Close your eyes. This won’t take a moment. I want you to picture… a one-horse town. And I guess that’s all I need to say, isn’t it?

But just in case, let’s say it’s midday, the sun’s blazing down on Main Street, the mythical `one horse` is grabbing some shut-eye under the hanging-tree and one oldtimer is sitting asleep outside the barber shop. I dare say you now have a very good idea of the sort of scene I want you to conjure up. But just in case, let’s sling in a tumbleweed.

Right, that’s the setting. Now for the stranger. You know he’s going to ride into town real slow. There is no other way, is there? You know too he’s going to be dusty and hot from the trail. And thirsty? Hell, his throat’ll be – what’s the word? Yep, you got it: parched. And just in case there’s anyone there apart from the oldtimer to hear him riding up to the hitching-rail, we’ll give him a little sound-effect of some sort. Who knows, it might turn out to be his signature tune. You’re probably thinking of a little jingling of spurs; or maybe you want him to be playing a jew’s harp.
Well, they’re good answers, but I need to step in here and say no, what the little old guy outside the barber’s shop hears, as he wakes from his siesta and feels in his jeans for a pack of cigarettes, is a dry, rhythmic squeaking.

Ee-eek… ee-eek… ee-eek… ee-eek And as the stranger slows down, so does the noise. He’s had that squeaking all along the Republican River. Two hundred miles, and it’s been driving him nuts.

Finally he comes to a stop, and the town is silent once more apart from the chirruping of the cicadas. As he lowers himself stiffly onto the road and steps up to the boardwalk he grimaces. And the oldtimer pauses with a cigarette between his cracked lips and a match in his hand, pushes his hat back on his head and squints up to see what kinda darned fool is out in this heat.

“Saddle-sore, huh?”

The stranger nods his head. “Ridden fifty miles since sun-up.” And then, as he shakes the trail dust off his clothes he asks, “Say, is there anybody in town can help me get this fixed? She’s in real bad shape.”

The little old feller rubs his chin, strikes a match on his boot-heel, and holds it to his cigarette. “We-ell,” he says as he sucks on it, “there used to be a feller back of Main Street.” He holds the smoke for a moment, then lets it out in a long slow loving plume. “But he died.”

Then he casts a sceptical eye over the stranger’s trusty steed and asks, “Guess you ain’t from around these parts, huh?”

Okay, we can stop fooling around now. I will tell you precisely what happened next in the little town of Red Cloud, Nebraska (population 1204) sometime in the late summer of 1994. I said to the guy, “I wanted to take a little trip across The Great Plains.” And he said, “Hell, I wouldn’t mind doing that myself – on a Harley Davidson.” And then he looked at my trusty steed once more and sort of snorted, and said, “But on a goddam bicycle? Hell no!”

You may as well call me Slim. The little old feller did, as he bought me a beer in the saloon and introduced me to his friends. “This here’s my buddy, Slim, from England. Riding a bicycle clear across the U.S. of A.” I tried to tell them, no, I’m riding across Nebraska, but they wouldn’t listen. Too busy trying to remember when they last saw a bike in town, and who that feller was who used to fix `em – and what he died of.

As I struggled west next day into a strengthening wind I decided that next time I came out on the Great Plains I’d come by car. And, just for the hell of it, I would indeed cross the entire U.S. of A., except I’d do it south to north rather than coast-to-coast. I’d drive from the Mexican border clear to Canada, all the way up the Great Plains, all along the Hundredth Meridian.