Postcards from America

The biggest surprise in riding the RAAM is how little time there is to observe, reflect or absorb anything going on around you. The only time really is at the rider transition, where the vehicle is stationary, there is about 3 minutes before the incoming rider arrives and the stress of riding hasn’t started. This leaves an odd pattern of small memories, like postcards of America.

The start is organised chaos. Hundreds of riders getting in line ready for the start. Nervous riders taking photos on their phones, tweeting and joking. Then the National Anthem – the Americans really do this well. A young songstress belting out the Star Spangled Banner as the riders face the flag. Americans with hand on heart. They believe it and they mean it. No jaundiced jingoism here just the genuine confidence you belong to the greatest nation on earth. It must have been like this when we had an empire! A count down and we are off, only 3000 miles to go. It’s surprisingly low key. Holiday makers carry on bemused by the activity and the amount of lycra. I am not sure what I expected but I somehow expected more.

Riding North on the second night of the race. Signposts for the Grand Canyon to the west and the Navajo Indian reservation to the right. An endless climb up from the Arizona desert continues. Racing is close, teams jostling for position and sites to transition riders. From the bike there is a real tranquillity over the desert, no trees, no people, no livestock no buildings, just an open expanse of nothing. From maps I can see the area is called “the painted desert”. The sun starts setting, the rocks are painted pink, quite vivid on the eastern horizon. It is beautiful, harsh but serene. I see a person, it looks like a scene from Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Poor, dry, hot dusty and unemployed. Then it’s dark and soon, surprisingly cold.

After the desert the Rockies, a slow constant climb for a day and then suddenly you’re in the mountains. Cascading rivers, waterfalls, pine forests and snowy peaks. The passes are high, up to 10,000 ft and the air is noticeably thin making an easy climb hard work. When you are in them the Rockies don’t look big but the peaks are 14,000ft, nearly as tall as Mt. Blanc, but they are wooded and somehow lack the grandeur of the alps. Maybe it was just the bit we rode through!

“It ain't that big. The whole United States ain't that big. It ain't that big. It ain't big enough. There ain't room enough for you an' me, for your kind an' my kind, for rich and poor together all in one country, for thieves and honest men. For hunger and fat." - John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath.

But the US is big and there is space. There is rich and there is also surprisingly poor. At times it looks 3^rd world poor but without the hunger. Broken down shacks in rundown homesteads. Rusting cars and farm equipment in the yards. And it is big. In the prairies the fields are endless stretching to horizons in all directions. Roads melt to a vanishing point. The space is juxtaposed with the intensive cattle farms. Acres of open space, green and irrigated. The cattle, penned in dusty cages. Thousands, no space, no grazing just bare earth and a heavy stench. These factory farms don’t smell like English dairy farms. They smell of chemicals and fear. If I hadn’t been a vegetarian I probably would have been after cycling beside these penned ‘burgers in waiting’ for miles on end. All around them green fields, the range where “the deer and the buffalo roamed”. And then there are grain silos. Incongruous tower blocks. You see them, and then an hour later you reach them on the bike. Three or four vast towers sitting alone on the edge of a railway track and road. A stark symbol of intensive and industrialised arable production. A few corn flowers in grass verges hinting at the past. The intensity seems wrong and unnecessary, but I guess it is the price of feeding a nation that eats a lot.

The evenings are damp and cool. It’s loud, noises penetrating the mist, frogs, toads and crickets is my guess. The stars of the show are the fireflies. We don’t have fireflies in Britain, they add a natural sparkle to the evening dusk. In Ohio we stop, fireflies are dusting the fields and unusually are lighting up the oak trees. They blend seamlessly into the night, a vignette of twinkling stars from your feet up into the night sky. If it wasn’t for the heat it would be quite Christmassy.

Mornings are misty, cool and fresh. The mist is thin and wispy. Like candy floss lying over the fields. As the sun rises the floss turns sweet sickly pink. We ride into the dawn. Headlights projecting the riders reflection onto the bank of mist like an drive in black and white movie. Then the fleeting dawn has gone, the temperature rises, the will o the wisp retreating in the sun. It is only riding through 24 hours a day that you get to see these time of the day. Dawn, 4:30 in the morning. Dusk, 8:30 at night. Most sensible people off the road, missing best parts of the day.

We cross into the Missouri swamps I think. Warm and muggy with a musty smell of decay. Swarms of mosquitoes when we stop. Surprisingly it gets hilly. Short sharp bumps. It’s like a different world. Temperature at night inverts. The cool air sinking into the valleys. Another sensation you miss travelling by car. The shifts in temperature are stark, if short. Temperature inversions are what makes alpine valleys work for skiing. Oddly here, the houses are on the tops of the hills, I wonder if the choice is to live at the top of the hills accept the heat but avoid the midges or live in the cool of the valley and get eaten alive.

And into new England. It looks like England only with wooden houses. The roads are also English, up and down and meandering. We slow down for fire engines and police. A house in the middle to the hamlet raised to the ground. Stunned people in night clothes literally looking at the ashes of their lives. Hopefully no one hurt, but the complete devastation of the property is shocking. We cycle on into the morning leaving the smouldering carcass of the house and the shattered lives. The scene makes the RAAM seem somewhat frivolous.

Across the US we receive shouts of encouragement. Farmers in fields, Harley Davison rider. Other teams support crews shout you on urging you to Annapolis. Cynical Europeans may scoff but the Bamby like enthusiasm of the US is great. Seems no Americans can understand why you would want to ride a bike across the US. I guess the only reason is because you can.

Final impressions – America was unexpectedly varied, unexpectedly beautiful and unexpectedly serene. I expected brash, loud, new and got old, mellow and calm.

Would I do it again, no.

Was it worth doing, yes.