(Originally published in the April 29 to May 5, 2012 issue of the Baguio Chronicle ---
a weekly newspaper based in Baguio City, Philippines ---
by Sly L. Quintos, Associate Editor.)
To take a chance and win; to feel the glow of muscles too long unused;
to sleep on the ground at night and find it soft; to eat, not because it is time to eat,
but because one’s body is clamoring for food;
to drink where every stream and river is pure and cold;
to get close to the earth and see the stars --- this is to travel.”
~ Mary Roberts Rinehart, from Through Glacier Park in 1915
RIDING a Trek 520, Daryl Farmer, a twenty-year-old two-time college dropout, did what lost men have so often done in this country: he headed west. It was the summer of 1985. Ronald Reagan was in his second term and the Los Angeles Lakers, led by Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul Jabbar, were on their way to their third championship in six years. A music festival called Live-Aid played to audiences around the world in order to raise money for the world’s starving children.
“It was a time of optimism,” he said.
“I purchased this bike in 1984,” he recalled. It has old-school caliper brakes. The gearshift levers are on the down tube of the frame, and shifting is made by feel rather than by clicking into place. The bike was made specifically for touring, which means its longer wheel base covers more ground per pedal rotation than a mountain or racing bike. “Riding this bicycle after riding a mountain bike is something like the difference between driving a Cadillac and a jeep. But I didn’t even consider buying a new one. A good bicycle, even when neglected, will last a lifetime.”
“I can’t think of myself back then as anything but a boy. Naive, sheltered, and painfully shy,” he wrote. In the year that preceded the summer, I’d quit my second college and moved back in with my parents. My father wanted me to go back to school. I drank beer instead. I had a girlfriend. We spent evenings drinking coffee, taking walks around Broadmoor Lake, parking in the Garden of the Gods. She told me her life goals, none of which seemed to include me. I felt an anxiety I didn’t understand, a longing for something I couldn’t define. So I did what countless other lost young men have done in this country."
In 1985, there were no cell phones or even phone cards. A call home required a pocketful of quarters or a voice on the other end willing to accept a collect call. There were no ATMs. Money had to be wired or taken as an advance on a credit card during normal banking hours. Computer use required an understanding of foreign languages today more outdated than Latin: Fortran, basic, and Cobalt. Much has changed in the West. Major urban areas are sprawling.
Twenty years later, with the yellowing journals from that transformative 5,000-mile bicycle trek in his pack, Farmer set out to retrace his path. Bicycling Beyond the Divide: Two Journeys Into The West (332 pages, University of Nebraska Press) is Daryl Farmer’s story of pursuing that distant summer and that distant dream of home, where home is endless space, a roof of big sky, and a bed of dry earth.
“What endures are fragments of memory, pieces that no longer flow together as a whole but remain scattered, like a puzzle once put together, now strewn about: a rattlesnake on a desert highway, a drenching hailstorm, a small town Montana bar in the rain, a Navajo man named Verl, a night of fireworks on an Oregon beach, an elderly couple in Raymond, Washington, who took me in and fed me,” Farmer wrote. “I remember turtling across highway 95, Nevada’s most desolate highway. The winds, rebelling in true Nevada fashion, had reversed their usual westerly flow. For three days I’d averaged a measly six miles per hour, while bomber planes from a nearby military range flew overhead.”
"Just as the years altered the man, so, too, have they altered the West, and Farmer’s second journey affords a unique perspective on these changes --- as well as on what lasts. Whether caught in a Colorado snowstorm or braving a Yellowstone herd of bison, kayaking with orcas in Puget Sound, trading Ninja moves with a homeless man in San Francisco, or getting the lowdown on aliens on Nevada’s Extraterrestrial Highway, Farmer charts a moving landscape of people and places. This is the West where the natural world and personal character are inextricably linked, and where one man’s ride into the past and present takes us to the heart of that ever-evolving connection."
“To think of that summer on the bicycle is to dream myself home, and home is an endless space, a roof of big sky, a bed of dry earth. I’ve decided to retrace that route, to ride it again. I work at convincing myself that in some ways it’ll be easier now. I know more; can better take care of myself. I’m banking on wisdom to make up for the lard,” Farmer recalled.s
Farmer was born in Colorado Springs at the foot of the Rocky Mountains where he developed a love for the outdoors and a taste for the open road. Early in his teaching career, he coached high school basketball in Colorado and New Mexico. He has since lived and worked in a variety of places including Oregon, New Hampshire, Mississippi and Alaska, where he taught in the Athabascan village of Nondalton.
He received a B.A. in Physical Education from Adams State College (Alamosa, Colorado) and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is also a graduate of the Rocky Mountain School of Photography.
In addition to bicycle touring, he has kayaked in the San Juan Islands and off the coast of Maine, backpacked the Copper Canyon in Mexico, canoed the Macal River in Belize and winter camped in Alaska’s Denali National Park. Farmer has taught writing and literature at the University of Nebraska and the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas where he lives with his wife, Joan.
Bicycling Beyond The Divide is his first book.*
