The Long Landscape (A Filmmaker Cycles the American West)

A filmmaker cycling across the United States reflects upon his connection to other passionate cyclists from 20th-century surrealism, adventuresome high-wheelers, science fiction, and philosophy in this charming and artful travel book.

For readers of Rebecca Lowe (The Slow Road to Tehran), Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), and Sara Dykman (Bicycling with Butterflies).

The challenge: to cycle from Disney's Epcot Center toward San Francisco — a 4350 mile journey — on the cusp of summer. In search of the mythological American West seamlessly represented in movies and literature, Delpeut and his beloved cycling companion instead discover a landscape rarely felt in its actual punishing weather and expanse. On their way through the South, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, the couple encounter a blistering and varied cast of characters. A philosophy emerges as they bicycle their way across America that unites the challenge, wonderment, discovery, and naiveté that brought them along these roads. Woven into their journey is the history of long-distance cycling in America, the 19th-century high-wheeler adventures, H.G. Wells's Wheels of Chance, the sublime paintings of Mark Rothko, and Alfred Jarry's parody Supermale about the erotics of the machine age. On the day the author turns forty, the adventure culminates in Las Vegas, the ridiculous exaggeration of Manifest Destiny. But instead of becoming discouraged, he writes in a new introduction that this trip was the seed of a passion that has taken him and his still-beloved all over the world for decades since.

"Peter Delpeut’s Long Landscape is a rollicking ride across the United States. The book is a celebration of the nourishing potential of long distance cycling. Delpeut moves seamlessly between travel, film and cycling history, paying homage to the diary form. Imagine David Lynch’s Wild at Heart conversing with Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia and you get some sense of the vitality of this wonderful edition." —Dara Waldron, New York Times bestselling author of A Sheepdog Named Oscar