After 36 years, I had pretty much forgotten the whole hike-through-hell thing. Then, early this year, on GoogleFace, I found out what Billy had been doing. He’d been curing cancer
Betty Starr never knew it, back in 1950, that two of her own cells — two of the billions of gelatinous blobs guided by her unique DNA that made Betty Starr who she was — would ever grow, divide, and possibly change the course of human history. That these two cells would take very different paths. One straight into fear, and despair, and death. The other toward hope, inspiration and life.
These two cells would fight it out in a grand war, all across the planet, for decades, perhaps centuries, to come. A fight for life, not just for these two tiny cells, but for millions upon millions of people. People who never met, who have never heard of Betty Starr.
How could she have known? She was, after all, a pretty, happy housewife in Newton, Massachusetts, an upscale Boston suburb, with a nice house, a loving husband and a four-year-old son.
Betty was, by all accounts, a remarkable woman. Brought up in the ‘30s in a plush Park Avenue apartment, her movie-star smile had landed her a gig as a model for the Powers Agency, one of the most powerful and influential in New York. But now, having married and moved to the Boston area, she was concentrating on her family. And on volunteering to help quadriplegic WWII and Korean War veterans, who would thank this beautiful woman by creating artwork for her, holding paintbrushes in their teeth.
A Starr is born
On or about August 28, 1950 — maybe during a last still, hot night of summer, before the maple leaves turn and the cold wind starts roaring in from the Charles River — one of Betty’s egg cells went on a blind date with one of her husband Milton’s sperm cells. The result, emerging on April 28, 1951, was her second son, Billy Starr, a dirty-blonde ball of restless energy.
Evil Twin
Twenty-two years later, the other cell — that egg cell’s evil twin, if you happened to be writing a bad TV script — started its downward spiral.
The Starrs were an active, athletic, outdoor-loving family. One photo shows Betty with a million-dollar smile, leaning against the mast of a sailboat, looking like Daryl Hannah’s pretty sister gliding into a slip at the Kennedy compound.
That black-sheep cell was one of Betty’s melanocytes — the cells that produce melanin, which give skin its color. Unlike the egg cell that turned into Billy, which was big enough to see with the naked eye, this one was less than a tenth the width of a human hair. A combination of genetics and, possibly, a photon of UV radiation thrown from the nearest star, knocked a vital part of this one skin cell’s DNA off its rocker, changing its personality instantly and completely. Unlike millions of Betty’s other cells that had been damaged the same way, this one didn’t repair itself. Betty’s immune system failed to track it down and kill it. Instead of living, and eventually dying, as a productive member of Betty’s epidermal society, this one turned into the cellular equivalent of a drunken frat boy on spring break.
Clone army
It reproduced, and reproduced, and reproduced, making endless copies of its bad self. It stole nutrients and space from the well-behaved skin cells around it, like a bad roommate raiding the fridge after all the good girls have gone to bed. Nobody knows exactly where this wild, doomed party started, somewhere on Betty’s skin. But by the time it had been diagnosed, by the crude tools of the ‘70s, the clone army spawned by this one rogue cell had spread all through her body.
Billy Starr, then 21, knew nothing about this. He was going to college in Denver, hiking and rock climbing around the Rockies, and dreaming of trekking through the Himalayas after he graduated.
When he came home to Boston that summer, though, his father took him into his bedroom and told him that his mom was very sick. And was not going to get well. The sunny life he and his family had lived, and planned to keep on living, came apart like a Nissan with a car bomb in the trunk.
Spandex Ballet
Which is why, 36 years later, at 4:45 on a black August morning, I find my overstuffed self in an arc-lamp-lit hotel parking lot in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. I am, against all concepts of fashion decency, wearing skin-tight bike shorts. I am surrounded by thousands of quiet, equally Spandex-clad people.
I weigh over 260 pounds. No, it is not all muscle. My $699, internet-order road bike and I are facing 111 miles of Eastern Massachusetts. And the next day, another 78 miles of Cape Cod — a total of 189 miles.
Though I’ve been training for months, off and on, riding all over the South Bay, up and over Palos Verdes, up to County Line in Malibu, and even through the Adirondack Mountains of New York, I’m dreading this.
The last time I did a 2-day, 200-mile ride I was 18 years old. I’m old, fat, creaky and scared. I have no idea of whether I can do this or not.
The 300-million-dollar challenge
At the front of this sea of anxious, cleat-clacking humanity will ride both Senators from Massachusetts, Democrat John Kerry and Republican Scott Brown. Led by my old friend Billy Starr, now 59 years old, whom I can hear yelling into a microphone. Leading a charge — The Pan Massachusetts Challenge — that has, in the 31 years since he created it, raised over $300 million to fight cancer.
This once-a-year bike ride — the biggest single athletic fund-raising event in the world — donates over $30 million a year to the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. In a way, Betty’s egg cell is exacting its revenge, dollar by dollar, study by study, breakthrough by breakthrough, treatment by treatment. Survivor by survivor.
Betty’s undying egg cell gave Billy half his DNA. And all his upbeat, insistent, arrogant, pissed-off drive.
The trouble with Billy
This is not the first time Billy has gotten me into this kind of trouble.
I met him in 1975, when I was going to Boston University. I lived in a cellar, for 25 bucks a month. Billy was a friend of Dave Hellman, one of the BU students upstairs who had a room with a door. Billy was a smart, self-assured guy. A good guy, a fit and adventurous guy. But as far as we knew, just a guy like the rest of us.
Billy had lost his mom before I met him. But it was clear that he was suffering — and that he was looking for something, a great, tough adventure, to take his mind off the train wreck that had fallen on his mom, his dad, his brother Mark and himself.
In those days Billy, Dave Hellman, their friend Kenny Schulman and I were members of what I called The Boston Eco Hip. If it had to do with mountains, rocks, ropes, down sleeping bags and carabineers, we were doing it. Did we really hike much? Climb much? Camp much? Not much. But we just might. Any day now.
Then Billy had an idea.
Wet in the wilderness
He decided that the four of us should hike the first 400 miles of the Appalachian Trail. The first stretch is called The Hundred-Mile Wilderness, the wildest section of the 2,175-mile route. There are no towns, stores, bars, paved roads or McDonalds. We would have to carry all our own food, clothing, shelter, bedding, splints, tourniquets, vodka, bug repellent and cyanide tablets. If one of us broke an ankle crossing a freezing river on, say, mile 52, we would be well and truly screwed.
If you think June is a warm month, you haven’t spent it in The-Hundred Mile Wilderness. When it wasn’t raining it was sleeting. Or snowing.
After the first day we all realized that anything made of cotton was likely to kill us. Our T-shirts and jeans got wet, sucked the heat out of us, and stayed wet. But we had no Capilene. No Gore-Tex. Just crappy nylon bathing suits and sticky rain gear.
Hypo? Meet thermia
So we wound up running the Hundred-Mile Wilderness, moving as fast as we could just to keep warm, dressed in whatever we had that was plastic. I am, so far, a heterosexual. But the costume I wore through The Hundred-Mile Wilderness might lead one to assume otherwise: a red Speedo banana hammock and orange nylon chaps.
Hey, it was the ‘70s. I was experimenting. And trying not to fall over dead from hypothermia.
Today, there’s a big sign at the beginning of that trail that says you’re an idiot if you don’t have 10 days worth of food before you start. We had eight. And we believed Mountain House Freeze Dried Camping Food when they said “serving for four”.
Food Fight
There were no actual fistfights over who got to lick the scorched remains of dinner out of the Boy Scout aluminum pot. But it was close.
We were starving, footsore, rainsore, and just about every other kind of sore you can imagine. We had each lost 10 or more pounds in eight days. When we stumbled into Monson, Maine, we went straight to the general store, bought 2-pound bags of Peanut M&Ms, and poured them down our gullets like we were shoveling gravel into a cement mixer.
Billy, lunatic that he is, wanted to hike on the next day.
Man vs. Wild
It was then that I realized that to Billy this was an eternal test of man against nature, of manly perseverance in the face of adversity. Stupid me: I had thought we were going on a hike.
Kenny Shulman and I decided to let Billy and Dave scout the next section. Kenny and I hitched back to Boston, saw our respective girlfriends, ate and drank like pigs and fish, respectively, and then hitched back up to meet Bill and Dave three days later. We four finished the last, harder section of the hike together, crossing into the Presidential Mountains of New Hampshire, shuttling back to Boston, and then going our separate ways. I had a job waiting for me in L.A., writing about motorcycles — a job which I am still doing, in fact, just for the New York Times instead of Dirt Bike Magazine.
In the 36 years since, I had pretty much forgotten the whole hike-through-hell thing. It was interesting, I lived through it, and I went on to the next interesting thing.
Then, early this year, I found Dave Hellman on GoogleFace. And found out what Billy had been doing. While I was riding motorcycles all over the world, and writing ads and brochures for Lexus and Mercedes, Billy had been curing cancer.
Pedal power
In the late ‘70s, Billy had taken to hopping on his road bike at 4 in the morning and riding from Springfield, in the middle of Massachusetts, all the way out to Cape Cod, a 140-mile blast.
It was a way to escape himself, to disappear into the red haze of pain, exhaustion and determination for a few hours. But it didn’t really lead anywhere. It didn’t help people like his mom, and all the moms like her, before and since. Like Martin Sheen, lying in his whiskey-soaked Saigon hotel in Apocalypse Now, he needed a mission.
He got the idea of getting some of his riding buddies together and doing the same ride, but this time to raise a little money to help fight cancer. He put up flyers on every bike-path phone pole from Springfield to Boston. He turned the ride into a two-day affair, because few riders could keep up with his chased-by-the-devil pace. And invented the Pan Massachusetts Challenge.
The first ride had 36 riders. They got lost. They ran out of food. But together, they raised $10,200, and handed it over to the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, one of the country’s most prominent cancer research and care facilities.
My turn
Now, 31 years later, it’s my turn. At 5:30 a.m., with the sky just starting to light up, the pilgrimage begins, thousands of riders clipping in, shifting up and starting to crank our way eastward.
As we grind our way through the burbs, it becomes clear that all of Massachusetts is out in lawn chairs holding signs, ringing cow bells, playing bagpipes and yelling at us.
Every bike has a big name tag. So I am faced with thousands of strangers who suddenly know my name, telling me how great I am as I grunt, wheeze and sweat up every hill. Of course, being an old fat guy means that I am being passed by hordes of younger, fitter men and women and children at each summit, making the cries of “Dexter, you’re awesome” ring a little hollow.
Survivor
The PMC has taken the same route, through these 300-year-old towns and rolling green neighborhoods, every year for 31 years. It’s a powerful tradition in these parts, hooting for riders at 6 in the morning. And because cancer hits about one in three people, there are thousands of families along the way that have lost loved ones over the years. Or who have survivors among them.
Try keeping a stiff upper lip when you ride by a fresh-faced young boy, all bounce and grin, who is holding a sign that says: “Thanks To You, I’m 10.” The good news is that when you’re sweating like Louie Armstrong, tears have a way of blending in as they roll out your face.
Volunteers of America
The PMC is a monstrous logistical enterprise. Billy and his staff have to put on a huge road show, over nearly 200 miles, for over 5,000 riders. To support those 5,000 riders, they need 3,000 volunteers to set up tents, mix Gatorade, serve hamburgers, boil pasta, line up porta-potties, you name it.
Rest stops are located to provide you exactly what you need to keep going, exactly two tenths of a mile before you flop over and expire. Gatorade is mixed in mammoth tubs all across Massachusetts. Peanut butter sandwiches are piled ten-high, creamy or crunchy, in high-school parking lots. And the chirpy, cheery volunteers are determined to get you anything you want, before you want it, without your having to move a muscle.
At one stop I slumped into a shady alcove in a schoolhouse wall, my knees screaming, my helmet dripping. A volunteer ran over with a two-quart jug of frosty red Gatorade, and said “I’ll bring you another one when you’re done with that”. By the time I had finished it — about 18 seconds — she was there with another. I don’t know how they train these people, but if they had done the same customer-relations seminars at the Circuit City in Hawthorne, there would still be a Circuit City in Hawthorne.
On Your Left
I’m glacial on the uphills, but my whale-like shape turns out to have a good lard-to-drag ratio on the downhills. So men, women and children slide past me going up, time after time, calling out “on your left”, only to see me rocket past on the next downhill like a Gatorade-seeking meat missile. My downhill velocity and daunting momentum also let me coast up and over hills that lighter, more worthy riders have to pedal up — a sure sign that there is, in fact, no justice in this life.
I finally coast in to the day’s finish at about 2:30 a.m. I am salty, dirty, and drained. The stopover is at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy in Bourne, a quasi-military college that has its own huge wind turbine, its own ship, complete with 60-person bunk rooms and, today at least, its own hammering rock band and endless supply of free beer.
Harpoon Brewery is the official beer sponsor of the PMC, and the application of multiple India Pale Ales turns out to be an effective mood- elevation, hydration, and anesthetic therapy.
There’s no official start time on Sunday — people just ride off as they please, starting at about 5 in the morning. As I’m finding my bike in the dark I catch sight of Billy Starr, our friend Kenny Shulman, and the posse of thin, sleek hammerheads they ride with. I average about 13 miles an hour on a ride like this. Kenny has told me that he and Billy average over 20 mph. Before I can walk over to say hello they are up, on, clipped in and headed out.
Desperately seeking Susan
As the morning wears on, the line of riders gets thinner and thinner. I find myself riding up hills, again and again, in close formation with a woman named Susan, if her name tag is any indication.
After about the third hill, she turns to me as she pedals past and says: “You know, we’re going to be going back and forth like this for hours.”
She was right, of course. I’d gain a little on each downhill. She’d usually pass me at the top of every nasty little climb. Or she’d pass me, run out of steam, and I’d sneak by in the last few feet.
Finally, as we neared Provincetown we rolled onto an open stretch of Highway 6. On a long, windy climb through the dunes, I inched past her, the last PB&J finally kicking in.
“OK,” she said. “You got me.”
As the highway swoops into Provincetown, riders are faced with a choice. Go straight into town and cut off about 4 miles. Or turn right, up into the dunes to the north, and ride the whole 78.
I stopped, leaned on a guardrail and thought about it. The PMC chase vans were trolling, looking for old, fat people like me who had had enough. My face was beet red. I had run out of sweat a few miles back. But I had told all my sponsors that I was going to do this entire ride. Not just the easy part.
I also thought of Billy Starr, and that awful hike back in 1976. He had gone on. I had taken, by comparison, the easy way out.
Of course, I also knew that the skinny, 20-mph bastard had been partying in Provincetown for the last two hours, while I was sweating my gazongas off .
I took the long way. “It’s Cape Cod,” I thought. “It’s got to be flat.”
Uh, no. It was up and down, up and down, up and down. It was beautiful. It was painful. There are body parts that had signed off by then, body parts that I love dearly, that are now just coming back on line, nearly 2 months later.
But I did it.
Party Town
The PMC is a heartbreaking, heartwarming event. It is also a wicked-pisser party. The “Big Ferry” boat ride takes the serious celebrators from P-town to Boston.
It’s a three-deck ship, but the lower two decks are nearly deserted. The top deck is where it all happens — it’s packed with drinkers, dancers and a gritty, tough-girl rock band. If you have any energy left after riding 189 miles, this is the place to burn it off.
There was a woman dancing on her boyfriend’s shoulders up there. She was bald. Probably from chemo. She was having the time of her life.
Jonestown
I caught up with Billy Starr down on the lowest deck. PMC vets call this deck “Jonestown”. It is where spent riders tend to pass out, year after year, like so many sedated bears.
He was hiding from the crowd, sitting on the rusty steel plate, checking his iPhone. A 59-year-old man taking a few moments after 189 miles—and 31 years — of saving his version of the world.
To call Billy a rock star is to trivialize him. Bono wakes up in the middle of the night, wishing he were Billy Starr.
Most charities spend a big percentage of donations on their own salaries, administration costs, advertising, PR and the like, which means that a dollar donated can result in much less being actually contributed to their cause.
The PMC is different. Every dollar raised by riders goes straight to the Jimmy Fund, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute fund-raising arm. 100 percent.
How many lives does $300 million buy? How many kids who still have a mom? Moms who still have a daughter? Husbands who still have a wife? Will Billy’s $300 million save your life? Your daughter’s? Mine?
Billy’s mom was still alive, in a way. She was sitting next to me. And she was getting even.
“Look what you went and did while I wasn’t watching,” I said to Billy.
He just laughed.
Your turn
One of the reasons Billy, and the PMC, are so successful at raising money is that they don’t let riders get away with fund-raising bullshit. If you pledge to raise $4,200 — the minimum required if you want to do the longest ride, the Sturbridge-to-Provincetown run — you simply put it on your Visa card. If you don’t raise the money, the difference comes right out of your hide.
I am happy to report that I made it. Not just on the bike, but in my fund-raising total as well. I’m over the top.
But cancer, as you may have noticed, is not yet cured. So you might want to donate.
It’s easy. Go to http://www.pmc.org/profile/df0160, and click on “Donate to my ride”. Or just go to http://www.pmc.org/ and search for me, Dexter Ford. Or just find me and hand me a check.
If you can swing it, I think it’s reasonable to donate a dollar for every mile I rode. I can assure you that I hurt, somewhere, every one of those miles. ER
