Wheels of Life

Moorhouse grew up in the suburbs of Boston, but his mother is a native Dominican, and when he was 14 the family moved back to her homeland. His dad, a machinist, bought him a motorcycle, and he used it to ramble all over the island. "I remember going into the Syndicate area, up north, to ride on a network of paths that looked out onto the sea," he told me. "I went into remote mountain villages, and there was no electricity. The people spoke Creole. I got to know the island by riding my motorcycle."

Moorhouse had a BMX bicycle back then, too, and he rode without fear. When I stepped into a cafe in his old village, Paix Bouche, one man put down his rum, then demonstrated how, long ago, John would carefully stand up on his moving bicycle, placing one foot on the seat and one on the handlebars, so as to "cycle surf" down the street. "John Moorhouse," he said with thick admiration. "Madman! Professionnel!"

In 2002, Moorhouse did try to launch himself as a pro athlete. He quit his job at a bike shop and created a five-man pro squad, Team 24, but his income -- $4,000 here for a race victory; $500 there for wearing an "Ellsworth Bikes" shirt in a magazine photo -- was sporadic. "Unless you're Lance Armstrong," he said, "it's really hard." Until very recently, he was working a string of odd jobs -- installing highway guard rails, for instance. In between gigs, he would spend seven to 12 hours each day crawling the Web and posting ads -- on eBay, pinkbike.com -- for his Dominican cycling trips.

For Moorhouse, this trip was crucial. Our expedition needed to shine, and he rode -- we all rode -- with fervor. Once, John rampaged along with one tire high in the air for the length of a football field. Later, as I sailed downward toward the base of an approaching climb, he shouted encouragement -- "Momentum is your friend!" -- and then flailed past, standing up as he pumped on the pedals.

At the top of one hill on that first afternoon, I took my pulse. My heart was going at 192 beats per minute.

WHEN THE PAIN IN MY BACK WAS AT ITS WORST, I spent years exploring alternative medicine, visiting chiropractors, acupuncturists and, at the nadir, an "energy worker" who beseeched me: "Breathe! Breathe! Deep belly breaths now." Always, I felt a certain tacit judgment coming down on my head: My inner Vince Lombardi, they agreed, was an aberration of post-industrial Western society -- and it needed to be curbed, if not utterly purged.

I expected that Dominica would deliver me the same lesson. I knew, in any case, that it had some crucial lesson to impart. The people there are healthy. They subsist on fresh fish and homegrown vegetables, and they walk the hills. A myth prevails: Locals believe that they are the longest-lived people in the world. In fact, Dominica's premier advocate for centenarians, a publicist named Alex Bruno, claims that there are now at least 15 Dominican citizens more than 100 years old, and the whole island embraces a woman named Ma Pampo, who died in 2003 at the reported age of 128, as a sort of national saint.

Before I visited the island, a friend wrote to me, speculating on Dominican longevity. "I think there is something about the pace of life there," she said, having just visited, "about the lack of stress and the uncomplicated fishing communities. There's time for a slow beer in the afternoon. And it rains a lot, so you seek shelter and sit it out."

Biking the island, I saw that life in Dominica is often languid and calm. Once, for instance, I came heaving to the top of a pass and the first thing I encountered was a thin, sixtyish man sitting on the ground, his back against a tree as a lone bony cow behind him picked at the grass at the edge of a cliff. The man acknowledged me with a subtle nod and then resumed staring off into the distance, saying nothing, a study in energy conservation.

But there is a hard edge to Dominica, too. The soft-spoken Rastafarians hustle as they hoist crates of bananas into their trucks, and when their tempers flare they sometimes draw out their machetes and duel. In the roadside cafes, where old men gather to play dominoes, they slam their tiles down onto the table, sharply, as an expression of manhood.

And when I had the chance to meet 100-year-old Louisa Benoit, she was sitting up in her living room, her hair and her wardrobe impeccable, as she sewed a child's dress for a festival. Benoit has been working steadily as a seamstress since the 1920s, and I told her that she seemed pretty tough. "You bet I'm tough," she growled. "I can't walk, but you get down on that floor right now and I'll fight you. I'll beat you right now."

As dusk fell on our first day of riding, we climbed into a high mountain village, Bellevue Chopin, in the rain -- and then began swooping downhill. It was almost dark out, but I heard something beside me. Two kids, maybe 15 years old, were riding down with us on ancient BMX bikes. Unlike us, they had no helmets, no lights.