The Daily Targum: Two students, two bicycles, one million new trees

Imagine you had the ability to place Lance Armstrong and Johnny Appleseed into a blender and combine the two. What would come out? Just ask Matthew Cortina. The University College sophomore and friend Grant Gardner, who attends Virginia Tech, are planning to cross America by bike. Not only that, but the duo aim to plant 1 million trees during their journey. “It’s kind of an out there idea,” Cortina said. “I had the idea of doing something big. I wanted to see the country, I wanted to do something, I wanted to travel, so we decided to bike across the country.”

The thought came to Cortina as he sat in a coffee shop roughly five months ago, and has grown on him ever since. He pitched his plan to Gardner, who was on board immediately, Cortina said. “We said ‘Hey, why don’t we plant a million trees?’ It was really just like that. I came up with the idea, I told him about it, and he was equally enthused.” The ambitious pair has known one another since middle school, where they became best friends. They graduated from Hunterdon Central High School, in Flemington, N.J. Cortina said the trip is scheduled to begin May 15, 2008, in little over than a year.

The starting location will be in Yorktown, Va., close to Gardner’s school. From Yorktown, the two will cut through Virginia, followed by 11 other states until they reach their destination in Florence, Ore. The trail they will use, the Trans-American trail, is commonly known to bikers, and consists of both highways and residential roads.

Along the way, Cortina and Gardner will be accompanied by a medical advisor and Syracuse University film student Alex Conway, who will be shooting a documentary about their journey. The trip is scheduled to take 54 days, Cortina said. “There will be three to four weeks that we just spend resting or planting,” Cortina said. “Hopefully we can get a huge chunk [of the planting] done in those four weeks.” The two chose Oregon over any other West Coast destination because of its scenic beauty.

“Coming from New Jersey and from the Northeast, there’s this disattachment to the Northwest. You see pictures of it, and it’s such a beautiful area,” Cortina said. “That’s the core of America’s landscape and its nature and its beauty.” Although both Gardner and Cortina played sports in high school, neither of them has ever undertaken anything so physically grueling. “We never were crazy about bikes,” Cortina said.

“We figure it’s just another challenge and that we can do it.” He added that both he and his colleague are already beginning their training for next summer. In addition to biking, the pair will have to carry seeds with them to plant the trees. Cortina said he and Gardner will carry four to five days worth of seeds at a time.

“We’re going to try and ship [the seeds] to farms and volunteers along the trail and pick them up as we go,” he said. The two created a Web site, plantingamerica.org, where they have continuous blogs and a donations section. “We just received our first donation from a person that we don’t know,” Cortina said, smiling.

In addition to donations, he and Gardner are also selling shirts and other merchandise on the site to raise funding for their trip. Cortina said the journey, while environmental in nature, concerns much more than just planting trees. “The main goal of the trip is to put a million trees into the ground. But what we really want to focus on is we want to inspire college students and people from our generation to make a difference, to get up and do something,” Cortina said.

“We want to show people what we can do, and what the possibility is for people in our generation to actually accomplish something if they just get up and do it.”