Be Brave, Be Strong

by Jill Homer

  I approached the bridge that the directions warned I should not cross because it meant I had gone too far. I stopped and scanned the woods but saw nothing that appeared to be a trail. I did see a small tent pitched next to the road. The sun was settling but I figured there was at least another hour of usable twilight, and I wanted to continue moving. As I wheeled my bike past the tent, a woman’s voice called out, “Who’s there?”

  “It’s Jill with the Tour Divide,” I said. “Are you Cricket?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And is this the right way, the connector trail?” I asked.

  “I think it’s right over there, right behind me,” she said. “I figured I’d camp here and try to cross it with someone in the morning.”

  “You think it’s going to be that bad?”

  “No,” she said. “I’ve just gone far enough today. I’m happy here.”

  “Well, I think I’m going to cross while there’s still a little daylight,” I said. “Maybe shoot for the border tonight, but probably not. I’m just going to get some water in that stream over there and head out. I’m kind of a sleeper-inner, so I’m sure I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Well, let me know if you decide to camp here,” Cricket said in a way that told me she didn’t really want my company. I wondered if all of these racers I was meeting were as repelled by my presence as they seemed, or if that was just an insecurity born of my own imagination. Either way, I wasn’t quite ready to stop for the night.

  “I think I’ll go on,” I said. “But thanks.”

  Even in the brightest part of twilight, with Cricket’s assurances that this was the right spot, I had a difficult time picking out the trail entrance from the meadow where she was camped. I doubted if I would have ever found it had her tent not been pitched right in front of it. The so-called “singletrack” barely made an indentation in the grass and moss. A thin ribbon was tied to a tree several feet away from the initial clearing, and only faint footprints on the dewy ground indicated any real passage at all. Obviously, everyone had walked their bikes through this section of “trail.” I switched on my headlamp and picked out more footprints with bike tracks nearby.

  In the deep forest, twilight turned quickly to darkness. Within the narrow beam of my headlamp, I pieced my way along the trammeled grass as it wove through the trees near a gurgling stream. Then, almost as imperceptibly as it started, the connector dead-ended in a virtually vertical bluff. I shined my headlight in a large circle, looking for some way around it, but all bike tracks indicated that the route went straight up.

  The grade was at least sixty degrees. The cue sheet called it a “hike-a-bike” but it was in fact a virtual wall — a wall built of slippery mud and with chocolate-colored water cascading down the face. I grunted, hoisted the bike a few inches forward and planted my right shoe in the gooey cliff. I took a few more steps before I lost traction and slid all the way back to the bottom. I swore and threw my bike on its side, lodging the handlebars in the mud and using it as an anchor to leverage my body up the first crumbling step. After several “ax” plants, I was drenched in sweat and nowhere near the top of the bluff. The climb was so difficult that I had to tap deep into what I call my “snow bike mode,” a rather defeated state of mind I reserve for only the most ridiculous slog conditions, in which I tell myself that I’m merely living out some kind of bad dream, and to not be so uptight about it because I’ll probably wake up soon.

  For the next twenty minutes, I picked my way up 300 vertical feet by throwing my bike down, taking a couple of sliding steps, wedging one foot deep into the mud, picking my bike up and throwing it down again. By the time I reached the top of the bluff, I was exhausted. I staggered out of the forest into an large clear-cut area. The sky had become pitch dark, shrouded with clouds that blocked the stars. Within the faint beam of my headlamp, all I could see were piles of downed trees. There was no road or trail anywhere in sight.

  I swore again, probably for the eightieth time in the past half hour, and began lifting my bike over the seemingly endless minefield of logs. The road had to be around here somewhere, but what if I didn’t find it tonight? How far was I going to wander through this fallen-tree obstacle course before I finally just gave up and waited for daylight? I still had my GPS turned on, but the unit didn’t have any embedded maps of for Canada, and was therefore only good at showing me where I had been. The splintered remains of trees lay like bones on a battlefield, revealing nothing.

  After fifteen minutes, I was on the verge of collapsing on a log in a shower of tears when I noticed a strip of gravel on the edge of my headlamp beam. As I approached it, the gravel grew wider until I was standing on a road. I clicked on my GPS to check my progress. It had been an hour and fifteen minutes since I left Cricket’s tent. GPS indicated I had traveled less than a mile.

  I swore for the eighty-seventh and final time, and set the bike down on a narrow patch of moss only a few feet from the road. I doubted anyone would drive to a dead-end road in the middle of a clear-cut, so I wasn’t worried about being run over by a car. I pulled out my bivy sack and laid it out next to my bike, which held all of my food. I plopped down a few feet away in the middle of the road and ate a chocolate bar and a package of tuna for dinner. I tried to be careful with my crumbs because I was in the middle of the most concentrated bear country on the entire route, but I figured if I were a grizzly bear, I wouldn’t want to live anywhere near this graveyard for murdered trees. I doubted that what I was doing was really safe, but I couldn’t be bothered with technicalities. I curled up with my bear spray propped next to my head and quickly drifted into the unconcerned sleep usually reserved for the dead.

  Chapter Ten

  The First Border

  The soft jingle of a bear bell rang through the timber graveyard. I stirred in my sleeping bag cocoon and pressed one eye and cheek into the brisk morning air. The sun had already risen over the mountains that straddled British Columbia and Montana.

  As the sound of the bell moved closer, I wrestled out of my sleeping bag. The morning chill gripped my bare legs as I kicked away the bivy sack and stood up in my socks. Cricket pulled up beside me.

  “Good morning!” she said with a cheerful smile. “Wow, that was a mean piece of trail, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s an understatement. How long did it take you to get through the connector?” I asked.

  She looked at her watch. “Oh, I broke camp about forty-five minutes ago.”

  “It took me an hour fifteen in the dark,” I said. “I got lost coming out of the forest and wandered around in the clear-cut for a while.”

  “Yeah, the trail through that logging area isn’t even clear in the daylight,” she said. “I just headed downhill until I saw the road. And here I am.”

  “So,” I said. “Today, America!”

  “I can’t wait to cross the border,” Cricket said.

  “The cue sheet made it seem like there’s one more pass,” I said, “but it doesn’t seem like it’ll be a very big one.”

  Cricket laughed. “We’ll see!” I suspected she had as much respect for the cue sheet as I did. She continued down the road as I pulled on more clothing and packed up my bike. My watch said it was 7 a.m., which meant I had slept continuously for seven hours. That seemed a good and bad thing, because while it was good to capture full nights of sleep in order to finish the race, I still felt surprisingly exhausted for a person standing at the bright end of a good night’s sleep.

  Twenty minutes after Cricket had passed, I mounted my bicycle and followed her faint track in the dirt. To the south, mountains loomed like an impenetrable fortress as I pedaled due west, paralleling the Montana state line that was, according to my GPS, less than six miles away in a direct shot.

  The road grade steepened. After an hour of slow pedaling, I approached a fortress of debris, more than thirty feet high, piled across the entire width of the road and the steep gully below. I stopped and gaped at the towering remnants of a large
avalanche — a tangle of trees, twisted branches, boulders and snow. Did other bikers really climb over this thing? I didn’t see Cricket anywhere, so she must have surmounted the obstacle as well.

  I propped my bike against the snow wall and scrambled to the top, balancing precariously on broken limbs and half-exposed tree trunks. I picked my way along the summit of the avalanche pile until I found what looked like a track made by others, then scrambled down to retrieve my bike. I lifted it inch by inch over the downed trees, digging the wheels into the hard-packed snow like an ice ax while I climbed up the mound. Clumps of pine branches slapped me in the face as I worked through the tangle. The painfully slow effort to cross a hundred feet of road felt as tiring as the entire first hour of the day.

  On the other side of the avalanche debris, the rutted climb resumed. Switchbacks continued wrapping around the steep slope until patches of snow lined the road, and then stretched across it. My GPS indicated I was nearing 6,500 feet elevation, which meant I had climbed nearly 3,000 feet since that morning and was nearing the highest point on the route through Canada. The cue sheet said nothing about all of this seemingly important information. Its off-center black type seemed to laugh at me as the road turned due north, away from my home country that was close I could almost reach out and touch it.

  I crested a broad summit and looked out over fenced farmland tracts far below in the valley. I launched into the descent, zipping past fences, rotating sprinklers, and dull-eyed horses. Air screamed past my ears as my fingers hovered over the brakes, resisting the urge to slow the free acceleration. I cornered tight switchbacks and grinned into the frigid wind until my teeth hurt, but the pain of the morning melted away. It was my first taste of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route’s saving grace — for all of its unceasing elevation gain, there is a descent for every climb. And with every descent, there is an opportunity to escape sore joints, tight muscles, and sweat-streaked fatigue, in a vacuum of effortless joy.

  I crossed onto the paved highway that only minutes before had appeared as a tiny ribbon rippling through a wide valley. The border was finally less than 10 direct miles away. Filled with anticipation and adrenaline, I sprinted the entire way there. At the crossing, the border guard stamped my passport and asked me if I was “one of those bikers going to Mexico.”

  “I sure hope so,” I said. “That’s the plan.”

  He handed me his business card with my own name scrawled across the back. “If you make it, give this to the guy in Antelope Wells. He’s my buddy. We do this every year with you all. We collect business cards from bikers.”

  I smiled. “Fun,” I said. “I’ll try to remember once I get there.”

  In crossing the border, I was finally released from the tyranny of the cue sheet and found myself back on the well-worn, well-mapped path of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route. I switched on my GPS to the friendly black track that I downloaded to help guide me through the endless twists and turns of unmarked forest roads and trails. The route joined the narrow pavement of a farming road and continued due south into the glaring sunlight of late morning. Within what felt like a few free-rolling minutes, I was in Eureka, settling down to lunch at the only fast-food restaurant in town — to my joy, a Subway.

  I told the guy behind the counter to load my sandwich with vegetables and bought a salad on the side, knowing that fresh food was going to become increasingly rare as I travelled farther into cowboy country. I sat down with my huge meal to study what was becoming the only reading material I had any interest in — my maps — when another cyclist sauntered in the door and plopped down in the seat across from me. He appeared rested and clean but had a dejected look on his face.

  “I saw your bike out front,” the man said. “Awesome that you made it here. You seem to be doing really well.”

  “I’m feeling okay,” I said. “Just taking it slow, trying to get a feel for it all. At least I made it out of Canada.”

  “I’m lucky I even made it out of Canada,” he said. “I hit that last pass yesterday afternoon in a thunderstorm. I thought I was going get here a lot faster than I did, so I descended as fast as I could. It was raining hard. I was so cold I couldn’t even move my arms. Now I think I have a cold and my knee is jacked up. I can’t pedal hard without pain. I stayed here last night. Then I headed back to Roosville this morning, to start over at the border and see if it got any better, but I still have no power. I think my race is over.”

  “That sucks,” I said. I studied him closely, trying to figure out who he was. He had cropped dark hair, a thin build, Lycra shorts stretched over his muscled legs and a logo-splashed cycling jersey augmented by black arm warmers and a rather useless looking performance vest. In short, he looked like every other male cyclist in the Tour Divide. I regarded him with a crooked smile, braced for the social awkwardness of admitting I had no idea who he was, even though he seemed to know me well enough to recognize my bike outside the restaurant.

  “So, um,” I said. “Did you see any of the leaders come through?”

  “Of course,” he said. “I was with them until my knee went out.”

  “So what do you think — do any of them have a shot at the record?”

  “I hope not!” he said.

  “Really?” I asked. “What about John? How’s he doing?”

  A look of confusion shot across his face. “John?”

  “You know, John Nobile, the record holder,” I said.

  “Um,” he said slowly, looking at me suspiciously like I was asking him a trick question. “I’m the record holder.”

  Sudden recognition shot through my blood and my face flushed deep red. “Oh, you’re John!” I exclaimed. “I’m so, so, sorry. I did not even recognize you without your helmet on. It’s just been a long couple of days on the trail and I never expected I’d ever see you again. I really am sorry. You caught me. When you walked up here I had no idea who you were.”

  “That’s okay,” he said in a defeated tone. “I’m not feeling much like myself either. What about you? Where are you thinking of going today?”

  “Well, it is after 10 a.m., and it’s kind of nice in Eureka. There’s a big motel next door. I might spend the night here.”

  John gave me a humorous look of horror that indicated he believed I might be serious. “You’re joking.”

  “Of course,” I said, laughing. “I’m feeling pretty good right now. I was going to try to reach Whitefish tonight, but we’ll see if I make it. I’m kinda just taking it one mile at a time. Like that singletrack connector trail last night. Damn, what a mile!”

  “Was that hard?” he asked with genuine confusion. “I don’t even remember much of yesterday before that terrible descent.”

  I laughed. “Your worst part of Canada was my best. I was just up there two hours ago. It was beautiful.”

  “Hey,” he said. “If you’re going to Whitefish tonight, do you mind if I ride with you? It would be good for me to take it easy for a day and see if I can recover my knee. Then I can decide whether or not to ramp it up.”

  “That would be really fun,” I said. “I’d love company. But I have to warn you — I’m slow. Mind-bogglingly slow.”

  “That’s good,” he said. “Because alone I’d probably try to catch up to everyone and blow out my knee all over again.”

  We left Subway and rolled out of town together. I breathed somewhat laboriously at our initial pace, but John was hardly breaking a sweat. Because of our pre-race correspondence, John already knew most of my back story. Instead of working through introductions, he immediately launched into a thorough assessment of my bike, complimenting my bag system and criticizing my choice of front shock. He asked why I chose my particular seat and grips. He labeled my components as “low-end but probably adequate.” He questioned my platform pedals and running shoes before I fumbled through my frostbite explanation.

  “But good tires,” he said. “And looks like a solid frame. Is it steel?”

  “It is,” I said. “Cheap and
strong and full of Juneau rust. To be honest, John, I didn’t put a whole lot of thought into my bike. I just have the stuff I have. Geoff picked out a lot of it when we were building up the bike last spring. He wanted me to ride the Divide last year. I didn’t even consider it then, when we were still together. It’s kinda funny that I’m here now.”

  “Where is Geoff right now?”

  “In Juneau, with his new girlfriend,” I said, deliberately spitting out the last word. “But it’s been a while since we’ve spoken. I’m not even entirely sure he knows I started the race. Last time I really talked to him, I told him I wasn’t going to do it. But he probably checks out the race updates, so I’m sure he knows I’m here.”

  “So you and Geoff are really done?”

  “It appears that way,” I said. “It sucks.”

  “But you’re okay now?”

  “I’m up and down and all over the map, really,” I said. “But I’m working toward moving on. I even went on a date while I was in Utah.”

  “A date?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It was good. I met him last month on a rafting trip in Southern Utah. His name is Hansel. He’s a hunky river guide with blond hair and an unfortunate passion for country music. We went to a baseball game.”

  “How was it?” John asked.

  “The home team lost. To be honest, the whole thing was actually a little weird,” I confessed. “It wasn’t Hansel. He was really sweet, actually. I just don’t know how to act around men these days. Dating was fun when I was a teenager, but now it feels like a contrived sort of pastime. At one point during the game, he put his arm around me and I was like, ‘This guy is a basically a stranger.’”

  “I find that with the women I go out with, it takes at least three dates to work through that initial awkwardness,” he said.

  I grinned. John was methodical about everything, absolutely everything, even matters of the heart. He was so unlike me in nearly every way. I wondered how long he’d opt to ride with me. A day? Maybe two? A flash of dread shot through me when I realized he might want to ride with me all the way to New Mexico. It would be an easy jaunt for him and comfortable for me, but the possibility of constant companionship stripped away my ultimate quest in the Tour Divide — a pursuit of that quiet place beyond solitude and suffering where I could see through my experiences and expectations into the heart of who I truly was.