Sunshine envelops my body as I leave the coffee shop, hands gripped around a pair of takeaway lattes. It’s a sunny day in Lockport, a town of stone and concrete. The streets radiate and amplify the sun’s rays, turning them into heat. It’s spring in upstate New York, and this warmth still feels like an unfathomable luxury.
I spot Chris sitting at a picnic bench in the shade. The sides of his mouth are slightly pinched, and his blue eyes are downcast.
“I saw her, man,” he says. I’m trying to catch his meaning as I take a seat and hand him his cup.
“Aha,” I exhale after a foamy sip. “Bike Girl?”
“Bike Girl,” he nods. “But she’s heading in the opposite direction to us.”
Yes, the elusive Bike Girl: a solo woman on a loaded touring bike. A vision of independence and adventure — the kind of companion that some of us male cycle tourists dream about during lonely sojourns out on the road. Of course, a road romance between unwashed cyclists probably sounds better in theory than it’d be in practice, but a guy can dream — and dream we certainly do.
“Dang. Good for her, though. We love to see it.”
This isn’t irony — we really do love to see it. Despite our easygoing and open-minded nature, the bicycle touring community remains a disproportionately white and male bunch. Chris and I are no exception.
We’re white guys. You’ve seen us around: we’re the happy-go-lucky princes of western society. Things tend to work out pretty well for us. And they should, because society is built for us — specifically us — to thrive.
So we’re always impressed when we spot someone who isn’t a white guy out having an adventure on a loaded touring bicycle — especially when she’s a young woman.
“Yeah, she looked super cool,” Chris is saying, gazing back the way we came.
“You didn’t speak to her?”
“Well, she was working hard to get up that hill.” He gestures toward the aquatic locks that give Lockport its name, a series of waterproof gates that allow tugboats, barges and pleasure vessels to travel up and down the edge of the Niagara Escarpment. The Erie Canal Bike Trail shadows its steep approach into town. “She reached the top and then she smiled at me and said, ‘I thought there weren’t supposed to be any hills on this route.’”
“What’d you say?”
Chris looks into his coffee. “‘Haha… yeah!’” he says, imitating himself. He sighs and rolls his eyes.
“Bummer.”
“Yeah. She’s gone now. And we’re going in opposite directions, anyway.”
“Bike Girl, we hardly knew ye.” We begin to speculate about where she started and where she’s going — usually the first questions bicycle tourists ask one another on the road. As we invent her backstory, a tugboat painted in the blue-and-yellow of the New York State Canal Corporation drags an enormous log through the first of Lockport’s locks.
The Erie Canal Bike Trail runs for 500 kilometres alongside the eponymous man-made waterway, the 19th century equivalent of a superhighway across upstate New York. Its completion in 1825 meant that maritime traders could head inland up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany, where they took a left turn on the Erie. The canal carried them to Buffalo, on the shores of the Great Lakes, whose navigable waters stretched as far as Chicago. Goods on the Atlantic coast could therefore move deep into the North American interior without taking a costly overland route, opening up the west for expansion and exploitation — all thanks to the Erie Canal. For 80 years it was an essential commercial artery, and arguably fuelled the early rise of New York City as a global centre of industry, commerce, finance and culture.
As the blue-and-yellow tugboat descends through yet another lock, three brawny white guys amble out onto the deck to look up at the smattering of tourists gathered overhead. One smokes an enormous cigar.
He’s got the same build as Derek, a brawny white man Chris and I had met earlier in the day. Derek was dressed head-to-toe in camouflage, incomprehensibly drunk, when we met him in a small-town tavern.
“What the hell’re you two doin’ out here?” he wondered aloud as we stood at the bar. His companion, a round man with a red face, chuckled companionably.
We were in one of the many canal towns ambitiously named after ancient metropolises — Rome, Palmyra, Troy, Syracuse — that never recovered once railroads and highways rendered them obsolete. Downtown streets of 19th century grandeur were mostly deserted. Further out, in the noisy world beyond the canal and its leafy bike path, we saw vast asphalt savannahs studded with Tim Hortons and dollar store chains: Dollar Tree, Dollar General and — saddest of them all — Family Dollar.
Derek tried to convince us to party on with him back at his house, said we could pitch our tents in his backyard or, if the dogs bothered us, around the back of a bar he liked.
“Fence’n’ shit…” Derek slurred, swaying. He’d followed us outside. “Nobdody c’n fuck withya out thurr.” He thunked his bottle of Bud Light onto the table between our pints of craft IPA: America’s cultural divide in a single image. He took a step back, opened his hands in front of his barrel chest to make his point: “Look,” he said, fixing his eyes on Chris. “I stan’ my groun’. Nobody c’n fuck withya if I say they can’t.”
He let that hang in the air for a moment. When I glanced over, Chris was barely controlling his laughter.
Now, overlooking Lockport’s locks as the tugboat chugs away, Chris and I are reliving the encounter. I have Derek’s phone number scrawled on a scrap of paper.
“I have this theory that life is what you say ‘yes’ to,” Chris says.
I pause mid-sip, return my coffee to the picnic table. “‘Life is what you say yes to,’” I repeat. “That’s deep shit, mate.”
Chris seems surprised at himself, but he nods. “Thank you.”
We’re white guys, and life is but a menu of opportunities and possibilities.
“Anyway,” he goes on. “I’m a little ashamed to say it, but I was happy not to say ‘yes’ to Derek.”
“Derek sure said ‘yes’ to the liquor.”
“And the liquor said ‘yes’ to Derek,” Chris replies.
A cyclist rolls up and leans his bike against another picnic table: a tall, lithe young white guy in short shorts and a billowy t-shirt hanging from his frame. He pulls out his phone and thumbs it for half a minute until his companion rolls up on a recumbent tricycle.
“Awesome ride, Nick!” the second cyclist says, unstrapping his helmet and boosting himself out of the trike’s low saddle. He’s short and stocky, speaks with a bit of a lisp.
“Beautiful weather,” Nick replies. He’s leafing through his velcro wallet now. “Alright bud, looks like I got enough cash for a couple of drinks. You want something?”
“Orange juice please! Thank you, Nick,” the second cyclist says in a kind of sing-song. He takes a seat as Nick ambles into the coffee shop.
Chris and I sit in silence, gazes averted. In the past — in another life — I have been the perky bicycle tourist with a couple of months’ worth of travel under his belt, who would happily strike up a conversation with any stranger on a nearby park bench. I have also been that same bicycle tourist several months further down the road, bewildered as he suddenly finds himself recoiling from the alienating company of humans. And I have been that very same bicycle tourist, now approaching a year on the road, and instinctively familiar with the “oneness” of life on a bikeable planet where there’s no such thing as a stranger.
But here in Lockport, Chris and I have only been travelling for a few days — still in the earliest, embryonic stages of transformation from “Human” into “Cyclist.”
In a week’s time, at the end of our trip, a host will ask us, “What do you guys do?” and Chris and I will look at each other, startled by the question.
“To be honest,” Chris will say after a pause, “it feels like this right here is what I do.”
He’ll nod in a way that encompasses the warm glow of a pizza-strewn dinner table, the couple hosting us, their wine-drunk neighbour, our loaded bikes waiting for us out in the garage, the hundreds of miles of road and trail and forest and factories and new friends behind us.
Our host, a stoked silver-haired Bike Girl who first hit the road long before Chris and I were born, will grin in recognition.
“The change,” she’ll intone, eyes lighting up. “It’s just beginning.”
Her husband and touring partner of more than 30 years will be smiling, too, with candlelight shadows flitting across his face. “What a shame you have to go home,” he’ll say.
“Boys,” the elder Bike Girl will say, voice softening to meet the distress on Chris’ face, “the world is always out there.”
“Let me ask the question another way,” the husband will add. “What do you do for a living?”
“Well, tomorrow I’ll go home, where I guess I’m a software engineer,” Chris will say.
“I’m a ‘content strategist,’” I’ll add sheepishly. “Please don’t make me explain what that is.”
For now, however, we’re still firm Humans here in Lockport, and so we’re doing that thing humans do when we’ve been eavesdropping on the only people near us and then their conversation ends and we pretend we’ve just been sitting there admiring a fire hydrant the whole time.
Our trike-riding neighbour is a born Cyclist, however: open to the world, enamoured with it. “Wooow,” he gasps when our loaded bikes catch his eye. “Are you going across America?”
“Just to Albany,” we say. I feel myself sporting that superficial smile Humans wear when we meet a stranger from outside our usual social range. I realise my hand has drifted into my pocket, fingers grasping for my phone. I wrench it away.
“I like your bike, it’s rad,” Chris is saying, and in my mind’s eye I hear him saying yes. “And you probably have way less wind resistance, being nice and low like that.”
“It’s pretty cool, I guess,” our new friend says. “I can’t go as fast as my friend Nick, though. He’s inside getting drinks, you’ll meet him soon. I’m Pennyman.” He extends his hand and we take turns shaking it. “Do you have any pennies?”
We make a show of checking our wallets, but neither of us has cash.
“That’s a shame. I collect them. I thought: nobody needs pennies. Nobody uses them. They just lie around, you can’t buy anything with them! But you know who does need them?”
He waits for us to answer. I glance at Chris.
“People with leukaemia,” Pennyman says at last, as if it’s obvious.
“People with leukaemia,” Chris nods.
“The pennies go to leukaemia research. That’s how I got my name. Someday, I want to ride this bike across America, collecting pennies.” He pats his ride like it’s a reliable mule.
In my mind’s eye, I can see the titanic mountains, cathedral forests and deathly silent deserts that would await Pennyman in the west, far away from the wooded hills of upstate New York. Several years ago I rode a bicycle across the western United States, from north to south, as part of a larger journey through North and Central America. In moments of utter weakness the landscape and its creatures — strangers, instant lifelong friends — sheltered and nourished me. Clear demarcations between individual people dissolved, as did the boundaries between us and the wider world. A year on the road inspired a deep trust in Humans that I still carry like a talisman.
But I am who I am, wearing a face that Human society is predisposed to smile on. Would it smile on Pennyman in the same way? My gut tells me that it would, but these are the guts of an able-bodied white guy. What the hell do they know?
“Oh boy, Pennyman, you’re already telling them about your coast-to-coast trip?” Nick has arrived with two bottles of juice.
“These guys are going to Albany.”
Nick looks us up and down, then takes in our bikes. “Nice,” he says, with feeling. We sit in the shade and chat about Buffalo, a great rusting ruin of a city where industrialisation came and went like a travelling circus, leaving a few downtown trinkets and huge expanses of Chernobyl-like ruin. Chris and I spent a night in Buffalo and then moved on. Nick and Pennyman live there.
“It’s not a bad place,” Nick says. “Winter sucks, obviously, and it goes on for about three months too long, but upstate’s nice as hell in the summer and fall.”
“I heard you can take bike trails all the way up the Hudson from New York City,” I say, “and then from there you hop into Vermont and follow trails into Quebec.”
“New York to Montreal,” Chris adds. He’s heard me discuss this idea several times. “Would be a fun ride.”
Pennyman groans. “I’ve always wanted to ride to Montreal. Haven’t I, Nick?”
Nick frowns at his friend. “Pretty sure this is the first I’m hearing of it, dude.”
“Oh no, I’ve always wanted to ride my bike to Montreal. I heard they have pennies in Canada, too!”
Something has darkened Nick’s brow. “Canada,” he frowns. “I’d stay away from Canada right now. They don’t want people like me up there.”
There’s a moment’s silence while Chris and I try to figure out what he means. Nick is a white guy, after all.
“They got Trudeau in charge up there,” he explains, referring to the Canadian prime minister. “And he’s not letting people in unless you got that fuckin’ vaccine.”
Aha. I’d forgotten that “Canada” had recently joined the list of topics you should avoid with strangers in America, alongside obvious items like “Trump” and “vaccines”, old stalwarts like “guns” and, since the pandemic lockdowns and associated media frenzy in right-wing corners of the internet, even my home continent of “Australia”.
“Canada” had joined the list when a group of truckers and activists had taken over downtown Ottawa to protest vaccine mandates for cross-border travel and, in doing so, became a cause celebre for U.S. conspiracy heads.
“You didn’t get the vaccine, huh?”
“Hey man, if you want to put that poison in your veins, be my guest,” Nick says to his juice. Chris and I risk exchanging a glance, recognising the presence of a mind virus. Mind viruses communicate with slogans and memes — persuasive when you see enough of them on the internet, but awkward and bizarre when uttered aloud. “But you must be pretty stupid if you do.”
Since I first moved here seven years ago, I have watched my adopted home become more and more susceptible to mind viruses. The great post-war surpluses that lifted its living standards and lubricated its social cohesion in the 20th century have mostly dispersed, or disappeared into the pockets of its re-gilded aristocracy. Its broad middle class, who thrived on the exploitation of invisible billions beyond its borders, is starting to shrink, and the domestic ranks of the downtrodden and the alienated are growing. The underlying structures and inputs that keep the whole thing humming — unlimited resources, reliable supply chains, agricultural yields, governmental stability, climactic predictability — are sputtering out. And with nothing but patriotic myths to inform their understanding of their place in the world, paranoia and suspicion and outright fantasy have infected the middle American mind.
The growing gap between America’s patriotic myths and its lived experience is fertile ground for mind viruses. Even white guys now feel alienated from a world that, thanks to a million subconscious cultural affirmations per day, they expect to own. A few days down the trail from Lockport, Chris will look up from his phone, hollow-eyed, to inform me that a mind virus-infected teenager — a white guy like us — from a small upstate town had just driven into Buffalo, carried an “assault-style” rifle into a supermarket in a mostly Black neighborhood and murdered ten people in cold blood.
Nick sighs and shakes his head. Chris and I are making mental notes to steer clear of “Canada” when speaking with strangers. Sensing that the conversation has run its course, Pennyman interjects.
“Do you have Instagram?”
He types his handle into our phones. He makes sure we follow Nick, too.
Later, as I lay in my tent listening to the echoes of an owl hooting over the moonlit canal, I’ll thumb over to Nick’s profile. In one post, a selfie, he’s looking straight at the camera with melancholy green eyes. He’s written out some poetry in the caption, which begins:
A human I am
Where’s my strength
My guts
My sense of belonging to the whole
Christ sees me
In still moments
My guts sink to the bottom of me
I am thinking
Is this the last of me
I surrender
To decay
The last lines are:
Offer your compassion
And that will be the last of me.
Under the photo, amid a bunch of supportive comments from friends and family, I’ll see that Pennyman has written something I can’t decipher: Bye-bye bye-bye.
I’ll go to Pennyman’s profile and see that he’s posted the same photo of Nick’s face around the same time.
Pennyman’s caption reads: I have a best friend it’s name is Nicolas. He is sick we need to make him better 1000 ,0000%. Gratefulness of is life today he going to take us to Darien lake not today because he is sick the only we need is love passion of its love. And strength he give to the world praise to. Nicholas. Not just me we need every-one do you love my friend come to me I want Nicolas. To see this I hope he will be happy to see I Rote to him.
Chris and I have finished our coffees. We pack up the snacks and bike gadgets that have slowly disgorged themselves onto our picnic table. We swing our legs over our saddles, stand on the pedals and, with a ring of our bells, we say goodbye to Nick, to Pennyman, and to Lockport.
Quinten’s first book is The Guest: A Backroads Journey by Bicycle, about a year-long cycling adventure from Canada to El Salvador.