Be Brave, Be Strong

by Jill Homer

  John chatted amicably while I nodded and grunted, wishing he would ride ahead so I could nurse my malaise. Near the top of the first pass of the day, I was rescued by a swift thunderstorm that sent John sprinting away. By the time the rain let up and I caught up to John on the other side of the pass, my sore muscles were finally starting to warm up and the Sour Patch Kids I had forced down my throat were kicking in. John pointed across a large valley bathed in sunlight but ringed by dark clouds.

  “That mountain over there, the pointy one, that’s Fleecer Ridge,” he said. “Hard to believe, huh? That’s still nearly thirty miles from here.”

  “So that’s Fleecer, eh?” I said. Fleecer was yet another notorious section of the Divide, a difficult-to-locate intersection with a treacherous, technical descent on the downside. The reputation of these places tended to fill me with a dread that was quickly replaced with glee upon arriving there. I found I preferred the somewhat ridiculous challenges presented by unrideable obstacle courses to the usual physical strain of simply riding long and hard. In fact, all of the places I had been warned about — Red Meadow Lake, Richmond Pass and Lava Mountain — were all the places I already regarded most fondly. At that point, I expected nothing less from Fleecer.

  As John put on his warm jacket and leg warmers for the descent, I pulled a little wax-coated cheese wheel from my feedbag, unwrapped it and popped it in my mouth. As I chewed, the creamy cheese oozed down my throat and lined my stomach with the most incredible sense of health and well-being.

  “Oh my God, John, you have to try these things,” I said as I fished another cheese wheel out of my bag and handed it to him. “I bought them at the store in Butte. They’re like pure happiness wrapped in a ball of wax.”

  John laughed and popped it in his mouth. “Pretty good,” he said. “You need to remember these things. I’m serious. Make a mental note. When you find something that works for you, you don’t want to forget it.”

  We dropped into the valley and crossed beneath the interstate. As we started climbing anew, I looked wistfully down the pavement as it snaked along the basin in a comforting, familiar way. “There’s the road of my childhood,” I said to John. “Growing up in Salt Lake City, that was the road we used to get anywhere. When I was a surly teenager, I dreamed of moving to California and I-15 was my escape route. It feels so close. Now, if I headed south on I-15, it would take me home.”

  “How far do you think it is to Salt Lake City?” John asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “That’s the weirdest thing about paying so much attention to these Divide maps. I could tell you the name of every stream we cross, every valley we pass through, exactly how far it is to the next notable cattle guard, but I have no idea where we are in relation to the rest of the world.”

  “The Divide is an all-encompassing existence,” John agreed.

  We climbed Fleecer Ridge on the grass-lined tracks left by trucks, essentially four singletrack trails cut deep into the slope. We neared 8,000 feet, skimming the alpine tundra regions of the higher mountains. The trees thinned and steep meadows opened in front of us. As promised, my GPS track directed me hard right over a route that wasn’t a trail at all. There weren’t even tracks, just an open meadow stretching toward a dilapidated wire fence. Beyond the fence, the jeep tracks returned. They seemed to fall right off the face of the Earth in a descent so steep and rocky that I wondered if I’d be able to walk my bicycle down it. John was already inching his bike down the slope, looking comically tiny amid the expansive mountainside. I stepped off my saddle, throttled both brakes and dragged my bike in lurching lunges, stepping sideways on both feet to brace against a freefall. I stepped gingerly around each large boulder, looking up frequently to drink in the vivid greens and tiny yellow flowers splashed across a near-vertical meadow.

  The far-rippling landscape in front of me was both familiar in a primeval way and thrillingly new — a region thrust up like broken splinters from the bowels of the Earth. And the only way we could traverse it was a ladder of loose gravel and stones, cascading down the sharp spine of the mountain. Altitude brought us an ability to see worlds that were completely new, and also remember the worlds we had nearly forgotten. As I dropped down Fleecer Ridge, I remembered being a small child and curling my toes around the summer grass. I remembered being a teenager in hiking boots, following my dad along a ridge of the Wasatch Mountains. I remembered being barefoot and in love and clasping hands beneath the cliffs of the Oregon Coast.

  “I’m telling you,” I called out to John, “I-15 would get us to Lima a lot faster and easier.” But, unlike my statement when I left Basin, this time, I really was joking. The trucks and cars trapped on the interstate would never see these mountains, never experience this intense downhill push, never feel the rush of thin air and hard wind and gaping gravity that threatened to tear the skin from my body. It was these difficult-to-reach places that made the riding the Divide worth all of the soreness and fatigue and pain — Red Meadow Lake, Richmond Peak and Fleecer Ridge.

  “Woo!” I called out joyfully as I met John at the bottom. “I didn’t fall! I’m alive!”

  “That is a hell of a hike-a-bike,” John said.

  “Tough to fathom even jeeps rolling down that,” I said. “You know Mary, the woman who finished the Tour Divide last year? She claimed to have ridden down that stretch of trail. Just stuck her butt out and went.”

  “The whole thing?”

  “I think so.”

  “I don’t believe that,” John said. “She was either mistaken or she was lying. Maybe if you had a huge downhill bike and full body armor, maybe. But a loaded cross-country bike? It’s impossible.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She had a good story about it. I think it involved some thrashers on downhill bikes calling her a wee little girl.”

  “What time did Mary finish in, anyway?” John asked. “She has the women’s record from Banff, doesn’t she?”

  “Actually, Jenn Hopkins from the Great Divide Race has that because she started in Banff and time-trialed to the border. I think her time was twenty-eight days. Mary took twenty-nine or thirty. She was going really fast at first, but then she got injured near Lima. Something weird with her leg muscles, too much salt or something. Kind of amazing she finished, actually.”

  “Twenty-eight days?” John said. “You’ll beat that easily. Right now, I think you’re on pace for twenty-two or twenty-four days, tops. And if you increase your pace, you even still have a good shot at the border-to-border record.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But I don’t think it would be recognized because I’m breaking that GDR cell phone rule.” I smiled, because with John around, I hadn’t had an urge to break the cell phone out once beyond a couple of calls from inside motel rooms. My mother was probably wondering why I hadn’t called.

  John and I descended into Wise River. At the single-room store in town, we caught up Dario, who was traveling with one other Tour Divide racer who I didn’t know, and Jeremy, who must have passed John and me while we slept the morning away in Butte. Dario and his companion left just as we were settling down with a lunch of Hot Pockets and Pepsi. Jeremy left soon after that, still looking miserable as he limped down the street out of town. After the morning’s cheese-wheel-fueled riding, my appetite had waned again and I struggled to force down the relatively small portion of food.

  As we pedaled into the Wise River valley, John announced that he wanted to relive his glory days on the Great Divide one last time by sprinting as hard as he could up the final pass of the day.

  “I just want to see how fast I can still go. I’ll wait for you at the top,” he said. “And if I get too cold waiting, I’ll go ahead and ride into Elkhorn Hot Springs. It’s a nice place. I stayed there last year. You should be able to find it easily enough; just watch for the signs.”

  Finally alone for the longest period of time I had to myself since leaving Canada, I pedaled south below the waning afternoon sunlight and hummed along to my iPod,
sometimes singing loudly as the canyon narrowed and the road began snaking up the mountain. The sun settled directly behind me as the road turned east toward the alpine, casting my long shadow over the gold-tinted tundra.

  I pedaled toward the shadow, watching it lumber in front of me like an aloof companion. It wavered as though it wanted to pull away, so I began speaking to it. I remarked how beautiful the meadow was. I asked it to observe the little red flowers lining the road. The shadow maintained a peaceful silence, quietly accepting everything I said.

  John, going as hard as he could, reached the pass more than an hour before I did. When I found him at the top, he was shivering wildly.

  “Why didn’t you keep going to Elkhorn?” I asked.

  “I wanted to make sure you could find it,” he stammered through chattering teeth.

  “Oh good grief,” I said. “I’m a big girl, John.”

  “I’ll be fine,” he said gruffly. “Let’s just get going.”

  We rode the descent together, gulping down gravity and the unhindered freedom a massive downhill always provides. I gazed up at the warm hues of sunset stretched across the horizon as John looked directly ahead, fixated on the promise of warm beds and showers. I felt the best I had all day and I really wanted to keep going, beyond Elkhorn, beyond the road south, beyond Montana. My shadow faded with dusk, and I decided it was time for John to set me free. But despite his falling core temperature and impatient demeanor, he rode his brakes and stayed parked beside me, as though he suspected I might just shoot past the Elkhorn cutoff and leave him behind.

  We turned together into Elkhorn Hot Springs. Twilight still clung to the sky at 9:30 p.m., but the lodge itself was abandoned. When we called earlier, the proprietor had promised there’d be a room for us, so we let ourselves in and placed our stuff in one of six bedrooms upstairs, all empty. We made our way downstairs to the quiet and dark dining room to prepare a meal of convenience store snacks that we carried from Wise River, and soda that we found in a nearby cooler. We left $10 on the counter and a note thanking the unseen proprietor for four cans of soda, and a mention of which room we were sleeping in upstairs.

  John nudged me out of bed early the next morning. “We should get going. It might be a long ride into Lima if we get any kind of weather,” he said. “That Bannock Road gets some hellish mud after thunderstorms.”

  As we rolled south, the endless ripple of mountain ranges started to fade into the background and the landscape opened wider into high, arid prairies. The thick pine forests of northern Montana were replaced by sagebrush and grass, already dry and yellow in June. The climbs were more gradual, the descents less thrilling, and it seemed John was finally beginning to tire of my company, often riding twenty or thirty yards in front of me rather than beside me.

  Either that, or John expected I was tiring of him, even though that wasn’t exactly the case. Initially, I relished in the bouts of solitude. But after several hours of quiet aloneness, spent drifting through the dull hills of the present and the flickering shadows of my memories, I found myself both fascinated and distressed by the landscape inside my head. It was too vivid, too dark, too far from the world around me, and too close for comfort. It left me feeling lost, directionless, locked in a grueling journey that had no discernible end. The outside reality that John provided, with its rational observations, disconnected tangents and long stories about people I did not know and places I had never been, was sometimes irritatingly distracting. But suddenly displaced from it, I realized that John’s distractions had been exactly that — a pleasant diversion from my own thoughts, whose company I wasn’t sure I enjoyed.

  As we climbed into the high, open plain between the Beaverhead and Tendoy mountains, dark clouds started to gather over the rocky peaks in the distance. John slowed to let me catch up.

  “You’re going to have to kick it up a notch. We can’t get caught out here in the rain,” he said. “This road is made out of soft clay. It will turn to the worst kind of mud. We’ll be stuck out here all night.”

  The dirt road had a polished, cracked surface like paint on an antique piece of furniture. Flakes of mud crackled beneath our wheels and clung to our rims like cement every time we splashed through a puddle. Under hard rain, the Bannock Road would disintegrate to a swath of mud with the consistency of peanut butter. The sticky, chunky mud would build on our tires and clog up drivetrains until our wheels refused to turn.

  “I understand and I believe you,” I said. “But we’re more than a week into the Tour Divide. We’ve already ridden 1,000 miles. I am officially One-Gear Jill, and I can tell you, it isn’t a high gear.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to try your best,” John said. “It’s not outside the realm of possibility that you’ll have to walk your bike for thirty miles through the mud if you get stuck in a bad storm.”

  “John, I’m doing the best I can,” I said. “Go on ahead if you have to. If you don’t see me in Lima tonight, you’ll know I’m stuck out here. It’s no skin off my back. I’ll lay out my bivy and wait for the sun. But if I try to sprint now, I’ll really be cooked.”

  This time, John did not hesitate to leave me behind. Within ten minutes I could no longer see his thin figure ahead on the road, even as the sagebrush-dotted basin opened wider. I took John’s advice to heart and tried to increase my pace, but my legs ached with fatigue and pain. Pushing down hard on the tender muscles in my legs felt like a fate worse than mud, and I eased back. The distant clouds darkened and lightning flashed over the mountains. The rumbling thunder carried over the desert plain, but the sky directly overhead stayed mercifully blue.

  I started to see deep tracks of bicycle tires followed by footprints that had become fossilized like molds in the clay road. It was obvious that some of the racers who traveled through here before me had become stuck in the mud. Their staggered footprints pressed several inches into the hardened clay. Eventually, the tracks disappeared off the road into the sagebrush, where I suspected my predecessors had sought refuge from the goop.

  “Crap, that’s going to be us in a few hours,” I told my shadow, which was already fading beneath the quickly accumulating clouds overhead. A few sprinkles fell onto my hot skin. I groaned. “Well, this is going to suck.”

  But the feeling of the first droplets of rain reignited a higher gear that I thought had long since burned out, and my speed did increase as I climbed the last pitch of the broad pass and started dropping into another open valley. Despite the invigorating surge in energy, I gleaned no joy from sprinting. I felt only anxiety as flashes of lightning streaked over the far horizon.

  The storm remained on the periphery. As I rode down the valley, the clouds continued to move away, replaced by more blue sky and glaring sun. A hard headwind followed in the storm’s wake, blowing out the last fumes of my adrenaline and slowing me once again to a single-gear crawl. I did not grumble because given the choice, I would pick wind over mud without regret.

  The valley pinched in and the road turned into a narrow canyon that was lined with sheer rock cliffs. The road surface improved as it meandered into ranch lands, bordered by thin wire fences that created an almost comically weak barrier between clusters of cattle and the bald mountains that towered overhead. I descended along a wide creek as the road wrapped around a ridge and veered directly away from the wind. Flying downhill on smooth gravel with the wind at my back, I clicked up my pace until I suddenly found myself without any higher gears; I had no choice but to coast effortlessly through a blur of speed.

  A herd of cattle grazed lazily along the grassy shoreline of the creek. I whipped around a tight curve and surprised a group of four cows and two calves that had been standing in the middle of the road. The animals launched into a full stampede, galloping in front of me as I tore through their cloud of dust, screaming “Yah! Yah! Get off the road!” The small herd split up and veered toward both edges of the gravel. The sound of their hooves echoed like thunder through the canyon. I fearlessly plunged through the cent
er of the stampede, furiously sprinting beside their mud-caked skin and watching their powerful muscles ripple in the sunlight. I continued to scream “Yah!” as one cow looked directly at me, wild-eyed with terror. I pedaled as hard as I physically could and surged forward. I was the cattle driver, the cause of stampedes, a cowgirl without a horse outrunning panicked bovines. Smiling with satisfaction, I shot ahead, leaving the confused cows behind as they slowed to a trot and finally veered off the road.

  The canyon opened up and I again found myself dropping into the wide corridor of I-15, with its familiar truck stream roaring southbound. The Great Divide Mountain Bike Route turned south on the frontage road, again facing the strong headwind that had become nearly as impenetrable as a wall. I gasped into the warm air that whipped past my body and threatened to push me all the way back to Canada. It must have been blowing steady at thirty or thirty-five miles per hour — not quite strong enough to stop a fatigued cyclist in her tracks, but close.

  I plodded along the flat pavement at six or seven mph, head practically buried between my arms, eyes watching only the slow-moving front wheel and the white line on the road. The wind roared in my ears and I stopped frequently for breaks, turning my back to the blast just so I could stuff down some candy and nuts before the wind tore it out of my hands. For the duration of the seven-mile approach, every time I looked up, I could see the roofs and road signs of Lima beckoning from the edge of the valley. They never seemed to get any closer.