There comes a time in a man’s life where he
feels at ease in a hotel lobby across the street from the state Capitol,
dressed in a lime-green fluorescent jacket, black tights, and nylon-mesh
shoes that are something between ballet slippers and football cleats. Joe Bowen is anything but in-between. He’s
all-out — always has been. A former construction worker, Bowen is a
student of history and literature who can tell you all about Miguel de
Cervantes and John Steinbeck. Just look at his bicycle, a Trek 520 with
ungodly fat tires that marries two giants of literature separated by more
than four centuries. “Rocinante” reads the well-worn red
lettering stuck to the bike’s dirt-caked frame. “That’s the name of Don Quixote’s
horse,” Bowen explains. It is also, he adds, the name of
Steinbeck’s truck, which the author drove across America, recounting
the journey in the bestselling book Travels
with Charley. Quixote’s steed was a broken-down nag,
Steinbeck’s truck a 1960 GMC purchased new. Not quite two years old,
Bowen’s bicycle is, at least, the equal of either. It has taken him
to Canada. To Big Sur. To Mount Rushmore. To the Grand Canyon. To Niagara
Falls. To Gettysburg. And now, today, to Springfield, less than 2,000 miles
from home and more than 12,000 miles since he started this journey that
defines meandering. Bowen arrived last Friday after battling wind and
rain in an all-day ride from Beardstown. Most folks think of it as a
46-mile jaunt. For Bowen, who eschews highways for back roads, paved or
not, it was a 58-mile trip. He’s spotted 19 statues of Abraham
Lincoln in Illinois and has taken photos of each one. His first stop in
Springfield is the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. Not the museum. The library. “I went straight to the library, baby —
that’s where the action is,” he says. “I can go over
there to the museum later.” He had a bit of trouble persuading the staff to let
him stash his bicycle inside — he won’t let it out of his sight
for more than a couple of minutes — but eventually they relented.
Only at a cowboy museum in Wyoming was his bicycle refused entrance. After
more than a year on the road, Bowen is accustomed to explaining that if
Rocinante can’t go inside, he can’t, either. His smile is
lightning quick; his eyes have more sparkle than Santa’s. Top it off
with a friendly Kentucky drawl, and who could resist? He found what he was looking for: two letters from
Lincoln that mention Felix Grundy Stidger, a Union spy who infiltrated
secret societies that sympathized with the South and plotted to release
Confederate prisoners of war. Here in the lobby of the Statehouse Inn,
Bowen marvels at Stidger’s little-known exploits and tells of reading
about him in Andrew Johnson’s presidential papers and writings by
U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justices Earl Warren and William Rehnquist. He speaks with the awed enthusiasm of a man who has
found some sort of Holy Grail. Perhaps he has. He has seen the best and the worst of America. Stayed
up late talking with a woman who was airlifted out of Vietnam as a small
girl in 1975, with chaos all around. Visited a little-known memorial to
9/11 victims at Arlington National Cemetery. Rode into a storm and up a
mountain pass at dusk rather than be gouged for a motel room in a small
town in Washington state, only to have a restaurant owner offer him a spare
room for $25 a few miles later. Watched in amazement as a one-armed bicycle
mechanic repaired Rocinante, straightening the back wheel and fixing a
sprocket that had been improperly installed. Been fed and fêted by
complete strangers. To listen to Joe Bowen, his stories of the road and
of history, is to render superfluous the question “Why?”
Spending thousands of dollars on hotels, riding through freezing rain,
suffering in blazing sun, getting hit by a car, and trusting that his
63-year-old knees will see him through. It all makes perfect sense.
Bowen started this trip on April 8, 2005, in Lompoc,
Calif. But, really, his journey began in 1967, after his discharge from the
U.S. Air Force. He still recalls the call he made to his mother, back home
in Kentucky. I should be home in a year or so, he remembers
telling her. Confused, his mom asked why — after all, it takes less
than a week to drive to Kentucky from California. Well, he answered, I just
bought a bicycle and I’m going to ride home, but I’ve got a few
places I want to see on the way. His mom covered the receiver with her
hand, but he could still overhear what she said next. “I heard her
turn around and tell my dad, ‘There’s something wrong with this
guy,’ ” Bowen recalls. After buying a Schwinn Super Sport for $120 (nearly
$700 in today’s dollars), he had just $43.85 in his pocket. “I
absolutely knew — instinctively — the American people would
help me do it,” he says. “And they did.” Back then, cross-country cyclists were rare —
Bowen’s Schwinn now sits in a museum in Clay City, Ky. He figured he
could earn traveling money by cleaning truck stops and doing other odd
jobs, and he figured right. The longest he stayed in one place was five
weeks in Phoenix, where he painted a hotel. He wanted to see national
parks, presidential homes, and hydroelectric projects. “You
can’t do that without going over every mountain range in the United
States,” he says. Nor can such a trip be done in less than a year,
which explains the serpentine route he took, heading north in the spring
and south as autumn began so that he could winter in warm weather. He is
following this same route today. He had planned to set out next year, on
the 40th anniversary of his first adventure, but knee problems and
arthroscopic surgery convinced him of the need to start early, while he
still could. He’s crossed the Continental Divide 11 times,
but, remarkably, the steepest hill he’s conquered is in Illinois,
near Galena, where Ulysses S. Grant once lived. He stopped at the bottom
just long enough to take a photograph of a sign denoting the 15-percent
grade that lay ahead, then pedaled to the top. He was hit by a car in
Washington, D.C., but neither he nor his bicycle was seriously hurt. He
capped the accident by dodging traffic to retrieve his camera, which fell
out of his handlebar bag and landed in the middle of a busy street. He
didn’t think he had a choice. “That thing had about 500
pictures in it,” he says. He was so broke during his first journey that he shot
just seven rolls of film. This time around, Bowen has money for hotels,
which constitute about a third of his planned expenses. “I’m
63, man,” he says. “I can’t just roll up in a ditch
anymore.” About half of the money is coming out of his pocket; the
balance is from sponsors and donors. This is, officially, a trade mission
of sorts to persuade folks to visit the scenic byways of Kentucky. He rode
his way into shape, starting with a trip across Kentucky that earned him
recognition by the state Legislature (which, naturally, allowed him to
bring his bicycle onto the floors of the House and Senate) and Gov. Ernie
Fletcher, who presented him with an award designating him a Kentucky
Unbridled Spirit. To be sure, Bowen isn’t alone in his
long-distance exploits. Heinz Stücke, for example, left his home in
Germany in 1962 and has never looked back. At last report, Stücke, 66,
was in England, where his trusty three-speed that has taken him through
every continent save Antarctica was stolen. The theft made headlines in
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and New York, all of which Stücke,
deemed the world’s most-traveled man by Guinness, has visited on a
335,000-mile odyssey, the equivalent of circling the globe at the equator
more than 13 times. Stücke, however, has never walked across America
on stilts, as Bowen did in 1980 to raise money for muscular dystrophy
research. The 3,000-mile trek took more than five weeks, much of it spent
in agony. “The blisters on my feet every night looked like small
tomatoes,” he says. “The first month out of California, I
really and truly thought I was going to die.” At first, the Muscular
Dystrophy Association ignored him, he says, refusing requests for a letter
from Jerry Lewis to lend credibility to the venture. “We didn’t
get any money to speak of until we got to Texas,” he says. Then, a
Jaycees club in Dallas gave him a $50,000 check and challenged their
counterparts in Oklahoma to match it. By the time Bowen reached the East
Coast, he had raised more than $100,000, and Lewis invited him on the
annual telethon, where he appeared with Johnny Carson. “They were
real interested when they found out I had a check for $104,000,” he
recalls. As a long-distance cyclist, Bowen is built for
comfort, not speed. He’s carrying a laptop computer, anathema to
weight-obsessed bicyclists, who typically cut off toothbrush handles to
shave fractions of ounces from their loads. A half-dozen pens are jammed
into the pockets of his handlebar bag. Did the batteries in your digital
camera die? No problem — Bowen reaches into his bag, pulls out four
AAs and tells you to keep them. He has spares. Bowen is charisma personified, spinning yarns and
making instant friends. Consider how he enlisted the support of the
Appalachian Heritage Alliance in Kentucky, a cultural-awareness and
educational group that is sponsoring his trip. David Musser, education
director for the alliance, says Bowen just walked up to him at a dedication
ceremony for a cultural center in eastern Kentucky and asked for help.
“He starts telling stories about riding huge distances and walking
across the United States on stilts,” Musser recalls. “My wife
and I are looking at him, saying, ‘Who is this?’ Every single
thing was not only true but there were stories behind those
stories.”
By way of his laptop, Bowen is sending dispatches to
schoolchildren throughout Kentucky, where teachers are free to incorporate
his adventures into their curricula as they see fit. Some use his travels
as a starting point to talk about geography; others use his messages to
teach creative writing. He has received more than 3,000 e-mails since his
adventure began. His Web site includes messages from more than 150 people,
including police officers, park rangers, and hotel clerks who’ve met
him on the road. Strangers have written, offering him meals and places to
stay. Teachers have asked that he visit their classrooms. In Virginia, Bowen chanced across a bicyclist
at a grocery store who turned out to be a circuit judge who once heard
cases in the same Harper’s Ferry courthouse where the abolitionist
John Brown was tried and convicted. The judge guided him to the courthouse
on back roads only a local would know. In Washington, D.C., he met with
three congressmen from his state. Even former presidents are not immune to
Bowen’s charm. In Plains, Ga., Bowen wasn’t shy about asking
whether he could meet Jimmy Carter when he stopped by the former
president’s house. The president isn’t here, a Secret Service
agent told him — but he’ll be back shortly. Within minutes,
Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, pulled up in a dark SUV, jumped out, and
started asking Bowen about his trip. Later that day, a man from New York
arrived in town with a seven-passenger tricycle. Naturally, Bowen was soon
aboard, encouraging bystanders to hop on and help pedal. Once again the
dark SUV appeared, and Carter climbed on the driver’s seat, piloting
the contraption down the streets of Plains. What was perhaps Bowen’s most unusual encounter
occurred in Tennessee, where someone in a passing car threw a soda can at
him, striking him in his leg. In his online diary, Bowen tells how he lost
his temper, yelled a bit, then picked up the can to put it in the next
garbage can he saw: About a mile up the road I saw the car pulled into a
small market. We were going to have a talk. I pulled over near the car and
a tall young man got out. “I am sorry, sir, I didn’t mean to
hit you.” “I can accept that,” I told him. “It
takes a pretty big man to stop and tell me rather than go on down the
road.” I pulled my book out and asked him to write something in it
about what had happened. This is what he wrote: 3/12/06 I, Ricky Lee Gray,
apologize for being out of control and throwing a can out of the window and
hitting this good man. Sorry. Ricky Gray. Ricky may never look at this Web
site, but he made my day. Ricky is a good man. Ricky had tattoos on his
arms and most of us would have judged him wrongly. Including myself. But
Ricky has good stuff in him and my hat is off to a man that can’t
laugh with his buddies and go on down the road. The hardest day, he says, was the first one, when he
left his wife behind in California. “All of a sudden you’re
really doing, and you question your sanity,” he says. More than a
year and 17 flat tires later, he doesn’t seem crazy. Not at all.
To read more about Joe Bowen’s adventures, go to ridejoeride.org.
This article appears in May 18-24, 2006.
