Pedaling to Mexico on Trash Bicycles

The group promotes bicycle use not only for the beneficial environmental impact but also for its economic feasibility. The League of American Bicyclists estimates that bicycle commuting costs $120 per year on average; the American Automobile Association says it costs nearly $6,000 per year to operate a car. For Austinites and the Mexican workers the savings can be significant.

January 3, 2009 — Day One, 0 miles — Austin, Texas

Nineteen riders head for the border — 15 men and four women in their 20s and 30s. Most of the group are Austin residents, but some come from as far away as Maryland. For some, their bicycle is not only their sole mode of transportation, it is their livelihood. Four deliver food on bicycles for a downtown burger joint, and several others operate pedicabs (pedal-powered taxis).

After a long day of getting everything ready for the ride, about half the group rides to a brownfield, a piece of land reclaimed from its former life as a municipal landfill and later illegal dumping ground. The city donated the land to the Rhizome Collective in 2004 for them to clean up and use. We set up camp, erecting a community shelter out of a large tarp and some tree limbs, and then sit around a fire, talking excitedly about the upcoming weeks. The lights of Austin’s skyline are splayed on the horizon, but somehow it feels as if we’ve already begun our journey into the unknown.

Only later do I realize the symbolism of this first night, all of us sleeping on top of green, vegetative mounds that had once been trash. It’s hard to tell that just five years earlier this spot was covered with “680 tires, 10.1 tons and 36.5 cubic yards of trash, and 31.6 tons of recyclable metal,” according to the collective’s press release. Our first night’s stay at the reclaimed brownfield in Austin stands in stark contrast to the expanse of trash-covered fields we will find nearly 400 miles away in Derechos Humanos, which means “Human Rights.”

January 6, 2009 — Day Three, 102.6 miles — Kosciusko, Texas

We wake up in Seguin to a steady rain, but soon the clouds part and it’s a beautiful, cloudless day, a welcome change after two days of riding through cold drizzle and wind. We spent the night in the yard of a woman we had met at the coffee shop downtown. She’d been working behind the counter when we arrived, and by the fourth or fifth person in line, she started asking us who we were and what we were doing. When we told her, she immediately offered up her home and her yard to 19 strangers for the night. It seemed a fluke, but it would soon prove to be the norm.

Later that morning, we hop on our bikes and head south, unsure where we’ll spend the night. When we finally arrive at a gas station in Kosciusko, the sun is starting to set and a chill has entering the air. It seems like a good time to start looking for a place to camp.

The gas station doubles as an after-work hangout for the locals, who look at us curiously as we pull up. One man, a large, lumbering fellow named Harvey, walks up while we’re sitting outside discussing what to do next and asks us where we’re from. We are obviously an unfamiliar sight in Kosciusko, a town that doesn’t seem to be made up of much more than this gas station and a church.

We start with a spiel that will become familiar: that we are on our way to Mexico to donate our bicycles to workers in Matamoros. Harvey offers to take us to the community center for the night, a big hall with a bar and some outdoor pavilions next to a large field. Lined along the edge are at least eight gas cookers, big enough to boil a cauldron over, and some wheeled barbecue smokers — the kind you see all over Texas. We head to the pavilion, start setting up camp and use the sinks to wash some of our clothing with a washboard brought along by Stephen Williams, a 27-year-old rider from Missouri we called “Ugg”.

Soon Harvey arrives, after apparently notifying most of the town. Pickup truck after pickup truck drives up to say hello, see the to-do and talk to Harvey as he makes calls to get the lights turned on and the gas cookers fired up. His wife soon shows up with packages of homemade venison sausage — the fruit of Harvey’s hunting — and we all eat what feels like a royal feast, sitting around the tables getting to know each other and our hosts for the evening. There’s nothing like biking nearly 40 miles in the rolling hills to work up an appetite. It’s a reception we didn’t expect in small-town Texas, but we find this sort of response everywhere we go.

January 8, 2009 — Day Five, 187.1 miles — Mathis, Texas

Yesterday’s 40-mile ride into Pettus was one of the hardest days yet. Four days in and the hills and headwinds had been wearing us all down, but after Pettus, the land started to flatten out, dipping into the edges of the Rio Grande Valley. Everywhere we’ve been the roads have been littered with beer cans, bottles and plastic bags. We start playing a game today, like the “I spy” game bored children might play on a long drive. We shout out the new pieces of litter we see, each of us trying to notice the most absurd item possible. We start collecting too.

Steve finds a red bow tie and quickly puts it on, posing for a picture. Roy picks up a faded fake carnation and ties it to his handlebars. Josh scores a pair of rain pants and some Dickies jeans, while Joe finds a white, rubber-coated dish rack that he mounts to his handlebars so he can browse his Spanish phrase book while riding the flat, straight stretches of road. It seems as if every other mile produces something useful as well, like a length of climbing rope, a bungee cord or miscellaneous nuts and bolts that can be used to fix loose parts.