IF THESE WHEELS COULD TALK

XH

FROM THE ROAD

IF THESE WHEELS COULD TALK

Just under a year after a historic Bike4Alz ride, a rider looks back on the one constant, tangible accompaniment to each cross-country trek.

By Ken Barlow March 22, 2020

The stench of sweat and burning rubber is overwhelming. Nobody in their right mind would walk into this pigsty of jumbled jerseys, popped tubes, and 12 bikes pressed against the wall.

Fourteen men called the inside of the trailer “home” during the day, and at night they clang to church pews or bundled up under tents. The trailer offered each member a locker covered with short scribbled writings of positive passages from previous riders. Fourteen bags guard the side door, each holding a few days’ or so worth of clothes and a couple personal items that remind them of home some 3,000 miles away. Perhaps most importantly, a small cupboard stored with

The trailer has wheeled about 50,000 miles in its lifetime. It has seen blizzards in California, hailstorms deep in the deserts of Nevada, the peaks of Colorado, flooded trails in Missouri, and both the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean multiple times.

It knows these men better than anybody. The trailer has heard every crush from high school, political view, childhood hero, argument for greatest NBA player ever, and crude answer to “would you rather” questions the world should never know.

The trailer has witnessed the screams of triumph when the men climbed to the top of 12,000 foot mountains, rolled by the men playing tag on bicycles down mossy riverside paths, shriveled at their shrieking in high-pitched voices through tunnels, and relaxed with them as they sunbathed on the jelly and sunscreen stained floor.

Many greet the men when they arrive home and attempt to understand what it took for them to survive ten long weeks of trekking eleven states, but only the trailer truly understands the physical and emotional endurance it took to press on each day.

It has seen the men tested to their limits when they attempted to pedal up mountains. It will never forget the day it embraced the bruised and shaking riders sprinting into the back desperately clinging to each other and even chuckled when they told jokes only to warm themselves with laughter. The trailer shed tears alongside them when hearing favorite memories about loved ones who have passed away from disease. Only the trailer knows their pain.

To any person in passing, it looks to be an old trailer that could use a few hours of scrubbing and multiple cans of Febreze. It’s just another hunk of metal on wheels that smoke about once a month. But to a few, it is a beacon of hope. It is a symbol on the horizon indicating fresh water, some smiley fruit snacks, and an end, for now, to pedaling up many miles in over 100-degree heat. It is a reminder to the men to keep pressing on, that their journey does not stop at the end of a twenty mile stretch of so-called “flat” roads in Kansas or the sands and small gravel of the Kaytee Trail, or even the Atlantic Ocean— but that their fight continues past their country-wide journey.

The fight ends when families no longer suffer from memory loss, when sons and daughters don’t have to remind their parents their grandchildren’s names, when it no longer must watch men stream tears for miles at the thought of family and friends suffering. It ends when the world has been freed of this wretched disease the trailer is attempting to help end.

The trailer dreams of the day it is no longer needed. It hopes to one day retire to a nice parking lot and reflect on the adventures it shared with many cyclists. It hopes it can one day just be used for previous riders to take trips down memory lane. But for now, it sits on cold, black pavement at a fraternity house waiting for the day it will escort another fourteen men to the other side of the country to have the best summer of their lives. •

Ken Barlow is an alumnus of the 2019 Bike4Alz team, previously served as Chi Eta Historian, and currently serves as the Chi Eta Social Chairman. He is a WKU journalism major from Louisville, Kentucky.

XH WORDS TO LIVE BY

“I am responsible. Although I may not be able to prevent the worst from happening, I am responsible for my attitude toward the inevitable misfortunes that darken life. Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have— life itself.”

By American painter and writer Walter Inglis Anderson.