Author Pattie Baker takes us on a sustainable ride across the U.S.
In 2023, Dunwoody resident Pattie Baker traveled 10,000 miles across the United States alone on three modes of transport: her ZiZZO foldable bike featuring a rubber duck on its handle bars, bus and train. She did this for around $20 per day by coordinating her route around farm stays with the help of Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms, a nonprofit that links visitors with organic farmers. The visitors volunteer on the farms; the farms provide room and board.
Baker is an urban farmer who founded the Dunwoody community garden, among others around Atlanta. She’s also an avid biker and writer who turned 60 during the five-month journey and wanted to show other women how to solo travel safely. Another goal was to model sustainability and see if she could do it for the same amount of money in 2023—not accounting for inflation—that she spent backpacking across Europe in her early 20s in 1985. And she wanted to document the reactions to the rubber duck.
Last year, Baker published her 11th book, Round America with a Duck, that details this experience including doing 500 hours of manual labor on farms (“I loved every minute of it!”). Beginning with a pilot stay in Mableton prior to taking off from Atlanta, the 11 farms she visited included a commercial lavender farm in Lookout Mountain, a homestead with goats in North Carolina, a Krishna temple in Utah with a herd of llamas and a suburban “mini farm” in Boulder, Colorado.
Here, appropriately timed with National Bike Month, Baker points out, we chat with her about how she came up with this idea and the lessons she learned along the way.
What made you decide to do this?
I specialize in experiential journalism with a focus on triple bottom line sustainability: people, profits and planets. This is how the multitude of sustainability actions can affect the bottom line. I am an empty nester, and during COVID, I had been scheduled to leave for the Peace Corps in Uganda where I’d be for over two years, but that trip was delayed six times. [Instead of leaving,] I got a position with the CDC Foundation, heading the “Healthy You in 2022” campaign for the state of Alaska. When that contract was up, I was itching to tell a bigger story that was my own. A friend had given me a silly rubber duck, and I put it on my bike’s handlebars. After a time of isolation during COVID when people had headphones on and didn’t even wave as I rode by, the duck made people smile and talk to me again. I wanted to see what happened when I went across the entire U.S. with the duck.
You describe your book as a “quick read.” What do you mean by that?
My dad is 90. He and other family members have severe eye problems. I chose the font, spacing, short sentences and breathability of the page for readability. It’s 225 pages but a quick read for those reasons.
It’s also for the younger generations: Attention spans are short, so I wrote it in a way that you can pick it up and put it down. It is an external and internal journey. It’s about what’s happening during my travels, and you also get my thoughts and reactions along the way.
What are some takeaways and lessons you’d like to share?
The biggest, and my motto, is: Trust the journey. There are so many ways to live a life. We get into a routine, and there are expectations in our culture for what we should be doing. But this next chapter, we can write with more freedom than we think. Also, so much good is happening in this world. Look for the good, find the good and be part of the good. I worked with a number of young folks who are getting degrees to pursue positive solutions. There’s not one farmer who doesn’t recognize that climate change is affecting their lands. Step away from what you’re reading and go and speak with people about what they are experiencing.
