Becoming Frozen

by Jill Homer

  Sometime around two in the morning, sunlight finally faded below the horizon. I was in the prime of my race life, with a comfortable routine to each mile and a technique for even the most difficult obstacles. Nine laps were behind me and I was nearing expert status for this single strip of trail. I threaded the wheels through root mazes and deftly navigated rock gardens. Smooth doubletrack was a place for contemplation, to marvel at the salmon-hued sky and the fact that I had ridden my bike nearly one hundred miles — and there was so much life left in me.

  During the darkest minutes between dusk and dawn, I switched on a tiny headlamp and cast flickering shadows on the tree maze. Birch trees twisted into menacing silhouettes. My mind was foggy, flickering imperceptibly between the past and the present. Along the roller coaster descent, I rounded a corner and nearly collided with the backside of a bull moose as he reclined in the grass. Brown haunches materialized from a shadowy blob, and I had slammed on my brakes and squealed to a stop before I even realized what I was about to hit. As my vision focused, the moose looked up with infinitely black eyes and antlers as wide as my whole bicycle. I exhaled a timid squeak; the moose just blinked and regarded me with indifference. As he lowered his head and went back to ignoring me and the other cyclists who continued to pass without stopping, I stood for several more minutes, paralyzed with primordial instinct. Clearly the moose didn’t care about a mountain bike race; he was king of the forest and he would nap wherever he liked. I mustered courage and tiptoed around him, shaking with adrenaline. By the following lap, when the moose was still there, I was fully desensitized and roared past like everyone else.

  The hours began to blur together. The sun was bright and hot again, but the race clock was still many hours away from twenty-four. Geoff went to sleep for two laps, leaving me sandwiches, still lovingly cut into quarters, in the cooler. The staging area was almost completely still, with the beer-drinking team racers in their tents, and the solo racers scattered along the course. I arrived at my pit at the same time as Pete, whose shade tent and cooler were positioned next to our site. Pete’s legs were crusted with mud, and he stooped painfully to open his cooler. He regarded me with a smile and I grinned back, feeling as though we were sharing a wonderful secret. “Good luck,” I said shyly as he surged away, a ghost in the sunlit night.

  I lost track of my emotions — fear, angst, fatigue, and excitement all boiled together into a beige contentedness. I was a machine built to ride bikes. Technical descents no longer slowed me at all. I may or may not have been riding well, but I was too tired to care about the consequences. I released the brakes and barreled down minefields of roots, tossed from side to side. I gripped the handlebars and tucked my butt behind my saddle, instinctively holding onto the only thing that mattered to me at this point — momentum.

  My forearms felt like they were being pierced with needles. My hands were so rigid that I could barely peel them away from the grips, and my shoulders burned as though the bones had been replaced by fire irons. I didn’t want to visualize the horrors that were happening under my bike shorts, but stinging pains gave me an idea. Still, I was thrilled with how forceful my momentum had become. Geoff told me there were no solo women left in the race, and I was now behind only a handful of men.

  “If you can wrap up this lap in time to go out for another, you might end up in third overall,” he said.

  Energized by this news, I pedaled into lap sixteen about fifteen minutes before 11 a.m. I would need to put in my best effort to finish the lap before noon, wherein race rules would let me embark on another. But if I arrived after noon, my race would be over. My aches and pains had amplified to the point that I could no longer ignore them. I did not want to do any more laps, but the little voice of Adventure Jill still resonated.

  “Just imagine, third place. Geoff will be so proud.”

  I gathered the beige mass of emotions to muffle the excess noise in my head. Hunched in, I let the trail come to me. Now that my race life was nearly over, I had nothing left to lose. My body would be needed for only a few more miles, and then rest would come either way. I intended to go out with a bang.

  Legs aching, heart pumping, every muscle in my upper body searing in pain, I rolled to the staging area having given lap sixteen everything I had. It wasn’t good enough. The race clock read 12:04. The race official made a single check on her clipboard, and that was it. I was done. My lips curled into a numb half-smile. A warm satisfaction surged in my chest, and that was all that seemed to matter. Geoff jogged up from our pit and wrapped his arms around me while I continued to straddle my bike.

  “Awesome job,” he said. My effort was still good enough for fifth place. I had beaten a couple dozen men, as well as the three other solo women in the race. Just by moving forward.

  _____

  Moving on Up (er, Down)

  July 18, 2006

  Well, I’m moving to Juneau. It sounds a bit rash, I know, but it’s actually the culmination of several weeks of events that started the day they handed me number 111 at the 24 Hours of Kincaid (Elevens, my friend Ryan always told me, signify shifts in universal or personal patterns.) Anyway, the next day I received a cold call from the Juneau Empire. Next month, I’m going to be working there. Crazy how quickly life can shift gears.

  While Juneau is technically in the same state I live in now (and who am I kidding ... it’s the capitol), moving there is no small matter. It’s about the distance equivalent of moving from Denver to San Francisco, if the only way to get to San Francisco was to drive to a tiny upstate town like Arcata and then hop a slow-moving ferry down the coast. Oh ... and throw in an international border crossing as well. I might as well move to Seattle. At least it stops raining there once in a while.

  But that’s precisely the reason I’m excited. Juneau is this mysterious community isolated by a wall of steep, vast mountains and hundreds of miles of remote coastline. With 30,000 people, it’s the second largest city in Alaska and the center of its government — all squashed into this unlikely place teeming with grizzly bears and avalanche danger. As a former denizen of the wide-open Mountain West, who grew up with Interstate dependence flowing through her veins, I find this kind of lifestyle very intriguing. So I’m going to give it a try.

  Also, I’m completely in love with Alaska, and I realize that I’ve scratched only a small surface of this bewildering state. Moving to Juneau, I know, isn’t exactly going to open up opportunities to move freely through the Arctic. And yet — it’s another piece of a vast puzzle. For that reason, I couldn’t resist.

  When I think about leaving Homer, I feel sad. I feel anxious. I feel anticipation. I feel angry at myself. I feel excited. I feel terrified. I feel like I need to stop thinking about it even if it does make the hill intervals go faster. Change is so hard, and unfortunately I’m one of those people who thrives on it, craves it, consumes it with reckless abandon. I like the fact that there’s something new around the corner. It gives the present so much more meaning.

  *****

  The call came just a few days after Kincaid. A tattered number plate was still pinned to the handlebars of my bike. I huddled next to it in our shed, unintentionally brushing clumps of mud from the frame onto my jeans. I swatted at them vigorously, removing evidence of the fact I was hiding in the shed. As soon as the caller had identified herself as “the managing editor of the Juneau Empire,” I knew that I needed to find a private place to continue the conversation. She told me the Juneau Empire was in need of a weekend editor. The job entailed working nights and weekends on the copy desk, editing wire stories and designing news pages. She noticed I’d won an award from the Alaska Press Club, and based on that alone, offered me the position up front.

  “Are you interested in working for a daily newspaper in Southeast Alaska?” she asked.

  Was I interested? I had been unsatisfied with my current job for quite some time. At the Homer Tribune I made twelve dollars an hour,
had no health insurance, and felt no particular sense of loyalty to an employer who shuffled me into advertising work without my consent. But how could I move away from Homer? Just the thought of losing the beauty of this region was enough to break my heart.

  And speaking of broken hearts, would Geoff be willing to start over with me again? I couldn’t be sure he’d choose our relationship over the life we’d established in Homer. It didn’t seem likely that he’d be excited about Juneau. Geoff and I had visited Juneau once before as well — three years earlier — arriving by the state ferry during our big Alaska road trip. We huddled in tents at a “campground” that was actually a city-sanctioned homeless camp. Most of the other tenants lived in tarp shanties, and the designated kitchen shelter was a dilapidated haven for mice and rats. Our only hope for (cost-free) respite from constant sogginess was the local library. Days were gray and melancholy, nights were damp and cold, and my sleeping bag was growing mold by day three. The weather forecast promised at least another week of the same, and locals told us that nonstop rain was not unusual. Juneau makes Seattle look like a sunny paradise. It was enough to convince us both that Juneau was the worst place in all of Alaska. Still, we’d also bestowed that designation on Homer, and look how Homer turned out for us. Even Geoff agreed that ignoring first impressions and moving to Homer anyway was one of the best decisions he ever made. Maybe he’d be equally interested in expanding our Alaska adventure to the soggy Southeast.

  The editor offered six weeks to make the transition, a salary that was nearly double what I was earning, moving expenses, and benefits. No interview was required — the job was as good as mine. I all but said yes over the phone, but still waited several more days before I broke the prospect to Geoff. His reaction was both understandably skeptical (“Juneau, really?”) and surprisingly indifferent, (“Sure, why not?”)

  “Aren’t you going to miss Homer?” I asked.

  Geoff shrugged. “Yeah, definitely. But there’s so much I haven’t seen in Juneau. There are big mountains right outside town there. And yeah, the weather sucks, but it’s not great here, either. I don’t mind running in the rain.” In Geoff’s view, newness and exploration was always preferable to comfort and familiarity.

  A few days later — before I’d yet broken the news to my boss — my co-workers gathered for a bonfire on the Homer Spit beach. It was nearly the Fourth of July, the third anniversary of our initial escape from Homer. Sand-blasting gusts of wind kept the crowds away, and we huddled next to burning driftwood as cold air pummeled our backs and salty moisture clung to our skin. At midnight, an electric sunset faded into the bay, and Sean broke out a bottle of Jagermeister. I’d been saying no to beer all night, but relented to a few shots of liquor to “warm the core.” Layton showed up with the Kilcher cousins, and my heart fluttered as I shared a long, tipsy gaze with Eivan.

  Geoff didn’t seem to notice as he knocked back more Jagermeister with Sean, and I wondered how much he’d care if he did notice. Geoff and I had a wonderfully symbiotic relationship, and I felt love for him in the only way I ever understood love. Still, Geoff was the first to remind me that life is impermanent, and it was futile to expect that nothing would change when, in fact, everything changes, always. The prospect of something new and exciting tugged at both of our hearts. Eivan and Layton danced along the shoreline, almost too drunk to stand. Geoff and Sean cackled wildly at nothing, and I felt a surge of affection for the people I was going to leave behind. I understood in that moment that nothing could ever be the same, and that was okay.

  I staggered back to my car in the violet dawn of 2 a.m., realizing that I was too drunk to drive. It was the first time I’d been drunk since my blackout the previous summer, and I was angry at myself for returning to this state — inebriation and the amplification of shallow emotions. Excitement and acceptance of change swung back to disgust and fear. Was I really different than I was a year ago? Had Alaska changed anything, or had I just drifted from one escapist mechanism to another, pretending that change was my only choice because the other option — inertia — was so terrifying?

  *****

  The Soggy Bottom 100 was another mountain bike race I’d signed up for in my post-Susitna 100 frenzy. The hundred-mile race over Resurrection Pass was two weeks before my first day of work at the Juneau Empire. Stress had gotten the better of me, and I was mired in the logistics of moving to a new city that was seven hundred miles away. I felt underprepared and undertrained. Geoff had signed up for a trail-running race in the same region that weekend — Crow Pass Crossing — so we agreed to keep this trip on the schedule. On my blog I feigned excitement for another endurance challenge, but quietly I felt like the Soggy Bottom was just another hurdle I had to clear.

  Geoff and I drove north to Girdwood, where his race was set to start. We kissed each other for good luck, and then I drove his Honda Civic back to the coastal community of Hope, alone. I set up my tent on the grass next to the Seaview Cafe and Bar — a rustic building with white paint peeling off the wood, and loud bluegrass music vibrating through the walls. Riotous laughter rang out through the night, and deepening twilight reminded me how much sleep I was missing. Around 3 a.m., I crawled out of my tent and ate dry cereal several hundred yards from my campsite, just in case there were bears nearby. I missed Geoff, and wished I’d accompanied him to cheer for his race. Riding my mountain bike a hundred miles over muddy mountain trails was not something I wanted to do at this point in time. What did I have left to prove?

  An hour before the 9 a.m. start time, the race director, Carlos, rousted the group by walking among the tents and calling out, “Time to ride!” About two dozen bleary-eyed bikers eventually funneled toward a starting line, which Carlos had drawn with chalk on the street in front of the Seaview Cafe. As far as I could tell, I was the only woman in the crowd. Carlos yelled “go,” and we took off in a pace line that quickly fractured in two — fast, aggressive racers at the front, and not-as-fast-but-still-aggressive chasers in the back. Even the not-as-fast group held a pace that was near the limits of my abilities. My vision blurred and legs burned, and I had to sprint to keep up with them. I felt dangerously close to burning out in the first five miles, but I couldn’t afford to fall off the back of the race yet. The course wasn’t marked, and I didn’t know the way to the Resurrection Pass trailhead — a 38-mile long strip of singletrack that connected Hope to Cooper Landing. If I lost my way at this point, it would be the end of my race. A forceful inner voice asked whether that mattered, and I shoved the thoughts away.

  Sheer desperation let me hang onto the pack long enough to reach the trail, which cut away from the smooth gravel road onto an unpleasantly rocky and jarring path through the forest. I continued to chase after boys, convinced that this is what racers did. The pace remained fierce, and by the time I climbed above tree line — about twenty-five miles into the race — I’d entirely unraveled. Besides burning all of my energy on the climb, I’d been thrown from the bike several times when I slammed the front wheel into a rock or overshot a hairpin turn. Knees bloodied and face smeared in mud, I knew that slowing down was my only hope for survival. Maybe I’d come in last, and maybe that was okay. Not finishing at all was a concept that filled my heart with dread. Even though I wavered on starting the race, I hadn’t given much thought to the prospect of dropping out. I went into the Susitna 100 with such fierce dedication that I just assumed I’d either finish the race or die trying. The 24 Hours of Kincaid was an automatic finish — even one lap counted. The Soggy Bottom 100 traveled over the Resurrection Pass trail and back with a spur out the Devil’s Pass trail, offering multiple chances to leave the course. I could drop out at the next trailhead and no longer have to push through the pain in my knees, or endure the crushing fatigue. It would be easy, and I’d be the only one who cared. Why was I so afraid to quit?

  I let these thoughts fester as I descended through the glacier valley beside several lakes and a raging stream. It was a beautif
ul course, and I had to admit that nothing was inherently wrong with me. I reached the far end of the trail, Cooper Landing, with forty-five miles on the odometer. Carlos stood next to his vintage camper in the parking lot, doling out Vanilla Wafers and Gatorade.

  “Isn’t the Devil’s Pass spur twenty miles out and back?” I asked him.

  “That’s about right,” he said.

  “So that would make this race more like a hundred and ten miles,” I croaked. Cookie crumbs were lodged in the back of my throat.

  Carlos shrugged. “That’s about right.”

  Mud-splattered cyclists were still descending toward the trailhead as I climbed out; this surprised me, as I’d just assumed I was at the back of the race. As I pedaled, masticated Vanilla Wafers tumbled around in my stomach like wads of paper in a washing machine.

  “Those were a mistake,” I thought. I felt desperately thirsty, and had two liters of water in my backpack, but felt too nauseated to ingest anything else.

  Wispy clouds descended into the canyon, hanging like silk drapes over the mountains. The lower canyon was choked with overgrown shrubs, which whipped me in the face in slow motion. The trail was a thin ribbon of mud sliced with deep bike ruts, many of which had already been trammeled by fresh bear prints. My race-required bear bell hung from the saddle, cheerfully jingling in a way that was beginning to rattle my sanity. “Hey bear!” I called out to nothing. “Hey bear!”

  Hemlock forests became groves of spindly shrubs, and then rocky tundra as I gained Resurrection Pass for a second time. Purple lupine lined the trail, and yellow blooms emerged from a patchwork of matted grass — summer erupting from a landscape that had been covered in snow very recently. Clouds were beginning to lift; I could see patches of blue in the sky. Despite all this vibrant beauty, my mind was still foggy, and my gut was raw. The Soggy Bottom was my third endurance race, and I understood well the consequences of bonking. I knew calories were the only solution for my woes, but even thoughts of eating upset my stomach. I could still taste Vanilla Wafers — a flavor that had become extremely unpleasant — and battled an urge to vomit. Peanut butter sandwiches would never work. My snack stash also included a single packet of Gu, which was a remnant of my swag bag from the 24 Hours of Kincaid. The Gu was vanilla flavored. I pushed the packet of sludge to the back of my mouth, squeezed it into my throat, then gagged immediately. Choking forced me onto my knees, hands pressed into the mud as I spit up most of the snot-like substance. Finally I caught my breath, and promised myself that Gu would never pass through my lips again. But what to do about the bonking? I’d think about that later.