Quixotic

David Sylvester's latest quest will keep him at home.

by Brian Howard

I don't know what drives David Sylvester to bike across continents. I'm not sure he does, either.

Sylvester — "Big Dave" on phone messages — is the Southwest Philly native our own Mary Wilson told you about last July as he embarked on a bike trip across Asia. His motivations, even then, were not entirely tangible: He wanted to inspire people by meeting them, and by showing them that if he — a self-described large black man who's fit but not fantastically so — can cross a continent, they, too, can do extraordinary things.

He's already biked across North America, Africa and, as he chronicled on the Clog last summer, Asia. A traversal of South America was put on hold a few years ago thanks to a nasty car accident. Any further notches on his continent-crossing checklist will wait as Sylvester prepares for his second North American crossing.

This trip, which will kick off in San Diego on July 4, was inspired by a meeting with ESPN for whose Web site he'd written an account of his Asia trip.

"The ESPN article got a million and a half hits," he says he was told.

According to Sylvester, the editor told him, "We hadn't seen anything like that. You're not killing anybody, there's no scandal, you're not even a professional, you're like ... nobody."

She pegged him as "a cross between Forrest Gump and the Kevin Costner character in Field of Dreams." To me, he's more Don Quixote crossed with John Henry.

On is way home, he missed his connecting train to Philly and was looking at a cab ride or a long night in the Trenton station.

"I said, 'Fuck it, I'm gonna ride my bike home,'" remembers Sylvester. "On March 31, I rode my bike at 1:30 in the morning from Trenton to Philly and I was like, 'Wow, this is what I could do.'"

He decided that he'd bike across the country, stopping to volunteer for different charities.

The plan quickly unfolded. He'll feed the homeless in San Diego. He's acquiring a tandem bike so that in Phoenix he can ride with blind children so they can feel what it's like to be on a bike. He'll volunteer at a children's cancer center in Austin.

"I've managed to do a lot by putting my big ass on the seat of a bike," he says. For Sylvester, whose Web site is contribute2.org, the most substantial contributions are not monetary but those of time, of effort.

But Sylvester's got another motivation. He's traveling with voter registration forms and is planning to hit as many Barack Obama headquarters along the way as he can.

"Obama is talking about a lot of things that I'm talking about," he says.

HALF OFF DEPOT

Why live life at full price?

"This is the time," says Sylvester in an Obama-esque turn of phrase. "This is my time; it's certainly his time. If he does get elected — when he does get elected, I fully expect, after biking 4,000 miles for this man, to be on the president's council on fitness."

While that may or may not come to pass, it's part of Sylvester's motivation.

So is this: "When you look at some of the life expectancy charts for African-Americans, I have to think about my mortality," figures the 43-year-old. "According to some of these charts, I don't have that much longer."

Granted, Sylvester doesn't fall into a lot of the risk categories, specifically because of his active lifestyle. And that's the point.

"This is something that is good on a lot of different levels. Showing black men being healthy, black men on a bike. Somebody doing some good."

Sylvester's itinerary ends on 34th Street in New York City at the Australian embassy. Because that's the next continent on his list.

"[I] will walk in and go apply for my visa and let them know that Big Dave is coming next year."

(bhoward@citypaper.net)

Sylvester will have a bon voyage party on Wed., June 25, 5-8 p.m. at Marathon Grill at 10th and Walnut streets. He will be blogging about his cross-country trip on City Paper's staff blog, The Clog.