Cross-country bike journey of adventure and healing
Martin Bauman thought riding a bicycle from Vancouver to St. John’s was the hardest thing he had ever done. But then he wrote a book about the journey and dug into his family’s depression and his own childhood trauma and that proved even harder.
Bauman, now a reporter for The Coast in Halifax, was 23 years old when he bicycled solo across Canada in 2016 to raise funds for mental health services in his hometown of Waterloo, Ont. The ride came in the wake of his father’s depression, his cousin’s suicide, and an increasing awareness of his own childhood traumatic memories. His mission on the 7,000-kilometre journey was to encourage people — especially men — to talk about depression. Along the way, he raised $12,000 for mental health services, interrogated his past and reflected on family, community and belonging.
“I am still a reluctant memoirist,” he said in a recent interview to talk about his new nonfiction book, Hell of a Ride: Chasing Home and Survival on a Bicycle Voyage Across Canada (Pottersfield Press). “That was the eternal struggle — to plumb the depths of my own mind and psyche and history.”
When he set out on his summer-long, solo journey, Bauman was restless and in need of direction. “Leading up to the ride, I hadn’t processed my family’s story of mental health and I hadn’t processed my own trauma, my trauma of experiencing childhood sexual abuse, and not really thinking about it for years and years,” he said. “I wasn’t really comfortable yet talking about myself and my own struggles.”
But endless days on the open road gave Bauman the space and time needed to reflect on his past and to develop a new relationship with himself and his body. Testing his strength and resilience, the ride proved to be both emotional and physical therapy. It also taught him the value of connection and community.
“I think trauma — and perhaps especially trauma involving abuse — can be hard for anyone to talk about, and I've reflected a lot on how hard it is for men, in particular, to talk about abuse. I wanted to write the kind of book that I wish I’d had when I was younger,” he said. “I wanted to add another story into the mix to let others know they aren’t alone.”
During the ride, Bauman kept a journal, recording his thoughts and moods as well as stories about the people he met along the way who offered him food, donations, a place to sleep and candid conversations.
“I got a sense early on in the ride that I wasn’t going to last too long if I was going to try to do it all by myself,” he said, recalling an experience of being caught in a Prairie thunder and lightning storm and having nowhere to hide on the flat, open land.
“I was thinking how much I wanted company in that moment,” he said. “That was a very stark and clear reminder for me of how much we matter to each other and how much we mean to each other and how important we are to each other in terms of recovery.”
In the book, Bauman explains how a child psychiatrist told him that people can get by with a mental health issue if there’s a stronger social safety net around them.
At the completion of his cross-country trip, Bauman dipped his bicycle tire into the Atlantic in St. John’s and thought about where his journey had taken him both internally and externally. He hoped he had honoured his cousin’s life in choosing to embark on the ride. And as the trip ended, he prepared for what lay ahead. “… perhaps that is the truth of beginnings and endings: They are not fixed like coordinates on a map, but part of a cycle. A renewal,” Bauman writes.
THE CHILD GIFT
Elaine Mccluskey’s new novel, The Gift Child (Goose Lane Editions) opens with the disappearance of a man in a small Nova Scotian fishing town. Last seen driving away from a government wharf with a giant tuna head in the basket of his delivery bicycle, the man’s cousin decides to investigate his disappearance, and in the process confronts her own family history.
THE LITTLE RED NOVA SCOTIAN SCHOOLHOUSE
In The Little Red Nova Scotian Schoolhouse: For Whom the Bell Rings (Pottersfield Press) author David Mossman explores the education that took place in one-room schools across the province for more than 200 years.
With the Education Act of 1855, the Provincial Normal School was established to train teachers. Mossman uses the archives of graduates from 1892 through to 1940, to look at the school’s history. In 1961, the school was converted to the Nova Scotia Teachers College. Mossman also focuses on the teaching that took place in some oneroom schools in Lunenburg County, Cape Breton, the Annapolis Valley, as well as Black community schools and residential schools.
LEGACY OF A WEYMOUTH WOMAN
In Legacy of a Weymouth Woman: A Pioneering Spirit and a Love of Tall Ships (Pottersfield Press) author Blain Henshaw writes about his mother, a woman he calls an early feminist in the shipbuilding community of Weymouth.
“I never considered that my mother was an extraordinary person until many years after her death,” Henshaw writes in the book’s foreword. “She was a survivor, an innovator and an educator who, by example, taught me and my siblings the values of honesty, hard work, compassion and empathy, generosity, how to deal with adversity and, perhaps most important, how to have fun and enjoy life.”
Born in Ashmore, Digby County, in 1912, Lillian May Doty grew up in Weymouth North. In her teens, she became a stringer for The Chronicle Herald and loved to write about the adventures of the local ships and the men who sailed them. She was also a creative businessperson who made women’s hats and opened her own millinery and ladies' wear shop in Weymouth. While raising five children, she was a political campaign worker, first for the Progressive Conservatives and later for the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF).
“Lillian May Doty exemplified not just the best of country women, but the best of women anywhere,” Henshaw writes in the book’s epilogue. “It is so easy to overlook the accomplishments of ordinary people, those who go about their business and live their lives without occupying a large stage. Yet they form the backbone of families and communities with their resilience, resourcefulness and perseverance.”
Join Henshaw on April 6 at 11 a.m. at the Weymouth Waterfront Library to hear him read from his new book.