[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: It's The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry.

Imagine you're on a cross-country road trip. You set out from the west traveling over the snowcap Rockies in Montana, crusting their jagged peaks for breathtaking vistas. You pass through the rugged sand-colored badlands in South Dakota before continuing on down across the sun-drenched great plains of Nebraska where the flat road seems as if it could go on forever. Now, imagine you're doing all of that on a bicycle.

[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Hard to put yourself in those pedals? Well, here's someone who's done exactly that.

Erick Cedeño: My name is Erick Cedeño and I'm the founder of Bicycle Nomad.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Erick is a bikepacker. He travels long distances for weeks to months at a time with everything he needs strapped in his bike. These two-wheeled treks aren't just about seeing how far his legs can take him, they're a way for him to retrace the pathways of Black Americans before him.

Erick Cedeño: I've always been a curious person. Even as a kid, I wanted to see the country by bicycle. My first trip was from Vancouver, Canada to Tijuana, Mexico. That was about 2300 miles. It took me about 39 days, and I went along the Pacific Coast Highway. I just fell in love with the lifestyle, and I committed to myself to travel and see the whole country by bike, and I have done it. Last year, I completed all the states, every single one except Alaska. I still need to travel in Alaska.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What did you love about it when you first did it? What connected? You said, "Yes, this speaks to something inside of me."

Erick Cedeño: I think it's the solitude and being able to listen to myself. I just needed the space to calm down, and I didn't know what to do. One day, I woke up and said, "I wonder if I could travel by bicycle cross-country," and that's what attracted me to it. Just being able to be in solitude. I learned so much about myself, learned so much about the landscape of the country, the people of this country. Every year, I just took 30 days out of my life to go explore this country by bicycle.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Talk to me about taking this experience which is personal and exploring history and in that way, making it this broader collective project.

Erick Cedeño: Since I was a kid, I've been in love with history. I remember going to Mexico with my mom when I was 12-years-old, and she took me to Mexico just to see the pyramids and the temples of the Mayan and Aztec civilization. That was the whole trip to go to Mexico. That changed my life. That's who I am today. When I started traveling by bike, I enjoyed it very much, but I didn't see a purpose. It also was very challenging mentally and physically, so I needed that carrot. In early 2014, I decided to travel along the Underground Railroad by bicycle, a particular route of the Underground Railroad that talks about Follow the Drinking Gourd, that song. I stayed along the banks of the Tennessee River, the Ohio River, and all the way up to Niagara Falls.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Those rivers are crossing points in the journey to freedom, I'm wondering what you felt in those spaces.

Erick Cedeño: For me, it was a lot of learning about the resilience of the people that traveled through those routes. As hard as my trip was, I compare it to what they had to go to, but to travel through river and camp out, in a way, was for me, healing. I actually decided not to carry a GPS. I just had a regular paper map, but I also followed that song, and that's how they navigated.

That song, Follow the Drinking Gourd wasn't just a song, it was their GPS to navigate through the landscape of this country and seeing the stars and particularly the North Star. For me, I was traveling in the daytime and I realized that they travel at night, so I decided to take five days to travel at night. I will break camp around ten o'clock at night because I wanted to sense that fear and I also wanted to sense how did they navigate through the dark in Alabama and Mississippi and Kentucky and Tennessee. I took those days at night and I travel from ten o'clock at night till six o'clock AM.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Don't hit those handlebar breaks just yet, there's more coming up on The Takeaway. I'm still here with Erick Cedeño, a bikepacker and the founder of Bicycle Nomad. Now, Erick's bikepacking trips have taken him not only across the country but through history. Last year, he completed a ride of 1900 miles over a span of 41 days from Missoula, Montana to St. Louis, Missouri. He was following in the tracks of a group of Black men who had done this route before, all the way back in 1897. These were soldiers in the US Army serving in racially segregated regiments in the American West, who came to be known as the Buffalo Soldiers. 20 of them were selected for a bit of an experiment.

The army was thinking about forming a bicycle corps. The journey they undertook was grueling, 1900 miles in biting snow and blistering heat, 50 miles a day. They did it, but the army then lost interest in forming an official bicycle corps. When Erick Cedeño learned about these Black cyclists, he committed to recreating their journey. Since doing so last year, he continued to explore their story and to share it with others.

Erick Cedeño: Melissa, when I first started traveling by bike, I wanted to know who were the first people that traveled by bike. I wanted to know where they went and why did they go there. I saw a lot of expedition in the late 1890s, and then I came across the Buffalo Soldiers, the 25th Infantry, which we called the Bicycle Corps. It was just an experiment. I literally felt like I found gold because up to that point, everyone that I saw, their expedition were white. For the first time, I'm seeing Black men by bicycle traveling cross-country, and I felt cheated [chuckles]. I felt cheated because I would've said to myself, "If I would've known this in middle school and high school, or even in college, I probably would've started exploring my bicycle way ahead of time." They're my inspiration, my motivation to see the landscape because in 1897, there was the Bicycle Corps, they did three expedition. It was just an experiment done by the army. For me, they're my heroes and they're amazing.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I want to talk about Helena, Montana because we actually had a conversation with the mayor of Helena, Montana, who is a Black man, who's actually immigrated to the US from Liberia. It was this fascinating conversation. I understand that you had an experience at Fort Harrison in Helena when you were on this bike track.

Erick Cedeño: Yes. When I traveled through history, I want to go exactly where those people traveled through. It's similar to the Underground Railroad where I spent several nights at Underground Railroad Station. I wanted to have the same experience with the Bicycle Corps. I did a lot of research and I found out that when they went over the Continental Divide and they dropped into Helena, Montana, they stayed at this fort called Fort Harrison.

Prior to my trip, I called almost every day and I called the base in the fort, and I was like, "Can I stay there? I'm traveling through history." The Bicycle Corps stayed there. Because I'm not military, I was turned down all the time [chuckles]. When I went to Helena, I wanted to see the museum. They have a military museum at Fort Helena. I'm like, "Before I go camping, I'm going to stop at Fort Harrison and see if I could see the museum and hopefully, they have pictures that I don't have and maybe they have history of when this guy stayed there."

I was saddened to know when I went in there that there was nothing about the Bicycle Corps, so I immediately looked around and I left. As I was leaving, there was a lady waving from a building across from the museum, and I'm like, "Why is she waving at me? I don't know who she is." She comes down and she says, "Are you the guy that is retracing the Bicycle Corp? I just saw you on the news?" I said, "Yes, I am." She's like, "Thank you for doing that and giving them dignity, and love the work that you're doing. What can I do for you?" I said, "I would love to stay here." Immediately, she says, "Well, I could make that happen. I'm the colonel of this Fort."

It's so interesting those kinds of experience always happen when I'm traveling through history because I'm always talking to ancestors. I'm always talking to the people that are traveling those routes and that traveled those routes before. I always say, "Please tell me what happened here?" I'm not sure if they're listening, but I always get these experiences and out of all the military people in this Fort, the one person that could make that override greeted me. I always wonder how that happened but I know how it happened [chuckles].

Melissa Harris-Perry: Talk to me about staying safe on these trips, not only when you're camping, but also when you're biking while Black.

Erick Cedeño: That's always the concern, and my family always, even my dad, even till now, I'm an older person and my dad just keeps texting me like, "Please text me when you get to the hotel," because again, I'm person of color. I haven't encountered anything negative in 14 years of traveling by bicycle. I do see people's attitude change when I go into a room or grocery store but I'm traveling through places that may have population of 150 people and probably they've never seen someone of color, not in person, perhaps. For me, it's always a concern, but I've never experienced any negativity yet.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What projects are next for you? What big adventures await?

Erick Cedeño: 2025, I'm hoping to go to the North Pole. When I was a kid, Melissa, I read the history of Matthew Henson, who was a polar explorer and African American and is considered the first person to go to the North Pole. I read his biography and I just fell in love with who he was and how resilient he was. I want to go see what he saw up there, so 2025, the North Pole is next. Not by bicycle, but by skiing.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I was like, okay, now we have to talk about how in the world you're biking that way.

[laughter]

Erick Cedeño: No, I don't think you could. Not in the North Pole. In the South, you're able to take a bike but in the North Pole, you can't so you have to cross it by skiing.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I feel like this is a completely just personal question that how in the world do you keep your bottom from hurting from this long on a bicycle seat?

Erick Cedeño: I don't know if I have any nerves back there anymor because I'm just going to be honest, I've traveled over 50,000 miles cross-country. I've seen the whole country by bike, and I just don't have any feeling anymore back there.

[laughter]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Erick Cedeño is a bike packer and founder of Bicycle Nomad. Erick, thank you so much for joining us.

Erick Cedeño: Thank you very much, Melissa.

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.