Bridging economic and cultural divides

Written August 1 2011 , six weeks inot a 60 week bicycle trip around the U.S.


One of the great privileges of this trip is that we get to cross economic, cultural, racial, ethnic, religious and ideological borders and be with all kinds of people in all kinds of settings. We enter a community, at the laundramat, the KFC, the College, the hotel, the RV park. Often we have needs that thrust us into the community for that moment or hour or evening. We need rest, food, water, and always a bathroom. We need help with navigation, seek shelter from the elements, and yes, use wifi.


Often we hear dire warnings from our new community, about those people in the other part of town, or the next town. We have yet to find these warnings to be true.

We (that is – people in the United States – and probably most other places) live in such closed spheres, often side by side. We are often unaware of this and will deny it wholesale.

In Rochester, Cleveland, and Ann Arbor we saw entirely different worlds within blocks of each other. Trees are often an indication that you are crossing a class dividing line- (you know the term leafy neighborhood? What comes to mind? Not a slum. ) Who decides who gets the trees on the boulevards?

North Hampton is the home of Smith College a prestigious private liberal arts college for women. Our daughter’s workshop was taking place there and so it was our first stop. Coming in on the bike trail we missed our mark by one stop . We stopped at the KFC to clean up and to ask directions. None of the dozen people in the KFC- all happy to help- knew where Smith College was! We soon learned we were ½ mile from it. Just four blocks away from the KFC is the beginning of the college-oriented shops. Two different countries just blocks apart. Two worlds that seem to know nothing of the other.

The Smith college shopping area is stuffed with more organic local restaurants, clothing stores, coffee shops, yoga and reflexology studios and day spas than exist along the entire Erie Canal trail. Many more.

The people at the KFC, where we shared shade and clean bathrooms (“checked every 30 minutes”) but not food, were dining on buckets that provide lots of calories and flavor for little money. Around the corner you can spend 4 times as much on an organic mesclun salad.

I do not know what these observations have to do with how Smith College uses its resources to benefit the whole community. At the University of Minnesota where I got three degrees and taught for a decade, I participated in many discussions and projects designed to bridge the divide between “ town and gown”: to bring the resources and the knowledge generated at the university to benefit the community and the wisdom of the community into the university. I found that there were those deeply committed to this endeavor and others, often in positions of power, who preferred the greenhouse effect: a university cloistered from ‘the real world”.

In a car we can pass through areas that are worlds apart from us without learning anything about them. On a bicycle it is also possible to pass the worlds in which you do not belong without letting them touch you. But on a long trip like this we stop when we have needs and given our peanut-sized bladders – we stop a lot. We rely on people from all walks of life to help us out. Hopefully, in the exchange, as we share ourselves with them, we give something as well.

These exchanges are, by far, the best part of this 60 week bicycle trip around the United States.