“Anyway, what I’m gettin’ at is, if you two are out back in your tent tonight when the bear comes by, he just might mistake you for the bait. So you’ve got your choice: you can sleep inside in a nice warm bed out of the cold and rain—there’s supposed to be some thunderstorms through here tonight—or you can pitch your tent out back and spend the night worrying about bein’ eaten alive. It’s up to you.”
Mike flashed us a wide grin, and an entire tuna fish sandwich disappeared behind his teeth.
LARRY AND I FOUND IT extremely difficult to spend money in Michigan. The few times we pulled into a campground for a shower, the rangers refused to charge us. At the fruit and vegetable stands along the roads, we were given more than we asked for and never charged for any of it. In a laundry, in the small town of Vassar, southeast of Bay City, Bonnie Wagner, who worked there, insisted on washing and drying our clothes free.
“You two go on up to the store and get yourselves some lunch, and I’ll have your things finished before you know it,” she said.
When we got back to the laundry, Bonnie had an invitation for us. “The weatherman says there’s a hailstorm coming through here pretty soon, so I don’t think you should bicycle anymore today. I’d like you to come home with me and stay the night. I’ll feed you a good hearty dinner, and you can have a hot shower and sleep in a real bed. My husband’s been gone for almost six years now, and my youngest just moved into an apartment of his own; so I’m living by myself now, and I’ve got plenty of room, and I’d really enjoy your company. But mainly it’s just that I’d like to do a little something for you two because I think what you’re doing is wonderful, and I’d like to share in it—contribute a little something to it. We’ll spend the rest of today visiting, and you can start out again tomorrow, when the weather’s cleared.”
Bonnie’s enthusiasm and good-natured laugh, along with her kind, caring way, won us over right away. The three of us talked and joked all afternoon and evening. Bonnie told us about her life, her thoughts, her emotions, and her opinions, and she had us tell her about ours.
Bonnie made people feel good about their fellow human beings. She took the time to care about other people, to take an interest in what they were doing, to help them out. When we said good-bye to her in the morning, I felt as close to Bonnie as I did to my friends back home. She wrote to us regularly throughout the trip, and we wrote to her.
We would meet a lot of people like Bonnie in the next nineteen months, people who opened their homes and their lives to us and helped ease our bouts with homesickness and loneliness. They gave us a home and a family away from home.
CHAPTER SIX
Frosts
We knew the frosts were coming—the geese had been flying south for days—but we weren’t sure what to expect from them. We were as apprehensive of fall weather in the East as we had been of rain in the Pacific Northwest.
It was late September. We’d crossed Michigan and lower Ontario, Canada, and we were having a great time weaving from winery to winery in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. In the late afternoon on September 25, feeling warmed and numb from an hour of serious wine tasting, we left the Widmar Winery in Naples, at the base of Canandaigua Lake, and pedaled east into the hills between Naples and Keuka Lake. We were headed for the wineries at Hammondsport.
As we climbed up into the hills, the air temperature suddenly took a nose dive, and we had to stop and pull on our jackets, sweat pants, and mittens. Halfway to Keuka Lake we turned into the village of Prattsburg to buy food for dinner. Everyone in the local grocery store was talking about the snap in the air. Tonight would be the night, they all agreed; the first frost of the season. It was time to bring the potted plants inside.
Larry and I pitched our tent in the woods at the edge of town. The air felt icy and I kept on my wool socks and stocking cap even in my sleeping bag. In the morning the air seemed even colder, and the steam from our first words hung suspended inside the tent. I dressed inside my sleeping bag, then climbed out of the tent to see if the people of Prattsburg had guessed right.
The grass and our bikes were white with frost. Our aluminum pots had frozen to the board they were resting on, and the water in each of our bottles was a solid chunk, as was our carton of milk. Larry tapped the rain fly of the tent with his hand, and the sheet of ice that encased it shattered and slid off onto the ground. We worked for fifteen minutes coaxing our stove to life. Since my fingers refused to flex in the cold, I wore my mittens while I cooked and ate breakfast. Afterward, Larry filled one of our pots with the chunks of ice from our water bottles and warmed it on the stove to wash the dishes in. As the frost began to evaporate in the sunshine, a fog rose off the ground and obscured the grass and trees around us.
When we started cycling we had a tough time grasping our handlebars, shifting the levers, and pushing the pedals. We cycled for two hours before the stiffness finally went away. For the next month and a half, until we got to Georgia, a frost would greet us almost every morning, and at times the walls of our tent would be frozen stiff by seven o’clock in the evening.
Four and a half months and 6,450 miles from the start of our journey we arrived on the East Coast. On October 2, Larry and I rolled into Storrs, Connecticut, twenty miles east of Hartford, and spent the next three weeks with Fritzi Batchelor, a friend of ours who had moved to Connecticut from Santa Barbara in 1975. I had worked for Fritzi at the university library while I was going to school. She was now working at the University of Connecticut. She lived alone in her house in the woods with her dog and cat.
When we reached Connecticut, Larry and I were good and ready for a break from pumping pedals all day and constantly being on the move. We pushed our bikes into Fritzi’s garage, closed the door, and vowed not to set eyes on them for at least two weeks.
The livin’ was easy at Fritzi’s. Everything in her house was a luxury to us—the stove with its four burners, the oven, the refrigerator, the washing machine and dryer, the carpeting, and the pillows and clean sheets on the perfectly even surface of our bed. I’d almost forgotten just how pampered life could be. When I woke up in the middle of the night with an urge to go to the toilet, there was no need to struggle into shoes and layers of clothes, feel blindly for the toilet paper, fumble with the tent door and the rain fly, trip over rocks and ferns, and squat in the cold or pouring rain; then climb back into the tent and search out and squish any mosquitoes that had flown in while I was opening and closing the door.
Every morning, Larry whipped up pancakes and bacon, and when it rained or the wind kicked up we stayed inside the house all day and listened to the stereo or took a nap in front of the fireplace. When the weather was nice we went jogging or hiked in the woods. In the evenings the three of us sat in front of the fireplace and talked and shared a few bowls of popcorn. On the weekends Fritzi drove us around Connecticut to see the fall colors and the lakes and look through the antique shops.
In all, our first two weeks in Storrs provided a peaceful, relaxing end to our trek across the States. Only one thing worried me—I could barely squeeze into my only pair of pants. I now weighed 135 pounds, 28 pounds more than when I began our journey. Some of the extra weight, maybe 10 pounds of it, was due to the muscles I’d built up, but the rest fell into the category of plain ol’ fat. This was the first time in my life that I’d been anything but thin.
By the time we had reached eastern British Columbia, my upper body was heftier from lifting a sixty-five-pound bike over sand and bushes. Climbing passes in the Rockies had made my leg muscles bulge. So when we had dropped down into Idaho I was muscular—but definitely not overweight. Then had come Aunt Marge’s cooking, nine days of nonstop pork-outs, and no cycling. I left the cabin weighing 130 pounds, almost 15 pounds more than when I arrived.
I figured the extra pounds would disappear after a couple of weeks of bicycling, but that assumption proved completely false. By Minnesota I was up to 135.
The