"Crossing Bridges" by Lisa Watts
– The closer I got to 60, the more restless I felt.
Cars and trucks thunder past, just a few feet to our left.
Lisa Watts is a nonprofit communications manager living in Greensboro, North Carolina. She conceived and edited Good Roots: Writers Reflect on Growing Up in Ohio (Ohio University Press, 2006), an anthology of essays and poems by 20 prominent writers. She is working on her own essay collection about her two-month bike trip up the East Coast.
Author’s Talk
Lisa Watts recharging during her October 2023 ride through Europe
Sometime in the year before I rode my bike up the East Coast, I wrote to my beloved UMass Amherst journalism professor, Norman Sims, to tell him about the trip and that I planned to write about it. He thought I’d be writing some sort of guide to the route. When I told him that no, I wanted to write about my experience and how it felt, he cautioned me, “Well, you have to think about the ending. You can’t just hug your friend and walk away.” Which is pretty much what happened: 57 days after leaving Key West, Dee and I hugged on the border of Canada and went back to our lives.
This lack of an ending bothered me. Was there really no story arc, nothing to resolve by the end of my trip? I wasn’t a cancer survivor battling my way back to health by pedaling up the coast. I wasn’t fighting off crippling depression, and Dee and I didn’t face any huge calamities—we just rode our bikes for two months and I learned to communicate better. But as time passed, I began to see that the trip changed me in subtle but vital ways. The changes have a lot to do with understanding that life is a journey, not a destination, which is simple to say but much harder to practice. More than anything the trip taught me to embrace my sixties and life’s third act with all new enthusiasm and confidence. I’m still a work in progress, but I’m enjoying the ride.—Lisa Watts
Lisa Watts and her wheels of change.
