At the top of danielforrest.org adjacent to Home, I explain my purpose in creating a written record of some of what I think may be of interest after I am dead and to me in the meantime as my memory fades. I also write because I think I am more myself in written words than in conversation and as I kind of therapy, a way to use my mind. A random survey of people who know me or who have seen me in passing would mention something like “oh, the guy on the bicycle.”

At 75 I still ride a bicycle but not to the top of Mount Mitchell anymore. I hop on my old Fuji road bike to visit grocery stores mainly. During the COVID crisis I toured York County to photograph parks (dmforrest.smugmug.com). Part of me and my personal oddity is linked to bicycles.

I see December on this old photo which I think indicates that it was my Christmas present in 1955. The bicycle came from Stewarts’ Western Auto store in Saluda about a mile from where I was photographed. It was my first bicycle after the hand-me-down that I learned to ride on. The Western Flyer stood twenty-four inches tall and had twin white pin stripes on the red fenders.

The basket was the most important accessory because it earned me a fortune in soft drink/candy money. Soda pop came in returnable bottles worth three cents. In a hour or two I could find enough bottles to pay for snacks. As a child, I did not realize how patient Preacher Bryant was. He ran the Shell station just up West Church Street and graciously took my returns which I immediately converted into an Upper Ten or a Baby Ruth.

I rode all over town without constraints. Jennings Street was a popular destination. Ricky Yarborough, my best bicycling friend, lived there in his grandmother’s house. Sometimes we would just polish up our machines and admire their beauty, work on model cars, or go to the Western Auto to look at accessories. By that time I had twenty-six inch bike with chrome fenders and a built-in headlight. I had gone from a plain Ford to a Buick.

Ricky’s bike was similar to mine but red where mine was black. We staged races starting at the top of the hill where Jennings Street came closest to Red Bank Baptist Church. (The two “giant” hills of Jennings Street are visible in the photo above.) We would race to where Jennings met the Batesburg Highway without breath left to form words. I never won. Do not get me wrong. I was a good rider but Ricky was superb and determined. Ricky moved away and my interest in riding was overtaken by the prospect of driving a car at 14.

After a year at Newberry College, I transferred to USC in Columbia to finish my degree. My son Chris was getting old enough to leave at a Price’s Day Care just around the corner so that my wife Nita could go to work at Southern Bell to help support us.

Getting back and to from USC and J. W. Hendrix mobile home park in West Columbia was easy via SCE&G bus, but getting to work after school at Piggly Wiggly #60 on 378 was a problem because the distance was too far too walk and Nita needed our only car. I bought a three-speed Murray from K-Mart and became a regular bicycle commuter for the first time. Weaving through back roads, I could get to work just about as fast on the bike as I could via car.

After graduation and active duty military service, I started to work at Rawlinson Road Junior High School in Rock Hill. In place of a second car, I bought a Honda 360 motorcycle to commute on.

My bicycle days were over until my fifteen-year-old son Chris signed up to bicycle across America with a friend. He and Steve Dietrich rode coast-to-coast from San Diego, California, to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. His epic ride as a sophomore in high school inspired me to consider bicycling again.

My daughter Danielle and wife Nita are shown standing on the Delaware beach where Chris has dipped his back tire in the Atlantic to finish his transcontinental ride. In recent years I have driven coast to coast several times which renews my awe for what Chris did via bicycle.

We had two cars but Chris seemed to need our second car more than me. At that time a car was to a teen what a phone is now. I recruited Chris and his friend Keith Davis to join me in test riding to Northwestern High School where I now worked one weekend. We made it but Chris laughed at his fellow riders’ slowness.

After a few more weekend practice rides to get in shape, I decided I could handle the commute of about seven miles. My third life as a cyclist was born and continues to this day.

I had four commuters including the turn-of-the-century Fuji road bike pictured above. My former student Robert Baker prepared it for me in his College Cycle Shop on Oakland Avenue near Winthrop University. The Fuji is still in use, though not on a daily basis.

The daily five-mile commute to Northwestern is still etched in my head. So many memories . . . including the day a third-shift nurse somehow did not see me as I pedaled directly in front of the second entrance to Piedmont Hospital on S. Herlong at about 7:30 one morning.

Being hit by a nurse with attendant ambulances a parking lot a way had advantages. I was scooped up and checked out in the emergency room with all the alacrity and care that that is depicted on the best emergency shows on tv. My helmet was cracked and my jacket and shirt torn from my back in the slide that sent me down Herlong after my slipping across the nurse’s hood into her windshield.

I was very sore but all right, though my public crash caused a bit of stir at Northwestern. I was back at work in time to take over my second period. My Navy blue all-aluminum Canondale was twisted like a pretzel giving Robert Baker a chance to sell me yet another bicycle.

Back and to each and every day I went, except on days when rain was already present and heavy. My odd choice for adult transportation had become a habit. In the mornings I liked the direct contact with the outside that my indoor job sealed me from; in the afternoons I needed the exercise as break from the mental rigor of commanding the attention of teenagers thirty at a time. Eschewing the need for pumping gas into a car appealed to my Sierra Club mindset.

How many times did I answer, “Why do you ride a bike?” often followed by “Don’t you have a car?” Adult bike riding in Rock Hill is a lonely endeavor but there are antecedents. During the early twentieth century Rock Hill was an epicenter for the latest craze: bicycle racing. We had two wooden velodromes and the mayor of Rock Hill raced the mayor of Fort Mill before large crowds. (Some of that history is captured in the display adjacent to our current sunken Velodrome in River Walk just off Cherry Road.)

I also knew of the legendary ride of Paul Neal, who was affiliated with the shop where Chris bought his Schwinn Super Le Tour that carried him across America. Paul rode across America as a teenager in a ride that was reported in newspapers, creating an opportunity that saw the mayor of Los Angeles present him a key to the great western city upon his arrival. Paul recreated his famous ride a few years ago in his late 60s.

I had that inspiration in the back of my mind and the newspaper stories about a young biology teacher who rode from his home in York to teach at Fort Mill High School each day. Bill Hilton ended up at Northwestern where I taught. His ride was about triple the length of mine.

Riding connected me to other odd people who formed the Rock Hill Bicycle Club, formed by Dick of Dick’s bicycle shop. We rode criteriums through rural York and Chester Counties; for a time we rode to Myrtle Beach each year. I earned three or four Assault on Mitchell badges for completion of a race that started at Memorial Auditorium in Spartanburg and finished atop Mount Mitchell.

That hundred mile ride caught the interest of riders from across the U.S. and beyond. I remember leaders of the pack whom I glanced at on the starting line finishing and riding back down from the east coast’s highest point whizzing past me so fast that I could not see them beyond a blur through my salt-caked eyes as I struggled with the last twenty miles of the hundred mile event.

Hours later when I made the top, I stashed my bicycle into the luggage hold of a big charted bus and gladly sought the comfort of upholstery, glad to be borne back to Spartanburg in comfort.

I have been lucky enough to ride with my children, though I am mainly a solo rider. Chris and I rode to Columbia and on to Saluda to see relatives years ago. Elle and I did the Virginia Creeper Trail. Restricted to just bicycles, it puts on display what bicycle transportation could be.

What do the motorists who speed by me think of an old man on a bicycle? I suspect they think that I have lost my license, but I am used to the oddness of being out of a car because I walk places on a daily basis. I still hop on my bicycle on Sunday afternoons when Rock Hill traffic is tamer than normal and spin around just to see some territory and haul it in my pick-up to go camping from time to time.

I am not sure if children ride bicycles much any more. Video may have taken over what this small town boy took for granted: pedaling for pleasure. It is a part of the odd brand, what I am known for.

is Noraly Shoenmaker outside of You Tube. In 2018 the young geologist stopped scouting mining sites, residing in Holland, and started living on a 300 CC motorcycle. Her home is literally the remote world. She rides on “tracks” or unpaved roads in remote places reporting what she sees. She has filed hundreds of blog posts running about twenty minutes each.

My friend Pete Kreen, a motorcycle enthusiast, tipped me off to her site two years ago. I tuned in to watch her ride from the tip of South America in Puento Arenas, Argentina, near Cape Horn to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, on the edge of the Arctic Ocean. Since then she has ridden from India back to Holland and through the Mideast. She is currently riding Africa country to country and is in the Central African Republic. 

She does not tour familiar big cities. She does attempt to always ride village to village so what her more than two million viewers see are rural people in natural habitats. She eats what she can find along the way and has encounters with natives where they live outside of the commercial world that I live in.

Her motorcycle caught my interest first. Because of her small size and need to navigate dirt, she rides a 300 CC Honda that recently fell out of a pirogue (canoe carved from a log) into the Congo River separating Congo from the Central African Republic of Congo. She stirred my inner motorcyclist–I owned a Honda 360 in the 1970s and rode it back and to for work–but my interest in her machine soon gave way to her way of showing humanity to humanity.

She keeps her opinions and private life to herself and is to modesty what Donald Trump is to narcissism. She is an observer of geology, wildlife, and people in a journalistic way that places the viewer aboard her motorcycle and within her geographical location. Her editing skills–she creates all of her content–suggest someone who could publish video for National Geographic. She uses two Go Pro cameras and a drone to capture footage that she edits when she can find electricity and a SIM card to transmit on a laptop. 

Those items are part of the precious weight that she scrupulously seeks to avoid. Viewers have seen her drop her Honda and bog down to her seat more times than I have fingers.  She is an expert in using her small frame to position herself backwards against her fallen motorcycle to raise it. Until I started viewing her site, I thought I knew something about dirt roads from my rural South Carolina upbringing in the 1950s. Little did I know that those slick muddy tracks were comparative interstate highways compared to the rural third world she inhabits.

Through her blogs, I have seen vehicles so entrapped in mud that they have had to be abandoned until a dry season emerges. The “tracked” third world of her travels goes by donkey, camel, foot, and motorcycle. Noraly is weighted down but she often travels along side Chinese-made motorcycles in remote places that convey whole families and household goods. 

I love geography for its own sake and her Itchy Boots taught me more about North and South America than I had accumulated via a long lifetime of learning, yet that is not what places her travels deep in my heart. 

It is her encounters with people. Her Spanish and Portuguese are excellent and her French, adequate; she picks up local languages fast, earning her respect and smiles from natives.

She uses her bright smile and engaging, fearless personality to find out about people she meets and often boards with them in remote places. She is as expert in drawing out the lives of those she encounters as the best of NPR reporters. 

She has taken me into the lives of ordinary people in more than 100 countries. Her method is rooted in allowing them to speak for themselves. Occasionally the viewer gets a whiff of her worldview (especially in regard to wildlife preservation) but not often. She recently pointed out that her sojourn among the Pygmy tribes in Congo gave her a rare chance to feel tall because she was on average a head taller than Pygmies. She went on to say that people in the Netherlands are quite tall. Poof! That remark came and went quickly because she stands at an oblique angle from what typical internet influencers do. 

I am a somewhat melancholy person but every one of her broadcasts fills me with the kind of joy that often sends me to the next room to tell my wife Nita about what I saw in her contact with rural people in villages. She is a humanitarian and roving ambassador to the world in a Jimmy Carter kind of way.

One lone female motorcyclist has show me the goodness of humanity in remote locations around the globe. I hoard programs–she posts two in a good week–so that I have an experience to cheer me up at the end of the day at least once a week. Her audience comments give me a way to test my own experience. “Am I crazy to be so enamored of her reports?” I ask myself. For sure, “No.” Her followers exceed two million and reflect the wonder and joy that I experience, too, in comments that uplift in multiple languages.