Wheels of Life

For 11 years, starting when I was 27, I was so afflicted that, if I sat down on a hard chair, my lower back would immediately sing with a hot, electric-like pain -- a pain that would persist, after a minute of sitting, for days. Sometimes, with the slightest provocation, I experienced that same stinging pain in my forearms, in the inside of my thighs. I saw a dozen doctors. I was told, at one point, errantly, that I had a certain arthritis -- ankylosing spondylitis -- and that my lower vertebrae could fuse over time as my neck curled downward, like a question mark. I wrote standing up. I dined at restaurants standing up.

But one winter the sitting pain simply disappeared, leaving behind a constellation of intermittent and less keening muscle aches. I spent $60 on a used bike then, to see if I could ride a couple of miles day after day. I could, and over time I bought a new bike. I rode faster, and I found myself excavating a dusty and long-dormant version of myself that I'd almost forgotten.

I was there on Dominica as a reporter, sure, and all I had to do was follow John Moorhouse around for three days and 110 miles. No one was going to kill me if I rented a car. But there was no way I was going to do that -- no way. As I sat in the taxi, I resolved to wrestle up every hill, even though my back problem had flared up again. My hip was in pain, injured a week earlier, while I was stretching. I had not ridden in almost a week.

LUCKILY, A MINOR CRISIS SHOOK THE HALLS OF GOVERNANCE IN ROSEAU: The airlines misplaced my bike while it was en route to Dominica; my bike was at large. Dominica's minister of tourism, Yvor Nassief, got on the phone at once, to hound American Eagle. "Mr. Donahue," he said to me in somber tones, peering across his expansive desk, "we apologize. This is inexcusable."

Secretly, I was delighted. I had a whole extra day to stretch out my hip, and so I did what I often do when I feel the muscle fibers inside me are screaming at one another: I wandered around on foot, alone, aimlessly, trying to wriggle out of the cage of self-consciousness and find peace. I followed the Roseau River downhill from our hotel, near the village of Wotten Waven, and then cut sharply right, uphill, onto a narrow, steep tree-shaded road. Then I consulted my map.

Even though Dominica was a British colony until it attained independence in 1978, the names of the villages all around me were French -- Giraudel, Massacre, Fond Cani, Laudat -- and the people in the hills nearby often spoke Creole at home. The French held Dominica briefly in the 1700s-- and then stayed on, even after the British Navy defeated them. They built churches and schools and, with the English, brought in ships full of African slaves to work on sugar plantations. But the Europeans never really vanquished Dominica. The land was too mountainous to cultivate easily. The plantations were fragmented; the slaves kept running off into the woods to cook up bloody rebellions.

Today, Dominica remains untamed. There is only one fast-food chain restaurant on the island, and the airlines have to corkscrew down into Melville Hall, cutting hard and circling low in small planes, so as to angle onto the short runway squeezed between mountains. Neither Club Med nor the Sheraton has, as yet, elected to subject its clients to the indignities of landing here, and even Lonely Planet, which has published guidebooks on 135 countries, has so far shied away from producing a Dominica book.

I was there on Dominica because it's still wild, and I was after a sort of animal joy that you cannot get in a gym on a StairMaster. I wanted to feel the ragged beat of my heart in a place that resounded with its own green vitality. So I kept climbing -- and came, eventually, to a sign for Trafalgar Falls, three miles away. A driver stopped to offer me a lift, and I hopped in and rode up a couple of absurdly steep pitches as the car pulsed with house music. Then the guy reached his home, still far away from the falls, and I walked on until I found myself nearing a tall, dreadlocked man who held a machete loose in his hand. He was not wearing a shirt, and his pecs and abs rippled with a sinewy grace.

"You like Dominica, mon?" he asked.

I said I did. We strolled together to a small roadside shack. I bought him a beer, and we chatted a bit. Then I walked away. The air was steamy and the hills around me teeming with life -- with mango, guava and passion fruit growing wild -- and I kept picking the guavas up off the ground and eating them.

In time, I went back to the hotel. My bike had arrived, express, and with an Allen wrench I put it together. I tested the brakes, adjusted the seat. And then, along with Peter and John, I went out for a warm-up: down the hill into Roseau, the crickets chirping in the night all around us.

THE NEXT MORNING, we floated through Roseau again, riding in a pack. We cut left along the coast, through the villages of Loubiere, Pointe Michele and Sibouli, and drivers heralded us with their horns, having seen us on television. "Ah," said one woman, "you are the big cyclists!" We came around a bend, and John pointed inland at a rocky peak in the clouds. "See that?" he said. "That's where we're going." He spoke almost wistfully; we were retracing the routes of his earliest adventures.