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Local bikes across country, realizes it's the journey that counts
By COLBY FRAZIER — Aug. 27, 2009

When Frank Schipper turned 70, he knew he wanted a big birthday present.
Not a new car or a cruise to some distant land: he wanted to relinquish control and, for perhaps the first time in decades, strip his life down to the raw necessity of passing between one point and the next.

So on May 17, Schipper set out from the Virginia waterfront on a three-month bike ride that cut through the mid-section of the nation, taking him from one rocky shore to the other.
If freedom from everyday stresses was what Schipper was looking for, he found it.

Each morning he broke down his tent and pondered the day’s distance: sometimes it was 60 miles over the pancake-flat plains of Kansas; other times it was only 40 miles over the steep pitches of the Appalachian Mountains.

Schipper, a straight-talking man with a white beard who immigrated to the United States from the Netherlands in 1954 and graduated from Santa Barbara High School in 1957, settled into the routine, cooking for others on the ride every four days, and finding the vacation he was looking for.

“On this ride there was absolutely no responsibility,” he said during a recent interview at his home, narrating pictures from the trip that he’d tacked to a wall. “That was the high point for me.”
Schipper is a carpenter by trade. He founded Frank Schipper Construction Co. in 1982, and by appearances, has done little else but work hard ever since.

An avid bicyclist as a young man, Schipper hung up his bike after enduring a series of shoulder surgeries.
Then, in 2003, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, which after an operation, he kicked.

But two years ago, Schipper had an urge to clip back into the pedals. He bought a “shamefully” expensive bike, as he described it, and hit the road.

While he insists his true aim in his trek across America was self serving, it’s not totally accurate.

Before Schipper left Santa Barbara he gathered a number of sponsors, some who gave lump sums of cash and others who pledged per mile. In all, Schipper raised about $33,000, which he intends to donate to the TRADART Foundation, a nonprofit founded by his wife Leslie Meadowcroft-Schipper, that promotes and provides vocational courses in local schools.
Meadowcroft-Schipper joined her husband for 1,000 miles of the total 4,285-mile ride.

Throughout the ride, she said she didn’t worry about her husband a bit. She received a postcard in the mail each week with stories about freezing rain storms, soaking wet sleeping bags and painful, hilly climbs on the East Coast. Through it all, she said she’s “never seen him so happy.”

Schipper talks about his ride with a level of excitement one would expect from a child fresh from a week at Disneyland.
Surprisingly, he said the roughest part of the journey wasn’t over the Rocky or Cascade mountains, but rather the Ozarks and Appalachians.

“Getting up to the Blue Ridge was a heroic effort,” he said.
He said the prettiest state was Idaho, particularly a stretch he rode along the Lochsa River.

Also in Idaho, Schipper said he and the handful of other riders in the group braved a swarm of Mormon crickets. The insects were so thick along the highways that their carcasses made the road slick, he said.

At one point, a hornet flew down the front of Schipper’s jersey, “stitching a pattern” he said, on his chest.

In a wind-swept former uranium mining boomtown in Wyoming that saw its best days more than two decades ago, Schipper holed up in a hotel. After taking a look at the sheets on the bed, he chose to get some shut eye in the protection of his sleeping bag.

He crossed the Continental Divide nine times and was welcomed into churches to spend the night, sleeping on a pew in one that the minister promised was comfortable.
In Kentucky and Virginia, small box turtles were being killed in droves crossing the highways. Every time Schipper saw one wandering into traffic, he stopped and carried it to the other side. Once, Schipper mistakenly tried to save the life of a snapping turtle that tried to bite his hand as he helped it.

He recalled the roar of thousands of coal trucks rolling through the countryside in Kentucky, though he said he could count on one hand the number of times drivers were discourteous.
In a truck stop in Wyoming, Schipper said a gruff trucker told one of the best jokes of the trip.

The trucker, who was eating breakfast, turned to the group and, according to Schipper, said: “You guys are practicing the oldest profession in the world. You’re peddling your ass.”

Although most of the sights and sounds Schipper experienced were beautiful, some were eye-opening. He said a church in Kentucky was emblazoned with a swastika, a symbol that doesn’t sit well with a man who grew up in Europe during World War II.
Schipper kept a detailed journal and, shortly after his last few strokes on the pedals delivered him to the Oregon Coast, he calculated the trip in hard numbers. The whole trip was 81 days, with 70 days riding. He averaged 52.9 miles per day at an average speed of 11 mph. By his calculations that’s 80 revolutions per minute, or 1.8 million revolutions over the course of the trip, during which Schipper was on the bike for 390 hours.
To hear him tell it, and to see his eyes grow big and his voice elevate as the story thickens, one is hard-pressed to find a 70-year-old cancer survivor beneath that beard.

“I said ‘shit, 70th birthday, let’s ride across America,” Schipper recalls telling himself when he settled on what to get himself for a birthday present. “I made it in fine fashion. I’m so glad I did it.”
Along the immense pattern of highways stitched across America, the seemingly insurmountable task of riding more than 4,000 miles at the age of 70 melted into irrelevant numerals for Schipper that became lost in a landscape of people and places.
“It’s such a huge, huge endeavor,” he said, “and then you realize it’s the journey, not the numbers.”