The Long Landscape

A filmmaker cycles through the American West and reflects upon his connection to other passionate cyclists from 20th-century surrealism, adventuresome high-wheelers, science fiction, and philosophy in this charming and artful travel book. For readers of Rebecca Lowe (The Slow Road to Tehran), Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), and Sara Dykman (Bicycling with Butterflies).To cross the United States by bicycle with his beloved, a Dutch filmmaker sets out with her from Disney's Epcot Center toward Las Vegas — a 4500 mile journey — on the cusp of summer. His goal is to reimagine the dimensions and breadth of the American landscape without the mediation of a car's windshield. In search of the mythological American West seamlessly represented in movies and literature, they instead discover a landscape rarely felt in its actual punishing weather and expanse. On their way through the South, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, the couple encounter a blistering and varied cast of characters. A philosophy emerges as they bicycle their way across America that unites the challenge, wonderment, discovery, and naivete that brought them along these roads. Woven into their journey is the history of long-distance cycling in America, the 19th-century high-wheeler adventures, H.G. Wells's Wheels of Chance, the sublime paintings of Mark Rothko, and Alfred Jarry's parody Supermale about the erotics of the machine age. On the day the author turns forty, the adventure culminates in Las Vegas, the ridiculous exaggeration of Manifest Destiny. But instead of becoming discouraged, he writes in a new introduction that this trip was the seed of a passion that has taken him and his still-beloved all over the world for decades since.