Coast to Coast |   When I left New York on April 30 to bike across the country with my friends Meg and Erin, I gathered up a bunch of addresses thinking that I would write postcards along the way. But most nights all I could do was collapse wherever we ended up: In the home of some kind person we'd just met half an hour earlier, in a trailer park, a farm, a forest, a desert, a cattleman's ranch, a river's lip, a Wal-Mart parking lot, a church, a drafty school gymnasium, a blacksmith shop circa 1883, all of us grimy, exhausted and dizzy with laughter. Not too many postcards were sent. But if they had been, this is what they would have said:

A couple days out of San Diego, we stopped in the sleepy California mountain town of Pine Valley, population 416. We took shelter from the midday heat on the shady concrete benches outside a Frosty Burger and took the opportunity to maul a plate of nachos. Another cyclist rode up, a guy in serious spandex who looked like a racer. We asked if he was, and he said 'yes' just as his silver support vehicle up behind him. He introduced himself as Chris MacDonald, the only American qualifier who would be in the Race Across America at the end of June, one of the most grueling athletic events in the world. What we were setting off to do in two and a half months, they do in about eight days. Chris told us he hoped to do it in seven days and fifteen hours. Our jaws hit the ground. He showed us his $10,000 carbon fiber bike. He told us about his training regimen and sixteen-person support team. "And," he added, pointing to the ice cream stand, "this Frosty Burger is actually the first checkpoint of the race." We knew this was a good omen. He said that if we see him zip by at the end of June on the east coast, to hold up a sign that says "Frosty Burger" and he would know it was us. He signed our helmets, flashed a grin and wished us good luck.

I got a flat in the middle of Arizona on a bumpy two-lane road lined with pipe cactus and squashed rattlesnakes. The nearest gas station was only a few miles up, so I put out my thumb to try and get a ride there. Better to fix a flat out of the heat. A truck pulled over and a stylish young Romanian couple jumped out. When I told them that we were biking home to New York City, they gasped with shock and delight. They gave us oranges and money for sandwiches and hugs when we got to the gas station. After that, the ride into Prescott was a grueling climb to 9,000 feet in one day. We were delirious when we finally got there and collapsed for three hours, fantasizing about all the hot tubs there must be in this fancy mountain town. Alas, such things were beyond reach for camping travelers like us. We took the next day off and went to the health food store. The Romanian couple burst in -- they had a weekend house in Prescott and they'd seen our bikes outside. They invited us to stay there for the night. It was an big airy place overlooking a valley of pine trees. They fed us dinner and did our laundry. Then, they led us to their hot tub where they served us fresh strawberries and cream and fluted glasses of champagne. Meg felt like she was on drugs. I couldn't stop laughing.

We were riding through the giant, 300-square mile swath of northeast Arizona that is Navajo Nation. The sun was sliding toward the horizon. We stopped at a little store to try and figure out where to camp. Everyone there was Navajo. A man eating an ice cream on the bench suggested we pitch our tents behind a wooden bead shack up at the next junction - nobody would bother us there, he said. His name was Gleive and he said that his family's land was along our route another 50 miles up. Why don't we come stay there the next night? He wanted us to meet his father, an 84-year-old medicine man. We arrived at their land in the dusty hills the next afternoon. The whole family was expecting us. They fed us Indian fry bread, venison stew and blue corn mush. I talked for a long time with Gleive's niece, Sophina, a woman who was 29 like me. She assisted her medicine man grandfather, Frank Isaac, as well as her grandmother, an herbalist and hand tremoler, Juanita Isaac, and was learning the old ways from them. She told me what it means when you see a snake, a coyote, or an owl. She explained how they bury the umbilical cord of a boy under cow dung, and that of a girl under goat dung, to keep the children forever tied to the land. She talked about clans and taboos and elders. The grandmother, Juanita Isaac, puttered around in a long skirt, turquoise brooch, and aviator sunglasses. She took me into her little house for a hand tremoling - the Navajo way of future-seeing that was discovered to be her gift when she was a girl. Sophina sat beside us and translated her words into English since the old woman only spoke Navajo.

Frank Isaac invited us to sleep in his hogan, a ceremonial hut. In the morning, I drank coffee with him in his kitchen. He was nearly deaf and screamed when he spoke because he couldn't hear himself, and I had to sit close and scream in his ear for him to understand me. So we sat there screaming at each other. He said that the Navajo people came from monkeys in that spot of desert between four sacred mountains. He spoke of the white man coming as if it were a curious thing that had just happened recently. He said it was important that the Navajos keep their Navajo ways, and that everyone keeps their old ways. When all the ways become the same, he said, the world will be over: Boom. Just like that.

Frank Isaac went outside and told us to line up facing the sun rising in the east. He put a little pile of corn pollen in each of our hands and chanted a long protection prayer in Navajo. Then, in English, he told us to sprinkle the corn pollen on ourselves and our bikes. He squinted and promised us that we would get home safely. Then he sent us on our way.

In southwest Colorado, where the the mountain slopes are green and pocked with horses, a man pulled over and leapt from his car. He introduced himself as Nathaniel Newby, fellow cyclist ("I've always wanted to do what you're doing!") and professional master. Of what, we wondered? Of enlightenment, he explained. He leaned in and confided: "The secret to enlightenment is a car buffer." We were sort of dumbfounded, and he said that if we would tell him about bicycle touring, he would love to give us a buffing. He came to our campground the next morning with a Polishmaster 1900 car buffer in a box, and explained that he and a few other seekers of enlightenment had discovered that by applying a car buffer to one's body, it drops one out of the "monkey mind" and into transcendant states of non-thought. He had us sit in a chair and, one by one, buffed us with the buffer. He also delivered Stuart Smalley-esque sermons of affirmation and hazy New Age platitudes. He was entirely earnest and well-meaning. It wasn't until that evening that we discovered the bruises on our bodies. For weeks afterward, we giggled about having been buffed by Nathaniel Newby.

In Kansas, we rode along the Transamerica, a cross-country bicycle route that was developed in 1976 and that hundreds of people ride each year. We started crossing paths with other cyclists: a butcher from Belgium; a retired couple from Lake Placid; a pack of doctors and professors from Boston; a hippie from Atlanta; a cellist from the New York Philharmonic. Each encounter crackled with excitement over our common adventure. One day we met a guy named Fred who was riding west to east on a mountain bike and who, despite his sunburn and beard, looked strangely like Brad Pitt. We invited him to ride with us for the day. He was incredibly shy and secretive about his life, so we privately tried to surmise the details. Perhaps, we thought, he was a serial killer. Maybe he was a serial *bicyclist* killer, riding back and forth across the Transamerica, picking off unsuspecting cyclists. Maybe, we imagined, he actually *was* Brad Pitt, and was riding across the country to get over his divorce from Jennifer Aniston and the media's harping about his supposed affair with Angelina Jolie! In that case, we were sure that paparazzi from US Weekly would soon be hot on our trail. We loved Fred and the feeling was mutual, so he stayed with us. After a few days, we wrenched from him the truth that for ten years, he had been a famous male model. Reluctantly, he told us stories of Milan, Paris and Tokyo. He had appeared on a box of Calvin Klein underwear. He had been a favorite subject of Herb Ritts. Having just been caught in a torrential thunderstorm in the middle of Kansas, this bizarre information sent us into wild hysterics. Fred decided he would ride all the way to New York with us, and we dubbed ourselves Three Cackling Harpies and the Male Model.

In rural southern Indiana, we stopped at a little gas station for our usual mid-morning festival of doughnuts and candy bars. An Amish man walked in to get something. He looked at us and we looked at him with mirrored curiosity. He introduced himself as Ben Girod. When we told him we had bicycled there from California, he was fascinated and invited us to visit his family's settlement 60 miles up along our route in a town called Pleasant. We arrived there the next day. Ben Girod had eight children who flocked around us like moths in their handmade cotton clothes, black bonnets and bare feet. Ben's father lived nearby, as did his nine brothers, who had 89 children between them. Ben proudly showed us his vast woodworking shop, beautiful house he had built, barn full of animals and garden in which the family grows almost all of their food. His wife, Mary, took us down to see their canning cellar. The walls were lined with mason jars full of corn, beets, peaches, jam, meat, and tomatoes. They asked as many questions about our lives as we did about theirs. The Girods did not use electricity, telephones, or cars. They use oil lamps at night, the postal service to send letters, and horses and buggies to travel. The oldest daughter, Fanny, hitched up a horse and buggy to ride us over to an aunt's house to get a loaf of bread. She showed me how to drive the horse, and I steered it clopping down the road. When we returned, the table was spread with a huge feast for supper. After eating, two of the sons lugged out a big vat of ice cream they had churned especially for our visit. Everyone went to the front porch. We ate ice cream while Ben Girod told stories and his children sat captivated, hanging from his limbs and laughing. He told us that they knew about the world outside, but they believed that what people think is progress really is not. It was somehow hard not to agree with him. The sun set on the longest day of the year. The moon rose red over the cornfields. Fireflies glittered everywhere. The insatiability of the modern world seemed a million miles away. Now we're in Ohio at my parents house, resting up before the final stretch home. Whatever I thought this trip would be has been surpassed hundreds of times over. There was the waitress named Darlene who held our hands and prayed to the lord Jesus that the wind be at our backs and we not get hit by any trucks before sending us off with slices of cherry pie. There was the Vietnam vet who invited us to stay at his house and, late at night, told us that he still has nightmares about the little girl he killed when he thought she had a grenade, but really she had just come to ask for candy. There were the two self-proclaimed hillbillies near the border of Missouri who trounced around in cutoff jeans and cowboy hats, and invited us to try the turtles they were grilling outside their single-wide trailers. There were rodeo cowboys, wheat farmers, coal miners and NASCAR fans. There's been more beauty than I could sometimes fathom, and a welling up of patriotism that I never quite imagined from myself - a slipping away of leftist cynicism and a feeling that for all its faults, this great experiment in pluralism and tolerance and freedom and self-determination really has worked to pretty awesome effect.

I've sometimes thought back to the first time I hitchhiked, when I was 18 and stuck in Lincoln, Nebraska. The ride I got then was with a man who lived in his van, traveling from lake to lake selling flip-flops to campers. He was slow and joyful and wise. He said, "Always take the side roads. That's the way you find out what's really happening." In the 12 years since then, like most of us, I've traveled around America a lot, by plane, train, car, bus and motorcycle. But I have never, ever experienced anything like crossing this country on a bicycle. And I'm so glad to have taken the side roads.

Sorry for any phone calls and emails that weren't returned - I've been checked out of that stuff. I hope you're having a great summer!

With sore legs, burnt skin and lots of love, Jody

p.s. The Race Across America is happening right now, and our boy Chris MacDonald is in third place riding through Ohio. He left San Diego a week ago.