It all seems fated, somehow: The two cyclists, meeting by chance in an empty stretch of the Kazakh desert, yes, but also the writer stumbling across their story years later in an Alabama bike shop.

Author and magazine writer Kim Cross didn’t believe the story when it was first relayed to her by the owner of her local shop; it had all the signs of an urban legend. What were the odds? But Barb, the owner, had met one of the two cyclists through their shared industry and had heard the story firsthand. She made an introduction.

By then, it had been several years since Noel Kegel had cycled solo from the Atlantic-facing west coast of Portugal to the easternmost shores of China. He hadn’t kept in touch with Leon Whiteley, the other man he’d crossed paths with almost 5,400 miles into that trip, but they were connected on Facebook. Kegel — best referred to as Noel for purposes of Cross’s story and this analysis — reached out at Cross’s request, and soon she had both her protagonists lined up, willing to tell their story. Whiteley, or Leon here, had kept a detailed diary with daily mileage, dates, and photos; Noel had a Flickr archive complete with timestamps and location data — enough proof and material for Cross to go ahead with a dream piece. “It took a lot for me to believe that this actually happened,” she told me, “and that it wasn’t some big stunt.”

What happened is this: Two long-distance cyclists, strangers, started riding many thousands of miles apart. They converged slowly across months, from the west and the east, and finally met on, in Cross’s description, “an unpaved Soviet road that never seems to bend.” Their meeting was important — read the story to find out why — but in Cross’s careful hands it became something even greater.

That story, “What Happens When Two Strangers Trust the Rides of Their Lives to the Magic of the Universe,” was published this past March online and September in the print edition in Bicycling magazine. (When sketching out the story in her mind, Cross kept the palindrome in mind, and thought of the story as “Noel+Leon: A True Story from the Middle of Somewhere.”) It has since won the Gold Lowell Thomas Award for foreign travel reporting from the Society of American Travel Writers and was named as one of the Best of 2020 in the Sunday Longread. Cross was interviewed about the story for Gangrey the Podcast.

Mapping the story

Cross knew what she wanted to do from the outset: structure the story as a kind of palindrome writ large, one half mirroring the other. The approach would only make sense for this particular story, these men and their mirrored journeys. Ordinarily, Cross prefers not to get too fancy or look-at-me-go with her story structures, but in this case, it seemed worth trying. “I thought, if I can pull this off quietly, if the structure is kind of invisible to the reader, then I’ve actually done my job,” she says. Why a palindrome? It wasn’t just their names, Noel and Leon, but the pattern of differences and similarities between them. “These two guys are kind of like matter and anti-matter,” Cross says. “They’re doing essentially the same thing in opposite directions and for very different reasons.”

To create her story-mirror, Cross decided to start and end at the same place — in the middle, at the meeting point. Then she rewound each journey back to its beginnings and followed the two cyclists through until they finally, inevitably met in the middle again.

Her skeletal outline of the palindrome structure:

The Meeting (“narrative now” – written in present tense)

Leon – the start / reasons for riding (shifts to past tense)

Noel – the start / reasons for riding

Leon – believes world is sketchy / world proves him right

Noel – believes world is good / world proves him right

Leon – world is sketchy / but trail magic opens his eyes

Noel – hardest part / never doubts he will make it

Leon– hardest part / doubts he will make it

Noel – how it ends / what’s at stake (FLASH FORWARD, tense change)

Leon – how it ends / what’s at stake (FLASH FORWARD, tense change)

The Meeting (“shift back to present tense”)

Cross also had a clear vision for the language and tone she wanted to use. She remembered reading Paulo Coelho’s novel, “The Alchemist,” in high school, and being struck by its epic, almost biblical style. She decided to strive for something similar in her story. “I really wanted people to feel like they were reading a fable, and be transported to another world. I wanted it to read kind of like fiction,” she says. Especially in the first and last scenes (which are the same scene), “I worked hard to make the language feel a little bit different.” She wanted to signal to the reader: hey, something’s going on here.

Here’s a taste from the lede, describing the travelers’ eventual meeting point:

The earth spins. The sun rises. Long shadows shrink into puddles of shade beneath their spinning wheels. From dawn to dusk, in every direction, the landscape looks the same.

The only thing that changes is the angle of the sun.

Then, through the shimmering heat, a blur appears on their common horizon and gradually comes into focus: a simple white box of a building on the edge of the dusty road. Next to it, a metal shipping container marked by a hand-painted word, шaихaнa. Translation: chaikhana, a teahouse, where travelers can find water, food, and shade. The nearest city, on the Caspian Sea, is 235 miles away.

Cross worked and re-worked her sentences, trying to get the cadence and flow just right. She also scattered palindromes throughout the story, little Easter eggs for herself or for her most attentive readers. Among them: “race car” and “drawn onward.”

She went through a dozen drafts or more, workshopping it with friends as well as her editors at Bicycling magazine. She initially wrote two drafts and sent both to her editor, letting him decide if her structural play worked. “I wanted it to be a story that, if you read it a second time, you might get a second layer out of it, and if you read it a third time, you might get a third layer out of it.”

The result is something special, from the structure level to the sentence level, and beyond.

***

Eva Holland is a freelance writer and editor based in Canada’s Yukon Territory. She is the author of “Nerve: A Personal Journey Through the Science of Fear.”

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It’s hard to know where to begin when attempting to grapple with the sprawling legacy of racial discrimination and oppression in America. But Ta-Nehisi Coates knows there to start. “The Case For Reparations,” Coates’ latest tour de force in The Atlantic, spans more than 300 years of history, beginning with Clyde Ross, a black child of the Mississippi Delta.

In the 1920s, Ross saw his family’s land seized and his parents reduced to sharecroppers at the mercy of a system that was explicitly rigged against them. Ross served in World War II before joining the Great Migration, to Chicago. There, he got a steady job, married, and eventually bought a home in North Lawndale, a former Jewish neighborhood that was now welcoming middle-class African-Americans — a “pilot community” for integration.

[caption id="attachment_116588" align="alignleft" width="180"] Eva Holland[/caption]

But Ross and his wife were unable to get a normal mortgage. A mixture of legislative remedies, intimidation and violence, and industry collusion ensured that black families were locked out of the housing market for decades. Instead, they were catered to by predatory lenders and isolated by redlining. The community of North Lawndale festered. Today, writes Coates, the area is “on the wrong end of virtually every socioeconomic indicator.”

Coates goes on to explore the history of the American discussion — to the extent that there has been one — around reparations. He outlines the enormous wealth generated by slavery. “In 1860, slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together,” he quotes from historian David W. Blight, then adds:

The vending of the black body and the sundering of the black family became an economy unto themselves, estimated to have brought in tens of millions of dollars to antebellum America. In 1860 there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the country.

He touches on the collapse of Reconstruction, and the rise of the lynch mob, and the ways in which government efforts like Social Security and the GI bill all too often excluded black Americans from their benefits. Then he returns to Chicago, and the discriminatory housing policy that dominated much of the 20th century, documenting its cost with painful precision:

To keep up with his payments and keep his heat on, Clyde Ross took a second job at the post office and then a third job delivering pizza. His wife took a job working at Marshall Field. He had to take some of his children out of private school. He was not able to be at home to supervise his children or help them with their homework. Money and time that Ross wanted to give his children went instead to enrich white speculators.

“The problem was the money,” Ross told me. “Without the money, you can’t move. You can’t educate your kids. You can’t give them the right kind of food. Can’t make the house look good. They think this neighborhood is where they supposed to be. It changes their outlook. My kids were going to the best schools in this neighborhood, and I couldn’t keep them in there.”

Later in the piece, Coates quotes another North Lawndale resident who managed to cling to her home in the same way, struggling to make the payments by cutting back on everything else: food, electricity. “You cut down on things for your child, that was the main thing,” she said.

That’s a kick in the gut, and it gets worse the longer you ponder the statement’s implications. Generation after generation of African-American families, facing down structural discrimination by tightening their belts notch by notch, met with indifference from legislators and authorities, or by violence from whites, when they protested. Generations of children growing up isolated, their parents forced to pay the bills or lose the house, unable to spare time or money for much else. No help with homework, no tutoring, no extracurriculars, no music lessons or art classes. No college fund, no assets to inherit — seemingly no way out, and every neighbor stuck in the same boat.

The message to young black men, according to another of Coates’ North Lawndale sources, is:

“You ain’t shit. You not no good. The only thing you are worth is working for us. You will never own anything. You not going to get an education. We are sending your ass to the penitentiary.”

The key to the genius of “The Case For Reparations” is its focus: on Clyde Ross, on North Lawndale, on housing policy. That tight focus is deliberate. As Coates himself pointed out in a discussion with some of his regular commenters, he could have written this story using any number of societal lenses: “Someone could, for instance, make the same case from the perspective of criminal justice," Coates wrote in his exchange with readers. "This is not a comprehensive piece. It takes a narrow angle and just tries to work it." One commenter, Laurel Eckhouse, agreed that the housing angle was a potent one. "I was also thinking about mass incarceration as a modern theft of African American lives and property," she wrote. "Becky Pettit has a book called Invisible Men arguing that all the black-white gaps in wealth, education, etc., are substantially worse than people think because prisoners aren't counted. But it would have taken away from the focus and power of this piece, I think."

That's a crucial point. The focus on housing, on people striving for middle-class homeownership — on the way America has systematically punished black Americans who dare to reach for the American Dream — gives the story a particular power.

The promise of America, the big-picture concept, is that everyone is supposed to have an equal shot — at “making it,” at earning a living, at a plot of land or a house. Coates makes it clear that for black Americans, that promise always has been, and still is, a lie.

Eva Holland is a freelance writer and editor based in Canada's Yukon Territory. She's the co-editor of WorldHum.com, a former associate editor at Up Here and Up Here Business magazines, and a former online columnist for Outside. Her stories were listed as notable selections in The Best American Essays and The Best American Sports Writing 2013.

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