AUGUST 18, 2012
Zigzagging through country roads on a detour through a tiny town, somewhere in east Missouri, population under two hundred, the tarmac suddenly ends. I find myself on an unpaved road, with the main state highway some five miles away, according to the GPS. Pegasus wobbles and bumps against the large, jagged gravel, and eventually I’m forced to dismount and walk. The GPS is struggling to get a reading now, leading me down a maze of stony paths. The miles stretch on and on, and the GPS keeps replotting the route for roads that don’t exist. It’s exasperating.
“Stupid fucking satnav. Stupid fucking roads.” Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer, said the veteran adventurer Mark Twain, who clearly knew all about it. The road continues as far as I can see in either direction. Trekking under the sweltering sun, hungry and out of water, my mood starts to plummet as dehydration, hunger, and irritation rise. An old farm jalopy hurtles down the road toward me, kicking up clouds of white dust. I put out my hand, and the gnarly, graying driver in jean overalls slows up next to me.
“Excuse me, could you tell me if this is the right direction for the state highway?”
“Yup, I guess. But you got at least another three miles. Ain’t a good road for that bike.” He spits out a mouthful of brown tobacco juice.
“No shit.” Few things annoy me like people who state the obvious.
After an hour’s walking I finally get back on tarmac. My throat feels like the gravel road I have just been down. The next town is a few miles farther on, and I stop inside the first Subway I find. The sandwich chain has been sustaining me throughout America as it’s slightly healthier than the other fast-food options and it has branches almost everywhere. I order a foot-long sandwich and Gatorade from the woman on the other side of the counter. She gives me a sidelong glance and raises a single eyebrow.
I must be a sooty sight. I can feel the grit and dust sticking to my sweat. I am trying to forget what “bathed and clean” feels like, forget smelling good, and most of all, forget dignity. I slink off to the toilet in the hope of washing some of the grime from my face and arms. It is not much better when I have finished, but it will have to do. Stuffing down the roast beef and avocado sandwich helps raise my mood a few levels closer to normal.
AUGUST 19, 2012
I have hit Nebraska, where even Subways are hard to find. Decent food is a rare treat here. I am in wilderness country now. Nothing for miles between tiny deserted towns consisting of a few neglected shacks and houses, each with a population under ninety. The plains stretch into infinity. It is easy to imagine oneself back in the Wild West, where Comanches on horseback hunted wild buffalo. The terrain is flat, and for the first time in America, I have a powerful tailwind. In addition, I gain an extra hour of daylight when I cross the time zone.
“Let’s get it done,” I tell Pegasus again. It is a good day to push hard, and we cover 170 miles. Days like this one remind me of just how much ground I could be covering were I going in the opposite direction, with consistent tailwinds. Thinking about it gets depressing.
Most days blend into each other on the road. Days without incident. The impression of moving while time hangs in suspension. Long hours of sitting in the saddle, punctuated only by brief stops for food and water. These short breaks become the highlights of my day. I can muse for hours over what I will eat or drink when next I stop. What will I treat myself to after fifty miles? Will I have a Coke, a Red Bull, or a coffee? Shall I try that new peanut butter chocolate bar or some beef jerky?
A woman at a service station informs me there have been massive forest fires sweeping through the north of Wyoming. Seeing Yellowstone National Park has always been high on my wish list, and I’ve been looking forward to pedaling through it, so the news is disappointing. I will have to take a route passing through the south of Wyoming instead. One of the essential skills I’m cultivating on the road is flexibility. Anything can happen, and when it does, you have to adapt. Where there is a problem, there is always a solution.
AUGUST 21, 2012
I have stopped for lunch in the tiny border town of Pine Bluffs, just after crossing from Nebraska into Wyoming. It has the crumbling, derelict appearance of a ghost town. There are a few shops and diners with broken windows and boarded-up doors. The only place that seems to be open is a dive bar called Pal’s pub, where I hope to find at least a hamburger and fries.
It is a dimly lit, smoky joint with neon signs, old caps, saddles, pictures, and random paraphernalia covering the walls. A line of similarly overweight, bearded locals wearing cowboy hats, checked shirts, and colorful suspenders are sitting along the length of the bar. The cowboys give me a brief once-over before unanimously turning back to their beers.
“Do you serve food?” I ask the aging female bartender. The deep lines creasing her face are downturned in a permanent scowl. I imagine she has been here her entire life, stubbornly refusing to go anywhere else, while her neighbors have shut down and boarded up their businesses and the little town has slowly faded into oblivion. I wonder whether Pine Bluffs will become one more abandoned middle-American town within a few years.
“Read the board,” she snaps back, signaling with her thumb to a blackboard behind the bar.
It’s difficult to make out the faint white chalk scribblings in the neon-blue bar light. chicken burger and chips, $4, reads the only item on the menu.
“Guess I’ll have the chicken burger and chips.”
“What’re ya drinkin’?”
“A Coke, please.”
I sit at one of the dark wooden tables, and she plunks a warm Coke can down in front of me. Too intimidated to ask for a glass and ice, I watch as she stomps back over to the bar, pulls a box out of a freezer, tears it open, and tosses something inside the microwave. Five minutes later she’s back, carrying a plastic plate with the “burger”—a defrosted, breaded chicken patty the consistency of rubber—sandwiched between a dry white bun that tastes of chemicals, with a bag of plain potato chips on the side. To think I have been looking forward to this all day! Hungry as I am, I cannot eat the burger, so I swallow my stinging disappointment along with the chips and leave my four dollars on the table.
I am fully aware of how absurd it is that something as basic as food has the ability to affect my mood. I usually try to keep things light; it’s always easier to deal with little problems or difficult people with humor. But when I’m hungry, I can quickly become snappy, capricious, and grumpy. When life is stripped down and minimized to the absolute essentials, then silly things like the quality of food can get blown out of all proportion. To keep my negative emotions in check, I go into deep energy-conservation mode. This means keep still, keep quiet, keep calm.
Keep everything in perspective, I tell myself. I think about what food was like as a child growing up in developing countries across Asia and Africa. Almost nothing was eaten for pleasure. It was all just fuel, plain and awful. Fruit and vegetables were scavenged from the bins behind market stalls. It took hours to cut out the “good bits” from the rotten. Then everything was boiled until it was tasteless. As staples, beans and lentils came second only to livers and hearts, the cheapest protein anywhere in the world. If we were hungry, we filled up on rice. I remember thinking the impoverished locals ate better than we did. Food portions were rationed out, and we ate every last thing set before us, giving thanks, asking no questions, because beggars can’t be choosers, and we were “beggars for Christ,” or “missionaries,” as the adults preferred to call themselves. When I grew up, I swore I would never willingly eat “bad” food again. Now I chuckle to think how I wouldn’t mind some plain boiled beans and rice at this moment, and how “good” and “bad” are entirely relative and circumstantial terms.
I get back on my bike and start pedaling up the road when I happen upon a deli. Salvation! How can I describe my elation in this moment? Compared to the inedible dive-bar burger, the deli steak and cheese sandwich tastes like Michelin-star cuisine. I
f I have learned nothing else thus far, I have learned how to appreciate the little things—and what is existence except a giant conglomeration of little things? We don’t even realize our reliance on them, how much we take them for granted, until we are without them. Even essentials like food and water. It takes loss and privation for us to discover the true value of something or someone. This is the strange nature of humans.
A FERRY TALE
AUGUST 23, 2012
The flat, desolate wilderness of Nebraska has continued through the south of Wyoming, but with an awe-inspiring variation. Mammoth rock formations cut through the landscape, rising out of the silver and green sagebrush like ancient petrified titans. This country takes my breath away. It is a country for gods, animals, and philosophers.
I have been meeting a lot of Harley bikers and their leather-clad ladies at the service station rest stops along the highway. “We were heading north, passing through Yellowstone Park, and had to detour south because of the fires,” one couple tells me. “Don’t be headin’ north, whatever you do. We just come from there. The roads are impassable.”
Once again I am relieved to have gotten wind of the fires ahead of time and preemptively shifted my route south.
The bikers give me a salute and shout something I can’t hear over their revving motors as they roar out of the station. This country is ideal for social rebels. It certainly touches something archaic and primitive in me. I feel like a cowgirl heading west on my white stallion. Civilization seems very far away and very futile. A girl could happily disappear into the wilds here. I have fantasies of building a rough log cabin somewhere in the middle of the sagebrush-covered hills and dropping off the radar entirely.
It has been a month since I set off from Naples, but the time feels much longer and much shorter than that, as though I have always traveled like this, and always could, forever.
AUGUST 26, 2012
Mark Webber is a photographer who specializes in shooting outdoor adventurers. He heard about my journey through a mutual friend and has now met me in Twin Falls, Idaho, to follow me on the road for an afternoon and take some photos. Rain is threatening, but the wind is at my back, and I am flying past some incredible scenery on the Thousand Springs Scenic Byway. Cascades of spring water jettison out of the winding, phosphorous cliffs of Snake River Canyon. Two storms are rushing in behind me from the northeast and the southeast, and the force of the two winds acts as a powerful propellant. I pedal with a ridiculous grin stretching my cheeks.
Antonio calls. “What’s going on?”
“What do you mean?”
“The tracker says you’re averaging twenty-two miles an hour.”
“Is that all? It feels much faster.”
“So it’s correct?”
“Better believe it! Woohoo!”
It feels like I have won the lottery. If I could have this kind of wind every day, I would make it around the world in eighty days. I would have finished the United States long ago. The contrast reminds me once again of just how much the almost constant headwinds have impeded my progress across North America.
Mark is somewhere nearby, snapping photos. He’s been pulling his truck off the road and scrambling up cliff faces to get aerial shots of me and Pegasus racing by. I catch no more than flashes of him every so often, waiting by the side of the road. When he isn’t photographing adventures, Mark is a professional rock climber. He combines the best of both his talents to produce some incredible shots.
Eventually the two storms catch up and break over us in a clash of thunder and icy sheets of rain, so I pull over at a roadside bar. It is only midafternoon, but I have already covered nearly 125 miles. I feel like kicking back.
“Let’s have a beer,” I suggest to Mark.
“You want to drink now?”
“Why not? This rain’s gonna go on for at least another hour.”
We sit quietly at the bar and drink our beers, but I feel like dancing a merry jig on the bar top. The mood I’m in, I am up for just about anything. There have been bad days, but this is definitely not one of them. When the storm eventually blows itself out and the sun breaks through, Mark wishes me luck and heads home. Meanwhile I continue for another fifteen miles and stop for the night in Glenns Ferry, Idaho.
AUGUST 27, 2012
I grab breakfast—some banana bread, yogurt, and a carton of milky coffee—in a supermarket and eat it in the park across the road. By the time I come back to the typical forty-dollar-a-night motel—you know the kind: beige carpets and garishly patterned bedcover and drapes—to pay the bill, the manager is in his office. While he putters around, searching for the receipt book, I check out the black-and-white photo display on the wall depicting Glenns Ferry in various stages of its history.
“How old is this town?” I ask.
“How old is this town? Well . . .” The question seems to stump him momentarily. He strokes the stubble on his chin, scratches his balding scalp, and asks, “Where are you from?”
“Italy.”
“Italy, huh.” His eyes dart from side to side, and he appears to be making some sort of mental calculation. He finally comes back with: “Well, back when the world began—”
I start to laugh, but from the look on his face, I realize he’s not kidding and swallow my smile.
“—the first humans came over in ships.”
“You mean the early settlers?” I interject, trying to help.
“Yep, them settlers. And they started making their way west, following the Oregon Trail, which passes through here. Now, there is this river they had to cross, and on this river was this ferry. And this guy called Glenn used to take the settlers over the river on the ferry.”
Apparently the river, ferry, and Glenn were already magically there, back when the world began.
“Ah, so that’s why the town is called Glenns Ferry.”
He nods. “So I guess you could say it dates from . . . hmmm . . . somewhere back in the 1800s.”
From this brief history lesson I learn that both time and history are fluid.
AUGUST 28, 2012
The route I have planned passes through Baker City, Oregon, heads north toward Yakima, and then cuts across to Seattle, where I plan to catch a flight to New Zealand. There are a few long climbs, but nothing as painful as the mountains in Portugal, nor half as verdant and lush. It is late August in the northern Rockies, and the dry summers are getting drier all the time, so the arid landscape doesn’t vary much between various shades of brown and ochre. Halfway up a climb near the Idaho-Oregon border, I get my ninth puncture and pull off to the side of the highway to change the tube.
A few miles farther, throat parched from the heat and dust kicked up by passing trucks, I stop at a service station to fill up on water. A Range Rover drives up as I’m sitting on the step, munching on a chocolate peanut butter bar, and a group of Californians pile out, all chattering at full volume: “I mean, back in LA, we never see this kind of wilderness and desolation. I couldn’t believe we hardly saw a single tree passing through Wyoming. What an incredible drive. Real challenging.”
One of the women, with dyed-blond hair in an exaggerated perm and giant sunglasses, notices me and Pegasus leaned up against the wall. “Where’re you cyclin’ from, honey?” she asks.
“Boston to Seattle.”
Her mouth drops open, and she elbows one of her companions. “You believe that? She’s pedaled from Boston!”
“No kidding. We drove over from New York, and I thought that was difficult enough,” her friend says.
The day’s difficulties are not quite over. The service station manager informs me that the longest uphill stretch still lies ahead. “You’re gonna climb for a while. Let me tell you, I wouldn’t want to be you. No sirrreeee.” She shakes her head.
“There are times when I wouldn’t want to be me either,” I admit.
Somewhere along that seemingly endless uphill road, I feel myself floating, as in a lucid dream, my limbs mechanically pumping, but I c
an’t really feel them. Maybe I’ve been pedaling under the sun for too long. The passage of time seems indefinite, transient. I have one of those moments when I wonder if any of it is real. I grab the flesh on my arm and squeeze it hard to assure myself that it is, but even the knowledge that pinching my skin is meant to generate pain tells my brain it must be so. I start to wonder, if the mind can create any reality it chooses, then what is truly real? Maybe our bodies are just machines and life is a game we are all hooked into. Maybe reality is what is not “here,” is not what we think is “us.”
I know that my body is tired, hungry, and fatigued, yet I keep pushing on, and eventually the moment of self-punishment becomes pure inner expansion. If our minds can surpass the dictates of our bodies, then surely we are capable of anything. Everything starts in the mind. That is the seat of power, of whether we succeed or fail, of the beginning and the end of it all. When the mind gives up, the body soon follows.
I push my protesting muscles up the hill, and I’m rewarded with a red sun setting against a vivid vermilion sky, jutting ridges of rock to my left, and the river snaking along to the right. I stand up on the pedals, Wagner blaring through my earphones, the fresh wind against my skin, a giant grin on my face and miles of pure downhill bliss ahead of me. It is the rush of feeling connected to everything, to life itself. A microcosm of a universal macrocosm. I feel 100 percent alive. Nothing else exists except for this perfect moment.
And suddenly I am weeping for no apparent reason. Fatigue, stress, exhaustion, happiness, exhilaration? Life is a strange thing. You can create a reality to make it all easier to bear, then discover that you love the world you’ve created and it takes on a life of its own. Maybe none of this is real? Perhaps it is all just a ride? We forget who we are, and these moments awaken something in us that makes us remember we are the creators of our own worlds, our thoughts, our emotions.
This Road I Ride Page 6