Be Brave, Be Strong

by Jill Homer

  “Why wait?”

  Geoff shook his head and stared forward. It occurred to me then that Geoff and I weren’t actually going to be spending any amount of time living in a cabin in the Utah desert. He never had any real intention of that happening. I guess I was the only one who clung to this vacuous dream, although I couldn’t think of many places I’d be less likely to endure. No, Geoff and I were going to split apart as soon as the car could no longer take us where we both needed to go.

  We made it to Smithers, British Columbia, and drove to the doorstep of the home of Geoff’s friends, Kelly and Adrienne. I had never before met the couple, and had already grown weary of the “smile and pretend everything’s fine” routine I had tried to project since the initial split. At least amid the heavy tension inside the car, Geoff and I didn’t have to wear suffocating masks. But the alternative — trying to explain eight years worth of rejection rolled up in a really long drive — seemed impossible. Kelly and Adrienne only knew us as a couple. Geoff and I suited up to go out for our separate pre-dinner run and ride, and they laughed about our matching base layers. I returned from the bike ride to a table heaping with lentils and rice and three people laughing over near-empty glasses of wine. Life was so normal in Smithers, and I hated it.

  Darkness seemed to descend more quickly in the southern latitudes. When I mentioned this to Kelly, she laughed, because in her mind, we were still in the “far” north. When the bottles of wine were drained, Geoff announced he was going to bed. I sat up and chatted with Kelly and Adrienne until the phone rang at 11:30 p.m. Adrienne answered the call. His voice quickly turned low and serious. “Uh huh. Hmmm. Where. Are you sure? On the river? Oh no. Hmmm. Well, I’ll check it out. Let me know if they need any help.”

  Adrienne hung up the phone and Kelly and I stared at him, wide-eyed. “An ice dam backed up across the river,” he said grimly. “It’s coming up quick.”

  “On the flats?” Kelly asked. Adrienne nodded.

  “Where is that?” I asked.

  “About a block from here,” Kelly said.

  As Geoff continued sleeping, we pulled on warm coats and gloves and strode out into the night. Flashing lights spun through the darkness and sirens wailed. “The neighbor told us they’re rescuing people from trees,” Adrienne said. “The water’s coming up that fast.”

  I shivered in the cold stillness. “Do you think we should all evacuate?” I said.

  “She said the cops will come knock on the door if we have to go,” Adrienne said. “In the meantime, we should probably think about grabbing our valuables.”

  “I already have the emergency kit in the car,” Kelly said. “We just have to grab the cat and the computer. Nothing else really matters.”

  I thought about my car sitting in the driveway with my whole life inside of it. My bicycle rested on the roof rack. If the river would rise high enough to engulf the car and carry it away, it would release me from this whole twisted situation. I wouldn’t have to keep up the charade anymore. I would be free.

  We walked down the street. Three doors down from Kelly and Adrienne’s house, we saw boiling black water rushing across the neighbor’s long gravel driveway. It filled the deep embankment below the street like a canal. We walked another block until we could see a roiling tributary of the actual river, and beside it were mobile homes nearly submerged in water. The windows and street lamps were eerily dark, the rushing water frighteningly loud.

  “We should go back,” Kelly said, sounding nervous for the first time. “This is coming up really fast.”

  Back at the house, Kelly and Adrienne started collecting belongings. I woke Geoff up and told him what was going on.

  “Did they receive an evacuation order?” he asked groggily.

  “No, not yet,” I answered.

  “It’s probably fine,” he said. “The cops would be here by now if they thought the water was going to reach this level.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Just look out the window. There are fire trucks and cop cars everywhere. They’re probably too busy rescuing people to do door-to-door evacuations.”

  “So what are you saying? Are you saying you want to leave now?”

  “No,” I said. “I just thought you should be aware, that’s all.”

  Kelly knocked on the door. “Just talked to one of the police,” he said. “They’ve blocked off the road into the neighborhood, but he said the flood has tapered and they don’t think anybody on this side of the river will be affected. I’ll wait up to make sure, but it doesn’t seem like the flood is going to hit us.”

  “That’s a relief,” I said. I felt a sting of guilty disappointment, too. If the river didn’t interrupt our anguishing march south, then it would have to continue as planned. I felt a strong urge to cut the trip off right there, but if the river didn’t make that decision for me, I was going to have to make it myself. I resigned myself to the long and continued descent to the Lower 48, because I knew I wasn’t strong enough to stop.

  Chapter Five

  Marin

  Wisps of low clouds clung to the cables of the Bay Bridge when we entered San Francisco. The sea air was thick with salty sweetness despite the gas fumes from the traffic streaming beside us. I was homesick for everywhere else, with the fog painting a blurry image of my coastal Alaska home, and the traffic echoing the sounds of my sprawling suburban origins. The city beyond was just another stop in an opaque future, masked behind a curtain of gray.

  I was ready to be anywhere else. The 3,000-mile drive left me numb to my own weariness, but I still felt the unease of movement without clear purpose. The periods of silence between Geoff and me only grew longer the farther we drove south. We spent a carefree day in Vancouver, avoiding direct contact with each other as we caught up with old friends. We spent two nights with a mutual friend in Portland. I spent as long as I could each day piloting my bike along the fog-shrouded streets of the city. The last night, I lost my temper with Geoff when he wandered back inside the house at 1 a.m. after spending more than an hour on the phone with Misty.

  “How can you continue to build a relationship with her right in front of me?” I cried. “Even if you don’t love me anymore, even if I’m nothing more to you than a friend, or even just a chauffeur, I’m still here! Do you have any idea how that makes me feel?”

  “This is hard for me, too” he yelled back. “I can’t just ignore everything else that’s going on.”

  “I can’t believe you dragged me down here,” I fumed. “That was such an incredibly selfish thing to do. You think you can have it all, and the amazing thing is you seem to get it.”

  The next day we pressed through the thick silence into northern California. I took out my anger and hurt on a small mountain, mashing the pedals up a sandy road as I climbed from 2,000 feet to 6,000 feet into what at the time was noticeable altitude. Mount Shasta shimmered in the far distance like a mirage. I returned to the hotel calmer and more grounded and crawled into bed. Geoff wrapped his arms around me and softly kissed my neck. “This still feels so right,” he whispered. Tears streamed down my cheeks because what he said was true, and it was the cruelest thing he had said yet.

  The next day, I threaded a few more strands of hope around my fraying nerves. Geoff still gravitated toward me on some level. What if I could make him see that maybe that could be enough? It seemed pathetic to yearn for a partnership where love was only attached to one side, but people did that every day. So many marriages were based on partnership, and people didn’t give up on those because, as much as it pains romantics to admit it, partnership and survival are the basis for love. Geoff still needed me, somehow, and for that reason alone it was impossible for me to cling to the anger I felt toward him indefinitely.

  But we had to push any threads of progress under the table again once we arrived at our friends’ house in San Francisco. My pain, and our breakup, went back in the closet. Paul and Monika lived at the edge of a ritzy neighborhood in the heart of the city. Their semi-glamoro
us urban lifestyle was intoxicating, and I started spending long days and nights with them, visiting Alcatraz, touring the Mission, walking the pier, eating Ethiopian food and sipping coffee at a sidewalk café. The more I spent fully immersed in the San Francisco tourist routine, the more Geoff withdrew into his cell phone and its hateful connection with Misty. He rarely went out with us, and when he did, he was quiet and distant. I was losing him fast.

  I reacted by spending even more time away on my bike. When Paul and Monika were at work, I trolled the city streets without a plan or a destination, making turn after turn until I was hopelessly lost. I weaved the empty corridors of big industrial areas and tore through the clatter and screams of run-down neighborhoods. I raced behind streetcars and darted in front of buses. I stumbled into the Golden Gate Bridge and crossed it in fog so thick I could hardly see the bridge towers ten feet in front of me. Usually I didn’t even want to find my way back, but I always did.

  The day before his race, Geoff finally spoke to me directly.

  “Would you be okay with taking down the tent after the race starts?” Geoff said. “I think it would be best if I could just sleep as long as possible beforehand.”

  I nodded. In our three days in the city, I had almost forgotten that the reason we had even come to San Francisco was so Geoff could run the Miwok 100, a one-hundred-kilometer foot race through the steep hills of the Marin Headlands. I had promised months before that I would provide support for him during the race, and reminders of that duty only cropped up occasionally after we broke up. Now it was here and I just wanted to head out alone on my bike, to get lost yet again in a wilderness of pavement and noise. But if I abandoned Geoff now, that truly would be the end. I clutched my strained threads of hope as I got in the car with him to drive to the race start.

  Since my blow-up in Portland, we hadn’t talked directly about our cabin in Teasdale, Utah. As far as I was concerned, that option was still on the table even if both of us were silently acknowledging that was never going to happen. An actual open disavowal of the plan had yet to be voiced by either of us. And even as I loathed Geoff’s brutal honesty and even crueler emotional distance, I still wasn’t willing to let him go, not yet. I vowed to help make the Miwok 100K his best race ever. Maybe if he saw my devotion, he might think about me differently.

  We crossed the Golden Gate Bridge into the thick, sustaining fog. For the area’s proximity to the city, the Marin Headlands are startlingly remote, a series of steep grass hills rising as high as 2,000 feet above the sea. The rolling landscape is webbed with fire roads and singletrack trails, but with the exception of a few small towns at sea level, it’s mostly clear of human-built structures. For early May, the weather was dismal — forty degrees and raining with a stiff, gusting wind. With some difficulty, we set up our as-yet-unused, new car camping tent at the campground closest to the race start. Given the state of the weather, I wasn’t surprised we were the only ones there.

  While Geoff organized his race gear, I sat in the tent and warmed up leftover pasta for a late-night second dinner. As he ate, he detailed exactly what gear he wanted at exact checkpoints, the time range he expected to reach those checkpoints in, and what kind of schedule I would need to keep in order to drive my car around and reach them in time.

  “How do you want me to get you the stuff?” I asked.

  “Just hand it to me,” he said.

  “So, you want me to stand at the checkpoint with stuff in my hand and wait for you for an indefinite amount of time?” I asked.

  “Um, yeah,” he said, as though that part of my support duties made perfect sense. Hard rain was pelting on the tent. It was as near freezing as San Francisco ever gets. I envisioned an entire next day standing out in the cold dampness, waiting for the five seconds he needed me to hand him a bundle of race crap.

  He pointed to a single checkpoint and said, “I won’t need you between these miles — just at this checkpoint both times I come through. There will probably be, I don’t know, about four hours between them. You can either wait there, head back to town for a couple hours, go for a bike ride, whatever you want to do. Just be there in four hours or less.”

  “Okay,” I nodded. I had to devote an entire day, but his requests didn’t seem that complicated. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

  Geoff’s cell phone alarm went off at 4:45 a.m. We rolled out of bed and he pulled on his shorts and shirt, and rain gear over that. “I’m going to hand all this stuff to you just before the race starts,” he said. “But I’d rather not freeze, so if you could stick with me right up until the race actually starts, that would be great.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “I want to see the start.”

  “Then come back here and take down the tent,” Geoff said. “You might have to hurry, because I’ll probably be at the first checkpoint within an hour.”

  The rain had diminished to an icy drizzle by the time we reached the race start. Hundreds of people milled around in the morning darkness. Shorts-clad racers did jumping jacks to stay warm. Large men bundled in down coats kissed their runner wives. I stood as a placeholder in the long line for the men’s bathroom while Geoff collected his number and registration packet, then handed him a banana and a couple packets of Gu. I followed him with one hundred or so other runners to the starting line. As the race director counted down from ten, Geoff quickly stripped off his rain gear and shoved it in my arms.

  “See you in an hour,” he said tersely. “Remember it’s the vest this time, then the stuff in the drop bag the next time.”

  “Um, good luck,” I mumbled, but he was already sprinting into a rush of headlamps as they bounded into the foggy morning.

  Daylight broke, bringing with it a thick shroud of blue fog. I stood at the first checkpoint with Geoff’s hydration vest in my arms, and included a dry bag full of warm clothing because it was still in the low forties and raining, and I expected him to be soaked and cold. After about fifteen minutes, he bounded down the hill in first position and grabbed the vest out of my arms, not even breaking his stride as he discarded his used Gu packets and water bottles in a trail of debris.

  “You cold?” I called out.

  “I’m fine,” he yelled back, and continued running past the checkpoint station as a pack of five other runners followed close on his heels.

  The next checkpoint was a long way around. I stopped for coffee and inched my car up the switchbacks on the narrow, shrouded road. The fog was still thick enough to prevent me from even seeing road signs ten feet away, and I was terrified that I was going to plunge off a cliff, one thousand feet into the sea. That was, if I was even on the west side of the headlands. I wasn’t sure any more. I reached the checkpoint, grabbed the latest bundle and stood outside, chatting with other forlorn-looking race wives who clutched running gear and shivered in the cold rain. I waited nearly a half hour before Geoff blasted through, showering me with more discarded items and yelling that he needed the vest refilled with water and drink mix for his next time through that same checkpoint.

  “Still four hours?” I called out.

  “Yeah, probably,” he yelled back.

  I crawled back into my car and started the ignition to warm up. I started to pull on my own athletic gear — thick polar fleece leggings and jacket beneath heavy-duty rain gear. I figured I could get in about three hours of riding before I had to be back to attend to Geoff’s needs. It was a horrible day for a ride — all discomfort and no views — but I figured I had been fairly lazy in San Francisco and I could use the training miles.

  As I strapped on my helmet and moved to open the door, I noticed Geoff’s cell phone wedged in the side pocket. I eyed it with intrigue and revulsion, both for what I knew was in that phone and for what I was badly tempted to do. I felt a tinge of shame, masked by my growing well of blind jealousy. I found my hand reaching for it with the guilty thrill of a child reaching into a cookie jar. I flipped it open and started shuffling through the text messages. Geoff had deleted his incoming messages,
but his outbox was full of more than fifty, all directed to Misty.

  “I miss u so bad.”

  “Really wish u were here.”

  “Lots of driving, not fun. Cant wait to c u in idaho.”

  Blood drained away from my face and rushed into my brain. As much as already knew exactly what I was going to find, it was so much more difficult to see it in bold, black print. Before, in our silences, I could allow myself to read signals the way I wanted to read them. The signals displayed on Geoff’s cell phone left no mixed messages. And what did he mean about Idaho? Then I remembered. There was another race near the end of May in Idaho. He had told me that he was marginally interested in running it. Now I could see that not only was he actually planning on running it, but also was planning to meet Misty there. This clarified that Geoff had no intention of spending a month in Teasdale with me or driving to the start of the Great Divide race. This explained why the timing of my race had been so inconvenient for him. From this perspective, we were a dead relationship on wheels. He probably couldn’t wait to slough off the baggage and start his new life.

  All the brave acceptance of reality I had mustered during the past two weeks could no longer cut through my devastation. Geoff and I really were over. He had already moved on. I knew where that left me — standing alone in the foggy rain, clutching the debris of our spent relationship. And I had followed Geoff along three thousand miles of lonely road just to land in this spot. I had embraced him when he reached out to me and I had taken down his campsite in the morning and I had held his stuff in the cold as he sprinted past without even looking me in the eye.

  Tears returned to my eyes and I fought them back. I flung open the car door and pulled my bike down from the roof rack. I threw my leg over the saddle and stormed across the parking lot. A race official waved me down. “No bikes on the trail!” he yelled. I regarded him with a deadly glare. “Fuck you,” I seethed. “I’m going to the fire road, not the trail. At least let me out of the parking lot before you yell at me.” It was possibly the first time in my life I had openly cursed at a stranger. I felt no remorse.