Читать книгу The Road to San Donato - Robert Cocuzzo - Страница 10

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

—Attributed to Mark Twain

I could practically smell the coffee on his breath through the phone. Just past eight in the morning, my father was already heavily caffeinated. As with every day for the past twenty-seven years, he had risen at 3:30 in the morning, downed a pot of cheap coffee, thrown a handful of punches at the heavy bag hanging in the basement, brewed another pot of coffee for my mother, climbed onto his bicycle, pedaled thirty miles in the frigid cold for fun (and another five miles to work), showered, grabbed another coffee at the convenience store, and then dialed me up as he waited for his first client to arrive at his hair salon. Dad didn’t wait a second to launch into his grand plan.

“I got the idea for your next book,” he said breathlessly. “Let’s bike across the country.”

My father was known for these flights of fancy. When he got something into his mind, he didn’t so much put his foot on the gas as break the knob right off the throttle. Casual jogging back in the late 1970s led to him running twenty-two Boston Marathons. “Dieting” for my father consisted of consuming nothing but water and black coffee for seven straight days. One tiny tattoo during a midlife crisis cracked open the floodgates to nearly full sleeves of ink, including an ill-advised tattoo of a mermaid with a serpent wrapped around her shoulders that very nearly shattered my parents’ marriage. My father not only executed on an idea—he executed to the absolute extreme.

However, this proposition to bicycle across the United States was different. Dad fantasized about embarking on a long-distance bike ride like working stiffs talk about selling off all their worldly possessions, buying a boat, and sailing into the sunset. He’d been talking about it for years but never actually put the plan into motion. Just savoring the thought of setting out on a long, long bike ride gave him a certain satisfaction that was almost as good as actually going on the ride itself.

For twenty years my father had been addicted to running, logging nearly a hundred miles a week to and from work. His running kick began back in high school when he played football and earned the nickname “the Galloping Guinea” for sprinting around the field. By the time he was in his early fifties, the pounding on the pavement had blown discs in his back that left him crippled with pain. That’s when he rediscovered bicycling and went from an occasional pleasure cruiser to a full-blown zealot. His life now revolved around bicycling. When he started shaving his legs, my family knew this wasn’t another passing fascination. “It helps the sweat run off my legs easier,” he explained after revealing cleanly shaven calves. “And for, you know, being more aerodynamic.” Except we knew the truth: he’d gleefully given himself over to the cult of hard-core cycling. The shaved legs were a sign of this covenant.

In the years since, cycling had become my father’s greatest joy and indulgence. He didn’t drink, smoke, or even eat meat anymore. At the ripe age of sixty-four, his highs came from cranking through city traffic every morning and evening like a bat out of hell. On the weekends he clipped into his prized possession, a seven-thousand-dollar road bike—by far the most expensive thing he owned—and pedaled for sixty, seventy, sometimes a hundred miles or more. He was a raging endorphin junkie, and the hours on the saddle provided the mental balance that kept him sane. Better still, it kept our whole family sane.

Growing up, I knew that if my father didn’t get his cycling fix, he could be a miserable, short-tempered bastard. So my mother never gave him any grief about leaving her with me and my brother when he pedaled off on a long ride. Upon returning he obsessively washed every square inch of the bike’s frame, every link of the chain, all the cables, brake pads, and every single spoke. He let it drip dry before wielding a hair dryer to get into all the nooks and crannies. His love of his bicycles bordered on a clinical condition. They hung neatly in our basement like books on a shelf, each telling a story from his life. He owned at least six bikes at any given time, and I often caught him in the basement just staring at them adoringly.

Despite my father’s penchant for executing zany ideas and his love for the road, a truly long-distance cycling tour had eluded him. Perhaps it was because he was also one of the most stubborn creatures of habit to ever walk the green earth. He thrived off routine. Apart from the all too frequent bike accident, his days ticked along predictably for years on end. He wasn’t much for switching tracks. The mere suggestion that he would kick off from work, pack up a backpack, and hit the road into the wild unknown prompted a long, exaggerated eye roll.

Except this time was different. This time, he’d asked me to go with him. I lived for pulling the trigger on an adventure. I’d spent years backpacking around South America, pinballing around Europe, and driving across the country. The past five winters I’d schlepped to remote mountain towns around the world for a book project about an extreme skier. Maybe it was out of a lurking fear that I inherited the same wont for routine and creature comforts as my father that I forced myself to shake up the Etch A Sketch of my surroundings whenever the lines started getting particularly thick.

When Dad called with his idea for this bike ride, I had just turned down my dream job at Outside magazine to stay back in my native Boston with my longtime girlfriend, Jenny. I was working up the nerve to ask for her hand in marriage. Moving to the magazine’s headquarters in Santa Fe would not have boded well for our relationship, so after much deliberation I begrudgingly passed up the position. Though it was the best personal decision, turning down the job cut against the grain of my modus operandi. The decision had a ripple effect. I began flaking out on one adventure after the next. My failures to commit rattled my sense of identity. I felt creatively constipated and tumbled into a deep depression. I desperately needed a kick in the ass.

When my father called, I knew that the rough-and-tumble times of pedaling hundreds of miles across the country would do just that. But more important, this bike ride offered an exceedingly rare opportunity to spend time with my father, just the two of us. Growing up, I was Dad’s adventure partner. He put me on skis when I was three. By the time I was ten, we were scorching down icy double black diamonds together in New Hampshire. He introduced me to rock climbing when I was eleven. By fourteen, I hung upside down from a sixty-foot ceiling with him on the other end of the rope. And, of course, there was cycling.

My father had me on a bike before I could walk. He built a baby seat out of scrap wood and mounted it to the back of his road bike, taking me out on long weekend rides when my mother went to work as a nurse. Little did she know that he wasn’t taking me on leisurely cruises around the neighborhood. He buzzed down steep hills, weaved through traffic, and raced people on the bike path—all the while I kicked him like I was a jockey, screaming, “Faster faster!” He was once zooming downhill when a lady spotted me on the back of his bike. “Are you crazy?” she yelled out her car window. “I’m calling the cops!” Dad probably flipped her off and peeled away before the light turned green.

As I grew into adulthood, adventures with my father had become fewer and farther between. We rarely got a chance to rock climb together, and my skiing had taken me to bigger mountains beyond his ability. Yet as cyclists, we were still fairly matched in ability and strength, so I thought this trip offered an ideal context for us to reconnect. The trip would undoubtedly create memories that would appreciate exponentially in time. So much had been left unsaid between us since I moved out of my parents’ house after high school and catapulted into adulthood. This trip would give us hundreds of miles to say it all.

“Let’s do it,” I told him. There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. “Take a month off,” I said, “and do it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, talk to Mom. I’ll start plotting a course.”

MY JOB AS THE editor of a seasonal magazine gave me the winter and early months of spring free from office duties. Dad and I circled March for the target month for our cross-country adventure. I researched the Southern Tier, a 3,100-mile route beginning in San Diego and ending in Saint Augustine, Florida, that would allow us to embark in early spring. None of the stops along the route were particularly intriguing to us: Tempe, Arizona; Del Rio, Texas; DeFuniak Springs, Florida. The allure was in covering the distance between each destination. We didn’t really care where we were riding as much as how much we were riding—and riding all those miles together.

Dad penciled himself off for the month, the longest stretch he’d ever taken off work in his life. He was the owner of a hair salon, and the hiatus came at the perfect time for him professionally. After twenty-seven years owning and operating the salon, he was considering closing the business. The rent was too high and his business partner wanted to move on. But Dad felt responsible for his longtime employees and grappled with the question of whether to open a new shop or retire and let them fend for themselves. This trip would give him an opportunity to get out of the grind, away from his employees, where he could meditate on the next stage of his life.

And so we started training, planning, and mentally preparing for the miles ahead. As our departure date approached, each of us waited for the other to blink and call the whole thing off. But neither of us did. Sometimes we all need a catalyst—someone to insist that our audacious dreams aren’t so audacious. A person not to push you but to grab your hand and jump with you. Dad and I were each other’s catalysts. We held each other to it and prepared to leap.