They were kids, and some could barely ride a bike, but they made it across the US

In 1982, a band of 31 North Carolina teenagers found themselves pedaling their bikes across the Mojave desert, through the Grand Canyon, over the Rocky Mountains, under the Gateway Arch and over 3,600 miles of raw America — landing with a splash in the waves at Cape Hatteras.

They had all answered the same newspaper ad: Teens wanted for cross-country bike ride to raise money for multiple sclerosis.

And though some of them were only 14, and one of them tackled the journey on a Schwinn, and one of them had to learn how to shift gears, and one of them struggled with cystic fibrosis, they all signed on for the three-month slog — enduring 100-plus degree heat, taking naps in random restaurant parking lots, persisting no matter what.

Starting Thursday, their unlikely trip is chronicled in a four-part documentary airing on PBS NC — a love story to youthful daring called “Shadow of a Wheel.”

Experiences that change you

The four weekly, hour-long episodes, created by Asheville filmmaker Paul Bonesteel, who was a 16-year-old participant from Hendersonville, follow the kids across the summer they spent nursing saddle-sores and sleeping on the ground while their friends played video games and laid on the beach.

Bonesteel tracks down and interviews most of the original 31 after 40 years, and he finds they not only recall their trip in sharp detail, but still consider it a defining time in their lives — a period that turned them into risk-takers eager to take big bites of life.

“How does our experience as kids change us?” he asks in the film’s opening moments. “What meaning does it have now?”

His own answer comes through recalling a ride out of the Grand Canyon at night, almost entirely downhill, a memory that still drives him toward a more urgent and intentional life.

“You could see these mesas against the moonlight,” he told The News & Observer, “and it was hard to keep your eyes on the road. You don’t know if you’ll ever do that again, and the effort it would take was only possible if you would ride your bike across the country. You could fly to that place, and it wouldn’t mean the same thing unless you’d gotten there on your bike.”

Bike wrecks, homesickness, near mutiny — but they kept pedaling

The 31 kids all took their cues from Chuck Williford from Hickory, who had already made a smaller ride on his own and took his pitch for a mass, cross-country youth pedaling odyssey to the Multiple Sclerosis Society of North Carolina.

The group signed on and gave the ride an official chaperon, and soon Williford was posting ads in newspapers across the state, asking only for committed riders able to raise about $5,000 in sponsorships. His connection to multiple sclerosis is murky even today, but he was by all descriptions a dynamic pitchman with irresistible charisma.

One of those ads found Amy Hurka-Owen, then a student at St. Mary’s School in Raleigh, who describes herself as both the last kid picked for the kickball team and starved for the beatnik life at 16.

Her father, a decided non-beatnik, demanded to know how she was going to spend the summer and pointed out that some kids were going to ride all the way across the country for charity. He challenged her, offering to match what donations she could raise, and she defiantly accepted.

“Me and my pig-headed big mouth,” she told The N&O, recalling the moment. “We were in over our heads. As soon as you’d stop, you’d want to go to sleep. People would let us sleep in their front yards. You’re so far away, you have to keep going. No one wants to go to Kingman, Ariz., and your parents aren’t going to pick you up.”

Along the way, the group survived bike wrecks, homesickness, near-mutiny and Williford’s threat to fly home and leave them. But the farther they pedaled, the more they felt the urge to make it all 3,600 miles. Throughout the film, you hear Supertramp, Talking Heads, Pretenders — the soundtrack to their era.

Some of them started school the day after they hit Cape Hatteras, then scattered, talking infrequently if at all. The riders ended up earning about $50,000 for multiple sclerosis, and a few of them wanted to pedal back rather than get in the car with their parents.

Four decades removed from the experience, the riders in “Shadows of a Wheel” talk about not walking at graduation ceremonies because those sorts of things didn’t matter anymore. The ride did, and for some of them, it felt they never got off the bike.

“I have this sense that it’s just not as easy for young people today to commit to something, and to go out an a limb, risk, and just be bold, you know?” Bonesteel said in a promotional interview.

“If you’re not going to do it at 16, or at 20, or 25, you’re not going to do it later. Maybe you can, but it’s going to get harder. This is Paul’s philosophy, obviously. Go. Do it. Ride, you know? See places you’ve never seen. Meet people you would never meet. Otherwise, well you’re bored. It’s your own fault. Right?”

Watch ‘Shadow of a Wheel’

Watch on TV: “Shadow of a Wheel” premieres July 6 at 9:30 p.m. on PBS NC.

Stream: All four parts will be streaming on July 6 only for PBS NC Passport members. Details at video.pbsnc.org/passport.