Aboard the Trek Express, Somewhere in New England

As promised, the first of three posts from my 2001 bike trip:

Hello, family, friends and travel editors —

Just kidding about that last category.

I’m writing this from a cybercafe in Nantucket, paying by the hour, so that should be a check on my natural garrulousness. Day five of my trip, which has so far exceeded my expectations in all ways.

I started out Monday morning at seven a.m. from my home town of Westerly, R.I. – Una’s boyfriend, Wes, dropped my bike off there on his way back to Boston earlier in the week — after a little breakfast with my sister Barbara, having spent the night on their couch. Contrary to my usual form, I resisted her offer to make a bit of fanfare and take my picture, all geared-up with helmet, panniers, etc. I just got on the bike and rode off.

I took a circuitous route out to Route 1 North, first making a kind of memory lap around town. I biked down High Street, past the old Immaculate Conception Church, where I made my first communion and where I spent hundreds of bent-knee hours as a boy; past the now-closed Immaculate Conception School, where Sister Mary Robert interrupted classes one Friday afternoon to tell us President Kennedy had been shot, and where, a few years later, Sister Eva slapped me for asking her what the nuns wore under all that black, anyway; past the new Immaculate Conception Church, where I read from St. John’s letter to the Corinthians at Barbara’s wedding and where I gave my father’s eulogy; past the apartment where my grandparents used to live, where I was made to wash with Boraxo and brush my teeth with baking soda; past 43 Grove, where my fifth grade teacher, the sadistic Miss MacDonald, had an apartment; past Wilcox Park, where my father took me as a toddler to feed the pigeons; past the Westerly Library, where I discovered Robert Benchley (his books, that is) in the stacks one rainy afternoon; past the first two houses we lived in; turned up Granite Street past the Roger Williams Inn, where old Mrs. Bryson would tell us her memories of the McKinley assassination; past the Clipper Nursing Home, my father’s last residence, and where he died; past Dunn’s Corners, where the carnival used to come to town for a week in July each year; and then I ran out of memories, and started making some new ones.

I made good time, getting to Narragansett by nine. My overwhelming feeling most of the first day was anxiety, amid the pleasure of the scenery: anxiety that something would go wrong with the bike, and that despite my little store of tools and books I would not be able to fix it; anxiety that I would not get to Little Compton, some sixty miles away, where I planned to spend the first night, by bedtime. I headed up 1A toward Saunderstown, to take the first bridge of my journey, to Jamestown, and hit my first snag: though none of the bike books or maps mentioned it, the Jamestown Bridge bars bikes, and there was no obvious alternative way to get over. I whipped out my cellphone and dialed Karen Secora of the East Coast Greenway Alliance in Wakefield, and she put me on hold and asked around the office for advice. When she came back on she said that nobody knew what people did about the bridge; she guessed they just went over. So that’s what I did. I wasn’t bothered by the traffic, since after all, I zip down Ninth Avenue among the trucks, buses and cabs all the time. But I was nervous about being caught and sent back to the mainland like an illegal alien. That didn’t happen, not then or the second time I had to do it, later in the day, when I had the same problem on the Sakonnet River Bridge to Tiverton. In between I took a nice ferry from Jamestown, where I had lunch, to Newport.

Its first stop was tiny Rose Island, where you can apply to be the lighthouse keeper for a day or a week. A middle-aged couple got on with a lot of stuff – they had been lighthouse keepers for the previous night – and the captain remembered them from the day before. The woman held up her hand to show a new engagement ring, and the passengers broke out in applause.

The peninsula containing Tiverton and Little Compton is probably the most beautiful part of Rhode Island, a state with many beautiful places. By the time I got there, in mid-afternoon, it was clear to me I would make the Harmony House B and B well before nightfall, so I eased up a bit, stopped for a lemonade and bought some fruit at a roadside stand. The B and B, where I seemed to be the only guest – run, as they all seem to be, by a retired couple – was just perfect, and I have never been happier to see a hot shower and clean sheets. But before I did that, I biked a few more miles to the beach and took an early evening swim. I ached like crazy, and had gotten way too much sun, but I was quite happy and slept like a baby.

The biggest physical problem so far is not energy – I never get winded, and my legs are holding up fine – but soreness around my tailbone. I reluctantly wear these padded spandex shorts that give you a certain Jennifer Lopez effect, and I have a bike seat that is padded, with a kind of shock absorber built in. But it’s still somewhat painful at times, and maybe I should get one of those special bifurcated seats. I understand that impotence is a common side effect for serious long distance bikers, so I will probably retire my panniers after I reach Maine – no Tour de France for me!

It’s nice to know I can cover sixty or seventy miles in a day, but that won’t be the norm on the trip. Next day I did about thirty, to New Bedford, where I got lost for a few hours in the Portuguese section, looking for the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard, and I did 25-30 miles exploring Martha’s Vineyard on Wednesday and Thursday. (I’m estimating, since I gave up trying to install the little bike computer that had an odometer and speedometer.) After I send this, I’m heading out to Siasconset for the afternoon.

Feeling a bit more confident the second day, I took a lot of unmarked back roads, going by my instincts, heading toward New Bedford, and until I got lost in the city itself, it worked remarkably well. Acoaxet, Adamsville, Westport, Padanaram Village – all places I’d never heard of – were all incredibly beautiful, and when I remember that I have a camera with me, I stop to take pictures. I’ve always felt that this part of New England, at this time of year and in the fall, is one of the loveliest places on earth. To me these little towns and the surrounding countryside and beaches are our version of the Italian hill town, and I never get tired of them, despite a certain sameness – in New England, the white-steepled church, village green, town hall, general store, old cemetery; in Italy, the church with its Madonna, town square, the palazzo popolo, the well, and so on. (But I do find myself put off, at times, by the size of so many houses – many of them second homes – in a world where millions of people live in shantytowns and where, closer to home, one of the ex-prisoners in the Fifth Avenue Committee program is living with eight relatives in three rooms. The exclusivity of much beachfront property – “members only,” “private road,” etc.—also galls me.)

I hadn’t been to Martha’s Vineyard in over twenty years, and hardly remembered it, but really enjoyed getting to know it. The ferry landed in Oak Bluffs, and my friend Marcia Smith — who is staying there with her husband Stanley Nelson, a filmmaker, their three children and her mother, who bought the house from former Senator Edward Brooke forty years ago – was expecting my call. I biked the six or seven blocks to their house, and had a great evening. Mrs. Smith was once Thurgood Marshall’s secretary, and now lives in 90 LaSalle, where I used to teach nursery school 25 years ago, so we had a lot to talk about.

Stanley is making a film about the African-American community on Oak Bluffs. I was really taken with the Camp Meeting Grounds, a neighborhood of tiny gingerbread houses surrounding a big pavilion where each night some kind of event takes place, often religious in nature. On my second night in Oak Bluffs, I walked by during the community sing, where a few hundred people were belting out patriotic songs and hymns.

Marcia got me a room in Brady’s B and B, two houses down from her, and I spent two nights there. Brady Aikens, the proprietor, is a great character, physically and in other respects kind of a cross between Norman Mailer and William Styron. He spent summers in the house when he was a boy, and when the aunt who owned it died, he inherited it and turned it into a bed and breakfast. Like most B and B owners, he collects people – it’s much more than running a business, it’s social work, anthropology, etc. – but unlike many, he also tells you a lot about himself. A glance at his video collection revealed a passion for opera and the Southwest, and we talked about those subjects each morning at breakfast. Ordinarily I avoid B and Bs – when I travel for business, the last thing I want to do is talk to someone at the end of the day, and I love the privacy and anonymity of the hotel room. But spending ten or twelve hours on the bike each day alone, while I am enjoying it a great deal, has made me somewhat more expansive in the presence of strangers, which may come as a surprise to those of you more familiar with the curmudgeonly side of my personality.

Biked out to Chappaquiddick the first morning on the Vineyard and had a swim on the barrier beach (I decided not to retrace Ted Kennedy’s route), then got caught in the first of two spectacular thunderstorms of the day, each followed within minutes by a brilliant sun. (Chappaquiddick is an unremarkable – except for its natural beauty — largely rural island, like much of Block Island, and it is the locals’ misfortune to have it almost universally known, and only for a notorious incident. Like living in Waterloo or Yalta.) After lunch in Edgartown, I passed the rest of the afternoon with Bob and Helen Bernstein in Vineyard Haven. Yesterday I biked out to Menemsha, and took an inter-island ferry to Nantucket last night while Lucinda Williams (her fantastic new album, Essence) serenaded me on my discman. (Having grown up in Rhode Island, I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but the insularity of these island folks is amazing – a great many people I met on the Vineyard have never been to Nantucket.) I am staying in the guest apartment under the home of Yvette and Aryeh Neier.

This morning I got up early and walked the cobblestoned streets of Nantucket Center, very urban and reminiscent of other early 19th century districts like parts of Beacon Hill, Georgetown and East Providence.) Tomorrow or Sunday I will ferry over to the Cape and head out to Truro, where Woody Kaplan and Wendy Kaminer have kindly loaned me the use of their house, then on to Provincetown, where I’ll ferry to Boston Monday.

I am having an absolutely wonderful time. I wish I could say I am thinking deep thoughts, but most of the time – as perhaps this letter inadvertently demonstrates! – my head is empty of all but stray snippets of old show tunes and childhood hymns. After spending the first part of my sabbatical preoccupied with Haiti and the problems of ex-prisoners in Brooklyn, my brain has shut off for a while. With the sun on my back (and, unfortunately, the wind at my front most of the time, which is rough going lugging all your gear behind you), a smile on my face (and a helmet on my head!), I move northward. I hope you are all well, and look forward to seeing you before long.

Gara