I love being in the classroom. It’s wonderful when the bell rings, the seats fill up, and I can once again transport my charges to the foreign lands of 1607, 1776, 1861, and 2001. Open up your time machines to page 267! Come May, though, I get that itch to get out of Room 5, pack up my panniers, and spend a week just riding. I rise with the sun, pedal for seven to eight hours, and find a place to flop, grateful for having arrived safely and pleased with my progress. Though I bike alone, I meet many people, hear their stories, and learn lessons from the landscapes. Many of these lessons can’t be learned in any other way except at twelve miles an hour along a country road or a rails-to-trails path. I begin to wonder, How could I share this experience with my students? What new learning could there be in a community sharing in the hardships of a challenge? In 2016, I biked the Great Allegheny Passage with some friends, and I quickly realized that with its gentle grades, beautiful vistas, and historic sites, this would be the perfect ride for my students to have a real learning adventure. They would be challenged, face hardships, build community, and learn some important stories about our nation’s history.
They would be challenged, face hardships, build community, and learn some important stories about our nation’s history.
The Trip
The Great Allegheny Passage and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal together form a largely uninterrupted 350 mile pathway connecting Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Washington, DC. The path—sometimes asphalt, sometimes crushed limestone, sometimes muddy and root-strewn two-track—guides travelers past the hulking relics of the rustbelt; through thick, cool forests and high-walled ancient canyons; past caves; along rushing rivers; past famous battlefields and forgotten graveyards; through small towns; across long viaducts and aqueducts; and through tunnels dug and blasted by those hungry-eyed immigrants who stared at you from the pages of your high school history textbook. For me and six students, this would be our world for ten days in June.
Hardships
You can travel by car on the interstate between Pittsburgh and Washington, DC, in around four hours. So, why would one exchange air conditioning and a plush reclining seat for ten days sweating on a bicycle? A simple answer might be to experience some difficulties. A complex answer would be that this trail through the woods addresses a desperate and growing need—especially among our youth—for experiences which challenge us to surrender, for a time, our insistence upon comfort, speed, novelty, distraction, certainty, and ease. We need to unplug, slow down, and depend upon a community in real time and in real space. We need to suffer a little bit. While it was nothing like the Oregon Trail (our trip had ice cream and nobody contracted dysentery), real hardships awaited the riders: sore bums, backs, legs, arms, and wrists (there were injuries and medical clinic visits); heat, cold, wind, and rain; bugs, bears (one imagined sighting), and snakes (definitely not imagined); flat tires, broken chains, snapped spokes, and bent rims; long miles between meals and tepid water in dirty bottles; and granola.
For a number of students, the hardships began after the first couple of miles because that’s as far as they’d ever ridden a bicycle continuously in any one direction.
For a number of students, the hardships began after the first couple of miles because that’s as far as they’d ever ridden a bicycle continuously in any one direction. Most of these students had been socialized to believe that bicycles were for children, and as soon as state authorities permitted and their parents’ pocketbooks opened, they ditched two wheels for four and never looked back. The only adults they ever saw seriously riding were either wealthy, middle-aged, lycra-clad weekend speed warriors or those who were down on their luck. Their communities discouraged any thought of cycling in any daily practical manner. Far-flung suburbs, high-speed exurban roads with narrow shoulders, and poorly maintained sidewalks are very real structural barriers to anyone considering an alternative model of transportation. Our urban environments are so thoroughly designed for cars that it practically requires a trip to Amsterdam, Copenhagen, or Berlin to really understand it.
“Everything is so hard.”
For others, the hardships awaited the evening of day one, when they experienced their first ever night in a tent. Others finally broke down days later, halfway through the sixty mile day. Exhausted and aching, they doubted they had it in them to finish the day’s ride. At the end of a long, hot day, one rider, James, stared long and silently at the old-timey hand-pumped water fountain in the middle of our rustic campground. Finally he spoke: “Everything is so hard.” James was right. However, by the end of our week in the woods, all the students confidently shrugged at the news of our last day’s twenty miler, and barely registered the five mile rides between the restored historic canal lockhouse, which was our home for three days, and downtown Washington, DC.
Hardships Build Community
Our days would start and end with someone building a fire. The fire was built not because we needed it for cooking or heat, but because there’s something deeply comforting in the glow and crackle of flames. We’d make our breakfast, brew coffee, discuss our aches and pains, and compare theories about the noises we heard just beyond the tent walls. While the students munched on their bagels and poked at the fire, I read the daily devotions. The following is from the first morning on the trail:
Starting big, important endeavors is scary sometimes. You’re excited, you want to get going, but there is this shadow looming, and you don’t know what or who is casting it. This shadow can resemble a memory of a recent failure, it can take the shape of an as-yet-to-be-realized fear, or it can be just an amorphous blob of malaise, an unspecified funk you just can’t shake. You want to be bold, but what if it all comes crashing down?
Today we start our first full day of riding, and questions abound: What’s down the trail? Will I make it? Will I be able to move tomorrow? Might a bear eat me? We have these and other questions, and we crave certainty. We want it to be like a movie: we can enjoy the tension and suspense of the hero in a tricky spot because we know they’ve already filmed the sequel. The Bible is full of stories of people dogged by shadows in their lives, who nevertheless acted boldly in trying situations: Moses and the Red Sea; Esther raising her voice in the halls of power; Peter taking his watery walk; Paul, jailed, shipwrecked, and flogged. These individuals were deeply flawed and weak in their own ways. Moses was “slow of tongue” and a murderer; Esther, an orphan and an exile, not to mention a woman in a man’s world; Peter was temperamental; and Paul had his thorn. One of the great encouragements that I’ve taken from the Bible are examples like these: the countless stumbling, pathetic, and hopeless people that God has used to work his will.
So we don’t know what’s down the trail, but we do know these things: We will help and encourage one another along the way, and the God of the universe will guide us along this and every other path we take.
After breakfast we would break camp, strap our gear to the bikes, and slowly roll down the path. I encouraged the riders to spend some hours of the day in silence—no earbuds, no music, no talking, just pedaling, just being alone in the woods, not knowing exactly what was ahead. Most of the miles were spent in various combinations of conversations. This is an abridged version of this article. To read more, subscribe to the print or digital edition of Christian Educators Journal.
Christian Altena teaches United States history and government at the Potter’s House High School in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He calculates that over his twenty-eight year career, he has biked over fifty thousand miles between his home and various classrooms in Vancouver, BC, Chicago, and Grand Rapids.