America – C-VILLE Weekly

Riding lessons: A cyclist learns a lot about himself—and America—on an epic tour

On six-week jaunts over several years, Charlottesville’s Chris Register crisscrossed the country on his bike, interviewing people for his book series Conversations With US: Two Wheels, Fifty States, Hundreds of Voices, One America. The first volume, published in early 2019, is based on his 1,916-mile trip through the Midwest and Great Lakes states. Here, he offers a personal account of his journey and mission.

When I graduated from law school in Washington, D.C., in 2009, partisanship and political bickering were the worst I’d ever seen. I thought it would be cool to get out there, talk to people, and find what’s really going on. I did my first tour in 2010, nearly 2,000 miles, interviewing at least one person a day about their views on America.

After that tour, I took a break to work and save up my money, always knowing I’d get back to my tours and writing. In 2015, I quit my job and started my second tour. That’s recorded in the first volume.

Register’s book and more information about his travels are available at conversationswithus.com.

I’ll write about Charlottesville in the book that covers what I call Appalachia and bluegrass country. I remember coming down out of the Shenandoah mountains and riding straight to the Lawn. I interviewed two students—one of them came to the book-release party. That was cool. The next day I rode up to Monticello and spoke to Linnea Grim, the director of education and visitors’ programs. I ended up settling down here.

In all the ground I’ve covered, two stories really stand out. One is about the vastness of this country, and the other is about learning to walk in another person’s shoes.

I’m 39, so I grew up well after the civil rights movement. Most people my age or a little younger haven’t actually talked to someone who had to sit at the back of the bus. But when I was in Elgin, Illinois, I interviewed Ernie Broadnax. Ernie was the only black player on his debate and basketball teams in high school and community college. He told me, after a win, his white teammates would celebrate at a restaurant, but one of them would have to bring his meal to him on the bus. That upsets me. It gets me in the gut.

The other story unfolded at the Grand Canyon. I arrived at dusk. There was a full moon rising. After I set up camp on a rock outcropping at the edge of the canyon, I looked down and thought I saw the haunch of a large, brown animal that had moved around a rock. An hour later, after sunset, the moon was bright. I stood up and was looking out over the canyon. There was a sort of gray-blue hue to everything. I was soaking it all in. It was beautiful, an endless view. I looked to my left and saw bright flashes, like Morse code: dot, dot, dash. I finally realized what it was—a mountain lion. It had looked right at me, and the moonlight reflected off the lenses of its eyes. I never saw it again. If he wanted to get me, he would have. But he didn’t.

Ultimately, I’ve learned that I can do more than I ever thought I could. I climbed 12,000 feet to Independence Pass, outside Aspen, Colorado. My bike and gear are 125 pounds in all, and the oxygen gets kind of thin up there. I pressed on slowly, and I made it. Writing is like that, too. If you just keep going, you can do anything. Determination is the most important factor in success.
—Chris Register, as told to Joe Bargmann

Chris’ stats

15,769 miles

6,307,600 crankshaft revolutions

376 interviews

355 days on the road

47 flat tires

Letting it flow: Kyle Dargan fights futility with poetry

As a child, Kyle Dargan began writing rhymes largely as a matter of convenience.

“If you wanted to make music, especially back in the ’90s, you needed somebody with a studio and recording equipment,” he says. “But you could write [hip-hop lyrics] at home, on the bus, in a notebook, and share with people and workshop and take their feedback and try to get better at it.”

Now a highly awarded poet and writing teacher at American University, Dargan became interested in poetry just shy of high school. “One of the things I really push back against as a teacher at the college level is that by the time I get my students, most of them have probably experienced some poetry trauma,” he says. Whereas children are born with a basic element of creative freedom, he says he must “deprogram [his students] from the feeling that unless you are able to interpret a poem a certain way, you’re wrong or you’re wasting your time in reading it.”

Growing up in Newark, New Jersey, Dargan went to Saint Benedict’s Prep and then to the University of Virginia, where he was a graduate of the first-ever area program in poetry writing. He went on to Indiana University, where he received his MFA in creative writing, and then moved to Washington, D.C., to study art management and teach at American.

“I couldn’t have ever imagined it, but being here during the Obama administration I got to do some great work with the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities and [produce poetry programming] at the White House,” he says. “As much as D.C. is maligned, I really try to appreciate all the unusually marvelous things that can only happen here.”

Given Dargan’s penchant for exploring themes like contemporary masculinity and “America as a concept—not so much a place but an idea,” it’s easy to understand the relevance of his poems.

“As much as D.C. is maligned, I really try to appreciate all the unusually marvelous things that can only happen here.”

In his forthcoming collection, Anagnorisis, he explores the moment he understood his American fate in the same way a Greek tragic hero experiences crystalline self-awareness. “With all of the police shootings of citizens…I felt like, you know, ‘I have a feeling the country’s kinda going in a direction that I’m not quite sure of yet,’” he says. “And then the 2016 election happened. I was like, ‘Ah, okay, this is it. And I know what side of it I am on.’”

Still, he says, “when I think about America now, I’m one of the few who still believes America is heading in a post-racial direction. But I say that with a caveat that the hours, the years right before the change becomes real are often the most violent.”

After traveling to China twice in the last 10 years and examining why it continues to buy American debt, Dargan says he’s realized America’s biggest export is promise.

“I don’t want to look at it as hope,” he adds, “because I don’t think those ideologies are going to roll away easily. But I do think that America, more than anything, is a place of reckoning. It’s a difficult reckoning, and we are gradually becoming mature enough to handle that reckoning, but we’re not there yet.”

By helping heal the trauma inflicted on students’ creative self-expression, Dargan hopes to support that maturation process. “A big part of what makes creative communication work is being able to be present as yourself on the page, right? If you’re not open and vulnerable and honestly dealing with who you are and how you write, you’re limiting the potential of whatever communication you’re making with someone else,” he says. “I believe that the ability to communicate, first and foremost with yourself and then transferring that to others, definitely saves us all.”