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Barb Brushe’s and Bill Samsoe’s Bikecentennial ID cards, 1976.
We will go tandem as man and wife…
Ped’ling away down the road of life
—Harry Dacre, “Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)” (1892)
The Old Pali Highway climbs over the mountain that separates downtown Honolulu from the northeastern side of Oahu. It is a legendary road, which looms large in Hawaiian history and myth. The highway runs across ancient footpaths and passes near the site of a pivotal battle in King Kamehameha’s wars to unify the Hawaiian Islands. That battle, in May 1795, concluded when Kamehameha’s men drove hundreds of Oahu warriors off the edge of Nu‘uanu Pali, a precipice that drops more than a thousand feet into the valley below. The ghosts of those soldiers are said to haunt the Old Pali Highway. In the early 1960s, tunnels were bored through the mountainside and a new motorway, Hawaii State Highway 61, opened. The old road was closed to motor vehicles and became a favorite route for hikers and cyclists.
When Barb Brushe was a young woman working as a nurse in Honolulu, she knew the Old Pali Highway well. She would go for bicycle rides there, pushing the pedals of her ten-speed alongside her friend Cliff Chang. It was a friendship, not a romance, but Barb admired Cliff’s striking looks, long hair, and free spirit. And she liked that Cliff liked to ride bikes. On her days off, Barb would meet up with Cliff and bike the Pali: battling the steep grade and the howling wind on the ride up the mountain; pedaling past avocado groves and the lookout where King Kamehameha is said to have claimed his victory; zooming around hairpin curves on the way downhill.
One day in the winter of 1975 while they were crossing the Pali on the way back to Honolulu, Cliff asked Barb if she had heard about a mass bicycle ride that was planned for the following summer on the U.S. mainland, timed to coincide with the bicentennial celebration of the Declaration of Independence. Groups of cyclists would embark on a cross-country journey, following a route of mostly rural two-lane highways, from Oregon to Virginia.
Barb: Cliff said, “It’s called Bikecentennial.” Right away, I thought, “I’m going to do that.” It was a snap decision. We rode over the Pali to a bike shop where they had information about it, and I signed up to do it. I bought a Fuji road bike. And in the spring of ’76, I went home and I trained for it.
Barb had grown up in Roseburg, Oregon, a city of twenty thousand that squats on the banks of the Umpqua River, about 170 miles south of Portland. For decades, Roseburg billed itself as “The Timber Capital of the Nation,” a boast that may have stretched the truth, but not by much. In the 1960s, when Barb was a child, there were still some three hundred timber mills in town, most of them devoted to cutting Douglas fir lumber, the “green gold” reaped in the dense forests of the surrounding mountain ranges. Barb’s mother worked in the library at Umpqua Community College. Her father was a timber cruiser for the Bureau of Land Management.
Barb: My dad was six foot four. He was a big guy who worked out in the woods. He taught me how to ride a bike. As a kid, the bike was my means of transportation. It was my way of getting around Roseburg. I’d bike to school. I’d bike around the neighborhood.
For six weeks in the spring of 1976, Barb rode hard to prepare for the Bikecentennial. She built her stamina and toned her muscles on long rides in the Hundred Valleys of the Umpqua, along the river roads and across mountain passes that reached steeper grades and greater heights than the Nu‘uanu Pali back in Honolulu.
Barb: I was in good shape in those days. The hills were tough. It can be hard on your knees. But I was pretty strong. I got stronger.
Barb celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday on June 12, 1976. Two days later, a Monday morning, she strapped her sunflower-yellow Fuji to the roof of the family car. Barb and her mother were heading seventy-five miles northwest, to the coastal city of Reedsport, one of two West Coast trailheads for the Bikecentennial.
Barb: Right before we left Roseburg, my father said: “Any daughter of mine can do this.” I thought to myself, “Oh, gosh, there’s no backing out.”
When Barb and her mother arrived in Reedsport, they found a bustling scene. Reedsport was a conservative town, but it had opened its doors to the Bikecentennial, and its streets were filled with men and women of a vaguely countercultural cast—lots of lanky hair and scraggly beards—readying themselves and their bicycles for the long road ahead.
They milled around the Welcome Hotel, a three-story Art Deco–era building, which served as both the trailhead office and a hostelry where riders bunked down for a night or two before embarking on the trip. (The rooms were too small to accommodate beds for all the cyclists, so the hotel pulled the furniture out of a few rooms and riders slept on the floor in sleeping bags, up to seven per room.) Barb was issued a Bikecentennial ID card and an orientation packet. At a local public library, she gathered with other riders to watch Bike Back into America, a twelve-minute-long inspirational film featuring scenes of the forty-two-hundred-mile-long cross-country route: picturesque small towns, rolling plains, purple mountains’ majesty. The movie’s finale was set to John Denver’s “Sweet Surrender,” a maudlin folk-rock ballad whose lyrics evoke the romance of the open road and the freedom of young adulthood: “Lost and alone on some forgotten highway / Traveled by many, remembered by few / Lookin’ for something that I can believe in / Lookin’ for something that I’d like to do with my life.”
Barb spent the night at the Welcome Hotel, in a room with several other young women. The next morning, June 15, she woke up, had breakfast, and joined a group of cyclists outside the hotel to prepare for departure. She had thirty-five pounds of gear, which she bungeed to her bike’s rear rack and packed into panniers. She had an extra tire, a patch kit, and various tools for repairs. She had a sleeping bag and a foam mattress she had bought at a fabric store. She had a few changes of clothing, including warm clothes that she planned to send home once she’d made it over the Rockies.
Certain riders—more experienced cyclists and those who coveted adventure but not a social scene—undertook the trip solo. But most Bikecentennial riders joined groups of ten to fifteen, headed by a tour leader. There were two types of Bikecentennial groups. The cyclists who signed up for so-called Camping Groups opted to rough it, pitching tents in campgrounds or on farmland or, occasionally, laying out sleeping bags under the stars. The cost for Camping Group riders was $580 for the eighty-two-day cross-country journey, about seven dollars per day, meals included. Barb had signed up for a Bike Inn Group, whose members paid about four dollars more per day to sleep indoors—in church basements, school gymnasiums, college dorms, VFW Halls, Lions Club libraries, and other subluxury accommodations along the route.
On that morning, June 15, outside the Welcome Hotel in Reedsport, Barb’s Bike Inn Group briefly crossed paths with a Camping Group that was starting its journey the same day. The group’s leader caught Barb’s eye. He was strong and lean, with an air of calm and confidence about him. He looked to Barb like he was about her age, probably in his early twenties. He was wearing a white bicycle helmet.
Barb: At that time, few people wore bike helmets. It was an unusual thing. The guy had reddish hair and a pretty full beard. Not long hair—but longish. He looked athletic. It’s just one of those flash memories: I can picture him there with the helmet on. That’s the first time I saw Bill.
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Bill: My parents met when they were both working for Simmons, the mattress company. My mother was a secretary. My father worked for Simmons for forty-four years, as a packing engineer.
Bill Samsoe was born in 1953 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. A few years later, the Samsoe family moved to Chicago Heights, Illinois, a working-class suburb about thirty miles south of downtown Chicago.
Bill: I must have been five or six when I learned to ride a two-wheeler. My dad had had a heart attack, so our neighbor from across the street helped me learn. He would run behind me and keep the bike steady. The first time I took off on two wheels—it was fantastic. There’s an incredible feeling of independence and liberty.
Bill graduated from high school in 1970 and enrolled at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, Illinois. After college, he took an entry-level job at an insurance agency.
Bill: I lasted a month in that job. That winter, I went up to northern Wisconsin, to this small ski area. I became a ski bum. I didn’t really have any direction in my life at that time. I made some friends up there, fellow ski bums. One of them suggested I take a leadership training course with American Youth Hostels so I could lead bicycle trips. I went through the training course and I was able to lead a trip, in 1975, called the “Yankee Explorer.”
The trip followed a circuitous route, beginning in Connecticut, wending through Massachusetts, upstate New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine before looping south to Boston.
Bill: The kids were pretty young. They’d just finished the eighth grade. It was my first time in a leadership role. It was my first time on a long-distance bicycle ride.
Two of Bill’s friends from the American Youth Hostels training course had moved to Missoula, Montana, to run leadership training for a new organization, which was planning an ambitious cross-country bicycle ride for the following summer. When the Yankee Explorer trip was over, Bill called them up and they urged him to come west, to Missoula, to work for Bikecentennial. He figured he had nothing else better to do. He moved in with his friends, sleeping on the floor of their apartment in downtown Missoula. During the days, he worked at the Bikecentennial office, doing whatever was asked of him. He put together tool kits and first aid kits. He made hundreds of ID cards for Bikecentennial participants. When he was offered the opportunity to do the cross-country ride himself as the leader of a Camping Group, he jumped at the chance.
Bill: I really didn’t know what I was getting into. It was a lot of responsibility, being a leader on an eighty-two-day bike trip. When you’re young, those things don’t occur to you. You go with the flow.
Leading a Bikecentennial group was hard work. You had to be a strong cyclist. You had to be good in a crisis. Group leaders were responsible for the safety and welfare of all those in their charge. The job called for people skills. Adults were thrust together in close contact for two months, and conflicts arose. A cool head and a sense of humor helped. You had to know your way around a bicycle tire patch kit, and a first aid kit. If you knew how to cook, that was good, too.
Bill: The first day, we left Reedsport and rode only about forty miles. It was a shakedown ride. Pretty simple. It was my job to carry the cookstove. We all were supposed to take turns cooking. I did the honors that first night—I think we had macaroni and cheese and hot dogs. That night, we determined that I would not be doing much more cooking.
Bill’s group quickly settled into a routine. A strenuous day of biking would end at a campsite. They’d set up camp and take turns helping to get the meal ready. They would read, write in their journals, and attend to their bikes, cleaning their chains or switching out a patched inner tube for a new one. Every ten days, mail drops would bring news from family and friends. Bill often received letters from his older sister, Marge, who was also working as a Bikecentennial group leader, traveling the same route.
Bill: She was exactly two weeks ahead of us from Oregon all the way to Yorktown, Virginia. She would send postcards about what to expect on the trip. She sent along tips about good camping sites. I remember she wrote to warn me about a black-and-white dog in a particular spot that was attacking cyclists. Sure enough, we saw the dog come running out when we got there.
Bill’s Camping Group followed a snaking route east. Across the Oregon border to Idaho. North into Montana. They spent the night of July 4 in the tiny town of Wisdom, Montana, sleeping inside for a change, in a run-down house donated by a local. There was a black-and-white TV, and some of the cyclists tuned in to live coverage of the Bicentennial celebrations in Washington, D.C., and New York, watching the fireworks light the sky over the Washington Monument and the Statue of Liberty. Several members of the group ventured into town, where they lit sparklers and firecrackers with local children.
From Wisdom they headed southeast to Dillon, Montana. Then Virginia City, Montana. Then on into Wyoming. They passed through Yellowstone, skirted the Grand Tetons, and pedaled south over the Colorado border. Big sky. Big mountains. Big, beautiful country. Bill’s group had fallen into sync socially. Sometimes they synced up out on highways, too.
Bill: Once, our whole group got into a pace line riding out of Pueblo, Colorado, on the way to a place called Ordway. This was unusual. We almost never rode in formation all together like that. It was just a slight downhill, but we were moving pretty fast. We passed a police cruiser that was pulled over on the side of the road, and as we rode by, his voice came crackling over the speaker on the top of his car: “You’re doing eighteen miles an hour. Way to go.”
They kept rolling east. Ordway, Colorado; Eads, Colorado; Tribune, Kansas; Scott City, Kansas. As the cyclists moved from the mountains into the Great Plains, the weather turned sultry. On the morning of July 31, Bill’s group broke camp in Newton, Kansas, twenty-five miles north of Wichita. Their destination was Eureka, Kansas, about seventy-five miles southeast. As group leader, Bill normally brought up the rear, but that morning he asked his assistant leader to run anchor. It was a sweltering day, hot and sticky, with barely a breath of wind. A long ride lay ahead, and Bill was eager to get going. So he took off early, on his own. He rode hard for about forty miles, then decided to stop for a bite in Cassoday, a tiny farm town that bills itself as “The Prairie Chicken Capital of the World.”
Bill: There was a little restaurant, and I thought it seemed appropriate to have an egg in the Prairie Chicken Capital. I went in, I had an egg. Then I got back on the bike and headed out again. I wasn’t too far out of Cassoday when I caught up with Barb and Les.
Barb Brushe and her friend Leslie Babbe had also spent the night in Newton and were making their way to Eureka that day. Barb’s Bike Inn Group frequently crossed paths with Bill’s Camping Group. Back in Baker City, Oregon, both groups had stopped for the night at a YMCA. (The Bike Inn cyclists slept inside the building; the Camping Group pitched tents outside.) Before dinner that evening, the Bikecentennial riders descended on the Y’s volleyball and racquetball courts. Bill and Barb wound up playing on opposite sides in a doubles racquetball match. It was then that Bill began to take an interest in Barb.
Bill: I was impressed by how athletic she was. She knew how to handle a racquet. She was a really strong rider. Also, I have to be honest, she had great legs.
Now Bill and Barb were out on the road together—under the baking sun, in a vast prairie, somewhere close to the exact geographic midpoint between the coasts. They fell into conversation, riding more slowly than they otherwise might have.
Bill: Les had the good sense to bike ahead and kind of leave me and Barb alone.
They talked about their families, their hometowns, their plans. The weather was scorching, and a haze hung over the long, flat roadway. All at once, the color and texture of the sky seemed to change. Strange noises rose to their ears.
Barb: We were riding along and we started to hear this crunching sound.
Bill: It was like we’d entered a different weather system. Suddenly there were invaders coming out of the sky.
Various climatic conditions can produce the phenomenon known as a grasshopper swarm. The swarms typically appear in the aftermath of periods of rain that are followed by drought. Rainy conditions cause grasshopper populations to explode; drought diminishes their food supply and pushes the insects into smaller and smaller areas to search for nourishment. A grasshopper swarm is an event on a biblical scale. (Locusts are a species of grasshopper.) Grasshopper swarms darken the sky and blanket the land. Sometimes the infestations are so large that they are picked up by weather radar detectors. During the “great grasshopper plagues” of the 1870s, millions of Rocky Mountain locusts descended on the plains stretching from Texas to the Dakotas, devouring crops, stripping the wool from live sheep, eating through wooden tool handles and leather horse saddles, and halting the progress of locomotives that failed to gain traction on railroad tracks buried inches deep in insects. For humans on the ground when a swarm strikes, it is like getting caught in a sudden squall.
Barb: They’re flying in your eyes, your nose, your mouth, your ears. They’re all over the place, all over your body.
Bill: There were probably hundreds of thousands of ’em. Maybe millions. All over the road. Squish, squish, squish.
Barb: It went on for miles and miles. It was surreal.
Bill: A memorable day.
Barb: Bill and I had kind of been circling around each other during that trip. But we got to know each other a little bit, out there with the grasshoppers.
Bill: I thought to myself, “Man, Barb’s just at the top of the human being list.”
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One afternoon in April 1973, a man named Greg Siple was sitting at an outdoor café in a tiny village in northern Mexico when a curious image surged up in his mind: he pictured a huge group of bicyclists, riding in unison across the United States, like a giant swarm of insects. Siple, a twenty-seven-year-old from Columbus, Ohio, was in Mexico with his wife, June, and another American couple, Dan and Lys Burden. The Siples and Burdens were ten months and nearly seven thousand miles into a bicycle journey that Greg had dubbed “The Hemistour,” an epic eighteen-thousand-mile trip that ran the length of the Americas, from Anchorage, Alaska, to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of Argentina. That day, the two couples had covered forty more miles, biking from a campsite on the outskirts of the Chihuahuan Desert city of Torreón to Chocolate, a town so small it was barely a town at all. But now, as they sat chatting on the café porch where pork stew, not chocolate, was simmering in iron kettles, Greg’s thoughts drifted back to the other side of the border. What would it be like, he wondered, to undertake another bicycling odyssey, across the U.S. this time, traveling in the company of thousands from the Pacific to the Atlantic? Wouldn’t an event like that be popular and, what’s more, powerful, sending cyclists in droves out into the great land on a journey of discovery?
“My original thought was to send out ads and flyers saying, ‘Show up at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco at 9 o’clock on June 1 with your bicycle,’ ” Siple told an interviewer years later. “We were going to bicycle across the country. I pictured thousands of people, a sea of people with their bikes and packs all ready to go, and there would be old men and people with balloon-tire bikes and Frenchmen who flew over just for this. Nobody would shoot a gun off or anything. At 9 o’clock everybody would just start moving. It would be like this cloud of locusts crossing America.”
Greg was a graphic artist by trade. But long-distance cycling was his passion, and his mission. In July 1962, when he was sixteen, Greg and his father, Charles, took a two-day trip, biking south from their home in Columbus to the Ohio River city of Portsmouth. It was a “two-century” journey: one hundred miles per day. Charles found the ride exhausting, but Greg wanted more.
The following year, Greg found three companions to bike with him, and he repeated the Columbus to Portsmouth round trip. In 1964, six cyclists took part; in 1965, the number jumped to sixteen. The year after that, forty-five people joined the ride, including Greg’s childhood friend Dan Burden, and June Jenkins, the future June Siple, a keen cyclist who had led bike tours for the Columbus chapter of American Youth Hostels. By this time, the ride had gained a sponsor, and a clunky acronym, TOSRV (Tour of the Scioto River Valley). Within a few years, it grew into one of the largest annual bike touring events in the United States.
In 1973, 2,200 riders took part in the TOSRV. As for Greg: he—along with June and Dan and Lys—was thousands of miles from Ohio, heading south through Mexico. That afternoon at the café in Chocolate, Greg shared his big idea with the others. He wanted to stage an event that would “combine the best features of the TOSRV and Hemistour into a summer-long ride across America.” The Bicentennial was just three years away; a massive cross-country ride would be a perfect way to commemorate the occasion and to celebrate bicycling.
Right away, June and the Burdens said they wanted in. They got it. They could see it. It was one of those heady, giddy moments when a group of like-minded individuals experiences a collective epiphany, and the way forward becomes instantly clear, like a ribbon of road that’s revealed when the fog lifts. For the four friends, there was no doubt about the cause to which they would devote themselves for the next three years. Some weeks earlier, June had purchased a cyclometer, a little gizmo you attach to the hub of a bike wheel that ticks off the miles as you ride. That evening, when they arrived at their campsite on the road outside of Chocolate, June checked her cyclometer reading, the tally of the total miles she’d traveled since acquiring the device. It read: 1776. Everyone took this as a good omen.
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It was nearly two years later that Greg and June Siple completed the Hemistour, rolling into Ushuaia, Argentina, on February 25, 1975. They’d taken five months off in the fall and winter of 1973, but had spent the better part of three years on the road. For Dan and Lys Burden, the Hemistour had ended early, in Salina Cruz, on Mexico’s Pacific Coast, about one thousand miles south of Chocolate. Dan had contracted hepatitis while back home in the United States for a visit, and the Burdens never returned to the road.
But planning for the Bikecentennial shifted into high gear. The promotional efforts had begun, guerrilla style, with a series of cryptic classified ads placed in cycling magazines. (“BONETINGLING, Kaleidoscopic, Multitudinous adventure from brine to brine, backroading it for seventy days—BIKECENTENNIAL 76.”) Dan and Lys settled in Missoula, where they established a headquarters for the operation out of their apartment. They collected grants and donations—one thousand dollars here, five thousand dollars there—and acquired 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. Posters were printed up; fliers were distributed to bike shops. Word started to spread. Letters arrived in Missoula seeking more information and offering support. (Some letter writers were less encouraging: “A rolling Woodstock that will be a permanent destructive black mark on bicycling. My only hope is that you will fail before it gets started.”) A friend had a Volkswagen Microbus, and he and June took a trip across the country, armed with topographic maps, to plot a coast-to-coast route along the backroads.
That route—the TransAmerica Bicycle Trail—would take cyclists through ten states: Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, and Virginia. The trail passed through more than two dozen forests and touched five mountain ranges. It stretched over grasslands and sections of desert; it took in hundreds of small towns. Bikecentennial riders could choose to ride all or part of the trail, in either direction, from west to east or the other way around.
In 1976, the idea of bicycling four thousand miles across the United States struck most people—including, quite possibly, some of the people who had signed up to do it—as an odd and perhaps even foolish thing to do. But prior to the automotive era, stories of epic journeys by bicycle were mainstays of American popular culture. A bicycle was not considered a practical means of long-distance travel for the average person. (There were railroads and steamships for that sort of thing.) A long-distance ride, a bike tour, was an undertaking for special individuals, for adventurers and athletes and other seekers of glory. It was a means of demonstrating your physical strength and stamina, and also your character—your moral mettle and spiritual fortitude. It was a way to be a hero.
In the Victorian era, the exploits of bicycling voyagers—mostly but not exclusively American and British, mostly but not exclusively male—were chronicled in newspapers and magazines and in some of the earliest and most popular bicycle books. Bicycle races evolved to take the form of grand “tours”: competitions that covered vast distances, traveled between cities, and followed paths up and down tall mountains. The most famous of these long-distance races, the Tour de France, was the creation of a newspaper: a publicity stunt designed to boost circulation, cooked up in 1903 by the Parisian sports daily L’Auto. Newspapermen understood that serialized coverage of great treks on two wheels was good for business.
The literature of bicycle “expeditions” had an unseemly side. In these swashbuckling narratives, the bicycle was pictured as a colonizing and civilizing force, bringing enlightenment to primitive corners of the planet. The most famous bicycle travelogue, Around the World on a Bicycle (1887), the American cyclist Thomas Stevens’s account of his global trip on a penny-farthing, typifies the breezy racism of the genre. The “natives” that Stevens encounters in the Indian country of the American west, the Middle East, and Asia, are portrayed as savages and simpletons, who greet Stevens’s bicycle with wonder, terror, and incomprehension. In Stevens’s account, the bicycle is both an instrument of empire—a means of reaching the “darkest” and remotest corners of the world—and a justification for it: people who couldn’t understand bicycles, whose cultures did not produce the bicycle, deserved to be subjugated.
But there was another side to the Victorian cult of bike touring. In novels and songs and popular lore, the long-distance bicycle trip was a metaphor for conjugal bliss. Whether riding a tandem, or rolling side by side on his-and-hers two-wheelers, lovers traveled on a vehicle that was—as in the chorus of the famous hit—“built for two.” The bicycle brought couples together, sealed their bonds of love, and bore them on the greatest of all long and winding journeys: down the road of life, as man and wife.
The romance of the bicycle tour faded with the arrival of the automobile and the airplane, modes of transport capable of carrying people far greater distances at incomparably faster speeds. But around the time that Greg Siple and his father were taking their first two-hundred-mile round-trip bike ride, a resurgence of bicycle touring—and a huge new bicycle boom—was gathering force.
In the late 1950s and early ’60s, a new kind of bicycle, manufactured in Britain, found favor among American adults who, for years, had dismissed bikes as children’s toys. These British imports were different from the balloon tire behemoths that had dominated the American market for decades. They were lightweight, equipped with derailleur gears, and came in three-, eight-, and ten-speed models. They were easier to ride, and speedier, and they held appeal for adults who were seeking new ways to exercise, in a country that was growing more fitness conscious.
The new bikes were luring cyclists back to country roads and open spaces. “In summery locales like Florida and Southern California, grown-ups began taking ten-speeds on day trips and multiday vacations,” writes the historian Margaret Guroff. The bikes were marketed in advertisements that showed attractive, physically fit couples pedaling in bucolic settings. In the ’60s and early ’70s, an American bicycle touring industry arose to meet the growing demand for rustic adventures on two wheels.
Other advertisements revived the imagery of airborne bicycles from the 1890s. (An ad for the AMF Roadmaster, a popular ten-speed model, bore the tagline “Flying Machine.”) In fact, the new bicycle craze was far larger than the great turn-of-the-century boom. A 1972 federal government report found that there were now eighty-five million cyclists in the country, fully half of all Americans between the ages of seven and sixty-nine. Some of them were urban commuters and college students, who put the bicycle to everyday use. A greater number were recreational cyclists: fitness bikers and adventure bikers, who rode to get exercise or to get away from it all. In any case, they were buying a lot of bikes. For three straight years—1972, 1973, and 1974—bicycles outsold cars in the United States.
Geopolitics played a role. During World War II, fuel rationing prompted the biggest surge in cycling by Americans in half a century; in 1973, the OPEC oil embargo once again brought fuel shortages and price increases, leading many Americans to seek alternatives to travel by car. But a different kind of politics—a changing political consciousness—was also at work. This was the period of rising ecological awareness, the era of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), of the inaugural Earth Day (1970), and of landmark legislation: the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Clean Water Act of 1972, the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Young Americans, disillusioned by the Vietnam War debacle, were looking skeptically at their country’s institutions, patterns of consumption, and vaunted “way of life.” Automobiles—which for decades had shaped the country’s economy, built environment, and mythology—were coming under attack.
For many, the car was no longer an American dream machine. It was the foul Leviathan of the roadways, a polluter and a poisoner. (The term “gas guzzler” gained prominence in this period.) In the winter of 1970, students at San Jose State College held a weeklong “Survival Faire,” a series of rallies to call attention to environmental issues. On February 20, students staged a ritual interment of an automobile: they pooled their money, purchased a brand-new 1970 Ford Maverick, and rolled the car into a twelve-foot-deep pit. With mock-somber gravity, they conducted burial rites. “As the local citizenry looked on from the sidewalks,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported, “the students marched by at a slow funeral pace set by the band which played a selection of songs in dirge styles.”
Meanwhile, a new bicycle politics was emerging. In Amsterdam, the anti-automobilism message of the Provo movement was taken up by middle-class citizens, who were distressed by the number of traffic deaths in residential neighborhoods. They swarmed the streets in protest, demanding a safer, more bicycle-friendly, more sustainable city. Bicycle activists were asserting themselves in North America as well. In 1971, in Los Angeles, fifteen hundred cyclists joined a “Pollution Solution” ride organized by the group Concerned Bicycle Riders for the Environment. In mid-’70s Montreal, Le Monde à Bicyclette, a Provo-like affiliation of anarchists and artists, began staging direct action happenings that called attention to the toll of car culture and promoted the “poetic velo-rutionary tendency.”
It was in this atmosphere of changing values and generational disaffection that promotional literature began circulating in fifty states, touting “the biggest bicycle touring event in world history.” “Let 1976 be the year to bring before America its need to celebrate and keep alive the forests, farms, folk and fellowship of rural America,” read one of the earliest Bikecentennial fliers. The Bikecentennial was novel, but its tendency wasn’t quite velo-rutionary. It sought a compromise between old-fashioned patriotism and post-’60s counterculture. It gave a vaguely hippie spin to the archetypal American trek to the frontier; it was a bureaucratized journey Back to the Land. It was a classic thing, and a brand-new thing.
Bill: There were some people on the trip that I guess you might call hippies. But the atmosphere wasn’t really political.
Barb: The Bikecentennial had a unique feeling. It was a mood very particular to that time.
Bill: I felt like I was a straight arrow. I had a beard and long hair—long for me, at least. But I guess I was somewhat conservative. Not politically conservative. Just kind of a straitlaced guy. Most of the people in our Bikecentennial group were like that. They were just people that wanted to ride a bicycle from coast to coast.
Four-thousand-sixty-five cyclists took part in the Bikecentennial. About two thousand rode the full-length TransAm trail; others had signed up for shorter journeys, or dropped out before completing the trip. Most of the riders were white and middle-class. There were only four Black Bikecentennial riders. Some three-quarters of the cyclists were between the ages of seventeen and thirty-five, but there were a number of riders of retirement age, and a few children. The oldest person to complete the cross-country trek was sixty-seven, the youngest were two nine-year-olds. Cyclists from all fifty states took part. There were 329 riders representing fourteen countries outside the United States, including Holland, France, Germany, Japan, and New Zealand. In a survey conducted after the Bikecentennial summer, a majority of the riders said the most enjoyable aspect of the experience was “seeing rural America close-up.”
Bill: The Bikecentennial took you into nature and small towns. It was an education. You learned a lot about the beauty of the land. You met a lot of people.
Barb: It was quite a sight when a bunch of bicyclists rolled into your town.
Bill: People would come running out to tell us we could sleep on their farms. They’d take us out to ice cream, invite us to swim in the lakes on their property, invite us to use their phones to call home.
For the Bikecentennial cyclists, every day brought unexpected encounters, surprising sights, adventures and misadventures. Days could be long and hot. (Occasionally, they were long and cold.) But invariably there were pleasures out on the road and rewards waiting at the end of the day: a dip in a municipal pool, a drink at a small-town soda fountain, a local offering a plate of homemade cookies. At the Bike Inns and the campsites, they played cards and chess. Bridget O’Connell, a nineteen-year-old who began the trek as an independent rider but was “inducted” into a Camping Group, would perform flute concerts for her fellow riders each evening. Some Bike Inn cyclists became familiar with every frame of Bike Back into America, the promotional film, which was shown and reshown, since there were often no other entertainment options. The audience would boo and hiss when ill-paved roads appeared onscreen.
The cyclists formed fast friendships. There were unforgettable characters in their midst. Wilma Ramsay, the forty-nine-year-old proprietor of a roadhouse in Buchan, Australia, rode nearly the entire TransAm trail wearing a knee-length skirt, a girdle, pantyhose, and shoes with heels. Wilma was joined on the trip by her older brother, Albert Schultz, a prospector and mechanic from Alice Springs, Australia. He had the beard of a biblical patriarch and pedaled the trail wearing heavy work boots. He smoked a pipe; often, he smoked it while cycling. He carried a wooden mallet to ward off dogs and a bottle of Everclear grain alcohol, which he added to the tea that he brewed nightly in his “billy pan,” or cooking pot. Prior to the Bikecentennial, the siblings had not seen each other in twenty-five years. Wilma invited her brother on the trip so they could get reacquainted.
Every rider experienced triumphs and setbacks. They endured headwinds, sunburn, saddle sores. Spokes snapped. People were always catching flats. There were food- and weather-related calamities. A Camping Group had a Chinese meal at a restaurant in a tiny Kentucky town, and half the group ended up at a local hospital with IVs in their arms. Riders got caught in thunderstorms and, sometimes, snowstorms. On June 13, when a freak blizzard hit portions of Wyoming and northern Colorado, several Bikecentennial riders found themselves pedaling on a mountain pass through fifteen inches of snow.
Many riders had never slept in the open air before and they learned how to scout out the best spots: in fragrant pine forests, next to babbling brooks, in cornfields where the sound of the wind soothed you to sleep. They spent the night in tipis in Idaho and lean-tos in Kentucky. When bad weather struck, they took cover where they could: in church pews, in abandoned houses, in caves. The members of one Camping Group sought shelter from an overnight rain shower in a pigsty, where they slept among grunting hogs.
They encountered wildlife, although not all of it was alive. One day, Lloyd Sumner, a Camping Group leader, saw a prairie chicken get mowed down by a passing car. Sumner scooped up the carcass and carried it with him to that night’s camp, where he plucked it, cleaned it, roasted it over an open fire, and ate it for dinner. Riders pedaled past snakes, bear cubs, herds of cattle. On a road in western Kansas, cyclists slalomed between turtles that were making their way, slowly, to the other side.
For many riders, time seemed to dissolve as the real world, the world off the TransAm trail, grew more distant and fuzzy. They were on bicycle time. They were moving fast, covering fifty miles per day on average. Yet they were moving slow, in the way that bikes do: slow enough to notice a flower bending in the breeze on the roadside, and the bumblebee that was joyriding on that swaying flower. Sometimes they rode really slow, when the road turned vertical.
Barb: My most vivid memories are the mountains.
Bill: We rode some tough hills. We went over the Hoosier Pass, which is like eleven thousand five hundred feet. There were times when you didn’t think you could make it.
—
The most notorious climb on the TransAm trail was in Rockbridge County, Virginia. For weeks before arriving, riders had heard dreadful stories about the hill in the Appalachians that seemed to go straight up. Its nickname was the Vesuvius.
Bill: There’s a town at the bottom of that hill called Vesuvius, so we all called the hill Vesuvius. It was brutal.
Barb: I do not know what the grade would have been for that mountain, but if you told me it was eight or nine percent grade, I’d believe you. It was just switchback, switchback, switchback.
Bill: It took at least an hour, maximum effort. We couldn’t have been moving faster than three miles an hour.
Barb: You really couldn’t do anything except think: “Get one revolution, get another revolution. Just one more pedal stroke.”
Bill: The guys who were the really fast riders got up there first and came out on the Blue Ridge Parkway, where there was an incredible view of the Shenandoah Valley. Every time another rider reached the top, a huge cheer went up.
August turned to September. Bill’s and Barb’s groups were closing in on the trip’s endpoint, Yorktown, Virginia.
Barb: Of course, I was eager to reach that goal. But I really didn’t want it to end. You had that feeling like, “How will I go back to real life?”
Bill: One day, toward the end of the trip, I was at this little country store with a couple of the other group leaders. We were standing outside the store and Barb went riding past. I actually said it out loud: “I think I’m in love.”
Bill and Barb’s Bikecentennial groups reached Yorktown on the afternoon of September 6, 1976. They marked the occasion by dipping their wheels in the Atlantic Ocean. That night, a group of the cyclists, including Bill and Barb, biked a dozen miles inland to Williamsburg, where they celebrated with a steak dinner.
Bill: It was a place called the Peddler. They had these big roasts. The waiter would put the knife on the roast and say, “How thick do you want it?” They’d cut it off and they’d weigh it. There were, I think, fourteen of us for dinner. The bill came to less than a hundred dollars. Those were the days.
After dinner, the cyclists stuck around to drink and dance. Sometime late in the evening, Barb asked Bill to join her on the dance floor.
Barb: It wasn’t really my style. I’m not the kind of person to ask a man to dance. But for some reason it seemed like the right thing to do.
Bill: It was a slow dance. It was really, really nice.
______
And then it was over.
Bill: It was very abrupt. Disorienting. You’d just spent all this time with these people, taken this incredible journey. And suddenly everyone dispersed. The next day some of us rode our bicycles up to Washington, D.C. Others flew home. We had some Dutch guys in our group, and I remember they had to take an early bus to the airport to fly back to Holland. I didn’t really know what to do, so I headed to Colorado. I went back to being a ski bum.
Bill took a job at the ski-rental shop in a resort near Dillon, Colorado. That Christmas, he sent holiday cards to everyone in his Camping Group and a handful of people in Barb’s Bike Inn Group.
Barb: The truth is, I was really floundering.
For a couple of years, Barb had been in a relationship with a Coast Guard officer. She had originally planned to stay on the East Coast after the Bikecentennial ride, to be with him.
Barb: After the bike trip, I was a different person. I had just had the grandest adventure of my life. I realized that my relationship was not what it should be. Something was missing.
Barb moved back to her hometown, Roseburg. But she felt restless, and after a few months, she returned to Hawaii, and to her old job as a nurse.
Barb: And then I got the letter.
Bill had sent his Christmas card to Barb’s home address in Roseburg. Barb’s mother forwarded it along to her daughter in Hawaii.
Barb: I can remember where I was sitting at the Kapi‘olani Library in Honolulu. I knew right then that my life had changed. It was just a simple, friendly letter. But it hit me like a bolt of lightning.
Bill and Barb began corresponding and talking on the phone. When ski season ended in the spring of 1977, Bill went to Dallas, where his parents were living. While he was there, he applied for a job as a flight attendant with Braniff International Airways.
Bill: I began working at Braniff in May 1977. Lo and behold, we had a training flight over to Honolulu, with a quick two-hour layover. Barb and I arranged to meet each other at the airport.
But when Bill got off the flight, he couldn’t find Barb anywhere.
Bill: I went to a pay phone and called her apartment. No one home. I was kind of shell-shocked. So I walked around the Honolulu airport for a while and went to have a drink with my fellow flight attendants. I got back to the gate about fifteen minutes before we were supposed to take off. I looked up, and there was Barb.
Somehow, the two friends had missed the connection. Barb had spent more than an hour wandering the terminal, searching for Bill.
Bill: We talked for a few minutes, and then I had to go. She gave me this big hug. That was it—she had me.
They wrote many letters. Sometimes Barb dashed off a note during her breaks at work, writing on letterhead marked “Queen’s Medical Center Patient Progress Notes.” Bill replied on hotel stationery from the Ramada Inn in Kansas City or Dunfey’s Royal Coach Motor Inn in Dallas. They discussed books they’d read: Watership Down, On Death and Dying, The Inner Game of Tennis. The wrote about bike riding, about their roommates, their jobs. They often wrote about God and religion. Sometimes, more esoteric questions were pondered. In one letter, from the summer of 1977, Bill mentioned a Newsweek cover story he’d read about the possibility of life on other planets: “We beamed a message towards a star cluster estimated at 24,000 light-years from here. We can expect an answer in 48,000 light-years—if there is life there. The author proposes this: ‘Older civilizations, whirling around second- or third-generation stars, would possess technologies so advanced that to earth eyes they would appear indistinguishable from magic’…What do you think about that, Barb?”
That fall, Bill visited Barb on a few occasions, for a couple of days at a time. They spoke on the phone as often as they could afford. In December, Bill went to Honolulu for an extended stay.
Bill: I’d worked at Braniff for six months, which meant that I’d earned a week’s vacation and full flying-pass privileges. I flew over to Hawaii and spent a week with Barb.
Barb: December sixteenth was the day that Bill proposed.
Bill: It was the day before I had to leave. We went out to dinner that night. I’d waited until the sixteenth because that’s my birthday. I was hoping that if I proposed on my birthday, she’d take pity on me and say yes.
Barb: I’d just gotten out of the shower. I had an old robe on. I had a towel around my head. Bill got down on one knee and everything. What a scene. I told him, “You know, if you hadn’t proposed to me, I would have proposed to you.”
______
Bill and Barb were married on June 17, 1978, almost exactly two years to the day after they’d first crossed paths at the Bikecentennial trailhead in Reedsport. It was a small wedding, held at Barb’s parents’ home in Roseburg.
Barb: The minister from the church I grew up in performed the ceremony, right there in the backyard.
Bill: There were maybe thirty-five guests.
Barb: This was before the time of these lavish weddings. We had a couple of salads. And a cake, of course.
Bill: There was a half-keg of beer.
Barb: My best friend from childhood played the autoharp and sang “Whither Thou Goest.” Our neighbors from a couple of blocks away crashed the wedding. Homer and Betty Oft. What an appropriate last name. They were an eccentric couple—they were a little bit off.
Bill: The weather was perfect. It was just a great wedding.
Barb: It was a great wedding.
They moved to Dallas, where Barb found a nursing job and Bill continued to work as a flight attendant. They weren’t rich, but they had what they needed. They were happy. They were the kind of couple whose happiness inspires admiration and maybe a little resentment among friends and family members whose relationships are more troubled. They never seemed to fight. Disagreements, minor domestic disputes, were always resolved quickly and without raised voices. Barb gave birth to a son, Erik, in 1980.
There were stresses—times when money got tight. On May 12, 1982, Bill was sitting in a plane on the tarmac at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, waiting to take his fourth flight of the day.
Bill: I had flown to Washington, D.C., that morning, then to Memphis, then back to Dallas. We were supposed to end up with a layover in Kansas City. There were big thunderstorms in the area and flights started getting canceled out of Dallas. And then, suddenly, all the flights were canceled.
Braniff International Airways had filed for bankruptcy.
Bill: We were on the plane, at the gate, with a full load of unsuspecting passengers. Braniff had just died, but we had not been officially informed. I forget the sequence of events, but somehow what was happening became apparent. The passengers left the plane. I left the plane through a back staircase that exited to the tarmac. I avoided the terminal and walked out to my car. I had to drive home and tell Barb, who was seven months pregnant.
In June, Barb gave birth to a girl, Kelly.
Bill: It was a scary time for us. There was a moment when we were down to our last two hundred dollars. I scrambled and created a little business. I did lawn care and landscaping in the summer. I had a chimney sweeping business in the colder months. I did this for ten years. Shortly after Kelly was born, Barb continued her nursing career. We managed.
The Samsoes liked Dallas. They lived in a small house on the northeastern edge of the city. The kids were happy and had full lives with great friends. Bill and Barb liked the racial and ethnic diversity of Dallas. Erik and Kelly attended public schools where white kids were in the minority. Their classmates were the children of immigrants from Latin America and Southeast Asia. The Samsoes liked eating in Mexican restaurants and they savored the cultural richness of life in the big city. But both Bill and Barb loved the great outdoors, and they longed for a different kind of day-to-day existence.
Barb: We wanted our children to have a rural way of life. We wanted them to be out in nature, where they could plant and hike and kayak. Even at ten years old, our daughter was starting to say things like, “I want the best clothes, Mommy.” Of course, we couldn’t give her the best clothes. We didn’t have that kind of money. Also, I really missed the mountains. I just desperately missed the mountains.
Bill and Barb had friends who lived in Ravalli County in southwestern Montana. The Samsoes learned that fourteen acres of land were for sale near where their friends lived, in a scenic valley, fringed with forest, that spreads out in the shadows of the Bitterroot Mountains. They took a trip to see the property.
Bill: It was the dead of winter. There was snow on the ground. Very austere, very bare. But so beautiful.
The family moved to Montana in 1992. They lived in Missoula with Bill’s sister, Marge, for nine months while their house was being built. It’s a two-story wood-frame house, with cedar siding and a deck on two sides.
Barb: We have two acres for our house. We left the animals in charge of the other twelve acres.
The Samsoes’ home sits about three-tenths of a mile from a bend in the Bitterroot River, in what once had been the territory of the Bitterroot Salish, or Flathead, people. Lewis and Clark’s expedition passed by the river bend on September 9, 1805, and Meriwether Lewis made a note in his diary: “A handsome stream about 100 yards wide and affords a considerable quantity of very clear water.” There are otters in the river, and various species of trout. The surrounding land is home to deer and elk and black bears and mountain lions. Bald eagles swoop overhead. Vultures roost in trees, and when an animal dies, they descend to do their work, picking the remains bare and leaving nothing behind, not even a bone. In this wild place, Bill and Barb found the life they wanted. But the early years in Montana posed challenges.
Barb: We left everything behind when we moved. When we got here, we didn’t have work lined up. Being a nurse, I was able to find a job pretty quick. But Bill didn’t have a job for a couple of years. It tested us.
Bill: I worked for a radio station for a short period of time. I worked for almost a year trying to start a business, but that didn’t happen. I wound up with two possibilities. I could go to work for a small solar energy company or a health club. I ended up at the health club. I did that for ten years. Eventually, I got a job as the membership director at the Chamber of Commerce in Missoula. That fit me like a glove.
It sometimes seems to Bill and Barb that time has raced past, decades disappearing in a blink. Over the years, they’ve planted more than seventy trees on their property, and they’ve watched those trees grow tall. They raised their kids and saw them get married and have kids of their own. In the early 2000s, shortly before Kelly’s wedding, her aunt Marge pulled her aside for a private chat. Marge just wanted to make sure that Kelly had realistic expectations. Did she understand that marriage was hard, that most marriages weren’t as good her parents’, that most couples were not so well-matched?
Bill and Barb have traveled as much as they can afford and have spent as much time as possible outdoors, swimming and kayaking, hiking and exploring nature. And riding bikes. When they lived in Dallas, they participated in an annual hundred-mile bike ride in Wichita Falls, Texas, called the Hotter’N Hell Hundred. For years, Bill competed in triathlons, racking up thousands of miles in the saddle.
In 2018, to celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary, Bill and Barb decided to cross the country by bicycle again.
Barb: It seemed like the perfect way to mark the occasion.
Theoretically, it was less strenuous than the Bikecentennial: a fifty-nine-day “Southern Tier” trek from San Diego to Saint Augustine, Florida. The trip was run by the Adventure Cycling Association, a fifty-thousand-member organization, co-founded by Greg and June Siple and Dan and Lys Burden, that evolved out of the Bikecentennial. The Southern Tier route covered 3,100 miles, a journey some thousand miles shorter than the one in 1976. Forty-two years earlier, Bill and Barb had carried their own gear; this time, a support van with a trailer towed the cyclists’ luggage from place to place. Although they spent most nights in campgrounds, there were occasional overnights in hotels—far posher accommodations than the Bike Inns of the Bicentennial summer. But the Samsoes were in their sixties now.
Barb: You get pretty exhausted when you’re going over mountains in the West. I really, really wanted to quit. We had purchased insurance just in case an injury occurred. I started thinking, “If I fall over and I break my collarbone, then we can use the insurance, and this trip can be done.” And then, after two weeks on the road, it just kicked in: “Oh, I can make it.”
On the Southern Tier trail, the sights and sounds were different than those on the Bikecentennial. The route rolled through the Arizona desert, Texas hill country, the Louisiana bayou. As in 1976, the route stuck mostly to backroads that led through small towns. But the mood this time was different.
Barb: There’s an ugly face of America right now. And of course you see it out on the road.
Bill: We saw a lot of Trump signs. “Make America Great Again.”
Barb: I’m not proud of myself for it, but I jump to conclusions when I see a Trump sign on someone’s lawn. I assume that the people are either very stupid or very hateful. Maybe both.
Bill: There was a real pride that you felt out there in ’76. It was a patriotic year. The so-called patriotism that people express today—to me, it’s not patriotism at all. Right now, we would never fly an American flag outside our house. It’s a symbol that has been taken over by elements in this country that we don’t want to be associated with.
Barb: Here in Montana, you see pickup trucks, with gun racks, and they’re flying two American flags. And they’ll have a Trump bumper sticker. Bill still rides his bike around here sometimes, and he’s had some bad experiences out on the road, with big trucks.
Bill: As they pass by, they’ll blow a plume of exhaust in your face. I’ve heard that they have a special button which activates it. I don’t know if that’s true—but it’s obvious that it’s done deliberately.
Barb: I know there’s a goodness in this country. In so many people. To me that’s the real face of America. But it’s hard to see it now. That’s the America that needs to come back.
______
Bill and Barb aren’t the only couple who met on the Bikecentennial in 1976. There were a number of Bikecentennial marriages. There were many flings.
Bill: I know that there were some temporary liaisons. Some hookups, here and there.
Barb: You were totally clueless at the time.
Bill: It’s true. Much later I found out that there were two members of my group that hooked up. They were together the whole way across the country. I suppose they kind of snuck off sometimes. They tried to make a go of it after the trip.
Barb: It didn’t last long.
Bill: I think it lasted a week.
One day back in July 1976, Barb’s Bike Inn Group made a seventy-five-mile trip from Missoula to Darby, Montana. Barb was about a third of the way through the journey that day, riding as she often did with Les Babbe, when the two friends pulled over to admire a breathtaking view. They were on the Eastside Highway, a two-lane road that offered a lofty vantage point on the scenery. Off to the west was a picture-postcard tableau of mountains and valley.
Barb: I can remember stopping at the top of the hill and looking out and thinking, “Wow, this is beautiful.” That’s where we live now.
The Samsoes’ house sits just steps from the Eastside Highway. Barb had pulled her bike off the road a stone’s throw from the spot where, years later, she and Bill would build their home.
They’ve spent more time at home than usual in recent years, because of Covid. For the first year of the pandemic, they almost never left their property. Erik and his wife live just twenty-three miles away in Missoula; Kelly and her husband and their two children live just six miles down the road. Barb’s mother lives in Missoula, too. But during those long pandemic months, Barb and Bill got used to visiting with their loved ones on Zoom.
Barb: We really didn’t want to see anybody. We were focused on trying to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe. We’re lucky, because we enjoy each other’s company. We played board games. Bill read.
Bill: There’s something my father used to say: “I wake up with nothing to do in the morning and by the time I go to bed, I haven’t finished half of it.”
Barb: We can go quite a way on a nice walk without leaving our fourteen acres.
Bill: You never get tired of the scenery out here.
Barb: It sounds corny, but the sunsets are the best.
Bill: It’s incredible to watch the sun go down over the mountains. To watch that last light catch the clouds and make gorgeous reds and pinks. We’ve seen a lot of this country, and I’m pretty sure there’s not another spot where we’d prefer to have a house.
The house is well lived-in.
Bill: It’s a house filled with love. Also, filled with lots of junk.
In many American homes, the flotsam of life—the trash and the treasure—has a way of washing up in the garage. In the Samsoes’ garage, there are gas cans and gardening supplies, tools and tarps, bags of fertilizer and charcoal briquettes. Tacked to the back wall, there’s a burlap sack from the Pakalolo coffee company—a souvenir of Barb’s years in Hawaii—and a large map of the United States. There’s a Pink Floyd poster on the wall, too, and a Led Zeppelin poster with lyrics from “Stairway to Heaven.” (“And as we wind on down the road / Our shadows taller than our soul…”) Bill’s old white bicycling helmet, the one that caught Barb’s eye on that day in Reedsport, hangs on a coat hook nearby.
There are also bicycles in the garage—nine of them altogether, suspended from hooks in the ceiling. There are three mountain bikes, and a couple of Bill’s triathlon bikes. (Bill calls these his “Go Fast” and “Go Faster” bikes.) There are a pair of his-and-hers Fuji touring bicycles, which the Samsoes bought for their fortieth-anniversary Southern Tier trip. The bikes cost $725 each.
Bill: That was about the price of the most expensive bike on the market at the time of the Bikecentennial. Nowadays, you can spend thousands of dollars on a bike.
There are two more bikes hanging from the ceiling in the garage: a yellow Fuji S10-S and a black Sekai 2500. These are the bicycles that Bill Samsoe and Barb Brushe rode across America in the summer of 1976.
Bill: Neither of us has been on those bikes in quite a number of years. I used mine for triathlons for a while, but it’s not really a triathlon bike. It’s a touring bike.
Barb: We’ll probably never ride them again, but I don’t think we’d ever get rid of them.
Bill: They’re museum exhibits, you know? But I bet if I put in a little bit of work, they’d ride fine. They say if you treat it right, a bicycle will run for a hundred years.