“I feel safe under the stars in that big, friendly clubhouse we call ‘America.’”
- Ben Stein, “CBS Sunday Morning”

The great thing about a good aphorism is that everyone immediately “gets it.” Although healthcare providers worldwide may measure and prescribe in milligrams, all generally agree “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

But when Rachel Rubenstein, Haverford College class of ’05, hears “it’s just like riding a bicycle,” what she ‘gets’ will no doubt differ from what the rest of us infer from the phrase.

Four thousand miles and 63 days on a bike can do that to you—give an old adage a new spin—and, in this case, provide a young college graduate an unforgettable glimpse of America’s heart, as well as her own.

Rachel Rubenstein opted in for the Habitat Bicycle Challenge while attending Haverford as a senior anthropology major. The Challenge, a cross-country cycling odyssey backed by Habitat for Humanity International, requires each participant to raise $4000 (or more) in sponsorship underwriting for the privilege of pedaling the country’s blue highways. Rachel dual-tracked the completion of her thesis and the obligatory fundraising throughout her senior year.

“It took me all year to raise the money,” she remembers. “I wasn’t sure I’d make it.”

Merely one of many times that doubts would draft behind Rachel and the other riders over nine long weeks on the road.
The Habitat Bicycle Challenge (HBC) is organized by the New Haven, Connecticut chapter of Habitat for Humanity, a not-for-profit which lists 13,000 active affiliates across the nation and 250 more internationally. The first ride that rolled off the Yale University campus in spring, 1994 strung out eight lonely students on stock Schwinn bicycles. While today’s participants are no less intrepid and still mostly students, their equipment and planning are more sophisticated, and their numbers have increased tenfold. Rachel’s 2005 adventure boasted 77 riders at the start and raised $380,000.
Over its ten-year history, more than 600 riders have made the entirely student-run HBC the “single biggest fundraiser for Habitat worldwide” according to its executive director, Bill Casey.

Casey, who’s been with HBC since its inception, adds, “As important as the money is, we also emphasize the participants’ efforts to raise awareness coast to coast concerning our poverty housing efforts.”

The Challenge, you see, for Rachel and the other idealists and adventurers does not end when darkness, high winds, hail stones or chamois rash give way at last to a long day’s dismount and a hot supper. Nearly every night, the riders, who cross the country in three groups along three separate routes—Northern, Central and Southern—present slideshows and answer questions about Habitat, their ride and themselves. Standing (you can be sure, after all day in the saddle) before gatherings arranged by the host organizations that house and feed them, the students conduct an educational outreach that connects the communities they’ve seen with those to come and the riders themselves with those who came—out of curiosity or gratitude—to meet them. Rachel regarded these sessions ambivalently.

“The ride provided us the means to start conversations with people you might think had little in common with us. We met so many people. It was especially interesting being introduced to different religions, traditions and practices.” But sometimes, Rachel, who began to experience intense back pain after the first week on the road, felt the need for respite from the day-and-night demands of the ride.

A stranger to her group when they wheeled out of New Haven on May 28, the somewhat reserved recent graduate felt “like I was always on,” as she navigated new roads and dealt with “all the social dynamics” that most concerned her prior to the ride. She recalls that, early on, “there were so many directional changes, someone would get lost every day.” She meant literally, but perhaps figuratively as well.

Rachel’s Northern Route group numbered 25, the majority women, as they passed their police escort at New Haven’s city limit and started across Connecticut. Four of these were designated leaders, two male and two female students who’d trained together and worked for months to organize the 4000-mile marathon. From advance planning (campsite reservations in the Far West) to mopping up (sweeping the back of the pack for stragglers) these student leaders would guide the group through the perils of Eastern metropolitan traffic, mid-western weather and over the Continental Divide. All the logistical needs for a nine-week trek through twelve states—accommodations, food, clothing, medical assistance, equipment repairs—were anticipated and addressed as if details of a military campaign. Three leaders rode with the group while an alternating fourth transported their gear (and covered their rear) in a van. Described by Bill Casey as possessing “an unbelievable maturity level for college students” they pushed westward like wagon masters through Connecticut, New York, Ontario, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and across Washington into Seattle, the promised land.

Rachel and the rest found a rhythm after a few days: seven, eight, nine hours in the saddle, 70 or so miles a day. Each rider rode at his or her own pace. At day’s end, the group would gather at a pre-arranged rendezvous, usually a church or community center (like a “Y”) where their hosts, usually Habitat volunteers, awaited them. This gradual, everyday introduction to communal living would resonate with Rachel, and was one of the treasures of the trip that made it “very hard” to dissolve the group when they reached their destination. “I missed the adventure and closeness, and dreamed about it for a long time afterwards,” she says.

Before the dreaming began, however, the rigors of the ride and the dangers of the road had to be faced. Every day. All day.

“Seeing a long flat road stretching ahead of me could be so demoralizing. Distances were often deceiving and there were many times when I would say to myself that I would be on this road forever. Wind was the worst. At least with hills, moving was based on your own strength and determination, where it seemed like with wind, effort did not equal results. “Some mornings,” Rachel says, “I thought I’d never reach lunch,” in effect translating miles into fuel consumption and illuminating the double drain on riders.

Physically, a cyclist might burn 9000 or more calories a day; mentally, you face a grind that strips you down to your essentials. New routes into the unknown where nothing is familiar, except the bike beneath you, conspire to make every inch of you ache, especially where your soft parts and its hard surfaces interface. Despite exhaustion and discomfort, every rider must remain alert to myriad hazards: dehydration, insects, road ruts, debris (static and airborne…think thundering semis) traffic, rain and cold and the quit that comes at you relentlessly. Riders speak of being “dead tired” and “not with it mentally.” The price paid for distraction, or just a lack of luck, can be high. On Rachel’s Northern Route, one young woman spilled and broke her elbow, dropping out of the ride. On the Central, a downhill crash sent the victim home. On the Southern Route, another woman, Rachel “Ramie” Speight, was killed in a collision with a car in rural Kentucky. This incident, the first and only fatality in the history of the HBC, shook the teams top to bottom.

As Rachel Rubenstein remembers it, the leaders of her group gathered everyone atop a hill in Wisconsin and announced Ramie’s death. Riders were offered the opportunity to bail out; three from the Southern Route did, but returned to the road later and finished the trek. Many, however, were unnerved.

Rachel recalls her own dilemma vividly. “I was tired and hungry a lot. My back slowed me down to where I was getting up and setting out earlier than the others, who would then pass me. Eventually, the sweepers would pick me up and I’d be the last to arrive at rendezvous. I thought: ‘I don’t want to do this.’” But she did. “One thing I’ve noticed about pain is that when it’s gone it’s almost as if it never happened. It was always nagging me. I had to stop and stretch my back out a lot, and there was always intense tingling going on in my lower back. Because I was riding hurt, I strained one of my glutes as well, which then also had constant tingling.” And yet, she kept going; they all did.

Eventually, Rachel was treated by a physical therapist in Minneapolis, and her condition began to improve. Counselors were also made available to those still troubled by doubts and grief over Ramie’s death. A few days after the restorative stop in the Twin Cities, nearly two weeks after the accident, the group assembled for an informal service to commemorate the lost rider. Rachel says of this, “It was really nice to take a little time and reflect upon the loss, especially as a group. I was really glad then that I’d decided to go on. I wanted to finish so badly, and I also knew that the challenges of the Rockies would bring the group together, and I didn’t want to miss that.”

Now halfway across the country, the group began to bond as never before. Facing the vast, unpopulated emptiness of South Dakota and the hot head winds off the badlands, they all began to fight together, determined as one to finish. The endlessness of the open road and the sun-baked tableland tilting away to all horizons inspired contemplation in Rachel, “a peaceful zoning out where I just focused on the rhythmic pedaling.” She had found her stride. “I realized what my body was capable of producing. I began to feel that it was just a joy to do it overall.”

That joy seemed to suffuse the rest of the ride. With the wide-open West before them, the riders saw fewer towns and frequently camped out at night, eschewing accommodations in cities for 8-man tents and views of the Grand Tetons. Rachel recounts these days almost euphorically. “We tried to stop a little earlier, around three or four p.m. Part of the group would make camp while others got to explore our surroundings. We’d look for a place to swim or go for a hike. We’d all come together to make dinner and clean up. After dinner we’d play games. Camping out gave us the chance to develop greater camaraderie.”

There would still be the presentations, and the “builds,” occasional days off the bikes spent constructing a Habitat house in some community. (Rachel remembers these fondly: “In one we were laying flooring; it was fun working out the geometry around the fireplace. With the whole group pitching in, you could really see the difference we made.”) By now, a bunch of wannabe-do-gooders had matured into a cohesive, supremely confident, physically robust family. And families, when they’re working well, want to have fun.

“On really hot days, we’d look for places [streams and ponds] alongside the road to cool off—just stop and jump in.”
Which is what they’d done in the first place, these students (now educators) when they signed up for this grueling, gear-shifting ordeal. Jumped in. One at a time for the most part, although they were now cannon-balling along together. Like kids.

Rachel:
“There was one girl, Erin McLeod from Yale, who was really anxious about the big climbs we’d be facing. She thought she’d fall behind or fail to finish and that really worried her. She was an inspiration to me, as were many others on the trip. I saw how nervous she was at the beginning, and I saw the way that she chugged along mile after mile, day after day through her self-doubt.

On the day we climbed the Powder River Pass in Wyoming, she volunteered to sweep, riding alone behind, without the group’s support. We all reached the top of the pass, at 9,666 feet, long before she appeared far below us. Everyone gathered at a viewpoint to pull for her and watch her climb. I remember how loudly and long we cheered until at last she reached the summit and we all celebrated.”

E pluribus unum; the highest point on their route had become the high point of the journey.

Rachel and the rest of the Northern Route team rolled into Seattle on July 30, 2005. All but one injured rider had crossed by bicycle from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Only six days of the last nine weeks had been spent out of the saddle—three of those had been days off, the other three had been Habitat building days. They had raised nearly $400,000 dollars, the social awareness of populations in twelve states (and two countries) and more than a few frame walls along the way.

And each elevated their own self-esteem and the confidence of those they’d ridden with, and in the end, ridden for.
“I was always confident in my physical strength,” Rachel says now, “but the group experience—the sense of being an important part of a team doing significant work, that really uplifted me.”

The shy rider who’d frequently pedaled alone behind the pack now works in a Quaker internship program in Seattle, living communally and endeavoring “to build a peaceful, just, sustainable world” in the words of her program’s website. The Quaker Experiential Service and Training (QUEST) program provides interns with positions at local social change and service organizations and hosts an intentional, residential community where interns practice community-building skills and live simply. Rachel’s current position with the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project requires her to interview incoming clients and prepare cases related to immigrant spousal citizenship and legal status for pass-off to lawyers. Predictably, it requires a lot of teamwork.

Asked to summarize what she took away from the trip, Rachel seemed a little surprised at her own answer.
“Biking was the perfect way, the perfect speed to see the country, which was much bigger, more beautiful and a lot more rural than I thought, accustomed as I am to living in cities. Doors opened, physically and emotionally. I didn’t expect people to be so very generous. It made me happy, optimistic, and aware of the possibilities within myself and throughout the country. I’d love to do it again.”

And not just because she got to keep the bike.

Shawn Hart is a Philadelphia freelance writer, sportsman and boulevardier.