Jasmine Reese doesn’t have an address. For 30 years, she claimed zip codes in California, New York, Missouri, and Texas, but last summer, she broke her lease in Indianapolis and officially became a vagabond. The open road, she reasoned, suited her lifestyle better than any house, street, or city ever could.
But to be nomadic isn’t to be homeless. Reese knows the difference. As a teenager, she bounced between Los Angeles motels with her mom and younger brother. That was a necessity, and this is a choice. Some years ago, she left her property behind because she wanted to find peace and a purpose. Now she has both, and she’s sharing the wealth with strangers, one mile and roadside concerto at a time.
Pick any stretch of North America and you might spot Reese pedaling an Ice Adventure HD recumbent trike with her 7-year-old dog Fiji, a greyhound-border collie-American Staffordshire terrier mix, happily hoofing it beside her.
Reese will likely be en route to a church, elementary school, street corner, or living room to play her violin and bring people together through the power of music. Maybe she’ll end up crashing for the night at her makeshift concert hall, but she doesn’t always plan that far ahead. That’s life as a Wandering Long-Distance Touring Cyclist and One-Woman Orchestra, after all.
Such a job title doesn’t fit neatly on a business card or LinkedIn profile. And Reese certainly didn’t think she’d ever criss-cross entire countries on three wheels with her dog and violin. But as all cyclists will tell you, it’s the roads you don’t plan on taking that end up being the best rides.
On May 8, 2013, Reese hopped on her Kona Sutra touring bike, crammed a couple essentials—a change of clothes, some hygiene products, a few packets of protein powder—into a pannier, and started her coast-to-coast journey from New York to San Diego. She didn’t have any food, cash, spare parts, or plans for where to sleep over the next six months. But she did have Fiji.
Why was she staring down 4,000 miles in a half a year when she had barely logged a dozen in a day?
“I was so desperate to save myself from whatever was happening to me,” Reese says. “I was no longer the Jasmine I once knew, and I badly wanted to be that girl again. I thought that maybe at the end of that finish line, after this ultimate bicycle ride, the old Jasmine would be waiting for me.”
The old Jasmine had a knack for making the right choices. At age 12, she wanted to help her struggling single mother, Trinity, who was battling a lingering illness while working several jobs to provide for her daughter and toddler son, Jezrell. So Reese fashioned a makeshift babysitting certificate, advertised her credentials to families in the neighborhood, and landed jobs to help mom pay the bills.
“She’s always been an incredibly focused and driven woman who just looks forward and keeps going, despite all the obstacles,” Trinity says. “If I believed in reincarnation, I’d say she’s an old soul.”
That same year, Reese homeschooled herself to avoid the violence in the L.A. public school system. The following year, at age 13, after hearing Anne-Sophie Mutter perform Jean Sibelius’ Violin Concerto in D. Minor, Op. 47 on a classical radio station, she knew she had to play the stringed instrument. So she bought her own violin with babysitting money, named it Anakin in a nod to the Star Wars flicks, and cleaned teachers’ houses to earn free lessons.
“That’s Jasmine’s story: determination,” Trinity says. “When she sets her mind on something, she goes after it.”
Reese quickly zipped through several levels of local community orchestras, but wasn’t sure she could cut it in a university conservatory after graduating high school at 15. Instead, she worked a retail job during the day and returned each night to the dingy motel room the Reese clan rented. She only left town for Alfred University in New York once she made sure Trinity and Jezrell had a steady place to live.
But after transferring to the University of Missouri to pursue journalism, she felt torn for the first time in her life. While she badly wanted to major in music, none of the women in her family had ever made it to college. She didn’t want to disappoint them by picking an unstable profession.
When Reese turned down the opportunity to audition for Missouri’s music program, she fell into a downward spiral. “Suddenly I became very reclusive and inactive,” she says. “I went from a 3.9 GPA to a 2.5 in a year, all the way down to a 1.9 by the next. I gained 100 pounds. I was so isolated in my room that I could barely go out and do anything.”
It would take her years to find a name for what she was going through: major depression. “At first I thought this was all about the music thing, and then I attributed it to the burnout I felt after working so hard for so long,” Reese says. “But my depression didn’t have a reason or rhyme. It was just chemical. And it made everything I did up until that point seem so much worse.”
The old Jasmine, however, wasn’t around to come up with a solution. It was the new Jasmine’s job to find a fix in her place.
It took until 2011 for some canine intervention to alter Reese’s course. She had originally rescued Fiji to be Trinity’s dog, but the pooch had other plans. “I tried my best not to fall in love with her and grow too attached,” Reese says, “but she wouldn’t leave my side. She slept in my bed. She chose me instead.”
Fiji forced her new owner to get up, get out, and go for walks. And as Reese learned to care for another creature, she also made an important step in caring for herself. She wanted to exercise, but wasn’t yet comfortable going to the gym. So she chose option B: riding her mom’s old bicycle that was collecting dust in the garage.
On day one, she rode seven miles from her house to the University of Missouri and back. On day two, she noticed a trend: “Normally, I didn’t feel anything but despair,” Reese says. “But as soon as I got on that bike, I’d feel good. I’d hear myself breathing. I’d hear birds chirping. I’d see all these beautiful things.”
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Ultimately, school didn’t stick. But as the months went on, the better she felt on her bike. And while Reese’s depression didn’t disappear overnight, she began to hatch her plan for starting anew while pedaling around town.
“Bicycling was the only thing that made me feel like Jasmine again,” Reese says. So she pledged to chase those endorphins—and her past—across America, with Fiji riding shotgun.
Naturally, her mom was taken aback by the grand goal. “My stomach was in knots when Jasmine told me what she wanted to do,” Trinity says, “but I couldn’t stop her. And I wasn’t going to stop her.”
Trinity, too, had dealt with debilitating depression and repeatedly tried to take her own life. “My end result was taking pills and cutting myself,” she says. “I didn’t want to see my kids go through that. My objective is to support them. I knew this was something Jasmine needed to do in order to find herself, and if riding her bike around the country would put a smile on her face, I had to let her do it.”
Reese’s mission was audacious, but she was desperate. If this didn’t work, would anything?
On the first evening of Reese’s journey, she pulled over at a church somewhere in New Jersey hoping to camp outside in her pop-up tent. Before she could ask the pastor for permission, however, a woman stopped her.
“You’re not camping tonight,” the stranger told Reese. “You’re going to come with me to my house, and you’re going to sleep in a real bed, and you’re going to have a nice dinner with me and my family.”
In exchange for room and board, the woman asked Reese to volunteer at the local food pantry. It was only night one, but she was already surprised by the kindness of strangers. Tied to her phone in her depressed haze, society seemed flawed.
“When you stay in your room and look at social media all day, it’s easy to believe the world is filled with horrible, dangerous, negative people,” Reese says. “But when I got out there and met all these wonderful people, I realized there’s tons of good in this world.”
Over the next six months, Reese camped just three nights by herself. The rest of the time, strangers shared their homes with her or paid for hotels.
Ben Stallings was one person who opened his door for Reese. When he caught wind of her story on Warmshowers, a site that touring cyclists use to link up with potential hosts along their routes, he offered his spare room in Emporia, Kansas, without hesitation.
“I didn’t find what she was doing to be crazy—it was distinctive,” Stallings says. “Here was this woman who had to face all these prejudices and preconceptions: She was a single, overweight, black woman with a dog. And I really respected that.”
Reese was only supposed to spend the night; instead, she stayed for three. She and Stallings spent their evenings talking openly about anxiety, depression, and her rapidly changing societal views. “She has no illusions about the bad things that are possible,” Stallings says, “but she is determined to be an optimist when she interacts with people. That’s something most of us need to work on.”
As Reese traveled further west and eventually wheeled into San Diego on November 2, her perspective wasn’t the only thing that had profoundly changed.
“I didn’t experience a single episode of depression on that first trip,” she says. “That was just amazing to me. I went from being depressed every day to riding a bicycle across the country without ever feeling one of those dark feelings.”
Once she reached the Golden State, however, the old Jasmine was nowhere to be found.
“At some point,” Reese says, “I stopped looking for her at the end of the road. I was completely satisfied and happy with who I was in that moment, and I didn’t need to see that reflection anymore. I was proud of the person I was becoming.”
Still, Reese wanted more. After settling in Indianapolis in the years following her inaugural trek, Reese noticed she had neglected the violin, once the source of her deepest ambitions. She needed to find a way to chase her musical dreams.
Again, she recruited Fiji and set out to cover Canada, this time with her violin and a new trike designed to take the pressure off her arms. Over seven months in 2016, she went from Victoria to Halifax busking for strangers, performing private concerts in people’s houses, and meeting with communities to discuss music’s impact on the local level.
One of her stops included “Mayook Mania,” an annual private music festival that Shelagh Redecopp has thrown in her Mayook, British Columbia backyard for more than 35 years. She heard about Reese’s tour through a friend and happily offered her a place to crash—as long as she’d take the stage.
Redecopp, who is also a violinist, jammed with Reese and several other musicians on a bicycle-themed symphony that a composer in Germany specifically wrote for Reese. But Redecopp wasn’t just impressed with her bandmate’s chops.
“Jasmine made this huge decision to seriously pursue classical music only very recently, and that isn’t something you normally do later in life,” Redecopp says. “But that’s what I admire most about her: So many of us decide to do hard things, but we don’t usually follow through on them. She does.”
Elsewhere on her Canadian tour, Reese met Richard Roussy, who hosted her in his Castlegar, B.C., home for a week while she attended a nearby fiddle camp. In the evenings, they split firewood, weeded the vegetable garden, cooked dinner together, and became instant pals.
“She’s found a way to make friends with virtually everyone she comes in contact with,” Roussy says of Reese. “And she inspired me to make a real effort to communicate. I learned if you talk to people and listen to them, they’re going to do the same to you.”
Reese has a habit of inspiring each person she meets on the road in a different way—especially now that she’s parlayed two-life changing trips into a full-time position as a traveling musician available for hire.
It’s a fitting way to make a living, but Diane Hoogveld of Jefferson City, Missouri, who met Reese last May when Reese stayed with her, thinks there might be a different kind of occupation in the cards for her one day.
“Jasmine helped me understand that bicycling is an escape—from anxiety, depression, or whatever you have in your life that you might be suffering from,” Hoogveld says. “After that, I immediately started seeing everyone who stays with me in a different way. And if I can say this, I really think she’s missing her calling. It was like I lived with a therapist for four days. She’s a natural counselor.”
Trinity Reese admits that her daughter probably is suited for a more conventional profession.
“Every parent wants to see their child—especially when they’re as smart as Jasmine—be something like a doctor or attorney, because she just has so much to offer the world,” Trinity says. “But at the end of the day, every parent also just wants to know that their child is happy. And that’s how I feel. If this is what makes her happy, then man, I’m even happier.”
Reese and Fiji will wrap up the year in California, where she’ll stay for a month and continue to plot out her “embryo of a dream:” forming her own traveling community music school. In January, the pair will take the Pan-American Highway all the way down to Argentina, which will give Reese the chance to test out the concept with music programs in Mexico and South America.
It’s another aggressive goal, but just as Reese ultimately stopped worrying about reclaiming her past, she learned to live her life without regrets many miles ago.
“If you want to compete in a bike race, or enter a triathlon, or go on a long cross-country cycling tour, just do it,” she says. “Life is too short to keep putting things off all the time. It’s okay to move forward.”
