Rider passes 7,500-mile mark on bike trek

SANDPOINT - When you've pedaled over mountain passes in the Cascades and the Rockies, when you've crossed the breadth of the Great Plains and rolled to a stop at the edge of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans in turn, you become part of an exclusive group of people who move beyond dreaming about adventure and actually undertake it.

Mel Dick, who set out from Sandpoint on June 1 for a cross-country solo trip, this week begins the final leg of his coast-to-coast bicycle ride. By early November, he will have ridden across America - from its northernmost tip to the far side of the country at the Florida Keys - to raise money for a Panhandle Alliance for Education (PAFE) early childhood literacy program called "Ready! For Kindergarten." (See sidebar)

Now making his way down the eastern seaboard, Dick has amassed more than 7,500 miles of his 10,000-mile goal. Throughout the trip, he steered primarily along the blue highways - the back roads that travel through small towns well outside the shadow of the interstate.

"On a bicycle, you see America in slow motion," Dick said last week during a phone interview from Connecticut. "You get to see everything - what people do for a living, where they live, what their towns are like. Those are things you would never even notice if you were in a car."

Over the past three and a half months, the rider made most of his stops in communities of 1,000 people or less. Before he started the trip, he hoped it would be a way to rediscover America. The people he met during his time as a rolling anthropologist have been uniformly kind and generous with their time, he said, leaving him with the feeling that the country remains as strong as ever.

Detached from the red-faced commentators who scream at one another about nothing in particular on television, he's had a chance to notice the friendly wave from a front porch at dusk and the laughter of children who wait for the school bus as the morning sun rolls across the cornfields like spilled gold.

Spared the steady drip of daily bad news, he has seen the country at its best - hard working, helpful and filled with hope.

"I think most people see the glass as half full," said Dick. "They're family oriented and proud of their communities. My sense is that people are just plain fundamentally good."

Each morning, the rider takes the pulse of the small towns he visits by having an early breakfast at the local café, where he listens to conversations about commodities prices, the state of the economy and the price of gasoline. At the end of the day, having ridden about 100 miles, he stops at a local watering hole and hears, for the most part, the same topics of conversation.

The stranger who rolls down Main Street with his riding gear and bike trailer gets swept up in the chatter and always rides away claiming more friends than he arrived with.

"I haven't had a single negative experience with people on this trip - not one," Dick said. "But I will say that when you walk into the only place to eat in a town of 100 people and you've got your Lycra bike shorts on, you do feel like an outsider."

Listing a few of the favorite stops he's made so far, Dick mentioned standing at the foot of the immense Crazy Horse Memorial - a mountainside sculpture so large that all of the Mount Rushmore presidents would fit inside the Sioux leader's carved head - seeing the New England countryside and exploring the coastal villages of Maine.

Dick began to take detours that involved local color and regional history when he realized he was far ahead of his original schedule for reaching Key West. He has now been through 21 states and Canada, riding down the Oregon Trail, across the Badlands, over the Black Hills, along the Erie Canal and through Amish country along the way.

As he points his bicycle south along the East Coast - even though he still has another 2,500 miles to go before he reaches his fund-raising goal for PAFE - he feels like he's nearing the finish line.

"Oh, yeah - definitely," he said. "I'm coming around the turn and heading for home here. With some good weather, I could be done by Nov. 1."