Review by Woodrow Phoenix

Eleanor Davis loves cycling for many reasons, including the enjoyment of the endorphic rush from pushing her body to its limits and the relief from depression that comes with that, and the freedom it gives her to move through her environment efficiently and peacefully, engaging with the landscape and everything in it. Cyclists often have more than one bicycle for different kinds of riding–practical city commuting and shopping on one kind of sturdy, upright bike versus elegantly engineered speed over long distances on a sleek, lightweight frame, for instance–and after Davis’ father builds her a bicycle tailored to her precise measurements, she decides to explore the capabilities of both the bicycle and her body by cycling all the way from her parents home in Tucson, Arizona to hers in Athens, Georgia. This is not a casual trip. The distance between these two places is nearly two thousand miles, requiring her to travel continuously for two months through Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi to reach her home in Georgia.

You and a Bike and a Road is an autobiographical travel diary that covers the arduous eight weeks in early 2016 that Davis spent cycling mostly by herself across the southern United States. An award-winning cartoonist and illustrator, Davis is a tremendously skilled and inventive artist especially good at dynamic and surprising compositions that turn potentially mundane subjects into beautiful and powerful pictures. That is good news for readers of this book composed of the drawings she made in notebooks while she rested her aching knees. Most travel diaries of this type become mundane with the repetition of endless miles of road, but her sophisticated design sense is always in evidence with layouts that employ a variety of angles, vistas, diagrams and occasionally bravura displays of landscape drawing.

Her thinking is equally non-standard, and Davis has a careful, empathetic way of interacting with strangers, trusting their humanity and revealing hers. The result is an informal yet intimate and involving read that is very compelling, especially when her observations touch on the bleakness of exposing yourself to the emptiness and vulnerability of the unprotected human body in liminal, barely inhabited spaces; a defencelessness that drivers tucked up their cars never have to feel. Without the isolation and protection of a metal cage around her, Davis has to be far more aware of the people and environments she passes through and they demand far more from her, in sometimes funny, sometimes uncomfortable and sometimes terrifying ways. Davis documented her journey by posting her drawings on her twitter account, with the decision to take the pages and collect them into a book coming after she was back home again. Perhaps that creative freedom was the secret behind documenting her gruelling journey in such an inventive way.

The first version of this book, You & a Bike & a Road was published by Koyama Press in 2017. This newer edition is the same except for the brilliantly designed new cover, and a slight tweak to the title. There is one addition, a new afterword by Davis reflecting on the seven years since her trip:

“The bike rides I take these days are short – dropping my kid off and picking him up at preschool, going to the grocery store … I am a lot more scared riding than I used to be, before I didn’t actually care that much about getting hit by a car, but now I do. … I hope when my kid grows up … he’ll say ‘I remember my mom biking a lot with me when I was young.’”