88 Pianos: A Recumbent Adventure Across America Review
A fearlessly twisted and hysterically funny narrative, 88 Pianos: A Recumbent Adventure Across America, is a vivid and often bazaar collection of stories detailing the author’s quest to find and play 88 pianos while crossing America on a recumbent bicycle.
His unconventional musical quest takes him into lands where Hell's Angels measure virility with volume (The Meter is Rumbling) and where ghosts crawl under the sheets (Haunted Hotel). At one with nature, broken glass, road kill, and the used condoms sharing the shoulders of American’s highways, the author pedals merrily through spectacular granite peaks draped in silken clouds (In Lolo Land), along stunning river valleys and into canyons haloed in gold (Still Gold in Them Thar Hills) -- then just as often, battles swarms of insects while struggling up infernal inclines like the stark somewhere/nowhere of Idaho’s Hell's Canyon (Where in Hell is Hell’s Canyon?). Exhausted and exhilarated, amused and tortured, the author relentlessly pursues his pianos, and in the process, fills chapters with chronicles of extreme sports (Skiers on the Roof) and odd characters (The Postman Always Cheats Twice).
88 Pianos is a three month, 4,300 mile excursion through the trials and anguish of mental and physical isolation (No Thanks for the Memory), tempered with rye humor and the pure joy of bicycle touring. Along with the rigors one might expect -- the dehydration, the exhaustion, the merciless elements (Three Strikes and You’re Dead) -- the author also encounters some unexpected rigors like hurricanes and inundated trails where dragging the bike through knee deep, snake-infested flood waters become the only path onward (Snakes on a Plain).
What unfolds before the reader is a true story of viewing scenic wonders, layered between fascinating glimpses of everyday Americana, at a pace we rarely see in today’s hectic lives.
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