Chapter One
The Freedom Machine
If I am asked to explain why I learned the bicycle, I should say I did it as an act of grace, if not actual religion. Frances E. Willard, How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle: Reflections of an Influential Nineteenth-century Woman
My hiking partner and I were doing some high-speed desert driving, me riding shotgun with my bare feet up on the dash, on our way to a backpacking trailhead in the Rockies. We had promised ourselves that we would enter the Mojave in the early morning, even before dawn, but delays in packing put us on the road about ten in the morning. As we drove the endless midday miles with the windows down, breathing the lung-scorching air, I decided I liked the desert at high noon. I loved feeling stunned by its dragon''s breath and lulled by the sight of its hallucinatory horizon.
"Can I turn on the air conditioning now?" Katie asked a little before noon.
"But don''t you love the hot rush of air? The real air? How can we say we''ve experienced the desert if-"
"Okay, okay, okay."
Occasionally we passed an abandoned shack or trailer where someone had thought the cheap land worth a try at survival. I imagined their trips to Barstow for jugs of water, their afternoons-for surely they were unemployed to have chosen this for home-sitting limp in the thin wedges of shade cast by their shelters. I tried to guess how many days it took them to give up and quit. I admired these people who had tried this one last option, who had thought it might be better than urban homelessness, or moving back in with their folks, or even just better than a mortgage. Following my lifelong habit of noting options, escape routes, lives I could live if I needed to live a different one, I put a mental Post-it on the Mojave Desert. I could live here if I had to. I could survive where others had not. I had skills.
At first I thought I was seeing a mirage: a shimmering on the highway ahead of us, sharp steely flashes of metal and the wavering image of a human. As we drew closer, I could have sworn it was a person on a bicycle, but it was high noon and we were eighty miles from the next town, a good twenty from the last one. It just didn''t seem possible. Who would do such a thing? Then I laughed at myself: Most people''s mirages are bodies of water; mine are of bicycles.
Ever since inheriting my sister''s bicycle, an old, clunky yellow one-speed, I have been in love with two-wheelers. On my bike, I learned that landscape is a continuum, that the city rolls right into the mountains. I learned that my body knows secrets my head does not know, secrets that could be imagined into stories. On my bike, endorphins nourished my imagination.
Today, the shelves of my writing room hold bicycle models and the walls are covered with cycling posters. One of my favorite paintings is "Big Julie" by Fernand L?ger, which portrays a large, jaunty woman holding a flower in one hand and a mangled bicycle in the other. Butterflies flutter between Julie and her bike. Some people have totem animals; I have a totem machine.
That I might hallucinate a woman on a bike in the desert made perfect sense, but as it turned out, this was no apparition. Before us was a real woman cycling across the Mojave Desert. We drew up behind the traveler and stared with disbelief at her long blond hair, the panniers on either side of her back wheel flapping open, revealing the clothing stuffed inside. Two smooth, varnished wooden sticks stuck out one of the panniers. She also had two Evian water bottles tied loosely to the stem of her saddle and they bonked against the panniers as she pedaled. The bike was a cheap-looking hybrid.
The only explanation I could think of was that this woman was doing a story for Outside Magazine: the Mojave Desert by bike, alone, in under eight hours. And for a moment I was overwhelmed with envy. I wanted out of our steel encasement. I wanted to feel the windblown sand in my face, the road grit under my tires. I wanted to taste the sage-flavored air, listen to the silence of the desert that is like no other silence. In other words, I wanted to move through this landscape slowly enough to engage all of my senses but fast enough to experience exhilaration, which meant I wanted to do it on a bicycle. But ... not on a cheap one like this woman''s. Not with water bottles dangling off the saddle. Up close I saw that she had anything but an athlete''s body; she looked doughy. This cyclist moved too slowly, and too joylessly, to be an adventure tourist.
It took a few moments for Katie and me to come to terms with the fact that this cyclist was real, not a figment of the desert''s imagination. Then it took us another moment to decide that we should check out whether or not she wanted to be alone with her bicycle in the Mojave at noon. By then we had shot past the woman, but Katie made a U-turn and headed back. We passed her again, made another U-turn, and then pulled alongside her.
I called out the passenger window, "Are you all right?"
She squinted at me.
"Need anything?"
"I could use a ride."
She definitely wasn''t doing a story for Outside Magazine. Katie pulled over and I helped the woman unload her panniers. We threw those in the back seat and put her bicycle on top of our packs in the far back. Then she crawled in next to her panniers, and we got a better look at her. Her long blond hair was tangled and dirty. The skin on her face looked as if it had burnt and peeled a dozen times. She drained her water bottle, and we offered her water from our gallon jug. She refilled both of her Evian bottles, drank one down, and refilled it again, as if we might dump her back into the desert without notice. The only food we had in the car were Powerbars. She ate two in succession-a feat of true hunger-and took two more for later. We rolled up the windows and turned on the air conditioning. My playing at desert survival had lost its appeal.
Though Barbara told us her first name, she could not, or would not, tell us where she was going, so we rode in silence for a while, feeling nervous and awkward. I surreptitiously checked the location of my wallet. Was this some kind of scam? Had we fallen into the hands of a highway con artist? But the devoured Powerbars and her sun-blistered face did not jibe with any possible scam I could think up.
Finally Katie and I began chatting to one another about our upcoming backpacking trip, trying to fill the awkward silence. Apparently our conversation eased her mind about us, and eventually she began asking questions about our trip. We in turn tried questioning her again and this time received answers. In fact, we learned a great deal about her life and the purpose of her Mojave crossing.
Barbara had been married for twenty years. Her husband had broken her arm twice, three ribs once, her jaw once, and left her body covered with bruises more times than she could remember. He had prohibited her from ever leaving the house. If she did, and he found out about it, she got a beating. He also prohibited her from earning any money of her own and from having friends. The couple had two sons, the second of which had left home a month before we met Barbara. She had been waiting for that leave-taking for most of the twenty years of her marriage. The same week her youngest son left, Barbara took his bicycle and panniers, which he had left in the garage, and made her escape one morning after her husband left for work.
Those first hours were the most terrifying, she told us. She took only back roads, which lessened his chance of finding her. But if he had found her, he would have had a lot of deserted, witness-free territory for the punishment he would have surely handed out. By back roads, it took her days just to get out of her home range. With each passing day she felt a little safer, though never completely safe.
Barbara hadn''t the money to fly or to take a bus anywhere, but with the bicycle and enough cash to buy bread and peanut butter she was making her way to a small town on the other side of the Mojave, the home of a childhood friend with whom she had not been in touch for years. Because her husband had doggedly recorded the addresses and phone numbers of all of her acquaintances, she had had to choose a destination that had never crossed his path. This childhood friend did not know that Barbara was coming. In fact, Barbara had told no one of her plans, not even her mother or sister for fear that her husband would coerce them into giving him information, as he had done in the past.
By the time we met Barbara, she had cycled for twenty-four days and covered about six hundred miles. From the looks of her, the average of twenty-five miles a day would have been a full workout. She said that she usually slept in the heat of midday and rode mornings and early evenings. Occasionally she forked out the cash to stay at a campground for a shower, but most often slept in culverts. On the day we found her, she had begun to feel desperate. It was getting very hot and she had seen no culverts, no shade, no hiding places. It was as if she had been oblivious to the fact that the highway she was following had entered a desert.
As I stared out at the unending sand and sky and listened to Barbara, a new wave of envy blew through me. I thought it crude to envy a woman who was forced to escape an abusive relationship by means of a grueling physical journey. But she was, in fact, making the journey. She was running away. She was claiming her own path and doing it with a bicycle. I envied her for having the guts.
For all of my life, as far back as I can remember, I have longed to be somewhere else. Somewhere wilder. Somewhere warmer. Somewhere with more heart. As a child, I found temporary escape on my bicycle. Riding hard-until the sweat ran down my back, until my lungs felt like bursting-scoured out my confusion and pain, delivering me to a bright place of contentment. Today I still try to ride to that place. Getting on my bicycle is synonymous with saying, I''m outta here. If I''m lucky, ten or twenty miles into a ride, escape, wilderness, and freedom combust together and burn off my fear. I can, on my bicycle, arrive at places of great courage.
And yet, just as I play at desert survival with mind games in the car, or even during backpack trips of a few days duration, my escapes by bicycle have been child''s play compared to Barbara''s use of the freedom machine.
I tried to tell her how big her courage looked to me.
But she only shrugged and said that the bicycle ride across mountains and desert didn''t scare her half as much as her marriage had. In fact, though she told stories of difficulties on the road, she preferred talking about her traveling triumphs. Her favorite story was about the time she was ascending a mountain pass and came to a sign announcing that the road from that point on was closed. Unable to imagine turning back, she continued forward until she came to the place where a road crew was clearing a huge rockslide. She hoisted her bicycle and carried it across the rubble to the amazement, and eventual admiration, of the road crew. They applauded her when she finally reached the other side of the long stretch of broken rock. About five times she told us about that applause, and I realize now that it must have sustained her across much more than the debris of one rockslide.
I have spent several years thinking about Barbara and her story. Her appearance in my life has felt mythic, a backward-and-forward-looking message that I couldn''t decipher. Meeting Barbara in the wilderness of the Mojave struck a chord that sounded so loudly inside me that I couldn''t find any context for her journey. But it did have a context, and as I reflected on it over time the historical one was the easiest place to start.
When the bicycle craze hit the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, women immediately saw this new machine as a vehicle of emancipation. In 1895, Frances Willard, the temperance leader and suffragette, wrote a book called A Wheel within a Wheel on how the bicycle and cycling serve as the perfect extended metaphor for the feminist cause, indeed for all things important in life, from health to politics. Willard grew up on the prairie and spent her childhood romping out-of-doors. She insisted on wearing her hair short, which was very unusual for a girl at that time, and on being called Frank. She wrote that she "ran wild" until her sixteenth birthday, at which time she was forced into long skirts, corsets, and high heels. Though she spent most of her adult life working for temperance and women''s suffrage, she did not regain her personal freedom until 1893 when at the age of fifty-three she learned to ride a bicycle. Willard equated mastering the bicycle with controlling a woman''s personal destiny, claiming her own path.
Susan B. Anthony agreed, saying that bicycling gave women "a feeling of freedom and self-reliance," and that a woman on a bicycle is "the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood." Anthony claimed that bicycling did "more to emancipate woman than anything else in the world."
As more and more women took to "the wheel," manufacturers began making bicycles and other cycling products especially for women. The Starley Brothers made the first mass-produced women''s bike, the "Psycho Ladies'' Bicycle," and other manufacturers came up with products to battle the prevalent idea that cycling ruined women''s femininity. One company invented a screen that, once attached to the bicycle, shielded the view of a lady''s ankles and feet.
Even with such precautions, female cyclists were scorned by the dominant media. The proliferation and vehemence of newspaper and magazine editorials blasting women cyclists proved that men were quite aware of the bicycle''s role as an avenue to freedom. Some wrote that the freedom felt on a bicycle might intoxicate women to the point of wanting, perhaps even demanding, other freedoms. Others believed that the shape of a bicycle seat might stimulate a woman in immoral ways. Groups even lobbied to have bicycles outlawed for women. These pundits warned that, on a bicycle, a woman had no need for an escort. Though the logic of this fear is difficult to grasp-Did she not need an escort because she could now out-pedal dangerous encounters on her own?-it is easy to see how the idea of women not needing men would severely challenge the status quo. In 1895, in the Minneapolis Tribune, Ann Strong stated that bicycles were "just as good company as most husbands," and better yet, when you''re tired of your bicycle, you can "dispose of it and get a new one without shocking the entire community." The Victorian Era, and many of its strict rules intended to protect women''s femininity, was on its way out and some women were riding the bicycle to get away faster. In 1896, Margaret Valentine Le Long ignored her family and friends who begged her to stay home and rode her bicycle, alone, from Chicago to San Francisco. She wore a skirt and carried a pistol.
I wonder what Barbara of the Mojave would have to say about Willard''s book and theses, about Anthony''s declaration, about Le Long''s armed trek across two-thirds of the continent. For Barbara, the bicycle meant freedom in its most literal form: physical survival. Perhaps the urgency of her journey was too great for her to have been able to reflect on her place in the history of women, bicycles, and freedom.
As it turned out, we had found Barbara on the last leg of her journey. The next town, or so she told us, was her destination. As we drew closer to the home of her childhood friend, her talk turned to her future. She thought her friend would welcome her, but for how long? She had to find work, which would be very difficult since she hadn''t held a job in twenty years. She spoke with pride of the one-woman gardening business she had had before her marriage. Although most of her tools were long gone, she carried in her panniers a large pair of clipping shears, which she talked about almost as much as she talked about the road crew''s applause. I imagined that that one pair of shears was her only reminder of her skills, of her independence, of her ability to take care of herself.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Ice Caveby Lucy Jane Bledsoe Copyright © 2006 by Lucy Jane Bledsoe. Excerpted by permission.
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