Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
It’s for the Times; it’s for the country; it’s for one last time.
Bruce Weber, New York Times reporter, passed through Whitman County this week on a bicycle. It’s his second ride across the country and first through the Palouse.
“What is the Palouse?” he asked, at a stop in St. John, on a warming afternoon last Thursday with 35 miles to go to Cheney.
“The landscape is unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” he said. “For a New Yorker, it’s dizzying how much space is out here. It seems you could fit all of Europe in the region I’ve ridden this morning.”
Weber began the trip in Astoria, Ore., and rode through the Columbia Gorge before turning north through eastern Washington. Thursday’s ride started at Dusty after he had spent the night at the Gustafson ranch bunkhouse.
“I wouldn’t mind seeing some trees,” he commented.
Weber, a longtime New York Times reporter and former Esquire magazine fiction editor, grew up in Tea Neck, N.J., and took up cycling in the ‘80s after hurting his knee playing basketball. He rode some long routes, such as Montreal to New York and New York to Boston until he embarked in his first cross country ride in 1993.
It was the year he turned 40, riding from San Francisco to New York and reporting on it for the New York Times along the way.
Two years ago, he began to think about doing it again.
On July 18 he locked the door of his apartment near N.Y.U. and headed out.
He said he didn’t do any training in particular for this trip, other than the regular exercise and riding he does.
“The beginning part of the trip is the most difficult. Because I’m bicycling myself into shape,” he said. “I’m not looking forward to this afternoon.”
When he arrived at Cheney, he would have made 60 miles that day.
His cross country route is not planned. However, he’d like to stay north and where the temperatures should be cooler.
Out there on the long stretches of quiet asphalt, he can get to thinking, but there is a limit to it.
“Sometimes, it’s – what am I doing out here,” he said. The questions remain until a second wind.
“It’s a pretty consuming exercise, you’re basically fighting exhaustion. It takes a lot of brain power.”
The first time Weber rode across America for the New York Times, he wrote out his stories longhand and filed them by calling New York and reading them to a transcription department at the paper.
This time, it’s different. He’s on Twitter, he’s blogging, and the stories are typed and sent from the same device.
“Maybe I haven’t come to a conclusion on which is better,” he said. “The connectivity makes you feel safer, and less by myself. At least I’m on planet Earth. But the whole solo venture, the solitude of before, there’s more romance to it. It seems like a greater hardship, that I’m proud to have carried.”
Nonetheless, in 1993, the predominant media of the era played a role too.
He was riding through the Badlands of South Dakota where he first did a live interview with Katie Couric for the Today show, then another in Michigan. An hour later, he walked into a diner in the next town and everyone applauded.
It was quieter than that in St. John Aug. 4, but Weber liked what he was seeing, taking note of the absence of chain stores that have further burdened the American landscape since 1993.
“I kind of like that about these towns,” he said. “I just wish they were a little closer together.”
Each dot on the map, a few miles closer to his destination of the big town, New York City.
“New York is like millions of small towns,” Weber said, noting that, in his neighborhood, he doesn’t have to travel farther than the size of downtown St. John for anything a person would need.
“Although I’d be disingenuous to say this reminds me of New York.”
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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