Off-campus UNL users: To download campus access dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your NU ID and password. When you are done browsing please remember to return to this page and log out.
Non-UNL users: Please talk to your librarian about requesting this dissertation through interlibrary loan.
Beyond the Divide: A Bicycle Journey Across the West
Abstract
This literary nonfiction project is a journey narrative which chronicles two separate but parallel journeys. When I was twenty, in 1985, I bicycled across the Western United States. Twenty years later, I retraced that route. This is a firsthand account of my encounters with the people, climate, landscape and ecology of the West. Whether enduring a Colorado mountain snowstorm, managing my way through a Yellowstone bison herd, kayaking with orcas in the Puget Sound, revisiting the handicapped but defiant elderly woman I’d met twenty years before, or hanging out with alien aficionados on Nevada's Extraterrestrial Highway, the reader is taken along on both journeys into the heart of the ever-changing West. It is a glimpse into the psyche of the country both post and pre 9/11. This project has been influenced by my studies in eco-criticism and the literature of journey narratives such as William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways, John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley and Jack Kerouac's On the Road.
Subject Area
Modern literature|American literature|Recreation|Creative writing
Recommended Citation
Farmer, Daryl, "Beyond the Divide: A Bicycle Journey Across the West" (2007). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI3252438.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI3252438