York Corner
When we first met David Dean this past Saturday, his wife mentioned that he'd just completed a cross-country bicycle trip - his fourth.
"Eh???" we said.
And promptly made an appointment to interview him the next day.
We met at 10 a.m. at the York Beach gazebo, and there - bathed, finally, in pleasant weather and a cooling breeze after a week of stifling heat and humidity - we learned that David is now age 64, and that not only has he biked across the country four times, but that he's participated (afoot) in 68 marathons, in this country and in Africa and Ireland (including some "ultra" marathons 50 miles long), and that, as a history professor specializing in 19th-century America, he's spent six of the last 19 years teaching abroad, twice in Ireland and three times in Africa, most recently in 2004 and 2005 in South Africa.
Modest, genial and unassuming, and struggling a little to be forthcoming without boasting, he told us that, after finishing his latest bike trip on Wednesday, July 26, he'd given himself a day off on Thursday, then resumed a running regimen on Friday, to prepare for the New York Marathon in November. He runs 40 or 50 miles a week, he said, and on the morning we talked, he'd run five.
Whew, we said, after absorbing all this - and decided to go back to the beginning, to get some perspective on it all.
David was born and brought up in Indiana, he said, and earned a B.A. at Wabash College there before going on to earn Master's and Doctorate degrees at the University of Texas at Austin. Since 1972 he's taught at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and some of the appointments abroad have been through U.S. Fulbright lectureships, and some through arrangements of his own making.
We didn't take time to explore all those stays abroad, but we did learn in passing that Lesotho, where David lectured from 1985 to 1987, is one of only two countries in the world that is entirely surrounded by another country (South Africa in this case), and that it's properly pronounced "lessootoo."
His biking interest, David said, arose out of his interest in history.
"I'd read and taught so much about folks making their way across the continent that I wanted to experience as much as possible what they experienced," he explained, noting that, in the 30-year period between 1839, when the first organized trip west set out, and 1869, when the continental railroad was completed, between 40,000 and 50,000 people died en route, and, though they traveled with wagons, most actually walked alongside for most of the trip.
Though the countryside has obviously changed radically since, "the wind still blows," David noted, and there are still deserts and rainstorms and lightning and long distances between towns.
"I wanted," David said, "to know what it was like to be so tired that you can barely think at the end of a day."
He got the first taste of those challenges biking from Delaware to Los Angeles in 1984.
In 1990, he followed the old Oregon Trail, biking ocean-to-ocean in both directions, with his son-in-law for company on the way west. That year, on those two trips, he rode 7,000 miles in 70 days.
In 1992, he set out to give himself a 60th birthday gift by biking from Seattle east, and he managed 2,500 miles, doing 100 miles a day even across the Rockies and Cascades, before he had to stop in Illinois after straining his knee.
In the following year, his wife, Polly, dropped him off where he'd stopped in Illinois, but he managed only another 300 miles before having to quit with what proved to be walking pneumonia.
Last year, he rode from Erie, Pa., to Fort Ticonderoga and into Vermont before "wrecking" - catching his tire in a rut and bruising himself so badly that he had to ask a motel operator to help him off with his shirt.
"This year," he told us, "I finally finished the darned thing."
He went back and rode (in the rain) from Illinois to Erie, then had Polly drop him off at Middlebury, Vt., to complete the last leg of the trip in Maine at Boothbay.
For all the upsets of this last, four-year-long assay, David says that he's actually had some extraordinary luck. In Washington state, once, he came through a mountain pass just hours before an avalanche closed it; three weeks ago he pedaled through Ashtabula, Ohio, just two hours before torrential rains shut the whole town down.
And in Hannibal, Mo., in 1984, he met a fellow cyclist just arrived there by bike from Brooklyn, N.Y. They completed the trip to L.A. together, and they've since remained the very best of friends.
When we asked what David used for equipment, he said that his latest bike was a Cannondale with tires of medium width and a frame that permits him to ride somewhat upright to accommodate his back. (He injured it pulling a grandchild in a sled, and when a doctor, after surgery on it, told him to stop exercising, he said he simply "got another doctor.")
He carries about 35 pounds of clothing and incidentals, he added, including a tent, sleeping bag and sleeping pad, but advises sleeping in "cheap motels" and saving the tent for situations of last resort.
Now, he told us, he's done with crossing the country by bicycle, though he's not done with cycling. He'll still go on less challenging trips - 300 or 400 miles, say - and, of course, he'll continue to run.
This coming week, on Aug. 8, he and Polly celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. They were married in York Beach, and they've returned regularly through the years for family visits. (Polly is a sister to Ron Nowell.)
We wish them the very best, with, especially, years and years of free-wheeling down all the roads ahead …
