Be Brave, Be Strong

by Jill Homer

  “Good,” I said. “I’ll be fast. I’m actually feeling really tired, and I want to get an early start tomorrow, so I’ll probably just take a quick shower and hit the sack early.”

  I carried all of my dry clothing into the bathroom with me, then closed and locked the door. For the first time on the trip, I didn’t wash my dirty clothing. I had already decided I could wear the clean stuff for a couple days and hopefully find a washing machine in the next place where I spent the night indoors. I showered quickly and pulled on all of my clothes, even my arm and leg warmers.

  “Cold in this room!” I said as I walked back out.

  “Do you want me to turn up the heat?” John asked.

  “No,” I said. “I’m good.”

  “You said you wanted to start early, but they don’t serve breakfast here until 8 a.m. Do you want to wait for that, or do you want to start earlier?”

  I sighed. I probably could have dealt with one day without a shower, but I couldn’t handle another day without protein. “No,” I said. “I’ll wait for breakfast.”

  I crawled into the bed and John settled in beside me. He had at least put on his street clothes since he came out of the shower, but his demeanor was naked with anxiety and expectation. I turned and met his wide-eyed gaze, then sat up quickly. “Almost forgot!” I said as I jumped out of bed. I grabbed my little medicine container. “Ambien,” I said as I popped a pill in my mouth and swallowed it without water.

  “I didn’t take mine tonight,” John said. “It’s just a short ride into Jackson tomorrow. It won’t really matter if I don’t sleep all that well.”

  “If I don’t take sleeping pills, my heart will keep me up all night,” I said. “I don’t think it’s dropped below 150 beats a minute since I left Banff.”

  “I’m sure it has,” John said. “You would have had a heart attack by now otherwise.”

  I climbed back into bed. “Maybe,” I said. “I think my heart is just taxed. I feel like I’m both undertrained and overtrained at the same time. Sometimes it’s really difficult to cope with the physical strain. There are just so many ups and downs on a ride like this. One minute I feel like I could sprint up Everest, the next I can hardly turn the pedals.”

  “It’s important to keep your energy level in check, and consume some calories before you start feeling down,” John said.

  “Yeah, well, it’s emotional, too,” I said. “You spend this much time on a bicycle, and you’re bound to hate it once in a while.”

  “Well, I think you’ll find that those moods are directly tied to your physical state,” John said. “If you pay attention and avoid becoming too cold, or hungry, or depleted, you’ll almost certainly feel happier while riding no matter how long you’ve been on the bike.”

  “So all these big emotions can be controlled simply by stuffing a few more candy bars down my throat?” I responded. “Don’t you think that sometimes, maybe just sometimes, the things we feel are more powerful and lasting than the things we do?”

  John turned to me and smiled. “I think everything has a tangible origin,” he said. “But if I really knew how to stay in control all of the time, I wouldn’t have scratched from the Divide three times.”

  “Perhaps,” I said. “I guess I’m just one of those people who still likes to believe I’m somehow more than the sum of my parts. But who knows, really?”

  “Yeah, who knows,” John repeated in my same tone of fatigue-addled resignation. He reached over me and turned off the night stand light. About six inches apart from each other, we laid stiffly in the dark silence. I blinked rapidly with anxiety but the Ambien and the fatigue of the day worked swift and strong, powerful enough to cut through even the tightest tension. Just as I was beginning to drift away, John sidled in closer.

  “Jill?” he said with wavering nervousness in his voice.

  “Mmm?” I replied, already skirting that vague and paralyzed place between consciousness and dreams.

  “If I came to visit you in Alaska, would you teach me how to ride a snow bike?”

  “Yeah,” I mumbled. “Course.” I felt like I was speaking to him through a tunnel, becoming deeper and narrower with each ticking second of the mechanical alarm clock next to the bed.

  “And you’re okay with me leaving tomorrow?” he asked.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said, the words drifting slowly to the surface like bubbles in an ocean.

  He pressed his hips against mine. I could feel his arm reaching across my waist. “You okay?” he asked again.

  “Mmm mmm,” I mumbled. The last syllable clung to a frozen breath, because I was already gone.

  The next morning, we walked to breakfast together. John was as cheerful as ever, doling out advice about bicycle maintenance, good places to stay on the route, and the best places to acquire food. Neither of us said anything about the night before, nor did we ask any questions about it. I ate eggs and fresh fruit with rabid enthusiasm.

  “Where are you planning to stay tonight?” John asked me.

  “I don’t know and I don’t care,” I said gleefully. “Wherever the wind takes me I guess.”

  “You should try to make it to Pinedale tonight,” John said. “It will be a long day, but there’s not really going to be anywhere where you can buy supplies before then.”

  “I still have plenty of Flagg Ranch brownies,” I said. “Full of caloric goodness. I can make it days on those alone.”

  We finished breakfast and walked into the bright morning.

  “You know how to get out of here?” he asked.

  “Yes, of course,” I said.

  “And you know that Brooks Lake is coming up and there’s likely to be snow there?”

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “Don’t worry about me, John. I’se all growed up now. You just go home and rest and take care of that knee.”

  We wrapped our arms around each other in a lingering hug, our first embrace. “Thanks again for everything, John,” I said. “The first week of this race could not have gone more smoothly.”

  “Thanks to you, too,” John said. “It didn’t turn out like I’d hoped, but I couldn’t have had more fun.”

  We wrapped our arms around each other in one last hug, mounted our bicycles and turned in opposite directions, riding away from each other for good this time.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Heart of Wyoming

  The first pass of the day approached 10,000 feet. A stiff blanket of last winter’s snow draped down from granite pinnacles and stretched over open alpine meadows. Deciduous tree branches remained bare in late June. Even the air tasted different in Wyoming, with a cold crispness that masked sweet hints of decay, like a walk-in refrigerator in a butcher’s shop.

  The terrain on Togwotee Pass was similar to Richmond Pass — a calm, gradual climb that took Divide riders to their highest elevations yet, continued down the mountain on a smooth road, and then inexplicably veered off the main route into a nearly impassable mess of snow fields, rocky obstacles, and difficult navigation. But I had enjoyed Richmond Pass, so I didn’t feel grumpy when the maps told me I had to turn off the perfectly good, paved surface of Highway 26 and hoist my bicycle up a three-foot-high wall that of snow that covered the alleged Brooks Lake access road, which had been buried since the previous autumn.

  I lifted my bike to the top of the snowfield. A single set of footprints and wheel tracks dug a narrow trench down the center of the slushy surface. I wheeled my bike into the tracks and stepped into the footprints. It wasn’t much, but I was grateful that a trail had been broken since the previous day’s melt stripped away all signs of prior passersby. The tracks allowed me to not only walk more easily, but they helped keep my feet dry.

  “Thanks, Jeremy,” I said out loud, figuring there was a fair chance he wasn’t too far in front of me, although I had started late that morning.

  I walked for about a mile when the snowfield started to break up, revealing the dirt below. Saturated with a season’s worth of snowmelt, the road wa
s thickly coated in mud the color and consistency of melted chocolate ice cream. I planted one foot on the mud and slid forward. The slimy surface grabbed my feet and pulled me butt-first into the soup. Growling with frustration, I righted the bike and shoe-skied toward the next island of snow.

  As the road descended, the snow patches grew shorter, the mud patches longer, and the slimy soup started to solidify and clump up. The consistency took on the properties of wet cornstarch — that goopy substance used by science teachers to entertain children because it looks like liquid and even drips like liquid, but instantly solidifies to a clay-like hardness under any kind of pressure. The Brooks Lake Road was liquid cornstarch, glistening in the sunlight and clinging to my shoes and wheels until both became stuck in place. I took off my bike gloves and used my fingers to scrape away the clumps wedged between the frame and tires. But I couldn’t wheel my bike more than a few feet before it locked up with mud again. The adobe clumps were taking on reinforcement from dead pine needles, and the mass was rapidly hardening to the impenetrable density of a solid brick. I felt a sinking sensation of entrapment as I realized that as long as the mud persisted, it wasn’t even possible to push my bike.

  I zoomed out the screen of my GPS and tried to figure out how long I was going to be stuck like this. The map showed the Brooks Lake loop covering about six miles, and I had traveled just over a mile. I couldn’t fathom five miles of carrying my fifty-pound bike on my shoulders, but the map also showed a lodge about halfway around the loop. Maybe the road was plowed beyond the lodge, which would mean it would likely be dry. Still, even three miles was a daunting distance.

  I unclipped my frame bag, wedged my arm beneath the top tube, and lifted the bike frame onto my right shoulder. I wrapped my fingers around the stem, trying to keep the front wheel from swinging back and hitting my face. With the leaden weight pressing painfully on my shoulder bone, I took halting steps along the slippery surface. The mud still latched onto my shoes, building an adobe fortress around my feet until they were three times as large as normal, and three times as heavy. I staggered to the next patch of snow, about fifty yards away, and dropped my bike onto the ground, gasping as though I had just sprinted a one-hundred-meter dash.

  I walked my bike across the snowfield, still panting but relieved for the relative break. The relief was short lived, because just around the next bend was another long, open stretch of mud. I looked down at the shoes that I had nearly scraped clean. “That’s it,” I announced to the Brooks Lake road. “I am not walking through that crap again.”

  I walked to the outer edge of the road. Like Richmond Peak, the road was little more than a notch cut into a steep mountainside. A 60-degree wall of talus plunged into the road, which artificially leveled out to goopy mud for only the width of a narrow two-lane road before plunging into a talus and boulder-strewn abyss below. It was actually impossible to not walk on the road, but I refused to accept that reality. I shouldered the bike and stepped onto the lower slope. With its chunkier boulders, it looked easier to negotiate than the steeper, slippery scree above. But the downside of walking the lower slope was that it forced me to balance and scramble across a minefield of large rocks, and I was carrying an awkward and heavy bicycle in one and sometimes both hands. Another disadvantage of the lower slope was that the price of any mistake was a fairly long fall.

  I teetered and panicked, regained my composure and lost my nerve again. By the time I reached the safety of the snowfield nearly one hundred yards later, my heart was beating so rapidly I could feel it pushing out of my chest. That snowfield only lasted ten yards before dipping into another cauldron of mud. What were my other options? I had no other options. I could mire in mud or teeter on boulders, but either way, life for the next unknown number of miles was going to be exhausting, stressful and hard.

  Two miles and two-and-a-half hours passed. The more the road dropped, the drier and less ridiculous the mud became, until the snow was all but gone and the road was almost rideable. I passed the Brooks Lake Lodge and sure enough, the road beyond the resort had been graded and plowed. I hopped on my bike and tore down the hill, gasping at the sudden rush of speed. The crisp air sang out as it rushed past my ears and the patter of mud flinging from my bike joined a symphony of freedom. Within minutes of beginning my effortless, ecstatic descent, I turned back onto Highway 26. Had the race allowed me to stay on the pavement, I would have covered that four-mile downhill section of road in ten minutes. The six-mile Brooks Lake detour cost me more than three hours of the highest intensity, most frustrating effort I had exerted on the Divide. That knowledge made me smile with satisfaction. After all, if you’re going to do something ridiculous like a 2,700-mile mountain bike race, you might as well make it truly ridiculous.

  The highway continued to drop along the wide corridor of the Wind River, and despite the obnoxiously slow detour, I was still able to ride forty miles before it was time to start thinking about lunch. At the Union Pass cutoff, I saw a tiny gas station. It didn’t look like I could get much there beyond candy bars, but I remembered that somewhere during his long list of advice, John had told me there was some kind of lodge “at the pass.” I had so enjoyed my real breakfast that the prospect of real lunch was too much of a temptation. I bypassed the gas station without slowing down.

  My maps warned me that it was going to be a “tremendous grunt to get to altitude.” But the beautiful thing about starting a day on the Great Divide with a section like the Brooks Lake Road is that it can’t really get any worse. The wide, dusty climb to Union Pass was effortless in comparison.

  The route gained 2,500 feet in twelve miles — a standard-issue climb on the Divide, only one of many dozens. Spruce trees started to shorten and thin as I rose into the sub-alpine zone until I was surrounded by nothing but snowfields and talus slopes. The Wind River Range carved a majestic horizon in the distant west. The wind itself, above the reach of any kind of obstruction, blew hard and steady at my side.

  I stopped to put on a fleece pullover and hat. The wind howled with an eerie sensation of remoteness, like wind driven out of the Arctic. Out in the open alpine, I could see for many dozens of miles in nearly every direction. It was a world ruled by lichens, rock and distant granite spires, completely devoid of any sign of humanity.

  “Is there really a lodge up here?” I said out loud, and the howling wind instantly answered my ridiculous question. What was clear was that I had misunderstood whatever John had said about Union Pass. There was going to be no real lunch up here. I really should have stopped at that gas station 2,500 vertical feet below, because I was a bit low on calories. Surrounded on both sides by hundreds of square miles of designated roadless wilderness, Union Pass was a place humans had largely left alone. I would be alone with it, very much alone, for the next sixty miles.

  The road turned directly into the wind and I put my head down, taking the brunt of it through the vents in my helmet while my legs slowed to a familiar headwind plod. Cyclists like to say the wind is a hill you never go down, and in strong wind, with no place to seek shelter, that sense of artificial backward gravity only amplifies. On the gradual, rolling descent, I was slowly losing elevation but fighting a continuous and steep uphill battle.

  As I dropped away from the alpine tundra, I found myself no longer in the wooded valleys of western Wyoming, but out on the arid, sagebrush-dotted basins that dominated the rest of the state. The road leveled out in a river valley populated by cows. Thousands of hoof prints had turned the road surface to Swiss cheese, but the mud was dry, so I didn’t complain. I crossed a hundred-foot-wide, dirty emerald-colored canal and realized that trickle of a waterway was the Green River. Where it plunged through the narrow canyon lands of Utah, the Green River was brown, deep, and churning with whitewater rapids that in a not-too-distant past had, on a couple of occasions, frightened me to tears.

  “So you’re the Green River,” I said to the gurgling brook. “You’re not so bad up here.”

  The valley opened
wide in front of a cloud-obscured sunset, which cast a peach light across the plains. The thick vapor of my breath clouded the beam of my headlamp as night descended with me, toward an arid landscape that was different than any I had seen yet on the Divide. I had become accustomed to thick forests in my surroundings, and the ragged sagebrush prairie stretching over the horizon brought me a sense of satisfaction, because it was a whole new climate zone, and I had ridden there, on my bicycle, all the way from Canada.

  In purple twilight, the scenery faded to a black void with one glittering island of light, which I assumed must be Pinedale even though my map indicated the small town was still twenty miles away. The paved road rolled in and out of drainages but generally sloped downward. I knew I could reach town fairly quickly, but I longed to hold onto the deep silence that surrounded me on the open plateau. In its solitude the landscape kept me company, held me in peace, and showered me with stars. Out of the corner of my eye, I started to pick out nice, hidden areas where I could bed down in the sagebrush.

  “I should just camp out here,” I thought. “I’ve ridden my twelve hours for the day; I’ve done my hundred miles. I can always get an early start tomorrow.”

  I stopped near a mound to look for a spot out of sight from the road. I opened my feedbag to check my food supply. The bag of Sour Patch Kids I had been munching from had only a handful of gummy snacks left. There was one package of peanut butter crackers, a regular-sized Snickers Bar, and nothing else. I groaned. I had spent the entire day simply grazing and I was so hungry I could have easily eaten five times that amount, standing right there. It was scarcely enough food to fuel me into Pinedale, let alone serve as dinner and breakfast. No, I was going to have to go to town and stock up.

  It was after 11 p.m. when I arrived in Pinedale, population 1,412. I was certain everything would be closed, but I found an open gas station with a hotel right next door. The town, a pit stop on Highway 191, had a number of hotels, and the gas station’s neighbor looked like the most expensive one. But it had access to food, and that fact mattered more than cash — which has no calories — so I booked a room and walked to the gas station to buy Hot Pockets, root beer, oranges, and a fruit smoothie for dinner.