Two Wheels on my Wagon

by Paul Howard

  It was a work in progress.

  I brooded petulantly at the back of the group, hoping to act as a brake on our speed. To no avail. It was my fault: I had kept my sensitive, romantic soul hidden for too long under a façade of brash ambition. The others assumed more prosaic explanations: fatigue, or laziness, or both.

  We crested the watershed divide that was our route out of South Park and down into the town of Salida. The magnificent views over the 14,000-foot peaks of the Sawatch Range exacerbated the problem. We stopped to take photos. It was not enough. I wanted to paint. I wanted to hike. I wanted to go all Julie Andrews and prance around among the edelweiss.

  Actually, that might have been a bit too energetic. I was coming to realise that all I really wanted to do was stop this mad rush and rest for a while. I wanted, I acknowledged to myself, to stop. Full stop.

  It was something of a relief to admit to such heresy, and also something of a surprise. Not since my solitary vigil in Montana’s multitude of trees had I actually thought about stopping. Even then it was only because I was being driven mad with claustrophobia. Now, I had developed the imagination to understand where Steve McGuire had been coming from. Maybe it was just time for this bike ride to stop.

  Per, Stephen and Trevor clearly didn’t think so. They careered into Salida. I trailed in after them. I raised my concerns. They looked askance.

  ‘I think I might stop here for the day,’ I said, not willing to reveal the true extent of my affliction.

  ‘What do you want to do that for?’ asked Per in a way that seemed to exemplify thousands of years of restless, resilient Scandinavian adventurers’ genes.

  It was a good question. There were a million answers, but articulating any given one of them was all but impossible. I decided relying on my recently discovered enthusiasm for poetry and painting might sound implausible.

  I was saved from my dilemma by Safeway’s. Trevor and Stephen had bilaterally decided that yesterday’s luxuries of restaurant and siesta had been a step too far. Instead they headed to the supermarket deli section. Unlike the novelty charm of Helena, it was the very acme of soullessness. A true romantic would have struggled to find inspiration; all I could find was semi-frozen quiche and potato salad. It was not a place to end the adventure of a lifetime. In fact, it scarcely passed muster as a place to spend a lunchtime.

  Even the debilitating heat of Salida – it was nudging 100° F (nearly 38° C) – was preferable to the air-conditioned atrophy of Safeway’s. The three amigos rode off. I accompanied them.

  To lighten the mood, Trevor pointed out that it was Canada Day.

  ‘Canada Day? What does it celebrate?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, 4th of July is Independence Day in the US, so . . .’

  ‘Oh, nothing special. Just Canada’s “day”, I guess.’

  An hour later and I had my first puncture of the trip. It coincided with the ominous massing of cumulonimbus clouds above the high peaks ahead. As I fumbled with inner tubes and tyre irons, drops of sweat mingled with drops of rain.

  ‘Bet you’re glad you decided to keep going,’ said Trevor.

  The remainder of the climb to Marshall Pass, a mere bagatelle at 10,842 feet, was memorable for all the wrong reasons. It was long and steep. Navigation at the bottom was surprisingly awkward. And then there was the not inconsiderable matter of a terrific thunderstorm that accompanied us at far too close quarters for the best part of two hours. Lightning flashed incessantly. The sound of thunder was deafening. It was like riding in Thor’s chariot itself. I blamed Per. I told him as much, but he couldn’t hear above the surrounding din.

  The rain, too, was interminable and torrential. It became so intense that, against all advice and logic, Per, Trevor and I sought shelter in the trees at the side of the road. Stephen was somewhere ahead, we hoped. It was too cold to stand still for long, however. Back on the bike, the deluge that ran over nose and mouth made breathing difficult.

  We ploughed on and on through rivers of mud. Movement was the only protection against hypothermia. Finally, the top brought a refuge – of sorts. Leaning against a prefabricated toilet cubicle was Stephen’s bike. Inside was a shivering, half-naked Stephen, trying desperately to find some non-sodden clothes to wear for the descent.

  ‘Howdy! Come on in!’ he said gallantly.

  It was, on reflection, an unlikely invitation, but I accepted it with alacrity. The scene then repeated itself twice more as first Trevor and then Per arrived. It was something of a squash. I hung my coat on a hook and anxiously read the sign detailing the construction of the cubicle. It said the base was designed to withstand a force of 3,000 Newtons per square metre. My antipathy to physics lessons at school had not prevented me from remembering that a Newton was roughly one tenth of a kilogram (remembering useless facts was never a problem; understanding what they meant was). That equated to 300kg per square metre. I weighed about 70kg wet through, which I was.

  ‘How much do you weigh?’ I asked as nonchalantly as I could.

  ‘What? Why do you want to know that?’ asked Per.

  ‘Oh, just curious.’

  ‘185 pounds,’ said Per.

  ‘175 when I set out, but less now,’ said Stephen.

  ‘155 pounds,’ said Trevor.

  This was going to tax my arithmetical abilities more than I had anticipated. That was 525 pounds, divided by 2.2 . . . erm . . . er . . . a bit less than 250kg. Probably. Plus my own 70kg. Even assuming a safety margin in the construction process, that took us perilously close to breaking point. I eyed-up the size of the cubicle. Probably one and a half metres each way. That gave us two and a quarter square metres of floor space, minus the toilet itself.

  ‘We should be all right as long as we don’t all stand next to each other,’ I concluded triumphantly.

  I was surrounded by blank faces. Nobody had any intention of being closer to anyone else than they could possibly help.

  ‘The strength of the floor. That sign up there tells you how strong the floor is. I’ve just worked it out. If we don’t all stand next to each other, we won’t end up in the shit.’

  The others were delighted. Just in case I had been wrong, I opened the door and stepped outside. The weather was as foul as before. It could be said we were in the shit already.

  Fortunately, the descent was long but easy. Desperately trying to reach the bottom before my slowly deflating rear tyre made another repair stop necessary, I even outdid Stephen’s remarkable downhill skills. A large herd of elk, sheltering at the roadside, disdainfully ignored my sodden progress.

  It was after 8 p.m. when we arrived in Sargents. It was not how I had pictured it. The map showed a wealth of services that still, in the mind of someone from a small, crowded island, implied a town. Or at least a village, with shops, houses, a small green, perhaps. Instead there was little more than a trailer park at the side of a main road with a gas station and bar-cum-restaurant. The gas station was closed. The bar, the Tomichi Creek Trading Post, was open, and extremely welcoming.

  If Sargents had been something of a disappointment from the outside, once inside the bar we found it exceeded our expectations. There was, said the slightly tipsy bartender, a cabin for us to rent, and a grocery store that she would open up for us. There was a wholesome menu, and food was still being served. Most important of all, there was a karaoke birthday party.

  After we had reserved a cabin and ordered our food, it became apparent that there was little to distinguish between staff and guests. Those propping up the bar reappeared behind it; those behind it were clearly not immune to the temptation to keep the customers company. Every now and then, all would rush to the backroom for a singalong. It didn’t seem to make for a very sound business plan, but it certainly made for a convivial atmosphere.

  In fact, the mood was so compelling, and our relief at having made it this far unscathed so overwhelming, that we celebrated by ordering only our second alcoholic drinks of the whole trip.
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  ‘I think I’d better have a bottle of Fat Tire beer,’ said Trevor appropriately.

  Seizing on this indication that we were not such killjoys as we appeared, we were corralled into participating in the karaoke.

  ‘You’ve got to come and sing with us. It’s the rules. Everyone in the bar has to sing when “I’ll Fly Away” comes on,’ the smiling waitress explained.

  Per, Trevor and Stephen were disadvantaged by the fact they didn’t know the song. I knew the song, but couldn’t sing (not just couldn’t sing – can’t sing). We did our best; it wasn’t very good, it certainly bore no resemblance to Alison Krauss’s original, but it didn’t seem to matter.

  ‘I think we made them smile a bit,’ said Trevor.

  ‘I’m not sure they need much help in that direction,’ said Stephen.

  My enthusiasm for continuing the race had been restored.

  CHAPTER 24

  CANNIBAL ADVENTURE!

  DAY 21

  If it had taken for ever to reach Sargents, it took even longer to leave. Yet our attempts to depart started early enough. In fact, Stephen’s mobile phone resounded balefully at 5 a.m., a full hour earlier than anticipated. Disbelieving, I checked the clock, but there was no escaping the early hour.

  ‘Stephen, it’s 5 a.m.,’ I pointed out.

  ‘I know,’ came the muffled reply.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised; after all, it was his phone. Nevertheless, I thought it pertinent to remind Stephen that the intention had been to have a minor lie-in, this time until the luxurious hour of 6 a.m., so that we could make the most of the café and shop next to the bar in which we had caroused the night away. It did not open until 7 a.m., and we could not leave without going to the shop as ahead lay another 100 miles of nothing.

  By the time I had completed my litany of complaint Stephen had wisely gone back to sleep. I did not. Instead, I lay fulminating as ill-humouredly as if my beauty sleep had been disturbed by one of the children at home. By the planned rising time of 6 a.m., however, my frustration had mellowed and I had put the intrusion into some sort of perspective. At least I hadn’t had to change a nappy or mop up a pool of toddler vomit at the same time.

  With little need for haste, an orderly queue formed for that rarest of luxuries: a morning shower. Then, just as it was my turn, I pushed past my bike and realised the tyre that had been slowly deflating during the descent from Marshall Pass was now completely flat.

  Relinquishing my place in the shower queue, I set about removing the tyre. At certain times – say a sunny evening at home, in the garden, with a glass of wine to hand – mending punctures is a pleasure; at others, as yesterday, it is a simple necessity; mostly, however, it is a pain in the backside. Nevertheless, with practice it can be accomplished quickly and painlessly. After ten minutes, I sat smugly looking at a job well done.

  Then I remembered the two spare inner tubes that now had holes in them. If I didn’t carry out repairs to the originals before we left, I would have to do so en route if I suffered another puncture. Images of trying to make a patch stick to a tube in a thunderstorm like last night’s put paid to the instinctive desire to bury my head in the sand and ignore the problem. Yet I was in danger of causing considerable delay.

  ‘Time for breakfast,’ announced Per right on cue, and in the manner of a man for whom last night’s vast meal was but a distant memory.

  I told them I would have to join them later. They ambled off. Then, just as I had finally managed to locate my puncture repair kit, they all returned, looking rather downcast.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s closed,’ said Per.

  ‘What’s closed?’ I asked.

  ‘The shop and the café.’

  ‘But the sign said shop and restaurant open for breakfast at 7 a.m.’

  ‘Every day except Thursday,’ Stephen corrected.

  ‘What day is it?’

  ‘It’s Thursday.’

  I began to get the feeling this was going to be a day to forget.

  ‘What about the woman from last night who said it would be open?’

  ‘Nowhere to be found.’

  The café in fact would not open until midday. In the absence of last night’s host, the shop would not be available to us for another hour at 8 a.m. A half-hearted debate about the possibility of continuing without re-stocking ensued, but common sense prevailed.

  At least I was no longer the sole cause of our delay. After finishing my repairs, I went to the gas station to pump up my tyre. In keeping with the day so far, there was a sign reading ‘no air’. The compressor was out of action. I walked back to our cabin through a disparate collection of trailers, some genuinely towable, others by now well-rooted in Sargents soil. It was a fate we seemed in danger of emulating. All were accompanied by enormous, shiny pick-ups and only slightly smaller but equally shiny quad bikes.

  I inflated my tyre manually, an effort that made the café breakfast we now had to forego seem even more inviting. By the time I had finished it was 7.30 a.m. We twiddled our thumbs. We discovered a kettle in the cabin, but no tea or coffee. We found a toaster, but no bread.

  ‘We could always go to the shop,’ said Stephen with enforced irony.

  Eventually, we did go to the shop. It was not really worth the wait. There was little to choose from, though there was hot coffee. Determined to make the best of it, we had an impromptu competition to find the highest calorific content of our preferred snacks. Trevor and I went for pastries: blueberry cheese Danish and bear claw (a generic term for an almond-flavoured confection purportedly shaped like a bear’s claw). The cheese Danish won by a short head: 509 calories compared to 480 calories in a 4.5-ounce package. Stephen selected his personal favourite, Pearson’s Salted Nut Roll, a sort of peanut butter, nougat and marshmallow bar, and pointed gleefully to that fact that they had an even better calorie-to-weight ratio: 760 calories in 5.5 ounces.

  ‘You’ve not tried them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They’re disgusting,’ said Per, putting two into his shopping basket along with both pastries (cheese Danish and bear claw, just for the sake of comparison) and as many tortillas as the rest of us put together.

  ‘Just a little something,’ he smiled.

  We went to pay.

  ‘I thought you boys would have been gone by now,’ said the woman at the till, who had also been behind the bar the previous night.

  Clearly her alcohol-induced promise to be open for breakfast had been long forgotten.

  It was 8.30 a.m. by the time we finally left.

  ‘I’m beginning to get the feeling we’re doomed never to make it to Antelope Wells,’ I said as we rode along.

  ‘Nonsense. We’ll be finished in a week,’ said Per.

  ‘You’re just saying that so you can catch your plane,’ I objected. ‘The rest of us could take two weeks more, if we wanted, and have a day off tomorrow.’

  ‘Speak for yourself. I’ve got to get home so I can start my new job,’ Stephen pointed out.

  ‘And I just want to get to the finish as soon as possible so I can stop riding,’ said Trevor.

  This was the Catch-22 we were now in. With unfortunate timing, our enthusiasm for cycling was at something of a low ebb. We had made it past halfway, which had been a huge fillip. There was no escaping the fact, however, that this had meant we still had to do the same again. Recent experience demonstrated just how arduous that might be. Yet the longer we prevaricated, the longer we would have to keep riding.

  So we kept riding. Until I had another puncture, that was. I had been dawdling behind the others so they were ignorant of my plight. I threw my bike disgustedly into the verge and watched forlornly as they rode over the brow of a hill and out of sight. Even repeated blasts on the bear whistle I was still carrying around my neck went unheeded. It was a good job I hadn’t needed to use it in earnest.

  With plenty of recent practice I was soon underway again. The enforced solitude was surprisingly
agreeable. By lunch we were all reunited on the far side of Cochetopa Pass, the ‘Buffalo Gate’ of the native Ute Indians and another historically significant breach in the surrounding mountains, this time used as a stage route. With a gradient suited to coach and horses, it had not proved a major obstacle.

  We were now in much more arid country, though the grey skies above suggested otherwise. We stopped to eat in a dry, rocky stream bed bereft of significant vegetation. As well as its aesthetic deficiencies, it was infested with mosquitoes.

  ‘Yum. Salami tortillas with added insect,’ said Per, through a buzzing cloud.

  It was no place to linger. Yet there was good reason to ensure we ate our fill. It was in the nearby town of Saguache (‘nearby’ and ‘town’ being relative terms in Colorado as Saguache was more than an hour’s ride away and had a population of a mere 500) that one of the Wild West’s most heinous crimes first came to light. The crime in question was cannibalism, preceded by murder. The assumed perpetrator of both acts was Alfred G. Packer, a hapless prospector originally from Pennsylvania.

  In spite of advice to the contrary, including from no less an authority than Ute Indian Chief Ouray, Packer and five companions set off into the surrounding mountains en route to Gunnison in February 1874. As was inevitable, they were caught in the winter weather, then became lost and snowbound. Only Packer survived. When the bodies of his companions were later discovered, all had died violently and all had had strips of flesh taken from legs and chest.

  According to Packer, apprehended spending money from his companions’ wallets in Saguache, another member of the party – Shannon Bell – had gone mad and killed the other three prior to eating parts of them. Packer said he had then been forced to kill Bell in self-defence, and to perpetuate the cannibalism in order to survive.

  The courts thought otherwise. Packer also appeared to change his mind. He wrote a confession and was convicted of murder, but then escaped from jail. Nine years later he was caught again and convicted a second time, though this conviction was then reduced to manslaughter just prior to his intended execution. In spite of another written confession and his sentence being upheld by the Colorado Supreme Court, Packer died a free man, having earlier been paroled or pardoned, depending on which account you read.