Always in the big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place, there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the Unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into. What you are doing is exploring. You are undertaking the first experience, not of place, but of yourself in that place. It is an experience of our essential loneliness; for nobody can discover the world for anybody else. It is only after we have discovered it for ourselves that it becomes a common ground and a common bond, and then we cease to be alone.

- Wendell Berry

Introduction

At 25, after four years running a non-profit organization for kids with gay parents, COLAGE, I decided to ride my bike across the USA. Years before, I'd learned of an annual ride called Bike Aid, which raises money for grass roots groups in the third world through an annual coast-to-coast ride. I signed up, found 115 people to pledge me, bought a bike, and started riding. I had never ridden a bike more than twenty miles.

Starting with a four-day orientation in San Francisco in mid-June, 1997, myself and 23 other riders set off. It took us ten weeks, averaging 70 miles a day, to ride the 3,600+ miles to Washington, DC. There, we met up with 40 other riders who had ridden parallel routes from Portland and Seattle. Along the way I also stopped to interview teens and adults with gay parents for a book.

This is the journal I kept on the trip. It started out as a responsibility to my pledgers: I'd promised reports from the road. It quickly became a way to keep in touch with friends and family through my homesickness, as I would email accumulated entries from my laptop whenever I could find a phone-line. In the end, it was a way to escape from being rooted in the unending, mind-numbing, physical experience of riding.

We're Off!
In which the Brown's get macho, at a cheese factory I say good-bye to everything I know, and the Sierra Mountains take their toll.

The Desert
Where the trucks have 24 wheels and a slip stream of death, we learn about alfalfa growing and argue about organics with ornery ranchers, towns have more brothels than schools, and I fail to get to first base with a fellow rider.

The Rockies
Where I become a Mormon scholar, the queers recharge our batteries, I recall the day my father died minute by minute while riding 100 miles, we sing camp songs in a cattle trailer at 9,000 feet, and at the end of a 70-mile downhill I run into somebody.

Land of Bike Paths and Promise Keepers
In which the writer compares and contrasts two Colorado cities, and takes a fundie field trip to Focus on the Family.

The Prairie
Where the towns all have slogans, farmers earn my eternal gratitude, it's not the heat it's the…, pot grows wild, and the reader is learns about the curious circumstances surrounding Moby Dick.

Does Missouri count as the Midwest?
Radical activists disguised as farmers recruit, Jodie Foster throws a monkey wrench in my works, we remake the Lord of the Flies, acid trips through Honest Abe's home town, and I meet an Internet friend for the first time.

Grandmother has a heart attack and a stroke
Reflections on family, the not-so-big gap between young and old, lesbian-feminist culture, and how time is different on a Greyhound.

Welcome to the East
I take another break with a best friend, edify readers on the world-class city that is Pittsburgh, a cop almost kills, a father dies, and a cyclist is run down.

Appalachia
Some of the best small towns, steepest climbs, most stunning views, orgasmic ego-loss with another rider, and tofu scramble.

Into DC and onto the future…
The group finally comes together, almost. I am dismayed with my fellow riders and their lack of ambition, I try to summarize the experience and come of wanting, my mom writes about me speaking on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and lobbying congress, and calls me Junior.

Dedications and Acknowledgments