to the trip. Also at the meeting but later declining to come, were Mike Tobias and his brother-in-law Stuart Anderson, men I met not long after coming to Pittsburgh in 1974.
Zarky also said his good friend Paul Goldberg from Baltimore would be coming. Paul was a biking companion of Zarky's from long bike trips in Virginia and elsewhere. It did not greatly cheer me to learn that a participant died of a heart attack on the Virginia excursion.
Nobody knows how many people have biked the Pittsburgh-Washington trail since it opened in 1999, but the number is likely to be in the thousands, counting in both directions, so we could still be called pioneers. Zarky laid out the route and its perils. I did not particularly enjoy hearing about the Paw Paw Tunnel, through which riders have to shuffle in the dark for half a mile. The weather prognosis was not great, either. Zarky's trip in August 2007 was sunny, but he expected rain this time, and he was right on target.
Why did I subject myself to this? I was the greenest of the green. Everyone else in our band had cycled hundreds of miles, but before July 2007 my longest trip dated to 1957, a half-century earlier, when I cycled seven miles and back toward Montréal's Dorval airport -- which I never reached. Then in July 2007 the local JCC set up a morning's ride that was sixteen miles long, between Pittsburgh's South Side and North Side and back. That short ride hardly made me into a biker.
But the time and place suited me. I write books all summer long, from May through August, and I work best when some dramatic break intervenes between teaching and writing. In 2005 that was provided by my wacky visit to eastern Europe, lecturing in Poland and ancestor-seeking in Ukraine and Romania. In 2006 I took an eye-opening tour of architecture and estates I had never seen in the nearby Laurel Highlands, gathering material for a lecture in October. Soon after, Ellen and I walked an entire day through the Jewish quarter of Montréal, which I had never explored even though I grew up not more than two or three miles away.
And in 2007 came my thrilling trip to Québec City, where I took dinner in the home my great-grandfather Frank Herzberg built in 1902 for his daughter and son-in-law, Berthe and Charles Serchuk, before going far downstream on the St. Lawrence to discover the summer home of another great-grandfather, Wolfe Serchuk.
So a bike trip to Washington fitted the time and challenge nicely, as did the place. I had been looking intently at the Laurel Highlands -- the setting for the first half of the trip -- since 1998, when I embarked on my book on Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. I welcomed the chance to better understand the ecology and geopolitics of that district. I knew we would be biking a hundred miles along the Youghiogheny River, including the point where the turbulent waters of Bear Run join it after tumbling below Fallingwater's famously cantilevered balconies.
I liked the Laurel Highlands towns, and I had already written in the Fallingwater book how biking and white-water rafting had perked up their post-industrial economies. The South, where the second half of the trip would take place, has always been my favorite part of the United States. Surely it is the ultimate measure of a country to walk or bike it, and here was that chance.
I was foolhardy to sign up but open-eyed enough to realize that I needed training for myself and certain purchases to get my bicycle in shape, too. Within days of the organizing meeting, as teaching demands began to level off, I started to train on the computer-linked bikes at the JCC.
Here I had a bit of luck. The JCC had installed those stationary bicycles just a few weeks before. They have computer screens that provide the image of a track, so you can pretend-bike while you are pedalling like mad. They perfectly simulate rides of up to seven miles, with the video track twisting left and right and up and down, and getting harder or easier to pedal accordingly. First I did just a mile or two, then got up to seven miles in about forty or fifty minutes.
It was time to cycle outdoors. The first days after my classes ended, on Monday April 21 and Tuesday April 22, I began, alone, to ride from the Great Allegheny Passage trailhead at the village of Boston. This sits on the Youghiogheny River shore just outside of the industrial town of McKeesport. I got my motivation simply by riding as far as I could, sixteen miles the first day, so there was no choice but to do the same number of miles back.
The first day I got somewhat beyond the town of West Newton, then back: thirty-two miles. The next day I got a bit over twenty miles down the trail, toward Connellsville, and back: forty-one miles total.
Those early rides were tough. As I drove home from the second one, I fell asleep at every red light -- not smart. And the rides hurt! I knew I had to get more comfortable in my two seats -- the one attached to my body and the other one attached to the bicycle. I experimented with different biking shorts and three or four different saddles for the bicycle; then with a half-dozen different angles for the seat and a dozen different heights. I had to get the adjustment right, and finally came as close as I ever would. I was not afraid to spend money, even though I am a frugal person. I had the crew at Pittsburgh Pro Bicycles inspect and revise my bike so it would be ready for its long trip to Washington. I could only hope the same was true for its rider.
A week later I asked Ed Moravitz to bike together from Connellsville to Confluence and back: fifty-four miles. The next week, on Monday 5 May, we biked the sixty-two miles from Meyersdale down to Confluence and back. The direction was in reverse, since highway access made it easier to get on at Meyersdale.
At the same time I started buying more things I would need, even though nearly all of it (biking shorts, pullover, gloves, biking shoes) was alien to my austere persona. I inherited a "Camelback" from Jeffrey, which he had used in Israel. It holds two liters of water on your back, which you can sip from a tube up front. Then I got two gifts from Zarky. One was a tool set that covers most parts of a bike; the second (a loan only) was a set of panniers -- the side saddlebags I would need to take all my gear, including tools and two fresh inner tires. I already had a tight-fitting cap for winter biking, which would prove crucial in the cold and rainy days to come. Now I added a new helmet.
I had a light windbreaker but it was not rain-resistant -- as I would learn. I bought it around 1976 in Hanover NH, and it had served me in all kinds of adverse conditions, above all in Poland and Ukraine three years before. But I ought to have taken along something more substantial, since after five minutes on the second day I felt I was standing right under a shower.
Then I bought biking shorts, the farthest of everything from my conservative self-image. I paid $50 for a gel-based pair and $125 for a thick padded pair, and I used both. Next came gloves -- very important to keep up circulation in my hands and for changing gears fast. After that, a fine pullover made of wool, with long sleeves that can be pulled up as the day gets hotter. I discovered the verb "to wick," which describes how the pullover takes sweat from the body and casts its out. Traditional but high-tech.
Now more things for the bicycle itself. The joke was that I was pimping a bike that had cost me no more than $135, and that over a decade ago. But there were items I dared not ignore. So I bought a pump (it turned out to be a "smart pump," capable of attaching to various kinds of air valves, and luckily so). Then came the two spare inner tubes and an intimate item for the rider: "chamois butt'r," which Jeremy at Pittsburgh Pro Bicycles said was vital to cut down on pain "down there."
After I bought the new saddle for the bike (the store let me try three out, on city trails), there were still more changes the old bike had to undergo. I had a pair of extender bars taken off Jeffrey's bicycle and put on mine so I could put my hands in different positions as I rode. Finally, on Monday May 12 I had a three-hour lesson from Jeremy on how to change a tire and adjust the brakes and gears. The lesson helped me greatly, not just to understand the mechanics of my constant companion through 328 miles, but to bond with it, too. But there are limits to bonding with machinery. I never learned the bike's brand name, and after all the two of us have been through, it is still a no-name to me.
The trip route divided itself into sixty-seven miles on day one; forty-seven miles, all uphill, on day two; seventy-six miles on day three; sixty-five miles on day four; and seventy-three miles to Washington on day five. The average speed was eleven miles an hour, with a riding time of nine hours the first day, eight hours the second, nine hours the third and fourth days, and twelve hours the last day. Rain was our constant companion -- three days of it. The first day was sunny, the second day entirely rain, the third day dry but a towpath still muddy from earlier rains. The fourth day, all towpath, was rain up to late afternoon; the last day was dry but the towpath still muddy.
The First Day: Thursday May 15.
We bicycled from Pittsburgh to Confluence, Pennsylvania, sixty-seven miles. There was a false start at Boston, where we learned that a landslide had totally smashed the trail a mile in from the trailhead. So we went to the hamlet of Buena Vista, as close as we could get to the start by car, and there we began, at about 9:30 a.m.
We biked from Buena Vista up to West Newton. We were riding on what used to be the Western Maryland Railroad track. The financier George Gould cut this through the Alleghenies in 1911 to capture half the freight traffic moving between Baltimore and Pittsburgh, and link with another railroad he had pushed through from Chicago to Pittsburgh a decade before. The new line was an exact parallel to the one the Baltimore & Ohio line had set up in the early nineteenth century. Both lines cut up from Cumberland, Maryland, and across the mountains to Pittsburgh. The two tracks were in parallels on opposite banks of the Casselman and Youghiogheny rivers. The WMRR ended operations in 1979, and twenty years later the Pennsylvania portion of its track was converted to the crushed limestone hiking and biking trail that we were using.
The volunteers at the old Western Maryland train station in West Newton were happy to see us, and remembered me from my two training trips in April. As it turns out, I knew something about their town that they did not. Around 1798, Isaac Meason, the ironmaster whose Mt. Braddock mansion still survives south of Connellsville, brought over the British engineer Adam Wilson to erect a pioneering iron bridge over the Youghiogheny at this fairly narrow point.
We then biked some twenty-seven miles up to Connellsville, and took lunch there. The Western Maryland track used to cut straight through town, so the biking track does as well. I went to a gas station and said: "There are six guys here who would like to spend money in your town: where's to eat?" The reply was Villagieri's, which I took to be a local Italian restaurant until it showed up as Village Dairy. I have no recollection of my meal there other than at the end, when I ordered fresh bananas for the four of us at my table. The server was so intrigued she brought them for free. We left Village Dairy in good spirits. I had done the twenty-seven mile ride from Connellsville up to Confluence with Ed Moravitz, but it was a lot more demanding today with the weight of my gear in the two panniers and all the water and food on my back. The constant rain that made the track soggy and slow had produced instant waterfalls a score of times along the route -- as well as landslides.
The Youghiogheny was as high as I had ever seen it. The Great Allegheny Passage, as the mountain portion of the trail is called, provides a wonderful intimacy with nature. I had seen some superb flowering trees in April, though those blooms were off the trees by May. Another hour or so and we arrived at the village of Ohiopyle, a favorite of mine (it is just seven miles from Fallingwater, but the road is hilly, and few cyclists do it).
We were thrilled to see the rushing waters at the falls on the Youghiogheny, which I had never really heard roar before. The falls drown novice rafters every year, and they were the despair also of George Washington, who had proposed to raft troops all the way down from Confluence ("Turkey-Foot," he called it) to what is now Pittsburgh. But the falls spiked that dream. When E. J. Kaufmann took Frank Lloyd Wright to see Ohiopyle in 1934, when the two were planning Fallingwater, the falls were still harnessed to industry -- one reason, I propose, that Fallingwater itself has such an industrial cast to it. The industrial village is today transformed into a breezy little town of bikers and rafters. We partook of some ice cream and some bike repairs here, and headed up to Confluence. It had been a demanding day, and at Confluence we were glad to get into the small house we had reserved. We changed into regular clothes and walked to supper at the Lucky Dog Café, then I burrowed into bed.
The Second Day: Friday May 16.
We left Confluence early, after breakfast at the Sisters Café. It was starting to rain, and never stopped the entire day. We biked up to Rockwood, but the wet trail was hard slogging, and my energy in the rain was not great. On the way up to the town one encounters a sizeable inconvenience. The Pinkerton Tunnel was constructed for the Western Maryland Railroad in 1911 and, at 849 feet, is fairly short. We ought to have sailed through it, but it is closed until four million dollars is found to make it a safe biking environment. We had to cycle several miles around the tunnel. Our progress was so slow that instead of breezing through Rockwood we stopped to eat there: undistinguished pizza in a café I best remember for having heat.
We resumed -- raining all the time -- making our way up from Rockwood to Meyersdale, Pennsylvania. At Meyersdale still another railroad station serves as a welcome center -- but we were too early in the season, and received no welcome beyond a portajohn. Meyersdale is another of the towns that is waking up to the economics of the bike path. Extraordinarily for western Pennsylvania, with its fanatic municipal balkanization, the six boroughs of West Newton, Connellsville, Ohiopyle, Confluence, Rockwood, and Meyersdale have joined as a half-dozen Trail Towns to coordinate signage, facilities, and events.
With a constant incline of 0.8 percent, we finally reached the line of the Eastern Continental Divide, which splits the watershed captured by the Gulf of Mexico, west of the line, from the Chesapeake Bay watershed to its east. We started the ride at 720' above sea level at Pittsburgh and climbed to 2,400' at the divide. We would descend to 605' at Cumberland, Maryland, then down to sea level at Washington.
Big Savage Tunnel was lit but disorienting to bike through. Immediately after the tunnel, though, the track offers an almost dream-like vista into lush Maryland pastureland, and a moment later we crossed the Mason-Dixon line into that state. The great news was that the upward grind was over, and we began a constant downhill slide of ten miles to Frostburg, Maryland. I squealed with pleasure, out loud! I was riding by myself because I did not want to share the excitement of going downhill mile after mile.
The rain did not stop, but it alleviated, and by Frostburg it was no more than mist. At Frostburg we stayed at what was a bed-and-breakfast for some people, but not for us: we paid extra for breakfast. We were assigned a single long room with eleven beds, mostly bunks, with five tiny shower rooms down the hall. I got into the shower and for five minutes did nothing but hold my left foot up to the hot water. There had been virtually no contact between me and my foot for hours. Problem was, my left biking shoe was tight, and the rain had scrunched it up even more. Then the taut strap that was part of the left pedal ended communication with that extremity altogether.
The Third Day: Saturday May 17.
A glorious beginning to the day. At six the sun broke through and lit up our dorm room. We groggily moved to breakfast, then got on our bikes, which we had hosed down the night before. The first ten miles or so were still downhill, much of it alongside a single train track that they seem to have preserved for possible future use.
That brought us to Cumberland, Maryland, where the navigable portion of the Potomac River ends. Cumberland got rich as the farthest-west point of the original thirteen colonies. It served as the provisions point for the twenty-year-old George Washington in his 1753 trip from Mt. Vernon to Cumberland, after which he hiked over the Alleghenies and along the Casselman and Youghiogheny rivers to what is now McKeesport and on to Pittsburgh -- exactly the route we were doing in reverse. Cumberland was also the point to which General Edward Braddock brought his troops, with Washington as aide-de-camp, in 1755, before the British were massacred at what is now Braddock, part-way between McKeesport and Pittsburgh.
One of the few immediate pleasures on the trip -- as distinct from the pleasures I am now making up -- was realizing how important Pittsburgh is to the history of the United States. There were four Virginian or British expeditions to the Forks of the Ohio in all. Washington in 1753 to warn the French away; Washington in 1754 engaging the French militarily -- and losing; General Braddock in 1755, ending in defeat; and finally General John Forbes's triumph in 1758. That was 250 years ago, another of my reasons for wanting to make the trip this year. For political reasons, Forbes cut his way to Pittsburgh not through Virginia and Maryland, as Braddock had, but across Pennsylvania from Philadelphia.
Think too of Pittsburgh's place in the nation's industrial history. It was July 4, 1828 when construction began on what was then the most ambitious canal in the history of the world, generations before Suez and Panama, at a projected length of 460 miles from Washington to Pittsburgh. The route was evident in its name: the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal. The canal dug only halfway through its designated route and stopped at Cumberland, but that very day in 1828 other speculators began construction of the Baltimore & Ohio Railway, which had the same objective of linking the Atlantic seaboard with Pittsburgh. The B&O finally reached Pittsburgh in 1871, after three decades of being shut out of Pittsburgh by the Pennsylvania Railroad, which had reached Pittsburgh from Philadelphia in 1852. Until I cycled the route I had not realized that the two different rail tracks of the mid-19th century exactly replayed the two different routes to Pittsburgh that had been taken by Braddock and Forbes a century before.
Cumberland was a gay old town, one that pleased me very much in its ornate architecture from the decades after the Civil War, when the canal was still operating (parts of it until 1924, though most only to 1889) and the B&O was bringing freight and tourists to town. The Western Maryland line added its wealth for another half-century, after which the town declined badly in the 1980s.
It is just now springing back, largely on the tourist trade, including the money it gets from bikers. We took breakfast in Cumberland, got supplies and some minor repairs in a bike shop, took pictures at the canal terminal, and got started. Before the start, custom demanded kissing the behind of a mule in a bronze statue opposite the terminal: I declined.
The canal started right outside Cumberland, about 90 percent of it still full of water, generally stagnant. We could see parts of the canal that had been damned up by beaver, and something else I had never seen before. We passed two trees where beaver had started to gnaw on the trunks but had then left. Who knows why?
The principle of the canal is straightforward. It is a big ditch, generally 30 feet wide, and the barges were towed by teams of mules who plodded on the towpath, pulling ropes. The barges could have been floated up and down the Potomac, which is easily navigable at many points, but overall the Potomac drops several hundred feet between Cumberland to Washington, and this drop creates the rapids and falls that necessitated the canal in the first place.To bring the barges smoothly up or down this difference in grade, the C&O Canal was provided with seventy-five locks, each raising or lowering the canal boats an averge of ten feet. That may seem as though our 185-mile ride from Cumberland down to sea level at Georgetown was all downhill, but it was not. The towpath was entirely level, though broken at each lock by short downhills.
I did not inflict my enthusiasm for art history on my companions, but I enjoyed the fine proportions of the lockhouses, where the lockmasters and their families lived: simple buildings of one story plus an attic, rendered in stone, brick, or wood. The majority had been restored, with about a dozen too far decayed to be anything more than shells. Almost inconceivably, on the Web I found a film clip made of the canal still operating, mules and all, in 1917.
I never saw such splendid masonry as on this trip. With all my experience in Greek and Roman structures, including the Pont du Gard aqueduct and the superb Herodian work in Jerusalem, Caesarea, and Hebron, I had never seen such an abundance of finely cut stone as I did on the canal and the B&O and WMRR tunnels and bridges. Much of the stonework I examined looked too fresh to date from the 1820s, however, and I learned that the restoration of some of the locks and canal aqueducts (points where the canal was carried on stonework rather than in its earthen bed) was undertaken by the Works Projects Administration in the Depression. More power to them!
Jan Firewicz had warned me that the C&O towpath would make the trails in Pennsylvania look like superhighways, and he was right. The towpath is narrow, rarely more than seven or eight feet wide, just enough to let two mule trains pass each other, and insubstantial in foundation: packed earth with some natural rock outcrop and tree roots. Only here and there had the National Parks Service laid in some crushed sandstone in the worst of the washouts. After a good rain, the towpath gets soggy at best, with most of it turning into puddles and mud. The mud comes in stretches up to a hundred feet long, and the puddles are nonstop. When I went through the puddles or mudfields, I felt like a cat, because my spine would stiffen with fear every time I felt the back wheel swerving away from the front. There was nothing I could do about it: any number of times I came within inches of landing splat in the mud.
The towpath was made for mules and not humans, and was even more demanding than I anticipated. Each morning my bicycle seat would wobble, but how could that be, when it was locked in tight? It got loose from all the bumps on the towpath. The canal was always on our left as we cycled, then came the towpath straight in front of us, typically about ten feet higher than the water level in the canal. On the right of the towpath flowed the Potomac River. It could sometimes be as far as an eighth of a mile away, but in general it was close by, with a precipitous fall-off from the towpath down to the river, which was at times as much as forty feet lower.
The going was treacherous, since not more than a few hundred feet of the towpath, mainly the narrow stone ledges to the locks and aqueducts, had guiderails. The trickiest part were the culverts, which we encountered about 200 times in the trip. The culverts siphoned off excess water from the canal through a runoff into the Potomac. Every time I crossed one of the culverts it was with trepidation. I had to pedel extra hard to get up those miniature hills, then you hit the culvert's stone top, generally eight feet wide and eight or ten feet long, after which the towpath dropped just as suddenly, with no guiderails of any kind. The mules were surefooted, but we humans could easily have dropped into the culverts, a good twenty feet below.
But there were such fine compensations to being in the wild! We saw or heard frogs by the hundreds and turtles by the score, always inert, sunning themselves on tree trunks over the canal -- sometimes ten in a row. We saw the Great Blue Heron half a dozen times, each time in the Potomac, not in the canal, placidly eyeing the waters for fish. A hundred times more we saw geese with newborn goslings. The geese were generally swimming in the canal but we would also come across them sunning themselves on the towpath, their goslings -- two or three or four -- scampering alongside them. The parent geese would stop, flap their wings, and hiss at me as I drove by. I did not stop for further conversation.
The wildflowers were just as unforgettable, in a pleasant way: they were mainly phlox, pink and blue and white, waist high, and we saw them by the thousands or hundreds of thousands, maybe in the millions, now on one side of the track, now on the other, now on both. They were the most cheering sight imaginable. I thought of my late father Maxwell, who planted them all over our garden in Montréal.
We saw plenty of deer and a fair number of snakes. Zarky saw one hanging from a tree, but I spotted only the several that scrambled away in the grass as I approached. There were bears, too. We all became adept at analyzing poop. We could easily figure out dogs, horses, and deer. But bear droppings are huge, like the beasts themselves. More evidence: a bear paw print with claw-marks, definitely not a print from a horse. It was so precise that it could not have been more than a few hours old.
A mile or two beyond the print was a deer carcass across the towpath. I was alerted to it by two hawks that leapt into the air as I came up. A moment later I came across the carcass, which looked no more than a few days old-maybe just a few hours -- with a huge gash to its stomach. There was no highway for miles around, so we concluded that a bear must have mauled the deer, then other animals joined in the feast. I regret having no photograph of it, but it did not seem wise to stand between the bear and its prey. Some of our party thought the deer (we each saw it separately, then compared notes later) had been killed by a mountain lion, which I found no great solace.
When we saw the dead deer, around two in the afternoon, it was cold and raining. We were in clear sight of the Potomac, with trees growing from the old canal bed and on the heights beyond. I got the first of my three flats tires here -- a front wheel. Zarky Rudavsky and I got to work, and in some twenty minutes we had replaced the inner tube. I said to Rudavsky: "You did all the work. How am I going to learn if you don't leave it to me?" His reply: "You do your thing some other time; we have a lot of towpath to cover."
We started up again as Rudavsky muttered: "Could have been worse." I knew he meant bear -- and he did. I said: "What is our policy on bear?" After all, we were carrying food in our saddlebags and I had more food right on my back. I proposed that if we saw one, I would throw out my backpack and bike the opposite way. Rudavsky temporized: there were different strategies for the brown bear and the grizzly, and anyway, didn't they do most of their foraging in the early and late parts of the day? We never did create a bear policy, which I will insist on next time, even though there will be no next time.
Then, quite unexpectedly, I returned the favor. Now it was Zarky who got the flat, in the more complicated back tire. It came in the worst and nastiest rain possible. We got the job done together: mostly he but I was helpful in having the best pump on me. Zarky said nothing when we got started again, but the next day he confided in Paul Munro that I had been of real help to him on his flat the day before.
After another hour or so, Zarky and I reached the western mouth of the Paw Paw Tunnel. On the map you can see why they blasted it through: the Potomac takes three long meanders here, adding many miles to the route. So at some point, maybe not in 1828 but later, they cut through Sorrel Ridge for 3,118 feet: effectively half a mile. We ate before attacking the tunnel: the others from snacks they ordered at the Cumberland coffeeshop, me digging deeper into my trail mix and tuna-fish tins.
I had had fears of this moment ever since our organizing meeting at Zarky's back in April. No wonder that of the seven men who heard Zarky describe the tunnel, only four signed up for the trip. The tunnel proved not much less terrifying than in Zarky's vision. I turned my bike light on in front, and my blinkers in back. The tunnel is some thirty feet wide: twenty-five feet for the canal and five feet for a narrow ledge higher up. The height was calculated for the correct angle of the ropes the mules pulled, I suppose. The little bands that now shuffle through the tunnel move in only one direction at a time. There were no lights for the half-mile. Supposedly the whole region here lacks electricity, but how can we conduct a techo-war in Iraq and not light the Paw Paw Tunnel through solar panels if nothing else?
Only the simplest of wood railings stood between us and the water in the canal, and a child could have fallen in at any moment. Our shoes were wading through constant puddles formed by the weeping of the semicircular brick walls. The audio was worse than the visual: drip drip drip drip drip drip, some on us but mostly into the canal water. This was the spookiest experience of my life. We emerged at the eastern end to a knot of people waiting for us (they could hear but not see that we were in the tunnel). They told us there was a water moccasin snake waiting on the trail ahead of us, but in what possible way could that frighten me as much as what I had just been through?
We still had about forty miles ahead of us, with a slight easing of our task: the track of the Western Maryland Railroad, which we had used on the Pennsylvania side, was here paved for about twelve miles into Hancock, Maryland. But we were so tired -- at least I was -- that the twelve miles proved a tremendous hurdle, even though paved. The former trackbed was boring in its straightness and in the uninteresting vegetation bordering it.
Late, nearly 8 p.m., we drew into Hancock, got off the trail, and biked approximately a mile up to the Super8 Motel. But not me: I mainly walked it, being totally out of steam. Some of us hosed off our bikes, but not me. Why should I remove something that would only return the next day? That seventy-six-mile day was the hardest of all for me. We showered, walked into town, and found the Venice Pizzeria. There was a highly competent Latina server, with whom we joked a bit; my cheese ravioli was not terribly bad, but I was catatonic. I ordered a Tropicana peach drink and found it so good I ordered a second as take-out -- and secret talisman. I felt light-headed and walked back by myself in the cool air, now turned to rain.
The Fourth Day: Sunday May 18.
A bad scene. We woke around 6, and scouted outside for the weather. There was plenty of moisture in the air but it was not raining. On that basis I dressed and organized my panniers: what to stash on my back and what to leave in the saddlebags.
This proved unfortunate, because the weather dramatically changed right after that point. At 7 a.m. they let us in for an undistinguished breakfast (no protein!) and by 7:30 it was pouring outside. We biked down to a Sheetz 24/7 and got sandwiches in a hilarious high-tech manner, in which everything had to be ordered on a touch screen but the sandwiches were made by hand anyway. We stood dully and dumbly under the gas-pump overhangs, then pushed off into the rain. First stop was the bike shop next to the trail, where I bought a replacement inner tube. Return to the trail itself came around eight o'clock.
There were roughly ten more miles of paved ex-railroad bed, then back to the towpath. It was now raining "in your face" -- totally nasty. Here came one of the many lessons I picked up on human nature. My first delight was finding this bit of paved road, because I could make such superior progress. Then I hated it: the road was so straight and monotonous that I cursed it for being level instead of leading me downhill. It was lamentable that I had only a windbreaker, not a proper rain jacket. I could have taken one, but I was obsessed with the need to economize space in my saddlebags. Nor had I any sort of rain pants.
There was a certain logic in leaving them behind, though, because in Pittsburgh I never bicycle when it rains. By instinct or maybe as a gesture of hope I had packed just the windbreaker and biking shorts.
We went maybe another thirty miles on the towpath, with a minimum let-up in the rain. I then got my second flat. I pointed out to Zarky that if we walked another few hundred feet we could be in the light, where there was a break in the trees. Zarky found this farcical, but I prevailed. After the flat repair, we resumed slogging through the mud. The horizon was brightening now, but the towpath was unrelentingly slow going. Its material composition changed at various points, but it was still basically mud with some cinders tossed in at washed-out spots.
Around 1 in the afternoon we came to the Cushwa Basin, an overnight put-up place for the canal boats. Other bikers told us there was a town up the hill. We lifted up our eyes, and indeed through the rain we could make out Williamsport, Maryland. We biked uphill best we could, and found a fine village with an impressive high street: North Conococheague. I liked the town instantly because of the competent neoclassical architecture at the Basin. One of the buildings is a Canal Museum, which, however, failed to lure us in. Town legend holds that Williamsport was in the running to be the national capital. Mirabile dictu, the legend proves to be true.
Locals directed us to the Desert Rose Café, where we found ourselves in the company of Rose herself. Were I, like my god James Joyce, to turn this biking report into an Odyssey, Desert Rose would be my Siren. Her café, only a few weeks old, was avant-garde in food choices like hummus. The menu's tag line "Serving karma by the cup" was unexpected for rural Maryland, too. The snapshot taken of me inside the café shows me exhausted, but Rose's toasted cheese sandwich revived me, and the photo taken outside shows me plenty muddy (mud all over the bike, my shoes and socks and bare skin up to my knees) but unbowed.
My companions did a little desultory flirting with Rose, who manifested some interest despite their letting her know we were all married. Our spirits were brightened by the Siren stop, and the afternoon went better. The sun came out, and we kept up a decent pace until the point around lock 43 (milepost 88, counting from Washington), where we were obliged to leave the towpath. A sign declared that the towpath was impassible after a landslide and a washout, and other bikers said the towpath was below a solid foot of water, making it impossible to maneuver through.
So we headed inland for about seven miles of country road. I was unenthusiastic, because it took seven road miles to equal what would have been only three on the towpath -- from mileposts 88 down to 85. The detour had some pleasant aspects, though. We encountered a band of young scholars: three young men from Ellicott City, Maryland, who got on the towpath at Hancock. The men were athletic and quick witted. I asked, "Hey, I can never remember which Ellicott it was who founded your city, Andrew or Joseph," and got the pure-guess reply "Both." We would see them again the next day. If I liked Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" better, I would think of the three as fellow pilgrims.
I struggle to keep up with the many hills. Then I do something entirely stupid. A sign says, "Dam # 4 Road -- Steep downhill -- cyclists must walk bicycles." I was hardly going to do that, so I rode down and hoped by clamping my brakes for dear life I would be safe. But at one point I am not safe at all: the descent becomes so steep that I cannot corner as tightly as I need to, and I swing to the wrong side of the road. There was no car coming and nothing happened. But had there been a car I would not have seen it coming, nor would the driver have seen me, and I would have been killed. New York Times: "Distinguished art historian dead in freak accident," and the freak would have been me.
We re-entered the towpath after the Dam # 4 Road. Paul Munro inexplicably disappeared (he had left his camera cover behind), so Zarky ordered me to keep going. I did, but it turns out that Zarky got his second flat tire in that short stretch of trail where I was out of hearing range. We four others knew nothing about his difficulty, so we stopped.
Where was Zarky? The riders with cellphones -- all but me -- ran out of luck: no service. Some bikers came by and we questioned, Was there trouble back on the towpath? They said a rider in a recumbent bike -- Zarky -- blew a tire. This passing of news among strangers was a striking evocation of all the centuries of human history up to the coming of the railroad and telegraph.
Chaucer again, or Robin Hood's merry band in Sherwood Forest. Or Dante, with that brilliant reply when he left the Conte Guidi's castle in the Mugello and encountered the Florentine troops come to arrest him. "Have you seen Dante?" "Quando fu io, fu lui," Dante acknowledged: when I was there, he was there, too.
This wait stop for Zarky and Paul Munro was exceptional for me. Since I was invariably the biker in last position the entire trip, I would habitually come up to the group that had been waiting for me (not all that long) and they would immediately take off, depriving me of a rest stop. This time we all waited together. It was about 5 in the afternoon and the rain had stopped for the day, so I waded into the deep grass where the canal had left no trace except for a slight depression, adjacent to a horse farm. Placid as the horses chewing hay nearby, there is a second photo of me here, a carefree man in the deep grass.
What a wonderful feeling to be liberated of all concerns, though in practical terms that stop endowed me with some twenty bug bites that did not mature until Pittsburgh.
Zarky and Paul Munro finally caught up, and we cycled another twenty miles or so. At lock 38, the highway bridge leads over the Potomac to Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Paul Goldberg and Ed Moravitz were far ahead, and going too fast, so they missed the pertinent connection up to the bridge, which towered over us. Taking the only road they saw -- a formidably steep hill -- they puffed their way up to the bridge level and into Shepherdstown.
Zarky showed the rest of us instead an unmarked path with switchbacks that would zig-zag us up to the bridge. I am just barely making it at this point, and mostly walk into Shepherdstown, with a near-collapse into my bed at the Clarion Inn. Again I did not hose my bike. To evade the eagle eyes at the front desk, I entered through a side door and secreted the bike and me on the elevator. Not to get too graphic, but it was on night four that I discovered my internal plumbing was significantly messed up. I revived by drinking concentrated electrolytes beyond my regular supply, which are the "saltsticks" manufactured by my nephew Jonathan Toker in California. These put salt, magnesium and other things into capsules that a runner or bike racer can take out in seconds. The bottle says "Made by Toker Engineering Ltd.," which I like fine. Jonathan, one of Bill's two brilliant boys, is a Ph.D. chemist and Iron Man competitor, so he knows what he is doing.
I joined my companions at the hotel bar. Now came the historic split. We sat down at a table and two of the guys declared they were out ("bailing," in their phrase). The son of one and the wife of another were coming to get them the next morning from Baltimore and Leesburg. Another guy wanted to pull out, too. He had had enough, and since his wife was already in the DC suburbs at her sister's place, she could equally well collect him and the four bikes in Shepherdstown. He pointed out that we three others could rent a car in Shepherdstown as easily as in Washington.
I could hardly do the last seventy-three miles by myself. The trail was wild and isolated, and I had already had two flat tires on the trip, with one more still to come. I said: "Guys, I will not resist whatever vote is taken, but you get bragging rights only by biking to Washington, not to Shepherdstown." This ringing declaration convinced the three others to come with me.
The encounter confirmed for me that knowledge really is power. Chrissy, one of the servers, told me about an early breakfast place, Betty's, that opened at 5 a.m. (actually at 6). Then I asked Paul Goldberg, as the certified techie of the group, for the next day's weather report, which gave only a 10 percent chance of rain between Shepherdstown and Washington.
It was that solid information, more than my rhetoric, that carried the day. I relaxed, ordered a tuna melt for supper, and allowed myself my only silliness the whole trip. Paul Goldberg, excellent amateur historian of early America, asked me if I remembered who was the doctor who conceived the rapprochement between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and I answered Benjamin Rush. "Now I have an American Presidency question for you, Paul, or for the whole table. By what name did Lyndon Baines Johnson address his penis?" Robert Caro had inserted this tidbit not only in volume one but in volume three of his quartet on LBJ. I had to answer the question myself -- "Jumbo" -- and Zarky was shocked. "Franklin, I have never heard you speak like that in all the years I've known you."
The Fifth Day: Monday May 19.
Last leg of the trip. I got the front desk to ring the three rooms at 5:30 a.m., and they did. At 5:55 one of the guys chose to put his still-wet biking shoes in the dryer for half an hour. I said: "Better check with Zarky first," and he did, coming back with the understated "Well, Zarky wasn't happy." We left the hotel at 6:35, biked downhill to Betty's café on Main Street -- the kind of architectural assemblage you expect in a rich or formerly rich town. Along with the pancakes, Betty's café was full of injunctions. I enjoyed "Grouchy pays ten dollars extra," though I thought it inferior to the window sign at the motel in Hancock: "God Bless everyone: absolutely no exceptions to this rule."
As we left Betty's, a man in an electric utility uniform overheard us talking about shortcuts, and said we could take the paved road on the south bank of the Potomac as far as Harpers Ferry, then cross back to the north bank and the towpath. The man seemed knowledgeable enough, but bikers cannot afford vague talk. So I went back into Betty's and broke into a conversation two men were having at the counter. I asked them, would they recommend the paved road from Shepherdstown down to Harpers Ferry? Hell no, they would not: too many hills and murderous traffic. So I asked: "What about the Maryland side, is there any road that can break up the tedium [I probably said boredom] of those seventy-three miles of unbroken towpath?"
A near-bald, quite in-good-shape man gets up from the counter and to my surprise whips out an iPhone. He calls up mapquest or an equivalent and starts scrolling the map with his thumb. I am open-mouthed at the technical sophistication of this country gentleman. I call in Zarky, and the three of us consult. In the end, we dared take no more than a mile or two of river road on the Maryland side, being uncertain where it would lead us.
We cross Antietam Creek on a fine stone-arched aqueduct. On another occasion, with time not so microscopically doled out, we would have visited the nearby Antietam (Sharpsburg) battlefield. The Civil War rages all around us in the form of historic plaques -- an especially touching story of a young soldier outside the Shepherdstown cemetery. Being so close to the ground, so tied to the rhythms of the earth even if only for five days, we catch the sense of battles and sharpshooters and dysentry so much more than tourists speeding through in a car.
The challenge of this last day is the unrelenting, unremitting, uneventfulness of the towpath. It offers us no incidents, no changes of track, neither ups nor downs: nothing but plugging on. I cannot for the life of me remember when, where, or what I ate for lunch (but calling up my memory now, I do recall it: Whites Ferry, egg salad sandwich). I was famished when we got to Harpers Ferry, just thirteen miles into the day's journey. A photo taken there showns me distinctly peakèd.
Harpers Ferry is one of those American place-names that mean so much, if only we could remember why. The Internet jogs my memory. John Brown came here (with the backing of abolitionists in Boston) not to free the slaves, directly, but to raid the Federal armory here. The first victim in the shooting was a free African American, it turns out. Brown hoped to arm the slaves, and so destroy the Virginia economy.
But a train coming through town surprised him, and he was caught and executed.
What a blessed spot this is today, with multiple bridges at the conjunction of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers. I could only make out the town from a considerable distance, and I was unsure whether it lay in Virginia or Maryland today (neither: West Virginia). We take a few minutes to snack alongside one of the superbly cut-stone piers holding up the nearer of the two railroad bridges when a CSX train explodes out of a tunnel and hurtles across the Potomac right over our heads. To us below the CSX train looks for all the world like the Shinkansen -- the Japanese bullet train. What a joke, since the U.S. has wrecked its once-great train system.
We pushed on about twenty-five miles more to Whites Ferry, always hugging the Potomac shore. Whites Ferry is not remarkably historic: it's just plain old. The barge-like ferry here, guided by a wire strung across the Potomac, takes people and cars across the river between the Maryland shore and Leesburg, Virginia. Predecessor ferries have done this for two centuries. The store and snackbar did not offer a great deal: I was lucky to get some egg salad on toast. The surprise came outside, where the front wall of the store carries three black lines that mark the flood levels of the past generation. The lowest of the three lines, at the height of the second-floor windows, marks the floodline of November 7, 1985.
That flood came during the endgame of Hurricane Juan. Above that, the floodline of January 21, 1996, caused by rapidly melting snows that year. Right up at attic level, some twenty-five feet above ground, was the still more ominous line marked June 24, 1972. That was Hurricane Agnes, which continued northward to become the worst disaster to strike Pennsylvania -- ever. I cannot comprehend the vast outpouring of water from the Potomac that could have caused such flooding. Then I remember: what weakened the C&O Canal was competition from the railroads, but what finally destroyed it was flooding in the Potomac, with the final disaster coming in 1924.
Respite from our labors also came from the three young Ellicott City bikers at the snackbar -- the ones we met the day before, on the detour off the towpath. They were eating alongside, though not with us, and we got more information from them. One had just graduated from Virginia Tech; another from a university whose name was too mumbled for me to catch, but he was going to graduate school at Cornell. The third was graduating from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and aspired to a Ph.D. in math from the University of Washington. There was something life-affirming in these three young men who were serious about their education yet allowing themselves two days of plebian activity in biking and camping the C&O Towpath.
More slogging. The day was dry but the trail was still muddy. We pushed on sixteen more miles: how simple it all seems now, but I gritted my teeth nonstop. We came across civilization at milepost 14 from Washington, at the Great Falls of the Potomac, but it left me with a queasy feeling. One harbringer of this queasiness was the Yuppie Kayaker. A young man of perhaps twenty-two, the Yuppie Kayaker held a high-tech kayak, which he was going to put into the Potomac below the Great Falls. We asked how he would get back: no problem, he'll cellphone a friend who will drive him back to his car in the parking lot here. Not very heroic somehow.
The towpath had lost all its puddles and mud now, and it looked cosmeticized, as I suppose befitted an outing spot for the nation's capital. What a let-down to see so many people after a five-day trip in which an hour could pass without our sighting a soul. It has been decades since I read Jonathan Swift, but doesn't his hero Lemuel Gulliver come home from his adventures only to find he has nothing to say to humans and so ends up spending his days with horses? I was not enjoying my reconnection with civilization: the dozens of easy riders now swarming around us were mocking the hurdles we had just overcome. Also, civilization deprived us of one nice trail amenity: we could no longer go in the bushes.
But there were several sights to give me pleasure here. The first was the Great Falls Tavern. It was by now about 4:30 in the afternoon, and the slanting light played superbly off the glistening white walls of the squatly proportioned building, making reflections in the canal. I hauled out my camera, normally protected by layers and layers of ziplock bags, and took my best photo of the trip. I had not risked taking my digital camera: I had a premonition of diving headlong into the C&O Canal with it. This did not happen, but easily might have. I was exhausted by this point. I entered the Visitors' Center and picked up five identical brochures, in my blurry state of mind thinking each was different.
There is a restored set of five locks at the Great Falls, complete with a replica canal boat. But emblematic of the trip was the intrusion of wild nature alongside the manicured grounds. Truly miraculous were the Great Falls themselves. I have seen Niagara a half-dozen times, but the Great Falls of the Potomac are far more wonderful. The quantity of water flowing here (I'll invent the word "gallonage") is possibly less than that of Niagara Falls, or possibly more. The Potomac is, after all, a more significant river than the Niagara. It is the way the water falls that is so thrilling. Not in a sheet, like Niagara, but cutting through huge jagged teeth. I can imagine a person surviving Niagara Falls, and a score have, but it is not possible to imagine a little raft, craft, or barrel surviving the Great Falls of the Potomac.
I could have stayed the whole day here, but Zarky beckoned me to keep moving. He was by then in touch with Laurel by cellphone, and anxious to get us to Milepost Zero (that is a theoretical endpoint only: no marker actually calls itself that) in Georgetown, the first part of Washington we will encounter.
Now I experienced my third flat tire. It was losing air at a fairly slow pace, and had to be pumped up every three or four miles because of what turned out to be a faulty valve. No one was inclined to change my tire so close to trail's end -- certainly not me -- so I pumped and puffed along as best I could. Now we were all four riders close together, and ludicrously I was in the lead. Of course: they could not leave Georgetown without me, and staying behind me was the only guarantee of keeping me going at the fastest possible pace.
So we were cycling at somewhat better than ten miles an hour. Every three or four miles Ed and I took turns pumping me up. We kept up the fast pace, speeding all the more when we came within four miles of Georgetown. Now there was a paved path, called the Capital Crescent Trail, and we were joined by so many rollerbladers and cyclists that we needed a painted line to keep us from bumping into each other.
In this somewhat burlesque mode we entered Georgetown, at M street. The last few blocks of the towpath switched from cinders to brick paving. This surface was clearly an impossibility, or at least an extravagance, as a footing for mules to pull the barges in the 1820s. Another few blocks and we were done, at a sign declaring this the beginning of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historic Park. Here we saw the mingling of the canal waters with those of Rock Creek, flowing out of Rock Creek Park. From this point a canal boat could enter the Potomac itself, and flow pretty effortlessly to the sea. We were now at sea level and also the farthest point inland of the Potomac tidewaters -- an important consideration in fixing the nation's capital here. A mile or two away, the Mall preserves remnants of a separate system called the Washington Canal, which carried barges between the Anacostia and Potomac rivers. It had no direct link with the C&O.
Laurel Rudavsky was waiting with her minivan to take our bicycles back to Pittsburgh. Ellen had kindly sent down a change of clothes, for which I was grateful and my companions even more so. There was no place to change, so my last act of "forest rules" was to change in the front seat of the van.
Thursday night, three days after the ride ended, Ellen and I paid a call on the Rudavskys to thank them for all they had done, and we picked up two amusing stories. One involved the same three young men from Ellicott City. They had shown up at the same end-spot an hour before we did. Laurel saw they were trail bikers, and asked if they had seen four middle-aged men on the trail.
"Oh yes, we saw them a bunch of times."
"How were they doing?"
"Not bad at all, for their age."
Laurel then took their photo and warned: "Make prints of this picture and keep them forty years. When you are the age of those other men, will you still be able to ride the trail?"
The other ex post facto news was about Zarky's front wheel. The rim -- not the rubber tire but the actual steel -- was almost entirely broken through by the time we arrived in Georgetown. Another mile or so and Zarky would have had to walk, since there was no bike shop in the seventy-three miles from Shepherdstown.
Our excellent adventure was over, but I felt a mild depression set in. We had turned into an ordinary crew of tourists, no different to the people passing us in Georgetown from any others.
We hailed a taxi, got to Reagan National Airport, piled into a rented car at Alamo, and drove back to Pittsburgh: just 236 miles by highway. We were home in five hours, not the five days it had taken us to get there.
I wrote up the trip in the days following my return in the hope that I could discern Bigger Lessons from it than just how to adjust gears. I had hours of solitary time on the trip. Sometimes we would pair on the track and talk, but since I was always the last rider the others mostly left me alone and paced me ahead, while watching out for me in their side mirrors. What did I think about in all those hours? A great deal, something like half my life, plus hallucinations.
What I needed was to turn the adventure into a sustaining memory. Paul Munro and Zarky Rudavsky greatly helped the process by putting their photographs on Google's Picasa Web site, under the names paulwmunro and zarkyod, respectively. Zarky's photographs capture the comaraderie of the group, while Paul's give a good idea of the natural life we saw: the turtles, the herons, the wildflowers, the geese protecting their goslings -- everything but the deer carcass on the track.
Very helpful in turning adventure into memory was the simple process of emailing people about my trip: my family, old friends, my teaching colleagues, and even my academic chiefs at the University of Pittsburgh. Nearly everyone wrote back with their pleasure at my achievement, which made my re-entry into conventional society easier.
And yet.
I referred earlier to Gulliver's Travels. It was oppressive that, like Lemuel Gulliver, I had to carry these memories bottled up within myself. I confess I once likened myself to a Holocaust survivor (you will find this both preposterous and obscene: I report it as a state of mind, not as a state of truth). I had done something the outside world could honor but not share with me. Writing -- communicating with myself, really-would ensure that unlike Gulliver, I would not have such a difficult re-entry that I could only grunt to horses.
I needed to write for its cathartic value if nothing else. But taking a few days off fitted my professional as well as my personal agenda. The lines above are the first words I have ever dedicated just to me. My Fallingwater book introduces me at a few points, and you can find autobiographical glimpses in the preface to the third edition of my book on Notre-Dame de Montréal and in the preface to the Chinese edition of Fallingwater Rising (I wrote about discovering the power of landscape as I bicycled around Beijing). I also released a whole DVD that tracked my village-hunting in Ukraine and Romania. But none of my writings examined me to the degree that I do in this account.
The exercise was exhausting but also useful. It got me in shape for the close final editing I am starting to do on the text of my Pittsburgh book for the University of Pittsburgh Press. A week after I got back from the trail, I wrapped up negotiations with Harvey Miller/Brepols Publishers in New York for my four scholarly volumes on the archaeology of Early Medieval Florence. We are agreed that I can contract with a "trade" publisher, possibly HarperCollins, to bring out a wholly different autobiographical account of my years running the Florence Cathedral excavations -- what I cited earlier as the most difficult long-term task of my life. So two of the great labors of my life, one short-term and one long-term, will share a conceptual parallel.
There was a negative impetus to write, too. It disconcerts me to find the "heroic" component in my achievement already changing before my eyes. It was abhorrent to read in the Saturday May 24 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, just five days after my return, an article entitled "Biking: One Couple's Memorable Ride from D.C. to Pittsburgh." This was (in my view) exactly how not to do the ride. The article extolled a rich couple, retired but ten years younger than I am, who took twice as long to do the trip (three days just to cover Washington to Shepherdstown), with splendid accommodations and porters to take their luggage from point to point. The Internet is now full of advertising for this and similar "assisted" trips all over the U.S. Those luxury outfitters are stealing my heroics!
Luckily, something came in to counter this dilution of my achievement even before I got home. On May 19, while I was still pedalling to Washington, Paul Goldberg wrote: "A great ride. Gentlemen, I thank you for your company, your stoicism, your friendship, and to you Frank, in particular, I admire your determination and ability to overcome the elements. Bravo!"
Retelling the history of the trip makes me inquire how history forms itself overall. Historical fact is always elusive, even with recent events. Take the origins of this ride: did Zarky push me to do it, as I thought, or did I push him? He insists that after his ride with Aliza he swore he would never do it again, so his version may be right.
I have two other "takes" on history. One is a better understanding of the hurdles and adventures in the Odyssey. We encountered no Laestrigonians, no Cyclops, and no Sirens beyond the Desert Rose of North Conococheague Street. But with not too much exercise of imagination I could have dictated to posterity an account no less awe-inspiring. The second epiphany is my new understanding of the core practice in Judaism, which is observance of the Sabbath. I finally appreciate the genius of setting aside a day that prohibits work. (To the best of my knowledge, no other ancient people grasped the need for this.) Think if you had been an Israelite farmer four thousand years ago, slaving in the fields. Suppose you were told: "You are now allowed to work only six days, because God demands that you rest on the Sabbath." How you would have fulfilled that commandment to the letter!
And when festivals were prescribed, you would have observed them meticulously, too, because the Jewish holy days are closely bound to a farmer's life. At Passover, the exertions for the earliest harvest are finished; at Shavuoth, fifty days later, there is a short rest after the frantic second harvest; then nothing all summer until just before the final harvest. The farmers would relax on the New Year, the Day of Atonement, and the final harvest festival of Sukkoth, which was seven days long and probably celebrated (with drinking) right in the fields themselves. In our five-day travail, had I once been told "You are forbidden to bike today," I would have fallen on my knees in the nearest church, mosque, or synagogue.
Other thoughts from my trip were political and social. The country through which we cycled was unchangedly Jeffersonian: all farm or forest; wild, self-reliant, and rural, with villages merely for local commerce. The villages (Shepherdstown the only one of any size) were uniformly handsome in their architecture, civil in their mores, and friendly in their citizens. They were also White: with the exception of the motel owner and the Latina server in Hancock we saw no people of color until the very margins of Washington. This was America as it was on the eve of the Revolution, both the good and bad of it.
There were no overt reminders of slavery, but only a fool would imagine there was ever equality of races here. Nor was there a Cohen's or Rubinstein's discount clothing store on any of the high streets of the villages, reminding me that exclusion, like inclusion, can work both ways. I am advocating neither a return to our roots (too late for that) nor a forgetting of them, but I was glad to see the country as it had once been. I wanted Cumberland, Williamsport, and Shepherdstown to be preserved: why visit them otherwise?
This pulls up a wider question: To what degree can a country change and still be itself? The U.S. now has a practicing Muslim among its elected representatives (Rep. Keith Ellison, a Democrat from Minnesota) -- as do Canada, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Britain. I sincerely believe new blood strengthens our country, but surely strength comes also by holding fast to our origins. Call me naive, but I think our county can call on both those sources of strength.
Among the riddles on early American history that Paul Goldberg and I tossed back and forth as we rode, I asked Paul what Jew would have signed the Declaration of Independence had he not been killed in 1775 by the Cherokee, egged on by the British? The answer is the soldier-statesman Francis Salvador of South Carolina, that state's leading patriot in the agitation against British misrule -- the reason the governor had him killed. Francis Salvador was a very recent immigrant with the double handicap of being an observant Jew. He stands as a model for integration without losing integrity, or as others put it, unity without uniformity. The country will either forge ahead on that model, or surely wallow in separatism.
When you make your way through the country at this elemental level, you have to despair at times how the nation is being run, though there was much to cheer me, too. We were riding on the abandoned track of the Western Maryland Railroad, so the very ground beneath our wheels served as a constant reminder of the decline of America's railroads. But there was the simultaneous pleasure of seeing an industrial remnant recycled into a new and valuable use. We could constantly hear and often see the trains of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (the CSX System today) lumbering along. I wondered, How soon before CSX joins the C&O Canal in the industrial graveyard? And why does America want its railroads to die altogether?
The ride gave me plenty of time for natural observations, too. The Thursday 29 May Pittsburgh Post-Gazette informs me that the unprecedentedly vast rain in the first three weeks of May ended Pennsylvania's six-year drought, now that the water tables in the entire state are filled. My forehead, if not my brain, already knew this. This trip was the most time I had ever spent in nature. Failing both the canoe and swim tests, I was not allowed on overnight trips at Camp Arowhon in Ontario.
In 1973 Ellen and I camped two months in a tent in France and Germany, but those campgrounds would not qualify as natural environments. Now the trail and towpath put me right in the bosom of nature, and gave me some insight into it. One was how difficult it is to keep nature going. Millions of dollars to create the Great Allegheny Passage; millions more for constant maintenance to keep the C&O towpath in a state of nature. We saw no maintenence crews, but the sawdust everywhere made clear that somebody was regularly cutting away the trees that fell over the towpath. As it was, we still had to vault our bicycles over three newly fallen tree trunks, to say nothing of the dead deer.
Immanuel Kant declared that nature is dumb, yet I found it to hold many lessons. It was exhilarating to see that a dead tree that had fallen over the canal had sprouted a hundred flowering branches. Was the tree actually dead? Here was life affirming itself anew. The natural environment in the first half of the trip from Pittsburgh to Cumberland was not outstanding beyond the raging Youghiogheny and some flowering trees. Still, there was a memorable encounter with some deer the morning of the second day, just outside Confluence, when two leaped across the track just in front of us.
The sight was wonderful but not entirely so, since it reminded us of how many motorists and motorcyclists get killed every year by deer leaping into their path. It happens to cyclists, too.
There was also an incident right after the Eastern Continental Divide, where we saw a deer in great agony, trying but unable to walk or jump. It had apparently come down from a nearby highway, where it must have been hit by a car, and writhed in agony.
Thoreaus we were not, but we were traversing if not living in the wild, and truly felt part of the natural environment. At home, I tune out weather forcasts; on the trail I hung on to every detail. When we crossed the continental divide it was far more than a mere intellectual perception, as it would have been for motorists, because on the bicycle one feels everything. That whole day we were working against an upward slope that was demanding to us but nothing you would even perceive riding in a car. On a bicycle, everything is demanding. That explains why the descent after the divide was so exciting: on the trail every emotion is much more potent than in common living conditions. When I looked over the rich Maryland countryside and the well-maintained farms, I remembered a line from the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, and I blessed them unaware.
The weather changed at that exact spot, too, since the continental divide ushered in a new ecosystem. There seemed to be a similar shift in the weather pattern at Cumberland, which marked the beginning of the Potomac River Valley. At many junctures on the ride, both thrilling and boring, I could see myself on a giant video screen, inching my way the 328 miles from Pittsburgh to Washington, suffering in the cold and rain, glorying in the sunshine.
The natural world impressed me so much on this trip because -- being careful not to exaggerate -- I was living on a kind of point of death myself. This was not a death-defying trip, which the Federal Government would never have allowed us to do. But there is the useful Italian phrase pericolo di morte: one might have died at any number of points on the towpath. A sign at the Great Falls specified that about seven people die each year there, by dipping into the Potomac River and getting sucked in. Dozens of times I was distracted by an insect, a butterfly, or branches smacking my helmet. Had this happened while I was navigating over one of the culverts I could have lost my concentration and ended up in the water, either left or right. People fall into the culverts every year, and I would be astonished if this were to happen without loss of life.
There was a palpable sense that we could die on the trail. The eve of the trip, Zarky made the macabre joke that we all pack a copy of James Dickey's "Deliverance," the famous tale of four middle-aged men struggling against death in the woods. (I had already read it, not for the message but for the style: Dickey's later creation of the movie screenplay gave me brief hope I could do the same for the movie version of "Fallingwater Rising.") The closest I came to that foreboding was on day three, as I described above, when we had to change my tire in the pouring rain only a mile or two from the dead deer on the track. Encountering a bear, would I have had the presence of mind to unsnap my backpack and throw it away?
There were manifold lessons that I learned about myself. I reflected on my penchant for breaking rules-not the big rules of society like not murdering, but smaller rules I often bypass to do things my own way. On the trail, following rules was crucial, and I observed them minutely. The only point at which I did something stupid was that steep hill on day four, where the sign told bikers to dismount and I did not, opening myself to being killed. But that was the only truly dumb thing I did the entire trip. I also followed rules in caring for my bicycle: it was not just smart but vital to keep it in top condition.
Another lesson concerns stereotypes, and how I must not be seduced by them. How can I forget the man at the Shepherdstown diner who turned out to be a walking mapquest, with more high-tech in his pants pocket than in half the apartments in Manhattan? American life divides into those who have bought into high-tech and those who have not, but the Shepherdstown man totally belied the context in which we found him. It was also a good lesson to me that people are a lot brighter than they seem.
Though I might be pigeonholed as part of an elite, I was surprised, heartened, and gratified by the many enterprising blue-collar people we met. Any number of times, starting in the Sisters Café in Confluence, local citizens expressed interest in the Pittsburgh to Washington trail, said they had done some or all of it, or that they intended to. Many of these same people were purists: they did not get on or off at the Boston trailhead the way we had, but instead forged their way through the streets of Pittsburgh to make perfect the symbolism of Washington and the Forks of the Ohio. People are just not predictable by stereotypes. How could I not have recognized that to begin with? We mud-covered middle-aged Jewish bikers were fighting stereotypes ourselves.
Another life lesson is how vital it is to be not only self-reliant -- something I do all too well -- but interdependent. I depended on the wisdom of the rest of the group, and when I began training I appealed to them for help when it looked doubtful that I could last the whole trip. Zarky particularly helped with advice, from gear to gearing. I thrived on the encouragement and advice I got from Alan Orlansky at the Pittsburgh Pro Bicycles store, his patient employee Jeremy, and the helpful people at REI who listened to me before selling me gloves, a helmet, and biking shorts. It was Alan who advised me that instead of walking every few miles to get rid of my soreness I could stand up with the gears at their highest position, and so work some stiffness out of me. It was Jeremy who told me about the "chamois butt'r," which made sitting tolerable if no pleasure.
The "chamois butt'r" story is a reminder that I was living with my body in a way so different from that of mundane daily activities. My body was everything on the trail, though intelligence was demanded, too. One way of articulating what we put our bodies through was Paul Goldberg's calculation in a later e-mail that we burned approximately 16,500 calories on the first four days, so about 20,000 for the whole trip (but I have no way of testing this factoid). I made another observation on the human body after my return. My first two "return" days in Pittsburgh on May 20 and 21 were remarkably easy. It was only on the third day, May 22, that I began to wilt and only on Friday the 23rd that I was hit with a full physical and psychic meltdown.
I completed the ride through pure determination. The experienced bikers and I were made equal by the toughness of the route, which constantly demanded that I exceed my normal physical strength. But I also licked the route by attacking it as a problem, in a methodical manner, with the training indoors and on the track, and assembling the necessary provisions. The big lessons of the trip seem to have been self-reliance, interdependence, and rational planning.
Along with that, there was my wish to do something crazy, to stave off aging, and to declare that I was a "young" 64-year-old (my birthday fell during training, on April 29). I tried to be open about everything: the inevitability of bad weather, the harsh demands on my body, and the fact that on the trip I would for once be no leader. My sole job was to follow Zarky.
The trip also made me think of the "branding" of my own persona. Ed Moravitz set the tone for our dinners, joking about the medicinal qualities of beer in taking away biking pains. I thought I might drink some beer on the trip for what the Italians call cohesione sociale. But as a person who had sipped maybe three beers my whole life, all before my 18th birthday, why would I want to start drinking beer now? I stuck with iced tea and lemonade, and to hell with anyone who thought me a wuss.
In another type of contact, I drew closer to God. I did not blame God for the rain that started at Confluence and never stopped all day, but I thanked him/it for the morning at Frostburg, where despite the inauspicious name of the place, there was sun at six o'clock in the morning.
Actually, I started each trail day with a prayer. I thanked God for the day, for Ellen, for Sarah Augusta, Maxwell, and Jeffrey, for my intelligence, my wisdom, my energy, my body, and for the freedom to take five days off my work schedule. I continue to say this prayer every morning since my return, even though it is embarrassingly trite compared to the Psalms and the Prophets, and it only recasts what is already found in the traditional morning prayers.
Everyone on the trail must return with some sense that it was so live, and we who did it were living at a plane of excitement far above that of normal life. I miss -- to some degree -- the urgency of making split-second decisions. A thousand times, when I encountered a puddle or deep mud, I could generally make a sharp turn right or left to the margin of the towpath, where the water or mud was less bad. But that would take my wheels just inches from the towpath side: one slip and I could have plunged into the canal or the Potomac. It remains inexplicable to me, incidentally, that the Federal Government allows people on the towpath without putting up guardrails for their safety. This I guess is American society in the twenty-first century: go as far as you can, but don't complain that there is no safety net.
For the mudfields and the whole trip, no image played in my mind as frequently as Aesop's fable of the tortoise and the hare. Slow and steady was the ideal pace -- the only pace to set. Entering the mudfields, you could neither coast nor speed. You just had to plough through, slow and steady. The old saying proved particularly apposite at Shepherdstown, because the companions who pulled out without completing the seventy-three miles to Washington were the two who were most frequently ahead of the pack.
I return to the world of normalcy with some lingering disappointment. I would love to have again the immediacy, the vitality, and the self-reliance the trail gave me -- qualities that are missing in the rhythms of regular life. But for five days I pushed myself harder than ever before in my life, and I can only feel good about that.
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