BOOKS NEW-YORK TIMES One Man, Two Wheels, 4,122 Miles In ‘Life Is a Wheel,’ Bruce Weber Bikes Across America By LIESL SCHILLINGERMARCH 20, 2014 A man in the grip of a midlife crisis often gets himself a new set of wheels: a Porsche or a Jaguar or a Mustang convertible. But at 57, Bruce Weber, the author of the memoir and travelogue “Life Is a Wheel,” opted for a different vehicle, a shiny red custom-made titanium bicycle, which he resolved to ride from the Pacific Coast to the Atlantic. “Why am I doing this again?” That’s a question Mr. Weber asked himself as he flew from Kennedy International Airport to Portland, Ore., in July 2011, before embarking upon his cross-country bike trek. Why would he want to cover 4,122 miles in 14 effortful weeks by sheer leg power, especially when, as he tells us, he’d already done it once before? He was making this grueling trip, he decided, “to have important things to think about afterward.” His readers — especially those who share his vision of life as “a self-powered ride” — will find that his meditations set their own imaginations spinning. Mr. Weber observes that when “late middle age encroaches on middle age, the impulse to absorb new things or to view old things in a new way” can stall. At 57, he craved a “jump start” to spark his zest for life after two decades of testing personal change — and stasis. In the new millennium, both his parents had died, and serious girlfriends had come and gone. He had also written a best-selling book about baseball umpires in 2009, “As They See ’Em,” but his job — writing obituaries for The New York Times, where he has worked since 1986 — stayed much the same. Blogging about his journey for The Times (“Life Is a Wheel” grew from his posts) would allow him to shake up his routine and take stock. In 1993, at 39, before the rise of the Internet age, he had “blithely” embarked on a transcontinental bike ride, which he also wrote about for The Times in a less introspective spirit and without GPS, phoning in sporadic reports of his journey from roadside 7-Elevens. Back then, he suffered none of the qualms that freighted his recent trip. “Perseverance is, after all, easier for the poorly informed,” he writes. But his 2011 ride, undertaken at the dawning of a love affair that he hoped would last, gives him pause. He sees this journey, he writes, as a “bargaining session with the universe: Your legs are jelly and your will is wavering and suddenly there’s a gorgeous mountain to look at; then you find an hour’s great ride and pay for it with a dizzying climb on a rough road, or heavy traffic.” Starting in Astoria, Ore., on July 20, 2011, ending back in Manhattan on Oct. 22, he cycled 50, 70, even 90 miles a day for months, struggling with stiff knees and solitude, driving rain, steep hills and narrow, scree-strewed road shoulders. Along the way, he found new confidence in his powers of endurance and an exhilarating appreciation of the rich variety of this country and its people. “You can’t gobble up the nation mile by mile on your own power,” he writes, “without assimilating a sense of its greatness.” Hemingway had noticed the same thing, Mr. Weber recalls, citing that novelist’s remark: “It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.” Samuel Beckett also inspired Mr. Weber, with his qualified paean to cycling in an early novel: “The bicycle is a great good. But it can turn nasty, if ill employed.” Advertisement Mr. Weber suggests that the connection between pedaling and writing may not be accidental: Authors, like cyclists, must “push off in a specified direction with hope and uncertainty. Both make wrong turns, both are prone to whimsy, serendipity and sudden inspiration.” Not to mention “potential disaster,” alloyed with “hubris and self-doubt, anguish and delight.” Mr. Weber’s writing style, straightforward, unexaggerated and conversational, has an understated tone that recalls Hemingway more than Beckett: He rations his emotions, which makes the impact strong when he reveals grief, loneliness or fear. It’s curious to think of a man who has made his living by communicating for more than a quarter-century as a silent type, but that is the effect of this memoir. You sense the author’s reluctance to wallow; he is not aiming to show off, but to show his readers what he sees, and to confront his frailties when he must. In the flats of North Dakota, almost 2,000 miles into his ride, on a “scalding afternoon,” Mr. Weber steals a shady nap in the yard of a farmhouse, “under a tree so isolated it seemed lost.” Less than a week later, on a chilly, foggy Labor Day in Minnesota, he sails down a “paved, woodsy path through a region sprinkled with Paul Bunyan-iana”: gigantic statues of that fabled lumberjack and his blue ox, Babe. Some 800 miles farther along, near Saugatuck, Mich., cycling in a “pelting downpour” with only 1,000 miles left of his trip, Mr. Weber puts on the brakes so he can savor a vision on a high bluff overlooking the shore of Lake Michigan: a woman who resembles a figure in a painting by Monet, “standing quietly with her back to me, looking out over the water and holding an umbrella.” He stops to take a picture. As much as “Life Is a Wheel” tracks the ups and downs and detours of Mr. Weber’s recent journey, complete with details of route, mileage, bicycle maintenance and equipment failures to satisfy gear heads, it also holds the map of the interior journey of the man at the handlebars. Not two weeks into his trip, having reached Walla Walla, Wash., Mr. Weber interrupts his progress to fly to Los Angeles for the funeral of one of his oldest friends. (His girlfriend, nudging his moral compass, tells him over the phone that he’ll regret it if he doesn’t.) In a later chapter, he wrestles with his conscience in a different way, as he describes a harrowing and thrilling bicycle tour he took in 1995 through Vietnam (a place he had feared being sent in his teens), abandoning the guides to find his own private way through a mountain forest. Villagers take him captive overnight, — not knowing that the war has ended, and being unsure what to do with the charismatic American on wheels. And that’s a natural reaction to this writer who manages to be both expressive and enigmatic, inclusive and solitary — a rider in the world, coasting through the landscape, sometimes participating, always observing. Life Is a Wheel Love, Death, Etc., and a Bike Ride Across America By Bruce Weber Illustrated. 336 pages. Scribner. $26. Liesl Schillinger is a journalist who bikes a lot around New York and Block Island.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 09:06:44 +0000
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