Slow-wheeling to the sea
Author retraces pioneering cycle tour on a recumbent tricycle
“People will look,” warned Minna Caroline Smith in Lapham’s Quarterly about her pioneering tricycling touring of the coastal North Shore in eastern Massachusetts. It wasn’t just that the self-powered adult tricycles were novel, but so, too, were the women riding them. It was 1885.
The gender shock may now be gone, but as the only person steering a tricycle on the same roads a century-plus later, I knew exactly what Smith meant. My weekend travel convenience, a low-riding recumbent trike powered by hands instead of feet, was arguably even more attention-getting. This was a first try at adaptive bike touring. After a lifetime of riding around the world, I was changing to a hand cycle after spine cancer and a complication that left my legs partially paralyzed.
I had hesitated initially, aware of how low-riding would look. When I finally flipped the mental switch, I went all-in. In the ultralight performance trike I had rented from a shop, I was supine with my legs suspended in aluminum stirrups as if stretched on a low chaise lounge.
Cycling the coastal North Shore
In two days retracing Smith’s 35-mile route from Malden Center to Cape Ann, I had kids gush at me and my curious rig, and young adults clandestinely stick their iPhones out car windows to catch me on video.
I was glad to be riding again. I identified with the 19th-century Smith — not as a freethinking crusader, exactly, but as part of the disenfranchised: a disabled man trying to join able-bodied fun. I felt a tie. Our mixed-gender, middleaged party consisted of six riders: a few experienced cyclists, others first-timers. My wife, Patty, used a pedal-assist e-bike, the rest standard-issue road bikes.
Boston’s North Shore has always been a premier cycling destination. “In and Around Cape Ann,” a popular wheelman’s guidebook published in the 1880s, lauded the views from the largely well-tended and graded dirt lanes. In 1898, in the heyday of the pre-car bike-riding mania, a Boston newspaper printed a lavishly illustrated map of our bike touring route.
We set out on the Northern Strand Trail, an 8-mile, newly constructed rail trail through Everett, Malden, Revere, Saugus and coastal Lynn. The trail is also part of the East Coast Greenway, a 3,000-mile bike and pedestrian network linking towns and cities from Key West, Florida, to Calais, Maine. The wide, wellmarked trail was a revelation, creatively bordered with community gardens, vibrant murals and public sculptures.
We traversed on the trail beneath the Route 1 overpass and around the Revere Showcase cinemas. All of us, lifetime New Englanders and some living only a handful of miles away, kept saying some variation of the same thing: We had no idea any of this was here.
All for one, one for all
My low-rider, not necessarily viewed as a versatile all-terrain machine because the seat bottom is mere inches from the ground, was actually so low I could roll beneath splintered tree limbs. Where it couldn’t, I accepted a nudge, or even in the case of a then-crumbling Saugus River footbridge, a brief portage. It was an all-forone, one-for-all group adventure.
We rode a final paved, auto-free path into downtown Salem, part of a new network of protected lanes throughout the city, this one accessed at start and finish by black metal gates resembling high-wheelers. Smith’s group stopped here, too, for lunch, as well as for a touring portrait taken at the iconic 17th-century Salem Common.
We knew about the photograph from digital reproductions but were surprised to find the Essex Institute-owned original framed and hung in 3 ½-by-2 ½-foot glory at the Witch City Mall.
The magnificent Gold Coast homes
The 1885 ladies lost much of their party after the official photo was taken, the remaining riders continuing on to an inn in Manchester. We didn’t get quite as far, ending a 20-mile day at the Wylie Inn in the city of Beverly. The inn is on the grounds of a historic summer estate and is one of several magnificent Gold Coast homes dotting headlands and secluded waterfronts.
On the second day, we cycled the long route between Beverly Farms and Gloucester, detouring off Route 127; each stunning spur routes to ocean views. On one attempt to take a shortcut, we bypassed Thunderbolt Hill, a granite-lined drive near Singing Beach in Manchester where James Fields, founder of The Atlantic Monthly, once entertained Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Leveling the playing field
Touring with a hand trike, two big wheels behind me and a third centered in front was surprisingly great. I was sitting, of course, able to relax and leisurely take in the passing countryside. But I was thrillingly entertained on downhills. Trikes and e-bikes help level the playing field. More inclusive tours and a greater variety of them are likely to follow. But it was also good to know you can set off with old cycling friends.
Smith had initially planned for their trip to end in Magnolia, but a deepening craving for Gloucester clams brought her another 4 miles to a hotel near Pavilion Beach. We figured the trip would end in downtown Gloucester, too, but after a perfect fried fish and chowder lunch at the Causeway Restaurant, we went farther, 12 miles in all, keen to round Cape Ann.