Neil Hanson’s “Pilgrim Wheels”

In 2009, I joined a group of men from church for a weekend bike ride on the Katy Trail in Missouri. We spent Friday night in a state park near Boonville, and early the next morning we began pedaling east toward St. Louis. It was early August, and it was hot. We rode 92 miles on Saturday, and 70 miles on Sunday.

It’s difficult to explain the experience to someone who doesn’t bike. We sometimes traveled together, but mostly separate. We had a couple of riders who thought of it as a race, some as a social experience, and a few of us as a journey. I was in the journey group. Most of the time I rode by myself, pedaling through slight winds, long alleys of woods, occasional views of the Missouri River, and an almost unimaginable silence.

Neil Hanson took a slightly longer cycling trip – he rode across America. And he considered it a journey, along the Pacific coast of California into desert, mountains, and plains. Approximately the first half of the journey – from Monterrey to eastern Kansas – is beautifully described in

Pilgrim Wheels: Reflections of a Cyclist Crossing America.

It’s a book about a cycling trip, but it is far more than that. It’s a story, a remembrance, a meditation, and a series of reflections about his own life and the people he meets. This isn’t a “aren’t we a great country with wonderful people” kind of people – some of the people he meets are not kind and often downright strange.

Neil Hanson

A younger writer might have focused on the geekiness of cycling (and there’s a lot of geekiness in cycling). But Hanson is older – he did this trip at age 57 – and he lets both his experiences with cycling and his own life experience shape and describe the journey, what he sees, and what he learns. A friend joins him for part of the journey, but he is mostly riding on his own.

Hanson is also the author of The Pilgrim Way: A Cyclist Guide to Ultralight Touring (2016); Pilgrim Spokes: Cycling East Across America (2016); and Peace at the Edge of Uncertainty (2010).

What is perhaps most remarkable about his journey is the same thing I experienced on my much shorter and far less rigorous ride -- and that is pedaling through the silence. Pilgrim Wheels is an engaging and profound account of riding across this country of ours.

Top photograph via Neil Hanson’s web site.

Biking with Cezanne

He moves quickly, conscious

only of the pedals’ noise,

the clicking of the gears,

all other noise folded

into a silence,

and he sees the blurs of trees

smudged like Cezanne, and

a bridge like Monet’s, and

color like Renoir’s, and

this race has become

a painting, color

overwhelming lines, color

controlling motion and speed and

he becomes one

with the color,

he swirls

into a blending

of muscle and machine

and speed,

the air alive around him,

the air on fire,

a fire of brilliant blue

and green and enough

of yellow for contrast

and definition and focus, and

as he crosses the line

the watches click his time.

He lays down the brush.

Photograph by Lubos Houska via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Aili and Andres McConnon’s “Road to Valor”

He was a boy who came from a relatively poor family living in a small town near Florence. He was able to go to a school in Florence, but had to buy a bicycle for transportation. He worked and saved his money, and was finally able to buy a fourth-hand bike.

It changed his life. The boy became Gino Bartali, one of the great cycling legends. In Road to Valor: A True Story of World War II Italy, the Nazis, and the Cyclist Who Inspired a Nation, Aili and Andres McConnon tell Bartali’s story.

Actually, they tell three interlocking stories.

The first is Gino Bartali the great cyclist, who won the Tour de France twice – with each win separated by a decade – a record for time in-between wins that’s still unbroken.

The second is Gino Bartali the Italian resistance messenger, who at the behest of the Archbishop of Florence smuggled fake identity documents all over northern Italy, hidden in his bicycle. What he did saved the lives of hundreds of Jews. He even hid a Jewish family from the Nazis in his basement in Florence.

The third is Gino Bartali, the man whose impossible victory in a Tour de France stage in the Alps helped to stop exploding violence in Italy between the Communist and Christian Democratic parties. As one observer pointed out, men who had been trying to kill each other suddenly turned their attention northward, and celebrated Bartali’s victory together. Bartali had been 21 minutes behind the Tour leader, and in one stage erased the difference. He powered on to win the 1948 Tour, despite all of sports journalists and cycling fans who considered him a “washed-up old man” at 33.

The story of helping the Italian resistance and saving the lives of Jews was learned only fairly recently. Bartali, who died in 2000 at the age of 85, never talked about until late in life, when he told his oldest son some of what happened. Others, especially the Jewish families he helped to save, corroborated his story. His cycling around Tuscany, Umbria and other Italian locales could always be explained as “training.” But secreted in the tubes of his bicycle were false identity papers, to help protect Jews and also to help many escape.

The McConnons tell a riveting, wonderful story. Bartali wasn’t a saint; he had his human frailties like the rest of us. But he had great courage, and he acted on that courage – to save lives, and to win an impossible race. Even if you’re not a cycling fan, Road to Valor is an inspiring, moving account of a terrible time in human history.

Photograph: Gino Bartali cycling in a road race.