He Is Not Your Average Joe

That's Joe on the right. The man on the left pulled Joe and his bike up a steep mountain in Vietnam. Where there were once enemies, Hayward has found friends.

By Ray Glier

Joe Hayward doesn’t want to be told what waits for him at the bottom of a canyon. He wants to ride there. He doesn’t want to be told what he is going to see at the top of the mountain, either. He wants to ride there. Joe doesn’t want to guess what’s over the hill, or what’s around the corner. Hayward wants to think without thinking. He wants to let everything happen to him, not plan for it, or be told about it, whatever it is.

Joe, 79, goes on these grand bike rides covering 1,000 to 3,700 miles and he doesn’t plan until 4 p.m. each day when he has to figure out where to sleep. There is no travel frenzy before the start of his treks. There is no timetable.

“I have Point A, the starting point, and Point B, the end point,” Hayward said. “And then I get on the bike and start riding.”

The routine is to get on the bike and ride and be a willing participant to…whatever. Joe doesn’t look for memorable moments, or plan for them. They find him...like the man on the motorbike near Da Nang in Vietnam.

On a daunting mountain, which Joe labored for 90 minutes to go up 1.5 miles, a man handed him a strap and Joe fixed it to the bike. The man pulled Joe up the mountain. It saved Hayward's legs and about six hours.

This is adventure. Start where you stand. Be surprised.

Hayward retired as a high school principal at 60 and just decided, with little pushback from himself, that he was going to ride a bike across this country and other countries. No plan. Just some extra clothes and a water bottle and he got on the bike.

His first ride in 2005 was from Anacortes, Wash., (Seattle) to New York and covered 3,700 miles with various zigs and zags.

“People think I should be traveling with someone, but I prefer traveling by myself,” Joe said. “It's the only time where I don't have to take into consideration anyone else. I decide when I get up, I decide when to stop, I decide where to eat, and my whole day is an exercise in egotism because I just need to satisfy myself.”

What is illuminating is that Joe’s literal view of the U.S. and foreign places—the majesty of the countryside and meeting people—reinforced his figurative view of the world: that 99 percent of people are decent and caring.

“They're trustworthy, they're sensitive, they're kind, they're thoughtful, they're good people,” Hayward said. “So it has reinforced that understanding of humanity, that humanity is filled primarily with good people, and you can't let very few people relative to the population at large influence about how you view mankind.”

Joe has been on six of these trips starting with that Seattle to New York ride in 2005 and including St. Augustine to San Diego, Vancouver (B.C.) to Tijuana, Key West, Fla., to New York, Melbourne to Cairns (east coast Australia), and Hanoi to Saigon. 

That’s roughly 12,000 miles.

In March, 2025, he will trek from Kuala Lumpur to Bali when he turns 80.

He does not train for these rides. The bike is covered up in his basement. Hayward does not take it out for short expeditions around Southampton, Long Island, N.Y., where he lives.

“I do absolutely no preparation,” Joe said. “When I arrive at my starting point, I just get on the bike and I start riding. I don't ride around the neighborhood. I don't ride to destinations. I'm not a biker. I just take long distance trips.”

Joe is not fearful of bandits or drivers angry a bike is sharing the lane. That’s because he hasn’t run into these people. He doesn't look out for trouble.

What he has to look out for is the town folk hectoring him about his welfare.

“Riding through a small town on a really hot and sunny day, not wearing a bike helmet, I was stopped three times by three different women on motor bikes offering me their hat to keep cooler and shade my eyes,” Hayward said. “Finally, I relented and accepted this old baseball cap from the third woman who gave me all smiles, happy that I was safer.”

The Vietnamese people wrapped their arms around Joe. One woman, a teacher, invited him to her home to meet her father and have bread. Another woman escorted him across town to the store where he had to pay for his bike to be shipped home.

It was the same in the U.S. There were no rooms available in a small Midwestern town, but the hotel owner’s young son said Hayward could sleep in his tent in the backyard of the family house. And that’s what Joe did.

Hayward has also slept on a bed of pine needles in the forest of the Cascades in Washington.

**

Riding the bike came back easily to him at 60 years old because riding was such a big part of his youth. When he was 12 until he was 17, Joe delivered The Long Island Press newspaper seven days a week. It was 150 newspapers.

“I had muscle memory,” Hayward says about riding at 17 and riding again at 60.

He earned $30 a week and half went to his lower middle class household of five.

On his long-distance rides, Joe likely saw what most of us consider “poverty”, but those folks likely don’t know they are poor anymore than Joe knew he was poor growing up.

“We had food on the table, a roof over our head,” he said. “Looking back on it, I guess we were poor, but I didn’t know it.”

While he found what he expected on his six rides, which were nice people all around us, Hayward said there was one significant revelation. He is a Democrat, a New York liberal through and through and he met people with different points of view.

On his trips through the so-called “flyover states”, Joe came face-to-face with the the rest of America. “I know why people voted for Donald Trump,” he said.

Hayward called them “people”, not “the enemy”.

Joe’s rides may not have been planned, but they sure were personal.

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