The last few days had been nothing but narrow roads and bumpy gravel roads. In words, it would have been enough to push the top cyclists to squeeze their fists into the sky, said Scott V. Edwards, a professor in the Department of Organic and Evolutionary Biology.
It was a feeling Edwards had come to know well. After all, the 57-year-old ornithologist has been cycling the country since June 6 on a hike that began largely as a way to achieve a lifelong goal, but has become bigger as the country began to rely on racial injustice.
The adventure began in Newburyport, Massachusetts, after Edwards sank his tires into the Atlantic Ocean. It hopes to triumph off the Coast of Oregon by the time of August. There, he plans to play the Pacific. Covering about 50 to 60 miles per day, it approaches every day, but not all kilometers are majestic. Some are frankly exhausting.
“I’ve had wonderful roads with very wide maples and few cars,” said Edwards, also professor of zoology Alexander Agassiz and ornithology curator at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. “And I’ve had paths that make you think you’ve been sent to hell.”
– Scott V Edwards (ScottVEdwards1) July 17, 2020
Take the unpaved impediment course that traveled in western Iowa a month after you begin your journey. He’s one of the bad guys,” he says. It is narrow, difficult to pedal and shoulder only stones. Edwards had to prevent in his appearance and avoid absolutely every step of a car or truck. And all this with a motorcycle that weighed about a hundred pounds because of all the materials it contains. “These are the problems in which you somehow say, “What am I doing here?” said Edwards.
– Scott V Edwards (ScottVEdwards1) July 13, 2020
Some of the answer can be noticed in the symptoms associated with your bike. They Black Lives Matter, Black Birders Week and #ShutDownSTEM, a one-day stop in June to provoke actions opposed to systemic racism in clinical and educational communities.
Edwards points out that she was one of the ones he sought to do for years. But as a black observer and black scientist, he also sought a decision to raise awareness of movements and give his adventure a broader goal as racial tensions across the country continued to escalate. He added symptoms a few days after he left.
“It is vital for others to see that African Americans appreciate nature. It’s vital to show that we love camping and show that it’s not just about white heritage,” Edwards said.
– Scott V Edwards (ScottVEdwards1) July 28, 2020
With the pandemic erasing his summer engagement program, such as meetings or lab work, he made the decision in the spring that it was in spite of every moment. He wanderedly drew an address from the Atlantic to the Pacific, promised to send his two daughters (one of whom recently toured the United States) takes every dog he met along the way and set an exit date.
Edwards begins cycling around 8:30 a.m. every day after breakfast, regularly sipping cereal and charting the course of the day. If he’s in town, he’s going to enjoy bacon and eggs.
It’s pretty right after that. It stops each every five miles for a drink or snack. Lunch consists of many peanut butter and jam sandwiches. Edward stops around four or five in the afternoon. On a smart day. On a slow day, it’s only around 7 p.m. He basically sleeps in campsites. However, there have been some remains with locals and hotels.
“I’m not a purist in that regard, ” said Edwards. “I’m a pretty normal guy. I joke that cycling is the only game you can do well while you have your belly.”
However, although Edwards does not consider himself an elite, it is not easy. He makes the holidays unaided. No van follows him with his stuff. Your bike, which you rightly call the “aircraft carrier,” is loaded with bags containing food, snacks and materials such as a tent and spare clothing. It replenishes the points of sale that pass by the road, hidden and away from society.
He was full of images, sounds and other people from all over the country. Edwards documented much of this on his new Twitter account, ScottVEdwards1.
On June 13, a woman from Cortland, New York, screamed from her car to prevent her from buying her ice cream at a local movie restaurant. On June 24, he had dinner at Bowling Green, Ohio. He calls these reports random acts of kindness. Some of them were because of the signs. People also greeted him, knocked on the horn or thanked him for his conscience.
– Scott V Edwards (ScottVEdwards1) June 13, 2020
Some reports have been so optimistic.
On June 26, Edwards tweeted that he had won his first racist comment about the vacation of an 84-year-old white man in Monroeville, Indonesia. The guy said, “Other black people came here when God ran out of white paint. Edwards won an avalanche of online support, but noted that it was something that also happens to other people of color, even at universities.
“That kind of humor is appropriate in its day, and you just don’t realize that the global has changed,” Edward says. It also noted that in some rural communities, the motion has been linked to looting and violence. “He’s looking for an explanation of why with other people who think that,” he says.
On July 4, Edwards spent time in Galesburg, Illinois, hometown of population genetics founder Sewall Wright. He visited the cabin where the poet Carl Sandburg was born and the site of an 1858 debate between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas. After that, he crossed the Mississippi River and entered Iowa.
On July 23, he was discovered watching South Dakota’s Black Hills with admiration. And five days later, he had arrived at Crow Reserve in Montana and was on his way to Billings.
– Scott V Edwards (ScottVEdwards1) July 23, 2020
The music allowed Edwards to spend much of the journey. He played rock from the 1970s to bring it up some of the steepest hills. When things are sweet, play anything from Joni Mitchell and Aretha Franklin to Suzanne Vega and Stevie Wonder. Edwards wears headphones to listen to traffic.
He also spends a lot of time listening for birds. He’s seen and heard horned larks in northern Ohio, a dickcissel in Indiana, killdeers, and the invasive Eurasian collared doves in Iowa.
– Scott V Edwards (ScottVEdwards1) June 30, 2020
Edwards has been interested in bird watching and the outdoors since he was a child. He grew up in Riverdale, a Bronx neighborhood, which in the 1970s was “pretty rural,” he says. As a child, he read National Geographic and went camping with his circle of relatives in a normal way. A neighbor took him to bird watching.
His interest in science followed him at Harvard, where he earned a degree in biology in 1986 before earning a doctorate. University of California, Berkeley, in 1992. It focuses on avian biology, adding its genetic variation and the history of evolution.
Science was an option he was encouraged to pursue, Edwards said. You need other young people of color to have the same opportunity. He hopes to see more diversity among science and faculty professionals.
“These are role models,” Edwards said. “People want to see other people like them … we have to tell them that they belong to science and that there is a position for them.”
Reflecting on the journey, Edwards said he’s developed his own hypothesis on cycling and science: The two are a lot alike, he said, especially when it comes to grinding through challenges, like bumpy roads or a mountain of complex data, to get where you’re going.
“Know that the landscape, the cases and even the other people will disturb you,” he says. “You just have to make them wrong.