You and a Bike and a Road
Cartoonist: Eleanor Davis
Publisher: Fantagraphics
Publication Date: July 2024
Consider for a moment the idea that spaces, architecture, online interfaces, or basically anything you interact with, forces you into specific behaviors as a requirement to use the space. You might think of this as something like park benches with intermittent arm rests to prevent homeless people from sleeping on them. Or more subtly in the social media age, character limits that force you into either dumbing down one complex or inorganically breaking it up into multiple posts. The design of your environment is not egalitarian in any sense of the word, whether you’re thinking about it online or in real life. Instead, everything is driven by a question of access: who gets to access something easily and who doesn’t?
You and a Bike and a Road follows cartoonist Eleanor Davis’ bike ride from Tucson, Arizona to Athens, Georgia. As she travels from city to city, we meet a variety of interesting locals, as well as the geographical challenges that come not only with biking but with specific bodies as they attempt to travel in general. You and a Bike and a Road It is essentially about these concepts of hostile design that condition your behavior, paralleling the physical hurdles of bike travel to the ever escalating challenges of people on the border between the United States and Mexico.
If there is a central question in Davis’ comic, its “what are we struggling towards?” Davis’ journey is self-imposed, she likes to bike, she wants to take the opportunity to do this because she’ll never know when it might be possible again in the future, and biking helps her feel alive. Thus it’s not simply about being able to make it from one state to another, but committing to something tangible rather than letting opportunity and life fade from indecision. However, along her way she makes note of Border Patrol agents, police, and people attempting to move across the border. Her journey of deciding how to live is juxtaposed with others who are fighting simply to stay alive, people for whom the journey and destination cannot be separated but are entangled as part of a larger question about their survival.
Davis thus walks (or rather, bikes) a fine line here, one where she’s not reducing the struggles of these other people down to her journey but rather bearing witness to it as the privileges of life are rejected in favor of a grounded look at the American experiences.
In an attempt to help us understand these challenges, Davis relies on two different perspectives for every page. Firstly, there’s a linear, left-to-right movement from scene to scene, showing her progress in a manner that’s simple, moving easily from page to page. These pages have the tendency to read very quickly, giving you an appreciation of the tedium of Davis’ journey. Always moving forward becomes an illusion because the progress is never feels tangible but the momentum to keep going is always there.
The second kind of layout is all about depth, where objects or characters on the top of the page are always the furthest away, and as you move down the page, everything gets closer. In moments where the flat, linear pages are placed alongside the ones with depth, our perspective shift mirrors the challenge of Davis’ biking, as we become more and more used to seeing things as far away (and therefore exhausting) or nearby (and therefore to relief).
Every mountain Davis climbs, every rest stop where she nurses her sore knees, every moment of doubt along the journey always comes packaged with the feeling of the journey’s inevitability. We’re constantly moving towards something, but it always feels like there’s so much yet to go. The momentum doesn’t stop and at a certain point this has the effect of Davis feeling like a passenger on her own journey, raising the question to herself of what exactly is she struggling towards?
In the opening pages of the book, Davis gives a variety of reasons for why she’s doing this, and along the way she has several moments of self-doubt. The ambiguity of this always circles us back to what this choice is meant to mean for her. But the answer comes not in the form of a wordy externalization but in the simple relationships and nuances of the people she meets and urges her to go along.
The emotional core then is the people she meets along the way: the nice old woman who lost her husband, the man attempting to cross the border, the friendly biking enthusiasts and doctors who all cross her path and mirror her struggle in different ways. The weight of these interactions starts to build up a kind of pressure in the story. We grow to empathize with everyone but we also start to question who is allowed to press on with their life, and who isn’t. As Davis rolls through her journey and finds support, she equally sees others that don’t have the same luxury.
This is where the comic starts to break down for me, as Davis tries to articulate the struggles inherent to her choices and living out the American experience on two-wheels, but unavoidable falls into feelings of tourism where our sympathies become conflicted. As the difficulty of the journey mounts and she learns of life’s little pleasures along the way, we start to yearn for home again. The image of Davis finally seeing her husband’s face resonates deeply as we appreciate how hard it was to get here.
But the world she leaves behind, the people and places and questions of access, are all reduced down to her own ending rather than wrestling with the messy world she’s witnessed. This is a story that begs to have some degree of ambiguity, a denial of catharsis that instead gets punctuated by a defined endpoint. Afterall, as the old adage goes, it’s the journey not the destination. But at the end, this becomes too much about the destination. In that sense, even though the end feels pointedly clear, it doesn’t feel satisfying, as if the book isn’t over but simply ran out of pages with which to keep going.
Though, to take our own advice, the journey through You and a Bike and a Road It’s an enjoyable one. Davis’ use of perspective makes for an engaging read as we’re left to study the nuances and charm of each page. The townsfolk, bikers, and other people we meet are interesting windows into the vastness of the American south. It’s all so rich that you might consider taking a bike ride of your own across the country before the political reality of travel sets in and you stop yourself.
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