by Jill Homer
By the time I reached town, John had already gotten a room, taken a shower, and checked the weather and all of the race standings. He had been there for a while, but it was still a couple of hours before dark. I took my own shower and we walked back outside to go to dinner. The wind had only picked up strength. After spending time in the shelter of the room, the gusts felt like a full hurricane blast. My wet hair whipped around wildly and I couldn’t hear anything John was saying over the roar, even though he was standing right next to me. He pointed to the mountains south of Lima. Across the sky, a swath of clouds as black as the darkest hours of the night hovered ominously over the ridge. Near-continuous bursts of lightning streaked through the sinister sky. The contrast of darkness and electricity was so stark that the lightning cast discernible shadows on the ground where we stood. Deafening claps of thunder followed too closely behind.
“Holy cow!” I yelled over the roaring wind. “That has got to be the scariest storm I have ever seen!”
“It’s coming right for us!” John yelled back.
“Thank God for motels!” I yelled. “I’d probably be crapping my shorts if I were still up on the Bannock Road and I saw that.”
As we neared the doors of the restaurant down the street, I noticed a man with a loaded bike walking toward us. Two grocery bags hung from both of his handlebars. They were flapping so loudly in the wind that I could hear them even before I was certain the cyclist was Jeremy, but I assumed it was since no other Tour Divide racer was within fifty miles of John and me.
“Hey!” I yelled when he was in close enough range to hear my voice, about five feet away. “We’re going for dinner. Would you like to go with us?”
“No thanks,” he yelled back. “I’ve got dinner right here. I think I’m going to head down the road.”
“You’re going on tonight?” I said in disbelief. “What about that storm coming in?”
“I checked out the motel but it’s pretty expensive,” Jeremy said. “And it’s early in the day still. I was hoping to get to this campground at Lima Reservoir tonight. The road kinda skirts north anyway and I think that storm is going to bypass it.”
I couldn’t tell if Jeremy was brave or cheap or completely unreasonable. Hurricane gusts of wind swirled all around us, and we continued shouting over the din even though we were only standing feet apart. I knew that I was willing to give the proprietors of the Lima motel whatever they wanted, even if it was hundreds of dollars, just for the relative comfort of shelter from that storm.
We watched Jeremy’s figure disappear down the open road like a rider into the apocalypse. We ducked into the restaurant just before heavy rain started to fall. It pounded the windows as we ate, and fell in wide sheets as we darted back to our warm and dry motel room.
By the next morning, the raging tempest was finally subdued, only to be replaced by an overcast pall and light but steady rain. I had assumed John would continue riding south from Lima toward Idaho Falls, and I would be on my own as soon as we checked out. But as we packed up, John announced that he really preferred to go to Jackson, which was a nice place to rest for a while, so he planned to continue on the Divide for two more days.
“Really?” I asked. “Even though it’s raining?”
“Yeah, there’s some nice riding past here,” John said. I was mildly relieved to hear this. The very real terror of thunderstorms had reignited my reluctance to be alone.
We both overdressed for the weather, and I had to stop a couple of times to strip off clothing. Steady rain pattered on my jacket, and I was already drenched in sweat. I felt warm and relaxed, oddly comfortable in the wet conditions I had become so accustomed to in Juneau. As we pedaled up the road, we began to see more tracks and footprints preserved in the mud. Someone had scrawled the phrase “This effin bites” deep into the clay surface, which was beginning to soften in the rain. “The next 47 miles are very remote,” my map warned. “Road can be potentially mucky when wet.”
“Crap,” I said to John as I observed the sky, thick with storm clouds in every direction. “We’re not going to escape the mud today.”
Sure enough, within a mile we dipped into a thick, gooey stew that collected on our tires until both wheels on both of our bikes had seized up entirely. I dragged my anchor of a bicycle along the shoulder as John pushed his into the bushes and chipped away at the mud with a stick. After about 300 yards of sweat-soaked struggle, we climbed onto a higher, still muddy, but at least passable bend in the road. I chipped away the cement block of mud still clinging to the wheels and crank and started pedaling.
“Now is the time to find that high gear,” John said to me as he shot past. “You’re going to need power to get through this.
“Power?” I cried. “You mean like a rocket engine? That stuff is as thick as tar.”
“If you crank it really hard, you’ll float right through it. Watch.”
John plummeted into the next dip and sprinted through the next muddy basin, flinging massive clumps of mud in every direction as he swerved and fishtailed over the wet cement. I could see his legs straining, his neck muscles bulging, and I knew I couldn’t match the effort even if I had a vial of methamphetamine at my disposal.
“Whatever,” I called out. “I’ll see you in Idaho.”
But he was already too far away to even hear me. I didn’t mind; after all, he had the power to get out of the rain more quickly, so he might as well use it. As I watched him disappear down the next hill, I wondered why I felt so much resentment about it. John certainly didn’t have to hang with me as long as he did, and it definitely didn’t make sense for him to wallow in this mud, but at the same time, isn’t that what he had been doing? Wallowing in the Divide with me? As the days crept forward and John’s schedule remained open-ended, his actions confused me more and more. Did he want to stay in the race, or not? Did he want to travel with me, or not? And if he simply wanted to travel with me, but wasn’t willing to stay with me when weather conditions got tough, what did that mean?
Fifty miles, six hours of solitude, and many long walks through the mud later, I reached the abandoned ranger station at Red Rock Lake. There, in a low-lying wetland, I encountered the most impassable mud I had yet seen. It seized up my bike within a few steps, and even grabbed my feet and covered my shoes in so much chocolate-colored cement that I could hardly walk. I had no choice but to hoist the heavily loaded bike on my shoulder and trudge through the sagebrush meadow, well off the road. As I was doing this, moving at a rate of about a half a mile per hour, hundreds of wetland mosquitoes honed in on my scent and torpedoed my exposed skin with astonishing accuracy. I threw the bike on the ground and groped for my bug spray, coating myself with all of the DEET I had left. Just a few toxic squirts hit their targets on my arms and neck, and then my bug spray was gone. Since John’s mystical ten-mile-per-hour mosquito-free barrier was little more than a silly dream and I still had many open patches of unprotected skin, I had no choice but to pull on all of my plastic rain gear even though I was still sweltering in the humid heat.
“This has got to be the worst place in the world,” I said out loud. “Nothing but mud and mosquitoes for fifty miles in every direction.”
I spent an hour walking a mile through the thick goop. The army of mosquitoes slammed into my rain layer with such audible frequency that I could no longer tell them apart from droplets of rain. I finally reached the edge of a tiny town called Lakeview, no services, but a sight of an old Buick lumbering down the road lifted my heart out of its depths. Surely if a vehicle like that could maneuver from far-away places of civilization into this cluster of buildings, I could maneuver a bike out of it. Sure enough, the road improved considerably on the other side of town, where it had been coated in pebble-infused gravel that was firm enough to lift my wheels away from the mud. I pulled the bike off the road and scraped away pieces of thick mud coating the wheels and frame. I broke three sticks trying to chip away to half-hardened cement, so I finally resorted to removing my gloves and jabbing slimy clump
s with my fingers. I pushed away large chunks until my hands were as filthy as my bicycle, but at least my drivetrain and wheels had been unlocked. I was able to ride again.
About five miles past town, the sky grew darker and new streaks of lightning again broke the gray monotony. Without warning, clouds as black as the ones I had seen the night before charged directly over the mountains to the south. A cacophony of electric sound exploded over the open plain and there was nowhere, absolutely nowhere to hide. Before I even had time to assess the situation, a brilliant flash of light erupted less than fifty yards from my bicycle, followed instantaneously by a clap of thunder so deafening that even my vision went black. Terror shot through my body like a jolt of electricity and I pressed into the pedals, sprinting with the adrenaline-surge power of an animal that truly believes it is about to die. There was no room, no time, and no capacity for thought or analysis. The only concept I understood was flight, primal and almost comforting in its absolution.
I charged with blind fury until the thunder decreased once again to a rumble and the sky changed from black to dark gray. When I calmed down enough to look down at my odometer, I was still traveling twenty-five miles per hour on a loaded mountain bike on a flat, muddy road. Later that night, I would check my odometer’s maximum speed, which registered at thirty-eight miles per hour. It’s possible I forgot to reset my odometer at the beginning of the day, and that was a speed I had achieved the previous day while rocketing down the canyon into Lima. But I can never be sure. And under lightning-charged distress, I wasn’t about to discount a dead sprint at thirty-eight miles per hour as beyond the realm of physical possibility.
Much to my relief, the electric climax abated. Unfortunately, the storm symphony’s next movement was a sonata of heavy rain. The temperature dropped into the low forties and I couldn’t look up without stinging my eyes. I was drenched to the core in both mud and water when I finally crossed the Continental Divide, passing from Montana into Idaho. I arrived at the Sawtell Mountain Resort a couple hours after John. As he opened the motel room door, he was freshly showered and cheerful, which only added cruel contrast to my bloodshot eyes and solid layer of mud. He asked me how the ride went and I glowered at him, “Pretty much the way it was going when you left. I got stuck in the mud and eaten by mosquitoes. Oh, and I almost got struck by lightning.”
He smiled slyly and said in an apologetic tone, “I had to walk some, too, but I missed the thunderstorms. But, hey, they have a hot tub here.”
“Great. But I’m going to eat before I shower,” I announced. “I don’t even care how dirty I am. I’m starving.”
I walked to Subway alone and plopped into a booth, smearing mud everywhere I went. Soon after I acquired a foot-long turkey sandwich and a jug of Pepsi, Jeremy wandered into the fast-food restaurant in a similar state of disarray. I was happy to see he survived the night, but confused as to how I had possibly arrived in Sawtell before him.
“When did I pass you?” I asked as he sat down in the booth next to me with an equally large pile of food.
“Hard to say,” he said. “It’s been a crazy day.” He told me a long story about storms and truck-driving ranchers and bike mechanicals that involved other racers whom I also had managed to not see at any point during the single-road route from Lima to Sawtell. I nodded but didn’t understand a word of his story, my mind still lost in its own primitive state of flight and survival. We ate our sandwiches mostly in silence after that, occasionally saying things like, “Good bread at this one,” and “Weather really sucks right now.” I suspected that Jeremy had regressed to a caveman-like intelligence as much as I had.
Back in the hotel room, John was watching some obnoxious sitcom on the television and I consented to finally cleaning myself. After I emerged from the bathroom, I strung my shower-washed clothes around the room and dropped my towel to change into my dry clothes even though John was sitting on the bed just a few feet away. It occurred to me too late that I didn’t actually know him all that well, and I should probably be more modest. But just like the mud I carelessly smeared all over a Subway booth for some poor employee to clean up, the intensely self-absorbed focus of the Tour Divide had a way of stripping away social norms and niceties. The more preoccupied I became with my body’s comfort and discomfort, the less I was able to view it as a tangible entity in the world I moved through. I descended from not caring to not even understanding how the people around me might interpret that I smelled bad, or think I look like a hobo on wheels, or even possibly find me attractive. But I remembered enough from my old, civilized existence to realize that I was definitely not attractive.
I walked toward the mirror and winced at my reflection, with its charred lips and sunburned skin and swelling mosquito bites. My hair looked liked it had been styled, badly, by an 1980s punk rock beautician. Clumps of hair were permanently matted down in some areas, flying all over the place in others, and tangled against my scalp in the back.
“You know, if I could pack for this trip again, the only thing I would do differently is bring a comb,” I said John I plopped down next to him on the bed. “Oh yeah, and only bring one set of clothes. I had no idea I’d be doing my laundry every single night.”
John smiled wryly. “Yeah, but what would you wear around the motel then?”
“I don’t know. Towel. Who cares? I just coated an entire Subway booth in Montana mud. It’s pretty obvious I no longer care about social conventions or personal appearance. But my hair, wow. That’s taking lack of vanity to a whole new level of scary.”
“I think your hair looks good,” John said.
“Are you kidding?” I cried out. “I look like Scarecrow! And not the friendly Scarecrow in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ but the really creepy, scary Scarecrow in ‘Return to Oz.’”
I grinned at him. I thought I had made a great joke, but John just looked at me quizzically and turned his head away. After several seconds, he said, “So the weather forecast isn’t good. We’re supposed to get another full day of rain tomorrow. I don’t think we’re going to run into the kind of mud we hit today, but the next section of trail is this rail bed. It’s volcanic soil, always wash-boarded, and it’s soft and slow. I think after all this rain, you’ll be lucky to do five miles per hour on it. I’m serious. You’re going to need a lot of power to get through it, and if you couldn’t power through the mud today, I think you’re going to have to brace yourself for a slow ride tomorrow.”
“Whatever,” I said. “I’ll turn on my best snow bike slog mentality. I’ll be just fine.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking,” John said. “If the rail trail goes really slow for you, we could just stop in Ashton. It’s a little off route, but it’s a good-sized town. It would be a good place to spend one more night together before I head over to Jackson.”
“How far is Ashton from here?” I asked.
John drew a breath. “About thirty-five miles.”
“Thirty-five miles?” I blurted out, my squeaky voice betraying a sudden flash of anger. “That’s all? Why don’t you just come out and ask me to quit the race, too? If I do a thirty-five-mile day, I might as well just admit I’m not racing this thing and drop out with you.”
John looked hurt. “But what if the rail trail is really as bad as it’s probably going to be?”
“Unless I walk the entire thing at two miles per hour and it takes me seventeen hours, I am going beyond Ashton,” I said. “Even if it’s just five miles beyond Ashton, I’m going beyond Ashton. I am not going to consent to a thirty-five-mile day.”
“Okay, okay,” John said and sighed. “I guess this might be our last night together, then. I might not ride the rail trail with you tomorrow. I might just take the road because it will be faster. Then it’s a direct shot to Jackson from there.”
I sat back, calming down. “Oh yeah, I guess you’re right. This is going to be our last night together.”
John pursed his lips. “Yeah.”
I turned and looked into his large, brow
n eyes. “John, I really need to thank you for sticking with me through Montana,” I said. “I had a lot of fun, and I learned a ton. It was fun to get to know you. I’m not sure I would have made it to this point without you. Certainly not in this kind of luxury and with great hair to boot.”
John grinned. “I had a great time, too,” he said. “I never knew the Great Divide could be so fun.”
“Really?” I said. “And yet you come back to the race, year after year.”
“Yup,” he said. “One course record and three utter failures. But, I have to say, this year was the best failure of all.”
“Good,” I said. “I’m glad you don’t regret your decision.”
He shook his head. “Not at all.”
I turned to smile at him and he leaned toward me. His eyes were wide and lips tight. I gave him a quizzical look and stood up quickly. “Well, it sounds like I need to get up really early tomorrow to ride — er, walk — the seventeen hours of rail trail,” I said. “Better set the alarm, maybe for 5:30? I hope this place has coffee.”
“Okay,” John said slowly.
I popped a sleeping pill in my mouth and plopped down in the second bed, pulling the covers tight around my shoulders. “Wow, what a day, huh?” I said. “I never thought I’d ride any surface more exhausting than wet slush, but man, Montana mud. What a day.”
John let out a weak little laugh. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”
Chapter Thirteen
Beyond Idaho
The alarm clock blasted static noise at 5:30 a.m. John didn’t even stir. I quietly changed from my dry clothes to my still-damp clothes, packed up my bike and slipped out into the gray, drizzling dawn. The pine trees of Eastern Idaho were the tallest I had seen on the Divide, towering fifty and sixty feet over my head. Even the low branches were draped in satiny curtains of fog.
Just a few miles outside of town, I turned onto the old rail bed. Just as John had promised, the trail was covered in coarse sand. I closed my eyes and tuned into my best recollection of snow-bike slog mentality. I thought of the time I pushed my bike twenty-five miles along the powdered-sugar surface of the frozen Kuskokwim River during the last day of the 2008 Iditarod Trail Invitational. The course grains of wind-drifted snow were so loose that my feet sank deep into the trail, and I struggled to keep my speed above two miles per hour. I recalled the way the frigid wind blew hard at my back, the exhaustion and pain that needled at every part of my body, and the unchanging scenery of the wide river corridor that made me feel like I must have been mad to believe I was actually moving forward. It was all I could do to hold onto my sanity over ten hours of walking across that frozen wasteland. I took comfort in the idea that nothing on the Divide could even come close to that level of slog.