Two Cultures Press :: Going Home: Cycling Through The Heart of America (2014)

Going Home: Cycling Through The Heart Of America
Ken Stange
Published by Two Cultures Press (2014)

Going Home is the record of a three-week cycling trip undertaken by a middle-aged man and his son, pedaling 2,500 kilometers from New Orleans back up the map to their home in Canada. For the father it was a brief return to the country that was his home for the first two decades of his life. For his son, it was an introduction to the country that had shaped his father. This book is about this land seen more intimately than is possible in a car. It is also about the people they met along the way: 'Saint' Cecil of Natalbany, Louisiana; Ma and the homebody farmer at Ma's Hitching Post in rural Tennessee; Dennis 'The Hustler' in Nashville; Rose and Albert at The Jam Factory in Louisville; the 'Third Brother' in Bowling Green; Jimmy of The Crow Bar in Sabina; Billy 'The Biker' on the Geneva Strip; and many others, all people that somehow within minutes (or hours) came to personify and capture, like apt images in a poem, the heart of America.

Two Cultures Press (2014)
ISBN: 978-0-9809273-8-2
Softcover (6x9 inches) 286 pages
Signed by author edition also only: $20. (with free shipping!)

Also available from Amazon.ca and Amazon.com ($17.96 USD) here:

Going Home: Cycling Through The Heart Of America

Going Home: Cycling Through The Heart of America (2014)

Excerpt

CONTEXT: We arrive in Nashville after five days riding and camping along The Trace, a 710 km. swath of virtual wilderness that begins in Natchez. We set out on the town and are picked up by a hustler determined to be our guide who takes us to a seedy bar.

"We try to find out more about him, about Nashville in general, but Dennis is evasive. Instead, he is determined to pump us for information about our trip, about Canada. We are still so high about how far we have travelled, and feeling gregarious after so many days out in the solitude of the Trace, that we do far more talking than he does.
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Dennis catches me looking at a woman at the bar. He points out that she's the resident whore. "Goes pretty cheap," he adds, laughing.
.
No thank you! She was one of the most frightening creatures I've ever laid eyes on.

Her skin is pasty, with nasty red blotches. Her eyes are rheumy. Several of her front teeth are missing. She is obese in that doughy soft way that always reminds me of a garbage bag stuffed with some lumpy insulation material. I try to imagine what kind of man would, could, have sex with her. My imagination fails me.
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A door in the rear of the bar opens and an anorexic transvestite, who must be six foot three, sashays into the room. He/she is poured into clothes that had to be specially made; you can't find off-the-rack slacks with a forty-inch inseam and a twenty-two-inch waist. He/she comes flitting through the bar, wiggling his/her tiny butt and waving to everyone. A chorus of long suffering but tolerant sighs, followed by a "Hi Coco!", break like the wake of a motor boat on the shores of a narrow channel as this sweetheart passes through on the way to the front door."