Bike trip energizes Bangor man

Brent Hall and his roommate awoke early on June 5 to vacate their apartment in Flagstaff, Ariz., where they’d been living and working for about six months, and begin the long trip home to Maine.

By 2 p.m., after scrubbing the oven and sweeping out the place, they were ready to roll. Having decided to take separate vehicles, Hall’s roommate got into his car, his girlfriend beside him, and drove away. Hall then anxiously hopped aboard a black Schwinn 24-speed bicycle and slowly began pedaling his way back to Bangor. Just thinking of the nearly 3,000 miles that lay ahead made his heart race and his palms sweat.

“That’s when it all hit me, when I knew it was finally happening,” said Hall, a quiet, slightly built 20-year-old who rode into town Monday night after spending about 21/2 months on the road.

Sitting in his apartment on Hancock Street, Hall struggles a bit to explain what motivated him to make such a grueling trip. Youthful idealism and the romance of the open road had a lot to do with it, of course; that age-old urge to test fate, explore the vast unknown and perhaps find out a little about who you are and what you’re made of in the process. But the trip was also partly a political protest against the war in Iraq, Hall said, and what he believes was President Bush’s deceitful rationale for the invasion.

“I feel we’re there mostly because of the oil,” said Hall, whose bike frame carried a bright yellow “Bush Lied” bumper sticker that sparked some lively conversations at dinner tables and around campfires in the dozen states along his route. “I sold my van last December and haven’t driven since.”

Hall spent a month outfitting his mountain bike for the trip. He exchanged his knobby, off-road tires for skinnier ones, installed a more comfortable seat and handlebars, and added a headlight and saddlebags front and rear. He packed the essentials, such as bike tools, spare tubes, water and freeze-dried food, and then loaded himself down with lots of non-essential clothing and other supplies that had to be jettisoned along the way.

Meanwhile, his father, Joseph Hall, who lives in Brewer, fretted long-distance over his son’s safety and begged him to find a traveling companion for the trip.

“I told him it might be difficult finding someone who wanted to bike 3,000 miles across the country,” Hall said with a smile.

Before the trip, the farthest Hall had ever biked in a day was 30 miles. Leaving Flagstaff, he pushed himself hard for about seven hours and 65 miles through the 90-degree heat before stopping in the desert for the night. He had no tent, preferring to simply bed down in a sleeping bag in secluded spots along the roadside. That first night he read George Orwell’s “1984” by lantern light, wrote in his journal, dodged a couple of large black-widow spiders who scuttled too near, nursed his aching thighs and let his imagination wander freely among the stars.

He biked northeast through Arizona to southern Colorado, Kansas, Missouri and Arkansas. Prohibited from using the big expressways, he rode mostly on winding two-lane roads, occasionally four, which provided him an intimate connection with countless cities and small towns along the way. Frequently, when Hall stopped to rest or to eat, he met locals who invited him to their homes for supper and to stay the night.

As he grew stronger and more confident, his mileage increased from 65 or so a day to 80 or better. He learned to approach the most daunting Colorado hills with freewheeling optimism, reminding himself during each torturous climb just how sweet the ride would be on the way down. He winced when the big, lumbering RVs passed too closely, happily rode the drafts of speeding tractor-trailer trucks, and burst into song when he needed the comfort of a human voice.

One day in Colorado, Hall had coasted about three-quarters of the way down a long, steep hill when he stopped to talk to a man in a wheelchair who was struggling to make his way up. The man, who was in his 40s, had become paralyzed in an accident when he was Hall’s age. The doctors had told him he’d never be able to live independently again. The man didn’t agree and worked hard from that point on to prove the doctors wrong. Every day of his life he rolled himself three miles up that hill to keep his will and his upper body strong.

“He told me that it wasn’t so much what you have in life but what you do with what you have,” Hall recalled. “He inspired me, and I felt so lucky to be out there. And whenever I was tired and started to doubt myself, I would think of him and what he’d been through and it kept me going.”

After stopping to visit a friend for a while, Hall biked out of St. Louis and across Illinois. In Richmond, Indiana, he met a beautiful girl, spent a couple of glorious days with her, and then felt his heart break when it was time to get back on the road. He pushed east through Ohio and Pennsylvania toward New York, where he pedaled across the Hudson River on the Rip Van Winkle Bridge. The fair weather that had followed him from the start of the trip began to turn bad as he made his way into Massachusetts, where he was blasted for five straight hours with rain and high winds.

He visited his mother near Boston, and then rolled onto Route One for the last leg of the journey back to Maine. Eventually he began to see the familiar signs for Key Bank and IGA, and heard someone use the word “wicked.” He knew his trip was finally ending.

Hall arrived at a friend’s apartment in Bangor at 8:30 p.m., Monday, thrilled to be off his bike and back to a real bed, hot showers, a roof to keep out the weather and meals that don’t come from pouches. He’s planning to start college this winter, and hopes to get involved with the Peace & Justice Center in Bangor and become more politically active to help defeat President Bush in November. He thinks he’d like to work as a caregiver for the elderly, his job in Arizona, or maybe get into some other social-service field in which he can do some good for people.

“Anything is possible,” Hall said. “I know that now.”