Eleanor Davis’ graphic novel You and a Bike and a Road came out in 2017, but was reprinted this summer by Fantagraphics. I heard about it from a very cool artist I met on my failed bike trip last spring; I’m not sure if she recommended it to me just because it’s about bikes, or because she knew how much of its story would resonate with me in that moment. Either way, I’ve read it twice since I picked it up at the bookstore this week.
The autobiographical book tells the story of Davis’ attempt to bike from her parents’ home in Tucson, Arizona, to her home in Athens, Georgia. She illustrates each day of the trip in a diary style, with pencil drawings that range from simple lines to busy sketches of countryside and towns. Along the way, she meets cool people, sees beautiful sights, and grapples with the self-doubt and intense introspection that comes with biking long distances by yourself.
I love the vulnerability in the book; while my own bike trips have been blessedly free of bros and bravado, narratives about distance cycling often skip over the moment-to-moment in favor of grand narratives of achievement. The book inspired me to look back at photos of my own bike trips last night, and so many of my pictures brought back memories that aren’t entirely good: blurry photos when my hands were shaking with exhaustion, the last picture before a flat tire stranded me on a 90-degree day in the middle of nowhere, stretches of farmland highway that managed to be both boring and stressful. Something I love about bike travelling is that, because you’re going so far, a day can contain so many different sights and emotions; in one moment, you’re picking through city traffic cursing the world, and in the next you’re all alone atop a beautiful vista awed by how much it rules to be alive. Davis’ book captures all of that variety, without making the trip seem better or worse than it is.
Because much of her trip takes place along the border, immigration features heavily, with Davis encountering Border Patrol and people worrying about her safety alone in the desert. This brings up some of the ways privilege plays into bike touring; as the US more and more aggressively criminalizes homelessness, what does it mean that some of us can, in a way, become temporarily homeless for fun? On trips, I’m often aware of how my camping or loitering would be met with very different reactions if I weren’t so obviously a guy on a bike, or if I weren’t in areas bike travellers frequent. I’m aware of how willing strangers are to help me, and how willing I am to trust them, in ways that everyone doesn’t experience, and I appreciated this playing into Davis’ narrative.
You and a Bike and a Road doesn’t come to any grand conclusions about any of this, or about bike travelling in general; in its messy, big-but-also-small story, it captures the variety and realities of bike touring in a way that made me even more desperate to get back on the road before the winter comes on, to remind myself that the world is so much bigger than I often let it be. I’ve only done a little exploring since moving back to New York, feeling intimidated by how much logistically harder it feels than it did in DC, where the woods were right outside my front door. But there’s still time if I just tell myself I can do it and get back out there.
(Also, it’s frankly amazing that Davis can consistently draw a bike, which I am convinced is impossible. Seriously: before you scroll down, try to draw a bike from memory. So hard!)
