A Ride Across America by Simon Parker

Review by Liz Dexter

Fascinatingly, many of the small towns I found along the way seemed to be stuck in a time warp. I cycled past rusted 1940s Studebakers and big red fire hydrants that bore the scars of long, hot summers. I found derelict train stations, boarded-up art deco theatres, struggling local newspapers and stainless steel diners that served Coke floats, home fries and big slabs of blueberry pie. Even more intriguing, though, was that this otherworld was filled with millions of American citizens that I’d barely seen portrayed on the silver screen, let along on the BBC, Fox News or CNN. Forty per cent (128 million) of the American population lives in its coastal counties, crammed into cities such as Los Angeles, New York and Miami. The rest, however, reside in the immense, and often ignored, expanse between.

We open, memorably, in a crack house, visiting a rather alarming gentleman, back in 2016. Parker quickly explains that this ride, across the US from the West Coast to New York, inspired him to take a journey diagonally, from the westernmost to the southernmost tip of the contiguous United States (i.e. the bits that aren’t Alaska or Hawai’i) in 2023, because he met ordinary people, the ones you don’t see in violent opposition on the TV, who might talk to him about the state of the nation right now. So he goes across America, through Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, talking by chance and sometimes by arrangement to hundreds of people who share details of their life and opinions in remarkable detail, even when they say they don’t like to talk politics with close friends or family because of the inevitable fall-out. 

Parker is an award-winning British travel writer and he’s reported from over 100 countries, done several long bike rides and driven a rickshaw the length of India. So he’s a seasoned traveller and able to get the most out of his bike, himself, his journey and his interlocutors. 

Of course, and hugely pertinently given the news reports in mid-July 2024 when I was writing this review, the talk concerns guns – the ownership of them, the reasons for having them, the opinion that Parker needs one himself, during the trip his brief foray into feeling he needed to get one, and a strange turn of his own opinion at the end – as well as country, God and, notably, community. It’s in the small towns, often well-served with bookshops and tied in around the football team of the local high school, that he finds a redemption for America, perhaps, a deep sense of community and helping one another, initiatives to rescue those getting left behind. 

He meets a refreshing number of helpful people, who might ask if he likes burgers then screech to a halt a few miles later to deliver a burger meal, or even when clearly a little odd, offer him water and advice (as well as guns and knives). He does encounter an awful lot of roadkill and it’s clear that there are passages in the trip where that’s the most exciting thing about his day, but there is a lot of it so this isn’t one to read over your dinner, I’d suggest. He also has a few near-misses but escapes unscathed, unnerved somewhat by the fact that on this journey, he’s racing to beat the birth of his first child (his wife comes out to travel with him, driving in support, for a couple of weeks during the journey). 

Parker makes sure that he pays attention to issues of race and racism, discussing particularly the Native American experience, shading into the Black experience as he gets into the Southern states, where the population statistics change somewhat. In Tulsa and Selma he makes sure to visit and interrogate his feelings about events that happened in those places, and to talk to Black newspaper owners and the like. As a seasoned traveller he is used to weird food and accent misunderstandings, but points out the horrendousness of the many “food deserts” where people literally can’t buy fresh food within tens of miles of their home, and the expense of the highly-processed, beige foods they have to rely on. So there’s a bedrock of a concentration on social justice which informs his experiences and conversations, very welcome in another travel book by a White male. It is often very funny, too, however, and that needs to be mentioned. 

Near the end of the book, Parker reminds any of his readers who might be contemplating such an epic trip themselves that you don’t need the fancy, personalised bike and expensive kit that he travelled with on this journey: “Adventure is about your state of mind and your desire to live life to its fullest. Not the value of your cagoule.” And he ends it with an impassioned plea to look up from our smartphones, talk to people and be vulnerable. 

A travel book, a work of on-the-road sociology, a coming to terms with a set of travels and travelling through life’s path and the effect that has on them. 

Liz Dexter cannot ride a bicycle for love nor money. However, she loves reading about epic trips by
bike or foot (or horse, etc.,). Liz blogs about reading, running and working from home at
http://www.librofulltime.wordpress.com.

Simon Parker, A Ride Across America: A 4,000-Mile Adventure Through the Small Towns & Big Issues of the USA (September Publishing, 2024). ‎ 978-1914613593, 308pp., col. ill. hardback.

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