Marblehead man returns from bike trip across country

MARBLEHEAD – Marbleheader Jean-Marc Dykes’ cross country journey ended Friday evening with warm greetings from a caring crowd of well-wishers.Dykes, a student at the University of British Columbia and a summertime instructor at the Acorn Gallery on Front Street, was completing a 4,000-mile cross-country bike ride for Lupus research.On May 28 he began in Vancouver, British Columbia, made his way to Washington and rode the Northern Tier trail across the continent to his hometown.His goal was to raise $15,000 for Lupus Research Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. As of this week, according to his Web site, www.lupusride.com, the ride has raised a little more than $10,000, with a lot of help from the students at Acorn Gallery on Front Street.Dykes rode for a Marblehead friend, Debra Highberger, who has been fighting the effects of Lupus for the past four years. Highberger and her husband, Jack, started the Acorn Gallery as an art school for challenged children nearly 14 years and thousands of children ago and the program has been so successful that mainstream children now line up to be included.An athlete, Highberger prided herself on her ability to leg press over 500 pounds. At least once a week she rode her bike the 40-plus miles between Marblehead and Gloucester before the doctors told her the bad news.Between one summer and the next, Dykes’ friend changed noticeably.”(Sickness) crept into Debra’s life like the cold, affecting her fingers and hands, suddenly she had a sore throat that would not go away,” Dykes recalled for the Web site. “She could barely hold a paintbrush. Her joints (were) on fire with pain (that) barely allowed her to walk.””Rain or shine, pain or no pain, Debra was up every morning for work and even though she needed help sitting and standing, (and) sometimes walking, she kept going? She was determined not to let this get the best of her.”Doctors at the Brigham & Women’s Lupus Center diagnosed her condition and put her on a treatment plan that eased her pain and helped her get some of her old self back.Returning home for December holidays in 2007, Dykes could not believe his eyes when he saw her and realized how much progress she had made in a few months – but ultimately he knew that doctors can treat symptoms but not the disease.Last summer he recalled a late afternoon conversation with Debra on her back porch, before she became ill.At one point he said, “‘How amazing would it be to ride a bike across the country? Can you imagine what you’d see? Waking up and riding into the sunrise, the mountains and all the people you’d meet.”It was a momentary fantasy that gelled for him when Highberger looked him in the eye and said, “Do it.” With those two words Dykes suddenly envisioned the Rockies, felt the rush of the wind and heard the silence of the prairie at sunrise.”If there is anything I’ve learned from this remarkable woman, it is that dreams, no matter how absurd, far fetched, or shadowed by impossibility, should be pursued,” he said.Those thoughts ultimately led him to his rideThinking about his friend and his decision, Dykes expressed only one regret: “Curiously enough (Deb and I) never got a chance to ride together.”Perhaps some people would say she was there with him every mile of the way.