The Hungry Cyclist: Pedalling The Americas In Search Of The Perfect Meal. Tom Davies Kevill
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eye on my worldly possessions propped up in the parking lot. I ordered a tall stack of pancakes, which arrived dripping in maple syrup, and downed cup after cup of bitter coffee while I laid out my damp map on the table and made a plan for the day.
Now where am I? Nyack, Nyack, Nyack—here!
It took a few seconds to find the small red dot that signified where I was, and when I did, it was completely soul-destroying. In a day that had left me feeling physically and mentally drained, I had cycled no further than two-thirds of the width of my little finger. A pathetic thirty-seven miles. Looking north, the Canadian border and the Great Lakes were a stretched hand away. If I carried on at this pace Toronto would take two to three weeks and Rio de Janeiro was clearly impossible.
The next week was the stuff of nightmares. I was unfit, underprepared and it was very hot. The sun woke me from my tent every morning and soon became a merciless tormentor as I struggled further north into the Catskill mountains of Upstate New York. The rich landscape of pine-carpeted mountains and placid lakes should have been breathtaking but I had no breath to spare. As each day of hard labour came to an end, I was greeted with another uncomfortable broken night’s sleep in my reeking tent, before having to start all over again at sunrise.
More than seven years of a nine-to-five existence in London had left me completely unsuited to the hardships of life on the road. However I cut it, pushing a ridiculously heavy weight up a mountain in 30-plus degrees just wasn’t fun. I was meant to be revelling in a newfound freedom. This was about as far from freedom as I could imagine. Dragging an oversized ball and chain disguised as a bicycle and trapped within a strange alter ego that called himself the Hungry Cyclist, I was meant to be cycling the Americas in search of interesting food and digging up local recipes. Instead I was surviving on chocolate bars, fizzy drinks and whatever else I could get my hands on at the sporadic gas stations that lined my route. I barely had the energy or enthusiasm to open a tin of beans. The Hungry Cyclist and his dream were both falling apart.
‘Buy me; buy me,’ called rusty station wagons parked in driveways.
‘Take me, take me, look at my powerful motor,’ goaded shiny, chrome-covered motorcycles with their fluorescent ‘For Sale’ signs.
And how easy it would have been to quit. To cash in my bicycle, dump the panniers and go on a real road trip in the land of the motorcar. The raw chafing between my legs would be a thing of the past. I could kiss goodbye to my aching buttocks and throw away my dirty, sweat-stained clothes. Covering as little as thirty-five miles a day, against the hundred I had projected, no more than a soul-destroying centimetre on my tatty map, I was making slow, painful progress on my way to Ithaca and the Finger Lakes. But as the long days and short nights gradually ticked over, the hills slowly became easier. It was revealing to see how body and mind learnt to deal with life on a bicycle, and I came to terms with the fact that this journey would not happen in the way I had imagined it would. After an initial few weeks of pain and suffering, I arrived in the town of Buffalo, famed for its chicken wings and the Niagara Falls. It was here that I would cross into Canada. I had cycled some five hundred miles after leaving New York. I was feeling fit, I was sleeping, I could operate my camping stove and I was almost having fun.
I was a cowboy. My sister was an Indian, hiding at the bottom of the garden in her wigwam that smelt of wet socks, doing whatever seven-year-old East Anglian girl Indians did. I would creep stealthily through the unkempt grass, in my finest hat, with a six-shooter at the ready, primed for an ambush.
‘Yeeeeeeeeeeee ha!’ Pow! Snap! Pow! Snap! Bursting into her peaceful camp, guns blazing, I ruthlessly fired off reels of pink caps while she ran for the cover of home, slapping the palm of her hand against her mouth, doing her best to warn me off with an unconvincing war-cry.
But cap guns and cowboy hats were soon replaced by a Walkman and a mountain bike, and the only contact I had with Indians was limited to over-imaginative, lustful thoughts provoked by Disney’s buckskin-clad, leggy recreation of Pocahontas. As I matured a little, Daniel Day Lewis running bare-chested through the mountains of Upstate New York in his moccasins and Kevin Costner soulfully pursuing herds of buffalo across the Dakotas provided me with a little insight into the native tribes of the Americas. But shamefully, as I arrived on banks of the Great Lakes, apart from childhood and Hollywood fantasies I knew nothing about the great and tragic history of the land I was now cycling through.
Moving further into Ontario, surrounded by the waters of lakes Huron, Ontario and Michigan, it was clear I was in Indian country. Eagle feathers and dream catchers now hung from the rear-view mirrors of pick-up trucks, whose ‘Support our Troops’ bumper stickers also declared ‘Proud to be Indian’. The patriotic posters that portrayed dust-covered New York firemen emerging from falling rubble under a red, white and blue Stars and Stripes, declaring ‘These Colors Don’t Run’, no longer adorned the graffiti-covered doors of gas station toilets. Instead, dreamy, sepia-toned images of old men wrapped in blankets with feathers on their heads, gazing at the horizon, proclaimed you should ‘Do what you know to be right’. But instead of taking their advice, buying a car and racing to Vegas, I continued cycling up the Bruce Peninsula that bisects the shallow waters of Lake Huron and Georgian Bay.
A popular summer destination for those escaping the sweltering city heat of Toronto, the Bruce Peninsula’s picturesque towns were well prepared for this seasonal boom. Pretty clinker-built houses, once home to wealthy fur traders, were converted into twee bed and breakfasts. Organic cafés, decorated with wind-chimes and lesbians, sold overpriced cups of coffee, and the famous Great Lakes ‘white fish and chips’ seemed to be sold in every one of the restaurants. Holidaying Ontarian families, towing caravans in long convoys up the Peninsula main road, licked ice creams and stared into the backs of digital cameras, but on the side of the road, the vendors sitting in part-time stands next to the highway selling wood carvings of eagles, feather-decorated dream catchers, buckskin moccasins and bags of wild rice to the passing trade told of deeper tradition in this bountiful corner of eastern Canada. Arriving in the port town Tobermory, given its name by Scottish fur traders, I caught the last ferry to Manitoulin Island. With my bike tied up below deck of the Chi-Cheemaun (big canoe) with the motorhomes and caravans, I sat above in the cool evening air watching the wake of the boat rip open the glassy skin of Lake Huron and began to feel thoroughly ashamed of my historical ignorance. I decided to take the very first opportunity to swot up on the First Nation culture of the Great Lakes. The next morning, after camping on the banks of the lake and full of campfire coffee, I rode to the Manitoulin Island cultural visitor centre for an education.
An impressive building with heavy wooden beams and a triangular roof, the centre provided me with vital information about how to stretch a tribal drum and weave a fish trap, and also gave me a potted history of the area I was in. I was in Ojibwa country, the largest and most powerful of the Great Lakes tribes and considered by many to be the most powerful in the North American continent. Occupying the lands around the Great Lakes and stretching as far west as North Dakota, the Ojibwa lived far enough north to have avoided the early flow of migration from Europe, but by the late eighteenth century they found themselves too close to the rapidly expanding trading posts of the Hudson Bay Company, and they were soon engulfed in a fur trade that was turning the Great Lakes into a war zone between the English and the French.
Beaver skins were big money back in Europe, and as demand for this New World commodity grew, the old rivals fought heavily to control the rivers, lakes and ports of the region. As outstanding hunters and trappers, the Ojibwa were unwittingly caught up in the Fur Wars, which continued well into the nineteenth century. Treaties were signed, alliances formed, alliances broken, and tribes were pitted against each other to best feed the appetites of smart Londoners and Parisians, who could not live without their fashionable beaver top hats. The Ojibwa traded with their new European invaders and, although the weapons brought wealth and power, the Ojibwa soon became dependent on French and English goods. The introduction of gunpowder, alcohol and smallpox would change the Great Lakes for ever. Changes in fashion brought a welcome end to the fur trade, but it was only replaced by a new hunger for lumber, copper and white fish, which tempted more Europeans to the area, where they pursued a policy of deforestation and overfishing that emptied the ancient woodlands and lakes of their harvest.
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