10 Years Since Northern Tier: Part I
Just get through tomorrow
(Suggested listening: “If Your Gonna Be Dumb, You Gotta Be Tough” by Roger Alan Wade)
The temperature in Belfast, Maine was falling fast. Several of my closest friends were hanging out at a brewery down the street turning strangers into friends. I would later turn those strangers into friends, too. But not that night.
No, on May 28, 2014 I was laying in my tent, feeling the effects of gravity a little stronger than usual.
“Just get through tomorrow,” I thought to myself. “It can’t be worse than today.”
May 28, 2014 was the first day I ever rode my bike more than 25 miles, and it was also the first day of a cross-country bike trip I’d signed up for. I rode 61 miles that day. The first 40 were powered by pure adrenaline. The last 21 nearly killed me.
Since I clocked nowhere near the recommended amount of training miles, I was totally unaware of what “caloric deficit” meant and how prolonged cardiovascular efforts while on such a deficit will lead to, “all your faculties shutting down one by one.”
My legs went first, cramping up on each pedal stroke, and my lungs left the room shortly after. I was lightheaded and lost in coastal Maine. What the hell was I thinking, signing up for a cross-country bike trip with so little experience? I was worried that I’d arrived on cavalry to a battle being fought with tanks.
The reality was I’d bonked. I bonked so hard that I became a cautionary tale Bike the US for MS would tell many new incoming riders. “If you wait until you feel hungry to eat, it’s too late,” Cassie Wertz, the longtime director of the organization once said. “That’s how you end up like Mike Platania on Day 1 of Northern Tier 2014.”
As the sun went down, ego death washed over me as I nibbled pitifully on a banana. Riding my bike across the country was the biggest, most exciting thing I’d set out to do, and I couldn’t even make it one whole day without being humbled.
Camp that night was at Belfast’s Heritage Park, which is situated right next to something called the Passagassawakeag River. The temperature bottomed out in the low 40s that night and that’s right you guessed it, that was my first time ever camping. I was far from home, even further from familiarity.
There’s that old aphorism about rock bottom being a foundation on which to build, and I held that idea close that night. The idea of riding an additional 4,234 miles and reaching Seattle seemed impossible. But riding the next day felt within reach.
In August 2013 I’d seen a photo of my friend Nora on Instagram.
It’s sepia toned in the way that pretty much everything posted on Instagram was back then, and she’s standing in a bay in Oregon, water up to her ankles and holding a bike over her head. She’d just reached the Pacific after riding 4,000 miles with Bike & Build, a housing nonprofit and she’s beaming, the sense of accomplishment and joy obvious on her face.
Directionless and eager for fun is a good way to be at any age, and in 2014 those were my key traits. I may not have graduated cum laude or been anywhere near kicking off my career, but if I could bike from one side of the country to the other, I could sure point to that and feel accomplished.
I decided I wanted to feel what Nora felt.
“I went west, for west is where we all plan to go someday.”
Robert Penn Warren
Enough mornings of my youth were spent reading Calvin and Hobbes anthologies between spoonfuls of cereal that the strip’s epitaph “Let’s Go Exploring” became hardwired into my brain. The problem was I’d had little chance to go exploring. At 22, my travels were pretty much entirely trips to see family New York, each time driving the same tree-lined sectors of Interstate 95 and stopping at the same rest stops.
All those hours on America’s worst highway festered in me. I had no idea what was else was out there west of the Mississippi, only that I wanted to see it all. Finding out two of my best friends felt similarly sealed the deal. To Joe and Drew I owe a great debt, especially Drew, that silver-tongued jackal, as it was in discussions with them that biking across the country went from an abstract dream to tangible thing. Having friends with whom you can take on only-mostly-misguided ideas is important, in my experience.
The three of us never sat down and confessed why we wanted to do it, or whether we thought we actually could pull it off but we agreed that riding across the country seemed awesome, so what the hell, why not, let’s go for it.
Enter Bike the US for MS.
The organization’s roots go back to 2007 when Don Fraser and a few friends of his, not unlike Drew, Joe and I, decided to ride cross-country. Difference was their motivation to ride sas Don’s mom’s recent multiple sclerosis diagnosis. After Don and co. finished their ride, things gradually took off.
Today Bike the US for MS is a proper grass roots organization. Bureaucracy is minimal and the money that cyclists raise truly goes directly to MS clinics and patients.
A brief example: One time in a supermarket parking lot in a town outside Buffalo, a guy walked up to us and handed us a check for a few thousand dollars. Told us his wife’s had MS for years. A few months later, Bike the US for MS got to tell a patient that, thanks in small part to donations picked up on the road, a new ramp up to their front door was on its way, and Bike the US for MS was happily picking up the bill.
Bike the US for MS is a conduit that takes money and turns it alchemy-like into better lives for people living with MS. Finding that organization was one of the most consequential moments of my life.
I spent the spring of 2014 scrambling to raise the requisite $1 per mile needed to ride, while also valeting cars to save up for my bike and camping gear.
One day in May I kissed my slightly confused yet still entirely supportive parents goodbye and headed up to Bar Harbor, Maine, where the great trek westward would begin.
It’s a magical world, and salvation was out there on the road, I was sure of it.
