Pancreatic Cancer UK

We have used a bicycle ride across the United States to promote awareness of pancreatic cancer, and to advertise the http://www.pancreaticcancer.org.uk website.

The route (below) was almost a straight line, diagonally across the US from southwest to northeast. It entails a relatively easy crossing of the southern Rocky Mountains in the west, but the full span of the northern Appalachian Mountains in the east.

The route was chosen for speed, and to transit some urban centres, specifically at the start and finish. and in the Midwest. Its disadvantages are the extremely busy and often poorly-maintained roads of the central Midwest and the so-called "rust belt", and the difficulty of finding campsites in built-up areas. Scheduled crossing time was 24 days.

I assembled the bicycle in Los Angeles airport on Sunday May 31^st, and started riding at about 3pm, due east. My immediate task was to get out of the Los Angeles Basin by nightfall, a distance of almost 100 miles. I took Imperial Highway much of the way - not, as you might expect from the name a major thoroughfare, but actually an ordinary street, well paved and relatively quiet. Unfortunately, night fell before I was "out": I camped behind some buildings in an industrial park on the outskirts of Chino, reasoning (correctly) that if I moved at first light the following day no-one would be the wiser.

Next day, the Memorial Day Holiday, I posted stickers advertising my mission in several of the small towns east of Chino. I completed my exit by riding up through the pretty San Timoteo Canyon at the southern end of the San Bernardino Mountains, followed by a transit of the San Gorgiono Pass (site of hundreds of enormous wind turbines) down to North Palm Springs on the edge of the Mojave desert.

Crossing the Mojave is a trial, especially so early in a ride. It's damn hot there, pure and simple. The sun broils you. To stay alive and functional, you must drink water almost continually, at least 30 pints a day. Imagine my dismay, then, on coming to one of the very few settlements in that part of the world, a railway siding called Amboy: Here, the huge sign outside Roy's Restaurant declared with stark and final simplicity "town closed, everything for sale". No water. Getting over the 130 miles of scorched earth between Twentynine Palms and Needles, last place in California before crossing the Colorado River into Arizona, took all I had, and then some. I checked into a motel that night, and lay in the bath for an hour, too tired to eat.

Next morning, I continued on the I.40 freeway (the only road east), which Arizona permits except through towns and cities. It is a beautiful road, fast and safe, and I rode it up to Kingman like a gazelle, spread the word with some stickers at the post office and a super-market, then proceeded (for the second time in my two-wheeled career) to one of the "must-do" travel adventures in that part of the world - the famed Old US.66. This longest-remaining (about 100 miles) loop of the USA's first long-distance highway (Chicago to Los Angeles), now largely disappeared, is a delightful ride through the high desert south of the Grand Canyon. The State of Arizona has paved it impeccably, and its old towns are still there, alive and well, with all the water and ice cream one could desire. I then continued on I.40 to the small town of Williams, AZ, passing enroute through spectacular pine-forested hills with Bill Williams Mountain majestic in the background, a sight in turn eclipsed by the still greater grandeur of Humphrey's Peak, the extinct volcano towering over Flagstaff.

At Williams, I turned north through the forest of the Coconino Plateau, up to the Grand Canyon. The road has been transformed over the years into a beautifully paved highway, one of the nicest bicycling roads in the USA. The police mercilessly enforce the speed limit here, which further adds to the cyclist's safety.

The Grand Canyon is of course an awesome sight. It was also a great photo-op for the pancreatic cancer campaign (photograph).

The placard reads "John Ballard Memorial Coast-to-Coast Bicycle Ride to Support Pancreatic Cancer Research", followed by the URL of Susan Ballard's web site.

Descending from the rim of the Canyon brings you to the western edge of the Painted Desert, and the long, hot ride across northern Arizona into New Mexico. For nearly all of this distance, you are on the vast Navajo Indian Reservation. A few miles to the north of my route along US.160 lies Monument Valley of cowboys-and-indians movie fame. I've been there many times, so did not make the short detour: it's anyhow rather barren ground for raising pancreatic cancer awareness.

The New Mexico towns of Shiprock and Farmington are a bit hectic, but pass quickly enough. A few more stickers, and they'd served their purpose.

Quite soon, you're into the Rockies, which consist here of two mountain chains running north-south, parallel to each other and separated by the broad, fertile valley of the Rio Grande, the San Luis Valley. The first range is the San Juans, the second the Sangre de Cristos. Both are utterly beautiful, and were still snow-covered as I traversed the high passes. All too soon came the long, plunging 50mph descent onto the Plains, at Walsenburg, Colorado, where things took a decided turn for the worse.

The conventional wisdom is that the winds blow from west to east across the USA. But for the ten days it took me to ride from Colorado across Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Indiana, I was head-first into a blustering flow of hot, humid air spinning anti-clockwise out of the Gulf of Mexico and racing west. That meant a tiresome headwind, and weather the likes of which you never see in England for its sheer violence and immense scale. This is tornado country.

Imagine being camped at the edge of a cornfield. As night falls, low clouds gather overhead, and as far as you can see in every direction - brown, grey, purple, and white, mingling together, some going up, others going down, rubbing and chafing, and grumbling like a cauldron of water in a rolling boil.

Lightning begins to flash. Not ordinary "Wow, did you see that?" lightning, but a continual, blinding, fearful rage of it, a discharge a second, two hundred feet above your head, all night long. Most strikes go cloud to cloud in weird wandering arcs and streamers (what happened to the shortest distance between two points, and how can it take so many paths at once?), but a few hit the ground, very, very close. Their thunder does not go "boom": The ground strikes are explosions, shockingly loud. The cloud strikes sound like huge pieces of sheet-metal being torn across, or gigantic drawers full of cutlery crashing down a long flight of wooden stairs. You lie there, numb, as if under shellfire. Despite your determination not to be afraid, your nervous system decides otherwise. Panic approaches and recedes repeatedly in sickening waves, but there is nowhere to run to, no choice but to lie there and take it. Wind shears slam the ground, and with each thunderclap the tent canopy jolts violently. Rain begins to fall, at first slowly, in drops the size of peas, then faster and faster until it drives through every stitch of every seam in the tent. Five inches or more overnight, and you're in a sorry state indeed by morning. Yet it could be much worse. Sitting in a Kansas roadside café the morning after one such storm, I saw on the TV that Denver Airport had been hit by hail the size of golf balls, with an accumulated depth of three feet of the stuff! Lying in a flimsy little bivouac in an open field, I think anyone would go insane from that kind of beating.

Repeated heavy rain is a nightmare. Your sleeping bag cannot be dried out, so you must endure wet, cold nights, one after another. Indeed, it's just about impossible to keep any of your equipment dry. My entire remaining stock of stickers advertising the website was ruined by the first of the big storms. The bicycle is soon covered with gritty dirt from the road, and every drop of lubricant washed out of it. Thank God for the discarded quarts of motor oil that litter America's highways! The residual spoonful of oil they contain has saved the day many, many times. I am ever thankful for small mercies.

It is a strong headwind, though, that is the cyclist's worst enemy. It forces you to grind along in low gear for perhaps fourteen hours to make barely a hundred miles. If it's coming at you from left of center, you get a terrific slamming from trucks, as they first block the wind, then, a split second later, quadruple its force with their own vortex. Wind all day long deafens you, stupefies you, makes you angry as hell, and finally exhausts you. It is an invisible, vindictive, relentless demon.

So, the crossing of the Great Plains was neither pleasant, nor fast, nor productive. The roads I followed for many hundreds of miles (notably US.24, US.30 and US.6) are for the most part in horrifyingly condition, very difficult and dangerous to ride. I suppose that as long as cars and trucks can get over them, the perspective of a bicycle rider doesn't count for much.

Thunderstorms were still rolling past when I entered Ohio. As night fell, I reached a place called Beaverdam, expecting to find a motel there, somewhere to dry out and get a decent night's sleep. But it turned out to be what is surely one of the world's biggest truck stops, an out-world place that reminded me of Tatooine, the spaceport ruled over by Jabba the Hutt. Yet it had not a single motel! So, there was little choice but to continue, to find a camping spot and spend yet another night in a wet sleeping bag. After some miles, I passed a small farmhouse. Behind it was a barn. I had gone past them perhaps another quarter of a mile when the voice of reason spoke: "Go back, and ask if you can sleep there!" I am absurdly stubborn, and never go back, any time, anywhere. But I did so. The name on the mailbox said "The Joyces". "Mr. and Mrs. Joyce!", I shouted. A soft London voice replied through the screen-door "Yes, can I help you?" I'd struck gold. There, right in the middle of Deepest Farmland USA, was a fellow countryman! And a shower, a meal, and a dry place to sleep, in a hay loft with two horses for company. Small mercies again.

Going east, you exit Ohio into Pennsylvania, in my opinion one of the loveliest of the States, although hilly as heck. But the wind had disappeared. Sixteen pounds lighter than when I started, I raced through the final 15% of the journey, making up the day I'd lost to the wind in the Plains, then advancing ahead of schedule by another. I crossed into New York State at the Delaware Water Gap (Port Jervis), and camped for the last time. Next morning, I crossed the Bear Mountain Bridge over the Hudson, entered Connecticut shortly thereafter, and reached the Atlantic coast at Westport. With a strong tailwind, and in delightful sunshine, I then rode up the coast, and arrived in New Haven about three in the afternoon, June 23rd. Total mileage 3242.7. Total time 23 days, 0 hours.

So it ended. A few stickers deployed, one or two people induced to show some transient interest in pancreatic cancer, a few photographs taken. What else had I accomplished? I'd found some words by which to honour John. Here they are:

No more may I recount with you
The pleasure of a mountain climbed,
Accomplishment of centuries
Upon our bicycles, the joy of walks
Through Sunday-silent Chiltern lanes
To lunch at providential pubs,
The point and counter-point
Of times and places such as those,
Appreciated, shared, and loved.

We were two brothers, born and bound;
I knew your heart, as you knew mine.
We shared disdain for riches gleaned,
By affluence were tempted not,
Nor tiresome trivialities
That milk the human breast for gain,
But sought the soil whence others shied,
The misty moor, the forest fast,
The desert deep, the driving rain.

Now you are torn away, but still
There echoes in my memory
Your voice of calm, which voice proclaimed
Your sensitive and brilliant mind.
My bed is where I choose to sleep,
But you, dear John, have no such choice,
Yet ground that now I walk upon
Is ground you also might have trod,
Which brings me comfort in my loss.

Gwyn Ballard

Written June 3, 2004
At Moran Point, on the South Rim of The Grand Canyon.

They alone were worth the trip.

Gwyn ,left, and John, right, June 2003 at
White Horse Hill, Uffington, Oxfordshire