On Your Left

By Jack Rightmyer

The idea to write my book “On Your Left” occurred to me as I was biking Parks & Trails New York’s annual Cycle the Erie Canal from Buffalo to Albany in 2013 with over 400 other cyclists including my wife Judy, our daughter Erin and our son-in-law Paul. Since that time Judy and I have completed other multiday bike trips such as across England from the Irish Sea to the North Sea, and for our 40th anniversary we biked from our home in Burnt Hills to the Battery on the tip of Manhattan along the Empire State Trail.

The Erie Canal ride is still the only group ride we’ve done, and it was a lot of fun. We biked for eight days and covered 411 miles. Our longest day was a 65-mile ride that finished high up a hill at Canajoharie High School (one of the few major hills on the trek).

We met people from all over the country and from Canada. Most of us slept in tents every night, usually covering entire athletic fields at various public high schools. Some nights we ate catered meals at a school cafeteria or park with the other bikers and a few nights we skipped out and looked for a local restaurant or pub. Occasionally there would be a guest speaker about the Erie Canal or about the local history of the area where we were camping. One night I remember there was a band and a big campfire.

The four of us tended to get into a routine, waking up at similar times and beginning the ride usually around 8am after our catered breakfast. There were over 400 people completing this eight day ride, but we often ended up biking with the same people every day. We were chugging along in the 14 to 15 mile per hour crowd. There was a fair amount of talking, but when you’re biking 50 miles on a hot July day with occasional showers or rain, you also tend to conserve your energy by focusing on what you were doing. This meant that for the four or five hours a day we were biking, we were mostly quiet and living with our own thoughts.

We were encouraged every morning at breakfast by the group leaders to visit various sights along the way, museums, towns, art galleries, which we did, and I also learned a lot about the Erie Canal, Fort Stanwix, and even the origins of Mormonism. It was also fun to observe the people who were wearing some clever bike shirts and apparel. Just about every day we biked with a mom and her 17-year-old son. One day at a rest stop I struck up a conversation with them. They were both from Canada. The mom was a teacher, and the boy played soccer.

After that conversation I got back on my bike and began thinking there was no way I would ever have gone on an eight day bike trip with my mom when I was17. With so much time on the bike I began to think through writing a story about a teenage boy biking with his mom in a group ride. Why is he doing this? What kind of kid was he? Where is the father? Is there a father? What if he met a girl his age on the ride and fell in love with her?

Every day after that, I looked forward to getting back on the bike so I could return to this story I was creating. I desperately wanted to find out what was going to happen. I decided to make the kid a runner. I knew runners. I’m a runner and I was a track and cross country coach for 29 years. I will have him fall in love with another runner, and it will be the first time he’s ever been in love, but it’s only a five day group bike trip. Will the love last or is it only a flirtation? Will this meeting change him in any way? And what about the mother? Maybe she was having marriage problems, and what if she also met someone on this trip?

For the last ten years I’ve been playing around with this story, adding to it, taking parts out. Originally, I thought I would set the ride along the route we biked, but then I thought it would be fun to create my own route through the Adirondacks on many of the roads I’ve biked. It’s been much fun to create this story, and this September it will finally be published. The boy and the girl in the story reminded me so much of all the wonderful athletes I’ve coached through the years. These are the kids in high school who are diligent students, never get in trouble and for fun they push themselves every afternoon from 3 to 5pm to excel as athletes. These well-adjusted teenagers are not usually the main characters in novels, but even good kids can have worries and face hurdles in life.

There are so many wonderful opportunities to go on multiday bike trips today, and I hope my book will inspire people to try a few. My book, On Your Left, is being published by the Troy Book Makers and will be available in September at most local bookstores and on Amazon.

Jack Rightmyer (jackxc@nycap.rr.com) of Burnt Hills was a longtime cross country coach at Bethlehem High School and is a recently retired adjunct English professor at Siena College. He has written two books “A Funny Thing About Teaching” and “It’s Not About Winning.”