Be Brave, Be Strong

by Jill Homer

  I mashed the pedals up the muddy fire road. The fog quickly swallowed the parking lot scene, muffling the hum of generators and chatting race volunteers. Within seconds I thought I could hear the lapping of waves on the shoreline, but it could have just been the flow of fog so thick that was close to liquid. Anyway, the ocean was probably more than fifteen hundred feet below. But I fixated on the ocean sounds as my heart pounded like a pressure cooker. I pedaled with every ounce of strength in my legs, and still a strengthening hate boiled inside my core.

  I fought to keep my heart rate near maximum capacity, in a place of dull darkness where thoughts only register in muffles and screams. Cloudy emotional pain could not enter this cave of intense but pure physical suffering. My vision began to blur. I didn’t know if it was fatigue or tears or the fog. It only made me pedal harder. The fire road rounded a sharp corner and began to drop steeply. The soft silhouettes of trees and brush blended into blurry shadows as I gained velocity. The road dipped into an opaque gray void. I hoped it would pull me all the way to the sea. I didn’t care if I was gone for three hours or three days. Geoff didn’t need me — not in life, and not in this race.

  Although I couldn’t see the odometer amid the blur, I would later discover that it topped out at thirty-three miles per hour. That’s how fast I was likely moving when the front wheel skidded across a mostly buried metal pipe that cut diagonally across the width of the fire road. It was the same color as the dirt, coated with rain, and I didn’t see it until that last heart-stopping second when I noticed my front wheel connecting with slick steel. The wheel skidded down the length of the pipe and launched skyward like a snowboarder dismounting a rail. Then, as though the back wheel were an edge suddenly caught in a groove, the bike went from thirty-three miles per hour to a dead stop in a fraction of a second, slamming me into the gravel with a deafening thud. My right arm hit first, followed by my face. My rain pants and fleece tore as I skidded down the fire road for more than ten feet before coming to a stop. My bike landed a good distance from my body, both crumpled on the road.

  I lay paralyzed with shock for several seconds. As my eyes blinked involuntarily against the pelting rain, I held my hand to my helmet and slowly pulled myself to my knees. My right arm throbbed with sharp streaks of pain. I could see blood seeping from a hole ripped in the arm of my jacket. I was too scared of what I might find to roll up the sleeve and look any closer. I stood up and staggered toward my bike. The pain in my arm rushed to my head and forced me to kneel back down on the gravel again. I was convinced my arm was fractured. There could be no other explanation for such blunt and intense pain.

  Amid the electric streaks of pain rose a new sort of agony. It was distant at first, a quiet hum in the back of my mind. But like a long-falling nuclear bomb finally connecting with the ground, it exploded in a cacophony of emotion so overwhelming, and a darkness so complete, that I heard nothing, saw nothing, knew nothing but pain. The pain was almost merciful in its totality, long festering beneath a hard shell only to finally be detonated by the fuse of a bike crash. My possibly broken arm, the road rash on my face and legs … these things were just fleeting, unimportant, consumed by an abstract mushroom cloud of despair. It was the pain of loss, and like a nuclear explosion, it swallowed everything.

  Still on my knees, I shuffled off the road and slunk beneath the low branches of a bush. I lay on my side and pulled my knees to my chin. There was nothing I could do but absorb the fallout. I clutched the arm I still believed to be broken and sobbed. My tears had no trigger or destination. They were just darkness settling, like ashes to a scorched Earth. Geoff didn’t love me. Possibly, he never loved me. Possibly, I wasn’t capable of being loved. But either way, I was alone in a dark, cold world, and I had no one I could rely on except for myself. The tragedy was that I wasn’t reliable. I was a broken person.

  Long minutes trickled away as I sobbed beneath the bush. Slowly I started to return to self-awareness. I wiped away thick streams of snot with my good arm. The throbbing in my left arm had diminished slightly and I had started to doubt that the injury was as severe as I initially thought. My bike was still strewn across the middle of the road. Someone else might come along and see it lying there, and try to help me. Or maybe no one would come along. I didn’t really care either way. They could let me lay here a few minutes longer.

  As soon as my sobs finally dissipated, I listened for the ocean. I could no longer hear the imaginary waves. My body remained in the fetal position and I wondered if I would ever find the courage or strength to crawl out from under that bush. Footsteps approached. I slithered out from under the branches and shuffled on my knees back to the road. A group of three cyclists were walking their bikes up the steep gravel. I had tossed my helmet aside earlier, and the bike was still in its original twisted position.

  “You OK?” one cyclist asked me as he approached me.

  “Yeah, I’ll be fine,” I said hoarsely. I was sure my eyes were bloodshot, and my skin blotchy and red. “I crashed my bike on that pipe over there. I’m still trying to collect myself but I don’t think I’m injured.”

  “You need us to send back help?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “I was just at Pantoll about twenty minutes ago. It can’t be a long ride back to there.”

  “I think it’s about six miles, probably mostly uphill” he said. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Just give me a second. I’ll be right behind you guys.”

  They left me alone and I slowly rolled up the sleeve of my injured arm. Long cuts sliced into my skin, and surrounding them was a large bruise already turning a dark shade of purple, but I couldn’t see any signs of a fracture. As I grabbed my overturned bike, the streaks of pain immediately returned. I righted the bike with my good arm and tried to grab the handlebars again, but even gripping the bars hurt my left arm more than I could stand. There was no way could I ride terrain like this, uphill, one-handed, and risk falling again on my injured arm. I resigned myself to the fact I would likely have to walk six miles back to the parking lot.

  For the next two hours, rain fell hard, fog swirled around, my arm throbbed, and I filled the remaining space with self-loathing. How could I have been so stupid? So blind? What made me think I could ever ride a mountain bike? What made me think I could make this disaster of a trip work? When I finally reached the parking lot, I was drenched to the skin, and shivering so uncontrollably that every movement returned pain to my bruised arm. As I wheeled the bike to my car, I saw Geoff approaching from the race tents. In my single-minded march through the rain, I had genuinely forgotten why I was even out there in the first place. Seeing Geoff made me realize I was probably late for my race duties. He was going to be pissed that I missed his run-through. I didn’t really care. For once he could be angry at me. Anger would be a welcome relief from his cruel indifference. But as he got closer, I saw his skin was pale, his eyes bloodshot and his face twisted into a miserable scowl. That wasn’t the face of anger — it was the face of disappointment.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled feebly. “Sorry I missed you. I went out for a ride and I crashed my bike. Bike’s fine but my arm’s screwed up. I’ve been walking for six miles.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Geoff said. “My race is over.”

  I propped the bike against my car and clutched my arm. I wanted him to notice that I was really hurt, but he wasn’t even looking directly at me. He was glancing back at the race tents, probably watching for someone else to come through. “What happened?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he exhaled loudly. “I really have no idea. Things were going great. I was running well. I was feeling strong, holding first place, and then my stomach turned on me. I threw up like five times out on the trail. I couldn’t keep any food down. I’d try to eat something and I’d throw up again. And I just felt worse and worse and weaker and weaker. I came to that last checkpoint and I knew I was done. I caught a ride back to here, so I’m early anyway.”

>   “You just tossed it in like that?” I asked. “Weren’t you still in first place?”

  “I maybe could’ve walked to the finish. But I wasn’t going to place in the top three, not even in the top ten at that point. The only reason to run this race was to get in the top three so I could get into Western States, and it wasn’t going to happen.”

  “So what do you want to do now?” I asked.

  “Now, I just want to sit in the car and warm up. Then I want to change my clothes. Then we can go home.”

  “And then?” I started to ask, but he was no longer listening to me. He took the keys I had just fished out of my pocket from my outstretched hand and ducked into the car to start the engine. I watched him through the window. Even through streaks of rain I could see the frustration etched in his face. I had the strong feeling that this would be the last time I would ever see Geoff through old eyes, because no matter how many times I saw him after this point, he would never look the same. This was the real break up, the final moment of truth. The one thing both of us needed more than anything in the world was someone to comfort us in our pain, and that was the one thing we couldn’t give each other.

  Chapter Six

  The Kokopelli Trail

  Just beyond a fortress of sandstone pinnacles, sunbeams stabbed through dark clouds. “God light,” my grandmother used to call sunbeams, because they projected peace even as the sky threatened storms.

  I turned down the volume on the car stereo and listened for thunder. Interstate 70 cut a razor-straight line through the desert, which was further divided by gold steaks of light and sweeping shadows. Through the open window I could smell subtle hints of sage, and tar.

  It had been a week since I left Geoff in San Francisco and drove in a single, angst-ridden, twelve-hour Interstate marathon to my parents’ house in Salt Lake City. I walked through the front door in tears, leaking more resignation and disappointment than anger. My mom and dad greeted me compassionately but quietly wondered what my next step would be. Surely not the Great Divide thing? And although I acknowledged that there were hundreds of more important things I could be doing, I had no idea what they were, and for now I intended to stay the course.

  “First,” I said, “I need to see if I even have a long trip in me.”

  I spent my first few days at home browsing my Utah maps. I stared blankly at the curving lines and red streaks that represented mountains and trails, failing to make any real sense of the abstraction. Since I couldn’t concentrate long enough to even determine simple mileage breakdowns, I decided planning my own route was out of the question. I settled on a three-day connection of two well-worn mountain bike routes in the desert, the 140-mile Kokopelli Trail linking Fruita, Colorado, and Moab, Utah, followed by the 100-mile White Rim loop in Canyonlands National Park. The beauty of the Kokopelli Trail was that it was marked with reflective trail signs, so I didn’t even need to pay attention to a map. I could just mindlessly follow the markers to my destination.

  The established nature of the route made my parents feel more at ease about me striking out alone, but it made me feel complacent. I packed up my bike bags with the bare essentials as I saw them — one change of clothing, light rain gear, a down sleeping bag rated to thirty-two degrees, a light air mattress, a bivy sack, tools, medicine, granola bars, sunflower seeds, chocolate, a sixteen-ounce plastic jar of peanut butter, and a six-liter bladder full of water.

  The desert drive to Fruita was unspeakably lonely. I had driven back from San Francisco with my friend, Jen, in the passenger’s seat, and had spent most of the following days with family and friends, taking only the occasional break from companionship to go for a training ride. This was the first time since I left Alaska that I had been completely alone. Solitude seeped like stale rainwater into my core, and I knew there was more where that came from.

  I arrived at the Kokopelli trailhead well after dark. With the car still idling, I flicked off the headlights and let my eyes focus on the ominous silhouettes of sandstone cliffs, eerily backlit by the moon. Trickling down my throat was that same layer of vague doom that always seemed to build before I started anything big. I took my bike down from the roof rack and started putting the pieces together. I figured I could get a few miles behind me and sleep near the trail before the hot sun came up. I tested the shifters and lubed the chain, then tested the brakes. As I spun the front wheel, it made a disheartening “clink, clink, clink” sound. I grabbed the rim and ran my hand along the spokes until I connected with the loose one. It was nearly broken off.

  “Damn it!” I yelled, and stood up, pacing around my car. Why didn’t I check over my bike before I left Salt Lake? I certainly couldn’t start a three-hundred-mile mountain bike tour with a broken spoke. That was only asking for wheel failure and the possibility of becoming stranded in the middle of the desert. But it seemed just as idiotic to admit defeat right there. If I didn’t even start my first overnight test run, I might as well scrap the entire Great Divide right there.

  As I mulled my options, I remembered my friend, Dave, telling me about a bike shop he had worked at in Fruita, about five miles down the road. Despite my resolve to start early and spend as little money as possible, I decided to rent a hotel room in Fruita and visit the bike shop in the morning. The thought of actually interacting with humans before I hit the long and lonely trail made me feel more at ease.

  The next morning, the bike mechanic in Fruita had me in and out the door in less than ten minutes, gripping a freshly trued wheel as I walked into the blazing sunlight. The temperature neared 85, more heat than I had been exposed to in nearly a year, and promised to become hotter. I drove back to the trailhead and reconfigured my bike. Between sleeping in at the hotel, breakfast, and the bike shop, it was already nearly 11 a.m. I had hoped to start twelve hours earlier, but I didn’t fret about the late start. I could still ride the route in three days, no problem. It was only 240 miles plus a thirty-mile road connector.

  I had everything mounted on my bicycle, my car locked, and my butt on the saddle, seconds away from launching into the sweltering desert, when my cell phone rang.

  “Hey Jill. Do you have a minute to talk?” Geoff asked.

  “I guess,” I said. “I’m in Fruita right now. I’m about to go for a bike tour on the Kokopelli Trail.”

  “That’s cool,” Geoff said. “That’s a fun ride. I think you’re really going to enjoy it. I’m still visiting my family in New York. But I wanted to call to talk about our stuff.”

  “What stuff?”

  “Everything in your car,” Geoff said. “What we’re going to do with it — I’m going to need some of that stuff when I go back to Juneau.”

  “Well, you’re either going to have to wait or come here and deal with it,” I said. “Because I’m not going back to Juneau until July, at least, if at all.”

  “I’m flying back to Salt Lake tomorrow,” Geoff said. “For a little while. But since I’m not getting into Western States, I’m probably not going to stay down there long.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “You can stop by my parents’ house. I left a lot of stuff there. The rest is in my car, which is going to be parked for the next few days at the Kokopelli trailhead outside of Fruita.”

  “Good,” Geoff said. “I was talking to Jen about taking a trip to Moab. Maybe we can swing out there and grab stuff out of your car.”

  “Actually, if you’re going to do that, maybe you could just drive my car to Moab,” I said. “I’m going to need it in town when I’m done.”

  “That could work,” Geoff said. He paused, and I let the silence ferment. It was the first time Geoff and I had spoken since San Francisco, and I didn’t quite feel comfortable yet dealing with him directly, even if it was only through formalities and logistics. There was still so much anger and hurt flapping out in the open. But the truth was, we were still connected in more tangible ways, ways that involved camping gear and clothing, and the quicker we could break those strained ties, the more likely we’
d grow more comfortable with the distance.

  “Well, I’ll leave the key on top of the front wheel,” I said. “If my car’s in Moab when I get there, great. If not, just leave a message on my phone letting me know you couldn’t pick it up and I’ll hitchhike.”

  “Okay,” Geoff said. “Either way, I think we’ll be able to help you get back. When do you think you’ll be done?”

  “Um, Thursday,” I said. “Three days from now. Hopefully. I’m getting a much later start today than I wanted to, so I guess we’ll see.”

  “You’re starting right now?” Geoff asked. “At noon?”

  “I had bike trouble,” I said. “Broken spoke. It’s fixed now.”

  “Hmm,” Geoff said.

  “Yeah,” I said. The fermented silence returned. I inhaled and exhaled long and slow, until I started to feel dizzy. Then Geoff said, “I am sorry. I’m sorry for everything.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, too,” I said and breathed out. “There’s probably more we need to figure out. But maybe later. I’m standing in direct sunlight. I’m roasting, and I really have to go.”

  “Okay. Talk to you later.”

  “Bye.” I turned the phone completely off and stuffed it in my pocket. My bike seat felt warm even though I had spent the last ten minutes simply standing next to it. The noon sun bleached the sky white, and washed out the surrounding sandstone cliffs to a sickly pale orange. I placed my last foot on the pedal and started rolling down the gravel road. The road narrowed to a singletrack trail, turned east and started following a sandstone bench several dozen feet above the Colorado River.

  The trail skirted the edge of the cliff, rolling over jagged boulders and plunging into sandy basins. One bad error would mean a quick trip to chocolate-covered river far below, and the exposure rattled me. I wasn’t really a desert mountain biker, I was more of a snow rider — soft surfaces and softer falls. Desert trails meant hard rock and cactus and plunges off cliffs, and I was timid, out of practice and loaded with twenty-five extra pounds of weight. I hit a few rocks too far to one side and tipped. I pedaled slower. I ran up against a wall of boulders so I got off my bike and walked. I was two miles into the 140-mile Kokopelli Trail, and already struggling.