KENNETH
I got to JFK in the morning, but I didn’t have a bicycle to ride. My precious little bike had been unscrewed and dismantled and taped together in a goofy shape so it could fit in a cardboard box. Now I had to breathe it back into form, but I didn’t really have a plan. I had just imagined sitting on a stinky curb and working away as herds of taxis flew by. A grassy patch somewhere would be nice. I saw a black man, wearing a suit, holding a sign with a funny name on it. A limo driver, here for a pick-up. He must know the place. He must have some ideas.
“Hey, can I ask you a question?” I said.
“Man, I just know where to park my car and where to get my customer. I can’t help you.”
“But…you don’t even know what I’m going to ask you…”
He softened up a bit, told me about a dog run that might be suitable, but it was small and, surprise, full of dog shit. I told him thanks anyways.
So I just go ahead and start tearing apart the bike box in the baggage claim ballroom. It’s early in the morning and hardly anybody else is around. Workers in fluorescent vests walk by and I listen to their chatter as I throw together my ride. Occasional tourists come up and ask me questions. One couple from Minnesota is especially enraptured - they get that look in their eyes that some older people get when I tell them about adventures, the “Oh, to be young again” glisten. They wish me luck and offer advice: “Don’t take any wooden nickels!” I turn that over in my head and keep working. My hands are getting greasy and I like it.
Then the limo dude walks up. “Hey man, listen, I’m sorry if I was rude over there, it’s just early and I’m cranky.” I feel reassured. It didn’t bode well that the first New Yorker I had talked to told me to get lost. Now he’s nice and inquisitive, asking about my plans and marveling. I try to sell him on the couchsurfing idea, the philosophy of hospitality. I tell him that all over America, cyclists have been known to just knock on people’s doors and ask to stay on their lawns. He balks.
“I couldn’t do what you do”, he says. I feel dumb, and look up as he starts to explain himself. “Nah, go on working with your bike, you can just listen.”
So he went:
It’s not the same for a black man. He says he doesn’t know his ancestors, doesn’t know where he came from. Was one of two black guys at his private school, could talk that talk, but when he’s in the hood he can talk like a brother. Straddles both worlds, he says. There’s a lot of fear. He mentions Obama, says he saw in the paper that one of Mitt Romney’s guys wants to smear him because of his connection to Rev Wright. Says he also saw an article that for the first time, white births in the country are in the minority. The world is changing, he says, but there’s still a lot of fear.
The stream of consciousness continues as he keeps me company, but his customer never shows up. “Hey, well at least I still get paid.” He says he’s gonna head home to get some sleep, but he tells me he’ll give me his e-mail address so that I can tell him about my trip. “Alright” I say, “What’s your name?” Maybe he doesn’t hear me.
“My name is Victory.”
“Oh. Okay. My name is Dennis.”
“Nah, nah, that’s my e-mail. Mynameisvictory. It’s a song. My name is Kenneth.”
And so Kenneth the limo driver was the first face I saw on this grand ol’ trip I’ve started. The first of many fresh faces and new ideas. I feel good.
RUSS AND JULIETTE
Russ was a CouchSurfing king. He was my first ever host, but I was definitely not his first guest - he’s had a hundred-fifty-plus. Out of his room overlooking the Coney Island funscape he took a giant posterboard, shaped like an oversized pair of shades, and he showed me where CouchSurfer after CouchSurfer had written their memories in scribbled sharpie. There wasn’t a single sad story to be seen. “Rus!” “Goose!” they all started, and then tales of Manhattan mayhem and Brooklyn foibles and fables of drunken nights, recollected all hungover-like. People from the world over had stayed here and left a note of love. It was like a human-sized yearbook page from the coolest kid in school.
We had a stupid amount in common - he spoke Russian and rode bikes and was itching to travel the world. We talked about him growing up in Azerbaijan, in Baku courtyards, but there was no kavkaz accent, just the dissapearing r’s of a Brooklynite and a serving of “fuck you”s for whenever some asshole got in our way. We drank Russian beers on the beach and ogled the hipster zoo in Williamsburg; in the Lower East Side we led a gaggle of French Canadian CouchSurfers to bars with names like “Fat Baby,” and in East Village we watched Ukrainian dudes do the sit-and-kick dance at a neighborhood festival. Russ took me to get a mindblowing bagel and this pizza that they dribbled olive oil all over and served with a plastic cup of soft pepper pieces and had pepperoni so thick the circles curled up into the shapes of bowls. He’d be a good tour guide if it wasn’t beneath him.
Juliette met Russ a couple days prior at a thrift store, where he bought a big ring made of coconut. I met her myself over that pizza I just mentioned, and on the spot I decided she was the shit. She was from England and had too-cute bangs. She might’ve been seven feet tall, and she played guitar. She was on holiday, as they say, staying with her sister in the city. She and Russ and I all biked around together on a pitch-perfect spring day. It was one of those weird travel-induced warps in social decorum, where you don’t even have to get to know each other because you feel like you already do. The sad part is that travel-friends happen fast and then the party ends. We all went our separate ways. Any couch of mine, though, is theirs if they need it. Karma is a common word in this circle, and with all my good luck with these folks I feel like I’ve got a debt to repay. Couches are the best kind of currency.
ANDREY
After years of learning Russian and living with Russians, I’d say my Russian radar is pretty good. So I was in central Jersey, just getting on this beautiful bike path along the Delaware and Raritan Canal, when my sirens went off. A guy on a mountain bike scooted along in front of me, and from one scan of the face I suspected something Slavic. Who knows, though?, I thought. Could be from anywhere.
But then I pull up behind him and holler in his direction - “Hey, are you from around here?” He turns back his head and, I think it was with only one word, responds with a short, shy “yes.” Well goddangit if I haven’t heard a more Russian “yes” in my whole life. Just dripping with russky. There’s a logical followup in that kind of situation: “Okay, well where are you really from?” The answer was quick and confident: “I am from Russia!”
I shoot him a “ya govoryu po-russky” (“I speak Russian”) and then there we are, biking down a maple-coated path in rural New Jersey, talking fondly of the motherland. His name was Andrey and he was 27. He was a software programmer, lived in South Bound Brook and rode the train every day to downtown Manhattan. He worked in a skyscraper and marveled at the city’s scale. “Amazing,” I said, and he agreed, shaking his head in disbelief. “It is very amazing.”
We get to talking and he tells me about this book he read, Adventure Capitalist, about a rich American investor who drove around the world with his girlfriend in a beefed-up yellow Mercedes. That, Andrey said, was a dream of his. He dreamt of yachts too, or of just buying a cheap boat and sailing to the Carribbean. I thought of all the tales he could tell his friends back home - “Oh, yeah, I work in a skycraper and sail the tropics in my free time.” The kid from communist Russia had capitalist dreams, and I couldn’t help but be impressed. When he first got to America, he lived in Philadelphia and took the bus every day across three states, working in New York but sleeping hours away because it was all he could afford. Now he was about halfway between the two cities, and he’d come out to this path to clear his head with cool air after stuffy days in the stress of an office. We breathed in deep and rode through the scene in admiration.
“Yeah, this sure is a dream.”
MATT
Matt called it travel juju. I had been biking along this beautiful wooded path, headed for Princeton with only the vaguest idea of my destination, and I was growing tired and anxious for the day’s end. I had found Matt’s couch on CouchSurfing and plugged its address into my Google Maps route-maker, but I had no real sense of where it was. I hadn’t even looked at the map. Something told me I was getting close, though, so I pulled across a bridge to the road along the waterway I’d been tracing, and I dug through my things for the address. I looked at the numbers, looked at the sign across the street, looked at the numbers, looked at the sign across the street…I was in disbelief. I had arrived. The place I was supposed to stay in had plopped right into my lap, right on my route, a big white wood-paneled house looking like a museum, fringed in happy-looking grass and the sound of gurgling water. “These kinds of things just happen when you’re travelling, man,” Matt said when he came up to greet me. “You open yourself up and the world pays you back.”
I had found Matt on the site and sent him a request because it seemed like we’d get along - he played music and dreamed of moving to Northern California. He was a nurse, and after taking off his scrubs he showed me his hobby, a custom-made table coated in turntables and drum machines. He put on some tracks with some fat-ass bass and we sat in his kitchen, praising the CouchSurfing ethos. I was his first guest ever - truly an honor.
We went to the market and picked up some Jersey-made beer and some burgers for the grill and a couple hours later we were strung around a table full of food and booze with his neighbors, telling the most ridiculous series of stories I’ve heard in a long time. There was the one about the crazy lady who lived in the apartment below, who said she was allergic to “chemicals” and was deathly afraid of Pine-sol. She rolled around the property in a tin-foil-covered wheelchair. It was a horse farm, actually, and they told a story about how when a horse would die they would call someone called “The Knacker.” Sometimes the old stallions would pass away in a stable, and there’d be no way of getting the thing out, so the Knacker’s job was to come and break it into pieces with a chainsaw. Brutal. And on the topic of horses, Matt’s neighbor had a friend who was a member of the local Black Cowboy Federation (yes, African-American horse wranglers from New Jersey) and he rode his horse from Manhattan to the Pacific. Kind of put my trip to shame, but hey, I was enjoying the crazy conversation.
Matt was right - travel made for good juju, and good vibes, and though I was sitting with a bunch of strangers I felt just at home. Weird how that works.
DEVON
When my friend Greg went to stay in Philadelphia with his college chum Devon, he came back raving. The beer, so cheap! The girls, so cute! The neighborhood, so fun! He also came back with a black circle that he had stabbed into his leg with a needle and a bottle of ink, but that’s another story.
So I had only the highest expectations, and Devon hooked it up. We had cheese wiz cheesesteaks at Jim’s, drank cheapo beer at a place called Locust (where even the ATM fee is cheap and the money’s dished out in ten dollar bills), and capped it off at the El Bar (where you can buy six packs from the barman, and where a guy came over and started a friendly conversation with me and wasn’t gay!) At Devon’s place after, we wrote satirical metal songs and lit firecrackers. The two activities are best done in unison.
Long live mutual friends, and new friends, and good friends, and friendly friends, friends and friends and friends, all the way down.
ADAM AND BRANDON
If I were a cyclist, and I saw another cyclist coming down the road riding a tank like mine, with bulging bags clinging to the sides and a sleeping bag strapped on top, I know I would say something. I mean, obviously that guy has a story to tell! If a guy walked in a room with a suitcase covered in souvenir stickers, you wouldn’t hesitate to holler his way. Cyclists are stuck-up, though. When I spot one I look up, meet their eyes, and shoot them a smile, but usually, if I’m lucky, I only get a little finger-wave. I don’t even get a grin. With their spandex and jerseys and stupid shiny sunglasses they are obviously lost in daydreams, pretending they are doing the Tour de France. They see me and pretend I’m a Frenchman cheering them to victory.
Adam and Brandon were of a rare breed: they work at a bike shop, but they weren’t pricks! On their Wednesday off-hours they were going for a ride and could have just zoomed past, but instead they slowed down and chatted me up. The chat turned into a talk which turned into a multi-hour adventure. We rode up the Schuylkill Trail, went by a fruit stand and picked up cherries, strawbs, and mangoes, took them to a park with a lake and threw the pits to the stagnant-water catfish. Turtles clamored up a floating log, trying desperately to hang on, and we jeered at them like drunks at a horsetrack. Back on the bikes, we passed abandoned factories as they fed me with precious local insights. Reading, Pennsylvania is the place so rough, “the hookers pick up you.” “Jawn” can be used as a placeholder for just about anything - “Let’s go sit under that jawn,” “Let me get a picture of that jawn.” A hoagie is not a sub and a sub is not a hoagie. By the end of the ride, I was so Pennsylvanian my driver’s license started changing colors.
We said goodbye as the nuclear smokestacks down the road barfed out plumes that looked like rainclouds (it actually started raining later, which worries me). Adam and Brandon had to go back. Adam, though, said if I ever needed bike help I could give him a call. Now there’s a model cyclist. You can forgive him for the jersey.
ANJA
Pennsylvania, if you’ll recall from your high school history class, was founded as a bastion of religious freedom. European Christians of various sects came to till its land and practice their faith here quietly. “Pennsylvania Dutch” has become shorthand for “Amish,” but in truth a good deal of these immigrants were Lutheran, and they settled in the hills of southeast PA. That’s where I found Anja, one of the more interesting CouchSurfing hosts I’ve had. She was a lutheran pastor, and in her modest house across from a hilltop church we had some lovely conversation.
I learned that she grew up and studied in Germany, and in her past life she was an anthropologist, working with communities in the Arctic of North America. After doing my own anthropology work in Central Asia, it was nice to meet an academic comrade. She commiserated with the usually unspoken troubles of the job, the stresses of research, the constant negotiations of quid pro quo with research subjects that all too often can devolve into awkwardness. I could tell Anja had a sharp, analytic mind, and it was stimulating to chat her up.
In the morning, I went across the street to her bible study group. A group of elderly women sat around a circular table with dog-eared texts; ginger cookies and coffee were set for refreshments. The ladies were kind and colloquial, with lots of corny jokes. A story was told about a bear who eats an atheist, despite his desperate pleas for the good mercy of the lord. Hearty laughs were had all around. Meanwhile, I hoped they couldn’t smell my godlessness. But just as they were open to this young new visitor, I tried to be open to their thoughts and passions. Like anybody, they were just looking for answers. “When I read this passage, I see it like this…” they’d say, “Am I right?” They turned to Anja as the biblical authority - they wanted confirmation and assurance. Anja would nod and smile. She was a sweet soul, and she helped them find their truth.
BARB
Barb was a viola teacher and a fellow bicycle tourist - I found her on warmshowers.org, which is kind of like a CouchSurfing site for bike people. She fed me steak and pancakes and ice cream, and for the first time in my trip I could finally vent to somebody who truly understood what I was doing. Nasty drivers, lousy shoulders, gnarly hills, achey knees - she had seen them all herself on her trans-America tour, and her knowing nods were worth even more to me than the tons of food she gave. Her home in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania was modest and warm, and all the cozier because of Barb’s maternal care. I slept like a baby and woke up refreshed, ready to ride on.
