Donald Miller and the Ride:Well Team Bike America

July, 23rd, Washington, D.C.

To a man, we’d tell you this country isn’t as big as we thought. You’d think crossing it on a bike would stretch it out, but it doesn’t. America feels like one neighborhood to me now. Out west the houses are close together and the people wear sunglasses, then there is some desert, then in Texas there are some ranches and some oil fields, and down the road in Louisiana people live on the bays and the rivers. When you turn left there you come into Arkansas and the accents get thicker and the talk gets slower and then in Tennessee it speeds up again, but only slightly. You’d never know how close Tennessee is to the Virginia’s unless you biked it. And in Virginia you can still hear the old English as though the ancestors of the founding fathers kept some of the tongue that once debated slavery.  When you slip down off the Blue Ridge Parkway you ride through the Civil War battle sites from which news must have come painfully slow to Lincoln’s white house. And then you arrive in D.C. and pedal around the monuments that make altars of our history. I don’t think the American people are any more special than any other group, and I suspect launching a kayak off the Atlantic and picking up our journey again in Europe would reveal to me that all the world is small, and the human story is even more remarkable than the American story. If we headed south from Europe to Africa we’d find ourselves in some of the villages for which we’ve been riding, and even though the journey would have taken years, it would seem to us we’d just left Santa Monica the previous week. At least that is how it seems to me now.

Today the team road into Washington D.C. which marked the end of one of our journey’s. From the beginning we’ve said we wanted to ride from Los Angeles to D.C. to raise awareness about the need for new water wells in sub-saharan Africa. And from church to church, gas station to gas station, bike shop to bike club and community group to grocery store we’ve done that. Not only has the team raised awareness, but we think we have already raised more than 200,000 dollars. Because of the kindness of those who have donated through our ride, more than 60 villages will receive a well, affecting the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who, without your support, would have gone another year without access to clean water. I speak for the entire team when I say thank you. It has been a humbling experience to receive your kindness in both the meeting of our needs, those being primarily food and shelter, and for meeting the needs of those we have come to love, though we’ve not even met them. Thanks on behalf of Blood:Water Mission and thanks on behalf of our brothers and sisters in Africa.

Arriving in D.C. this afternoon was a fitting close to this journey. I didn’t set out on this ride to discover America, but I feel I know and understand the country in a way that had previously been hidden to me. The America we see on television and read about in our newspapers is not the America that we found as we pedaled across at fifteen miles-per-hour. We encountered no crime, little drama, no fear or tension. Instead, in the small towns stitched together by back roads we found a generous kindness. Nearly every member of the team has been handed a twenty-dollar bill as soon as we explained what we were doing. We’ve been given free meals, we’ve been prayed for in the isles of grocery stores, we’ve been given water, free bike maintenance and parts, and we’ve heard countless stories about others who’ve done similar trips back “in the day.”

Small churches of every denomination took remarkable care of us, even though we were often too tired to appropriately express our gratitude. Just last week a church took us to one of their members houses to swim in their pool but within ten minutes of arriving all fifteen of us were asleep on his living room floor. And on the chairs around his pool, in his den and on his trampaline. Needless to say we were terrible conversationalist.

Of the hi-lights of the people we met was a woman named Jessica who worked behind the counter at a gas station outside Anson, TX. She gave me twenty bucks out of her pocket when I told her what we were doing, and then later I overheard her tell somebody else that her car had been reposesed that day. And in Tyler, TX, a group of homeless men who lived in a shelter heard we were coming to town and together raised more than $2,000 for those they considered less fortunate. In that same town, a dozen or so churches got together to host an event that drew 3,000 people. Sara Groves came in and performed a concert that night and pulling together the city raised nearly $90,000. I’m happy to report that the heart of America is good. It’s better than you might think. In a nation that so easily considers itself divided, we really aren’t. I think some of the cynicism that existed within me has been stripped away. I’m proud of my country.

But it wasn’t only “out there” that I found kindness. This team has come together as a family and expressed what seems to be a miraculous degree of patience and grace with each other. We are not a group of people who are alike. We would not have chosen each other as friends. We are old and young, loud and quiet, fit and unfit, proud and humble, and yet we’ve carried each others burdens. I recall one day outside Memphis when, because of  a very dangerous road, we had to shuttle for sixteen miles, only to find out that the Civil Rights Museum toward which we were riding was closed on Tuesdays. So we had to shuttle some more, and ended up driving twenty miles in the wrong direction, fifteen of us crowded into a twelve-passenger van, hungry and tired and hot. But nobody broke. Nobody said anything. We looked down for three hours at the carpet, out the windows, we kept our mouths shut. And the next morning we congratulated ourselves on not insulting each other when the tension was the highest. Amazingly, this group of people has ridden their bikes across the country without crisis or major conflict. Instead, we’ve come to depend on each other, to care for each other, and to encourage each other. We’ve learned to look past each others faults because living with an annoying person beats being alone. We weren’t made to be alone. Even as we’ve found goodness in the hearts of those we’ve encountered, we’ve found goodness in ourselves and in each other. In my opinion, this indicates God has been with us the entire journey. I don’t know how a community could have come together like this on its own.

The physical challenges have been demanding as well. We’ve ridden eight centuries, and several other days that were in excess of ninety-five miles. We’ve ridden in temperatures as high as 118, and as low as the mid-40’s. We’ve climbed as high as 8,000 feet, ridden on gravel roads for miles, crossed rivers over rope bridges, rode shoulders six inches wide with eighteen-wheelers buzzing by every few minutes only a few inches from our bodies. We’ve ridden into headwinds, slept on the floors of convenience stores, eaten peanut butter and jelly and turkey sandwiches nearly every day, and done more than our share of days dehydrated as we simply ran out of water. I’ve completed days that I never thought I was capable of completing, and still can’t figure out quite how I did it. I’ve ridden my bike more than 3,000 miles, when the longest ride I’d completed before this was 75 miles. To me the physical side of this journey seems like a miracle too.

Tomorrow morning we will ride from Annapolis, Maryland to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in Delaware, marking the end of another journey, the journey across a continent. And I’m not yet sure how to feel. Or what I will feel when we round the last hill and see the waves crashing on the opposite shore. I’ll post a small update to say that we’ve made it, and then reflect a bit before posting a final entry on this blog. I’ll also be sending in all the pictures worth looking at so you can get a feel for the entire story. I’ve shot enough film for a small movie, too, so that should be coming as well.

But for now, thanks. Thanks for your interest, for your comments, for showing up at our community rides, for donating through this site. And if we were blessed enough to have met you or to have had been taken care of by you at one of our stops, thanks for melting the heart of a cynic. I needed it more than you could have known.

Thank you so much.