Becoming Frozen

by Jill Homer

  My odometer told me I’d traveled seventy-eight miles when I descended to the Devil’s Pass trailhead, where Carlos was waiting. He’d run out of Vanilla Wafers and Gatorade, so the roving aid station had no aid. This didn’t matter to me. “Bout thirty-five more miles,” he said, and I nodded. The concept had become too abstract for me to visualize. What was thirty-five miles? Or a hundred? Or a thousand? Several riders were sprawled on the pavement. Some were rifling through packs, and others were lying on their backs and staring vacantly at the sky. I understood that their races were likely ending here. Their defeated postures looked so appealing. Did I have a good reason to quit? This concept also was too abstract to quantify.

  As I climbed toward Devil’s Pass, I didn’t see anybody else. In all likelihood, I was at the back of the race now. Bear tracks were everywhere, all but erasing evidence of other cyclists. “Hey bear?” I called out weakly. I imagined families of black bears prowling for racers they could scare away from their backpacks. “You can have my gross peanut butter sandwiches if you want,” I shouted. “Just don’t eat me.”

  The trail again rose out of the forest, where fog-shrouded mountainsides curled into the tundra. Sunlight flickered through rolling clouds, and I felt as though I was looking at the surface of a clear lake that had just been broken by waves. I blinked rapidly to shake away a sudden dizziness, but it was too late. My front wheel veered off the rocky slope and plunged into a steep embankment. My shoulder hit the rocks as a loud crack reverberated through my helmet, and then I tumbled for several seconds before an alder thicket broke my fall. I’d tumbled more than twenty feet from the trail, into a dry creek bed. Alder branches were tangled around every limb. It would take a few minutes of thrashing to free myself, and in the immediate aftermath of the fall, I felt too weak to fight this battle. For an indeterminate amount of time that might have been a second or hours, I lay very still, draped like a rag doll over the alder bush with my chin angled to the sky. My heart beat in synchrony with the streaming clouds, and my breathing slowed to a tranquil rhythm. It was nice to stop moving.

  Eventually common sense knocked from behind the stupor and demanded to find out whether I was broken or bleeding. Alder branches clung to my jersey and tights as I writhed, finally rolling onto the steep embankment next to my overturned bike. The motions necessary to free myself assured me that I wasn’t badly hurt. I wondered what might have happened if I had broken a bone; there was a chance no riders were approaching from behind, and Carlos was not the type of race director to fret about long absences. I might have been stranded here for a long time.

  “Be more careful,” I breathed as I wrestled the bike up the steep embankment. Endurance mountain biking was such a ridiculous endeavor. If the constant physical strain wasn’t enough, we were taking our efforts to the wilderness where bears and moose lurked in shadows, rugged terrain demanded constant vigilance, the consequences of mistakes could be grave, and help was far away. I was born into a privileged society where comfort and security were just handed to me, and it took only minimal effort to maintain them. This society taught me that time is best spent gaining more comfort and security, and only fools would throw away energy on a task that promised only struggle and pain.

  I wiped mud from my knees and rotated my right arm. My shoulder was sore, but at least the joint was still attached. I continued pushing my bike up the trail, walking while I waited for involuntary shivering to subside. The clouds grew thick again and my head was foggier than ever, flickering between dreamy abstractions and anxious jolts of awareness. During these increasingly short periods of lucidity, I groped for bearings. “There’s the A-frame.” “This must be near the top of the pass, twenty-five more miles.” “I don’t remember these rocks. The mountains look different. Am I still on the right trail? Am I still in Alaska?” I couldn’t be sure.

  Dizziness returned as soon as I started pedaling again, and I nearly dumped the bike over another precipitous drop. I knew I had no choice but to sit on a rock and force down one of my sandwiches. I took slow bites amid waves of nausea and wondered how Geoff had fared in the Crow Pass Crossing. His race was twenty-four miles over a similarly rugged mountain pass, and he thought it would take him three hours and change to finish. I looked at my watch. It was six in the evening. What did that mean? How long had I been out here? It felt like years.

  Memories collided with the present until time lost its elasticity. I imagined Geoff greeting me at the finish line in a far-away future. He’d look mostly the same, but with wrinkles carved into his face and a wild gray beard. The Seaview Cafe would be boarded up, the sky would have a red tint, and the whole marsh would be flooded with murky sea water from the oceans rising. “What happened?” I would ask, and Geoff would say, “You’ve been missing for forty years.” We’d share a bewildered gaze, and I wouldn’t know what to say, because what do you say after forty years?

  I glanced down at my hands, which were smeared with dirt that made them look gnarled and aged. My grasp on reality was slipping, and I could almost convince myself that maybe, just maybe, time could dissolve. I looked up and remembered myself as a six-year-old child, tucking my head between my knees and tumbling down the grass of the hill behind my elementary school. Land and sky spun together in a dizzying kaleidoscope then, just as it did now. Dew would soak through my shirt as blood filled my head, carrying the sensation I was seeking — a feeling I still couldn’t describe. It transcended the definition of fun to something deeper, and more lasting. When I rolled through the grass as a child, the world wrapped itself around my body and filled me with the vitality of life.

  Finding that energy was so simple then, but the decades have a fatiguing effect. Our hearts become worn, and we can no longer feel the raw exuberance that we experienced as children. Or could we? Is it just that we forgot how simple it is? Adults tend to reject the notion of limitless possibilities, and instead cling to assumptions that offer comfort and security. Those who would throw themselves down a hill would be labeled as crazy, and those who choose to ride a mountain bike a hundred miles through Alaska wilderness are not far behind.

  But I wasn’t crazy, not quite — nor was I the brave athlete I wanted to be. I was a child again — a child and an old woman, straddling the great gap between consciousness and dreams. Images of Juneau flickered into my disconnected thoughts, with curtains of rain draped over drab and weathered buildings. For a place in my near future, it seemed impossibly far away. The finish of the Soggy Bottom 100 was just as distant. My mind and body were stalled in this present — a loop of pedal strokes, driven by shivering and exhaustion, as I traced a ribbon of trail that might have no end.

  I shook my head, fighting a sleepiness that threatened to fully unravel my mind. I fixated on thoughts of Juneau and wondered what new adventures the city would bring. Would I enjoy my job? Would Geoff and I find an equally nice place to live? Would we meet good friends? What adventures would we find? Would we pursue all the same hobbies? Would I continue to ride my bike over the mountains, searching for new sources of raw exuberance? Is this all there was?

  The sky darkened. I looked up from my trail of thoughts and felt anxiety. I wondered whether this was a storm, or simply the coming of night. Light rain began to fall, but I continued to fear night. The forest grew thick with wet hemlock branches, and the trail turned rockier. My bike bucked and shimmied, injecting hot pain into my shoulders.

  There were so many rocks. Each one required gentle finessing to minimize pain, which motivated me to re-focus all of my fractured attention on the present. In this state of mind, immediate obstacles were all that existed. Boulders and branches materialized from the void, and then disappeared just as quickly into the past. I feathered the handlebars, pulled the brakes and settled back. Each moment brought new awareness, as though a second were all of time. My wheels crossed the splintered wood planks of a bridge, and then rolled onto a wide strip of gravel. The road’s downward grade was barely disc
ernible, and I continued to turn pedals mindlessly until the Seaview Cafe came into view.

  Carlos was standing outside his camper holding a clipboard. Various mud-caked racers were sitting in lawn chairs, holding cans of beer and cheering. Carlos reached out to shake my gnarled hand and congratulated me for “winning” the women’s race in thirteen hours and seventeen minutes.

  “Am I the last one?” I asked.

  “No, there’s still three or four more guys out there,” Carlos said. “You did well for your first Soggy. The women’s record is twelve and a half hours.”

  I couldn’t conceptualize how there were any riders behind me. I hadn’t seen or spoken with anyone on the trail since shortly after I left Cooper Landing at mile thirty-eight. The cloud-saturated sky was becoming an even darker shade of gray; it was 10:30 at night. Time continued to roll forward at the same rate it always had, but the experience felt as though it spanned weeks or months. Why was that? There was this driver, this spark of determination that was so small, and yet capable of moving forward even when my body languished and my mind all but shut down in protest. It was through this tiny driver that I experienced the world in the largest of ways — an expanse of perceptions and emotions drawn in through the beating of my heart.

  *****

  Geoff’s fifth-place finish in Crow Pass Crossing put him solidly in the top ten of the Alaska Mountain Running Grand Prix. He intended to improve his standing further with the most difficult race of the season — the Matanuska Peak Challenge. The course ascended and descended two technical mountains, and featured nine thousand feet of climbing in just thirteen miles. This race took place only two days before I was scheduled to start work at the Juneau Empire. There was one more race after that, and we agreed that Geoff would finish out the series along with our year-long lease in Homer, then travel to Juneau with our cats once I secured an apartment. Matanuska Peak would be the last I’d see of Geoff for three weeks, and I planned my move so I could be there for him at the finish.

  However, thanks to banal delays during my last shift at the Tribune, I arrived at the trailhead in Palmer several minutes after Geoff finished the race. Craig greeted me first and exclaimed that Geoff took second, surprising everybody in the crowd. Behind him, Geoff was sitting on the pavement with his legs splayed and a drunken smile.

  “How do you do it?” I stooped down to wrap my arms around him.

  “I finished almost twelve minutes behind Harlow,” Geoff said. “But I had fun. This course is crazy. It’s steeper than anything I’ve seen, just straight up and straight down the rocks. You’d think there’s no way the race goes this way, if it weren’t for the course markings.”

  “It sounds crazy,” I said. “You’re amazing.” I could feel Geoff’s heart racing against my chest as I hugged him tighter. It was an electric feeling, like passion coursing through our bodies — shared passion. Even if this was all we had to bind us together, it was enough. Raw and powerful passion emanated from everything around us, and it was more than enough.

  Rushing to meet Geoff in time for his afternoon finish meant I was still getting a ridiculously late start for my road trip. I was scheduled to catch a ferry to Juneau at seven the following morning. The ferry departed from Haines, which was seven hundred miles — at best, a fourteen-hour drive — from Palmer. It was after three. Even if I drove through the night, I’d still be cutting my schedule tight to catch my ferry in time.

  I gave Geoff one last sweaty hug goodbye and drove my Geo to a gas station on the outskirts of town, where I stocked up on Pepsi to complement the two-pound bag of generic Fruit Loops cereal I’d purchased for sustenance. Only sugar and caffeine were going to get me through this endurance race. I pointed the car up the Glenn Highway, winding through a narrow canyon dominated by the Matanuska Glacier.

  The long evening faded into blue twilight as I crossed the border into Canada. Driving to the mountain-guarded panhandle of Southeast Alaska necessitated a roundabout trip through the Yukon and northern British Columbia provinces before I could re-enter the state I left hundreds of miles earlier. In between was a veritable no-man’s land, with only one incorporated town — Haines Junction, where I hoped I could find a twenty-four-hour gas pump at three in the morning — and thousands of square miles of boreal forest, craggy mountains, and glacier-fed rivers. I’d thought so of places before, but this was truly the far edge of the world.

  Midnight passed under a sky that was deep violet, almost gray. It was August now, and it wouldn’t be long before darkness returned, and then even daytime sunlight would sink into the southern horizon, and ice would return. As I looked out over green meadows bursting with fireweed, it was difficult to imagine winter in this place. Life is short but it’s also long, at least the way we perceive it sometimes.

  Amid the near-night, my headlight beam caught a gleam of something bright, shimmering just above the yellow line on the road. As the car approached, the light focused into two yellow circles — eyes. The owner of the eyes didn’t even budge, so I took my foot off the accelerator. As the car rolled to a stop, the animal came into focus — rippling gray fur, triangular ears, bushy tail. It was a wolf. I took my hands off the steering wheel and let the car idle. The wolf continued to stand in the middle of the road, just looking at me. It didn’t appear to be the least bit afraid.

  After several seconds, the wolf moved to the side of the road and trotted toward my car.

  “What’s wrong with him?” I wondered. “Is he injured? Do people feed him? Is he looking for a handout?”

  The wolf came within ten feet of the passenger’s side of the car and approached no further. Instead, it turned around and loped along the highway shoulder. As I inched the car forward, the wolf broke into a run but still didn’t leave the road.

  For several seconds that seemingly stretched into hours, I kept pace a few dozen feet behind the wolf. Its long legs moved with astonishing grace, and I marveled as my car’s speedometer crept up to twenty miles per hour, and then twenty-five. What was this wolf doing? It was such a strange mystery, and yet it also felt like a usual occurrence. “I’m in the Yukon after midnight. Of course there’s a wolf running down the road.”

  The wolf stopped so I did, too. It turned and regarded the car once more, then turned abruptly and darted into the forest. There was no evidence to reveal its reason for departure, so the mystery would never be solved.

  “Amazing,” I thought. “A lone wolf.” Next to my sighting of a phantom that I thought was a wolf during the Susitna 100, it was the first wolf I’d seen in the wild.

  I reached for my cell phone to call Geoff, but there was no reception on this highway. Out here I was even more alone than the wolf, because this was his kingdom, not mine.

  “Thank you wolf,” I said out loud, as though this wolf had been some spirit animal descending on my journey to bestow sage wisdom. I smirked as I said this, because who was I to pretend a lowly human and her superstitions meant anything in the northern wilderness? But even if its meaning was only my own metaphysical yearning, the message was clear: Peace and freedom. The wolf was moving in the direction of Juneau, somewhere south of the snow-capped mountains, where strips of red sunlight still hovered over the horizon, and the future was bright.

  _____

  About the author

  Jill Homer grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, and graduated from the University of Utah in 2000. She began her career working in community weekly and daily newspapers before moving to Homer, Alaska, in 2005. She never viewed herself as an athlete, but she was looking for a unique challenge, and the esoteric sport of snow biking fit that description. A couple of years worth of (mainly mis)adventures landed her in the Iditarod Trail Invitational, a 350-mile bicycle race across the frozen wilderness of Alaska, in 2008. The unforgettable experience was the genesis of her first book, Ghost Trails: Journeys Through A Lifetime. She continues to balance an unquenchable thirst for adventure w
ith a freelance career in writing and editing at her current location in Los Altos, California.

  _____

  Other books by Jill Homer

  Be Brave, Be Strong: A Journey Across the Great Divide

  Jill Homer has an outlandish ambition: a 2,740-mile mountain bike race from Canada to Mexico along the rugged Continental Divide. Be Brave, Be Strong: A Journey Across the Great Divide is the story of an adventure driven relentlessly forward as foundations crumble. During her record-breaking ride in the 2009 Tour Divide, Jill battles a torrent of self-doubt, anger, fatigue, bicycle failures, crashes, violent storms, and hopelessness. Each night, she collapses under the effort of this savage way of life. And every morning, she picks up the pieces and strikes out anew in an ongoing journey to discover what lies on the other side of the Divide: astonishing beauty, unconditional kindness, and boundless strength.

  Arctic Glass: Six Years of Adventure in Alaska and Beyond

  Arctic Glass: Six Years of Adventure in Alaska and Beyond compiles the best essays of “Jill Outside” from the thousands of posts that have appeared on the Web site. The essays chronicle the adventures of an unlikely athlete who takes on harsh challenges in the frozen wilderness of Alaska, the Utah desert, and the Himalayas of Nepal. Endurance racing, overcoming challenges, and self-actualization amid stunning outdoor landscapes are common themes in these vignettes about “The Adventure of Life.”