by Jill Homer
I checked my e-mail on the computer in the front lobby. John had already sent me a message, telling me he was still in Jackson but was checking up on my SPOT tracker. “Looks like you had some trouble near Brooks Lake,” he wrote. “Nice job motivating to ride late into Pinedale tonight.”
I smiled because had I slept out in the sagebrush twenty miles west of town, John would have viewed that as a failure, while I viewed the necessity of riding into town as a defeat. “Thanks a lot, John,” I thought. “You’ve made a total comfort tourist out of me.”
I checked the race tracker myself. It looked like Jeremy had ridden past Pinedale and was spending the night somewhere east of town. The race leaders were moving through Colorado. A handful of people had dropped out but there were still quite a few orange dots on the route behind me, including Cricket, who had inexplicably fallen an entire day behind my pace and was just leaving Idaho.
“She must have had trouble,” I thought. “But she’s tough and she out-pedaled me before, so maybe she’ll catch me.”
I did notice that with John gone and Jeremy little more than a phantom shadow, I was falling into a rather lonely dead zone of the mid-pack. The leaders were surging farther in front, the back-of-pack was dropping farther behind, and I rode alone in my middle bubble, unsure whether I should make a real effort to speed up, slow down, or hold the lonely pace.
I didn’t motivate early the next day, which I justified because I had arrived late in Pinedale late the night before. I spent the morning doing laundry in my motel, typing e-mails on the guest computer, and making myself waffles in the Continental breakfast room.
“Okay, no more comfort touring,” I scolded myself as I walked out of the lobby after 9 a.m. “Tonight we camp in the Great Divide Basin.” I walked into the gas station and bought only a day’s worth of food because I planned to arrive in Atlantic City early, and I knew I’d move faster if I didn’t have a bunch of calories loading me down. John had already told me in his e-mail that Atlantic City was where I should spend the night, so I decided it would be a good place to stock up before setting out into the desert expanse of the Basin.
The route continued to parallel the Wind River Mountains on a dusty desert plateau. As I traveled west, erosion intensified and drainages became steeper, sometimes dropping many hundreds of feet into alkaline creek beds. The landscape was aspen-dotted near the top of the drainages but sandstone red at the bottom. I mopped streams of sweat away from my eyes. Beneath unobstructed sunlight I felt the heat sharply; it was the worst I had experienced on the Divide, although the temperature was still only in the high 80s. I slathered sunscreen on my arms and worked up a breeze by pedaling as quickly as I could muster. I covered the first forty miles of the day without even taking a break.
I crossed the Big Sandy River and climbed back to elevation. The ever-thinning groves of aspen trees had disappeared entirely, replaced by thirst-choked sagebrush. The loose-gravel road was becoming increasingly dustier. I dropped and climbed, dropped and climbed, across an arid landscape rippled by dramatic erosion. The climbs were all steep and short, so I kept my shifter locked in the high downhill gears, standing out of the saddle and mashing the pedals to power quickly to the top.
For a few miles, the road contoured the crest of a broad ridge, the exact boundary of the Continental Divide. Cattle grazed on both sides of the road. I thought with a smile that the cows on the right were peeing into the Pacific, while the urine on the left was headed for the Atlantic. Before the Tour Divide, the idea of the Continental Divide had always been a vague one at best, an arbitrary line across America. But after spending more than a week paralleling its jagged peaks and broad passes, I began to understand the mystique of the Divide and the appeal of following it. This was the backbone of the continent, the beginning of everything.
I mashed up a few more steep drainages before suddenly, about twenty miles from Atlantic City, something in my right knee snapped. I was certain I heard an audible “pop.” I cried out in pain and hopped off the bike, staggering to the top before I doubled over and let the pain shudder through. My knee throbbed and I wondered if I had torn a tendon, but after a few minutes I realized I could still bend it slowly. Still, any sudden motion hurt. And the joint was swelling a little and stiffening up. I walked several hundred yards, coasted down the hill, and limped up the next pitch.
The sharp pain began to subside and I started riding uphill again. Spinning the crank lightly helped keep stiffness at bay, but I couldn’t put any power into the pedals without considerable pain. I wondered if this is what had happened to John in Canada. He claimed to have put too much pressure on the joint until the whole thing gave out. But I had also had trouble with my right knee in the past, and wondered if this was a return to something my doctor had diagnosed as “angry knee,” — commonly called chondromalacia, the injury involves acute swelling of the cartilage beneath the patella.
My pace slowed considerably as I pedaled and walked toward Atlantic City. I wondered if I should take John’s advice on staying in town so I could rest my knee and assess the extent of the injury. It was just after 6 p.m. when I arrived. The gravel road dropped into a small valley with weather-beaten houses haphazardly clustered around red dirt roads. There was nothing but open desert beyond. It looked like a set for a Western movie made in the 1950s. A hand-painted sign on the side of the road read “Atlantic City, population 57.”
“Oh no!” I cried out. Fifty-seven people? Towns that small rarely have more than one street, let alone services. I had only a couple liters of water and was nearly out of food. I had been depending on that place to stock up for my ride across 140 barren miles of the Great Divide Basin. What did John mean by Atlantic City being a good place to spend the night? How could this place even possibly have a motel? I’d be lucky if it had a cattle trough where I could filter a few liters of water. I decided that from that point on, I was going to assume I had misunderstood everything John told me and would pay much closer attention to the recommendations on my maps.
That is, if I could even ride beyond Atlantic City. My knee still throbbed as I pedaled into town and tried to push down a rising wave of panic. The Great Divide Basin was the most remote, driest section of the entire trip. There was no way I could embark on the crossing with only a few candy bars as my entire food supply. If anything, I needed at least two days worth of food. If something went wrong and I ended up spending a few days out there, it promised to be a dangerous crossing indeed. Plus, I wanted to start the trek with at least nine liters of water. I hoped I wouldn’t have to gather it from a cattle trough.
I passed the place that had been listed on the map as the accommodations in town, the Atlantic City Mercantile. A sign on the door of the early-20th-century building read, “Closed Tuesdays.” It was, rather conveniently, Tuesday. But a drone of music thumped from the dilapidated looking wooden building next door, and as I approached it, I realized it was a bar.
Inside, at least a dozen people were perched around the counter, and there were even more people in an adjacent dining room.
“Are you guys open?” I asked the woman behind the bar.
“Until seven,” the woman told me.
“Do you have food?”
She smiled. “We have a whole menu. Come in! Do you want anything to drink?”
“Pepsi,” I said.
“Just Pepsi?” she asked. “Nothing in the Pepsi?”
“Plain Pepsi,” I said. “And a glass of water. And maybe an orange juice. Yeah, all three. And do you guys sell any kind of packaged food here, like candy bars and stuff?”
“A little,” she said. She pointed to two shelves in the back of the room. “Over there.”
The shelves were sparse to begin with, and they held a number of boxes that had already been emptied. They were out of peanut butter cups, M&Ms, Snickers Bars and nuts. I wondered if previous Tour Divide racers were the ones who had cleaned them out. All they left for me were a couple of packages of Oreos, a few trans-fat-lade
n pastries that looked so stale they were on the verge of crumbling to dust, and individual packets of Spam. Everything was food that I would have regarded with a scrunched nose amid the sweeping selection of a modern gas station, but in Atlantic City, Wyoming, I was thrilled to see it. I cleaned the bar out of their Oreos and pastries and reluctantly grabbed four packets of Spam.
From the restaurant I ordered soup and chicken strips. I guzzled my water and dumped the ice into a baggy to place on my knee, and sat contemplating whether or not I should ride out of town that night. It seemed smart to wait out the injury, but I also knew that pain was more likely to nudge me out of the race if I was surrounded in the convenience of a town. Out on the Basin, I’d have no choice but to pedal somewhere.
As I ate, a petite, older woman with shoulder-length gray hair approached me. “Are you the bicycle girl we saw walking out of South Pass City this afternoon?” she asked me.
“It’s highly likely,” I said. “I’m Jill. I’m from Alaska, but I’m riding through town with the Tour Divide. It’s a race from Canada to Mexico. Maybe you’ve seen the other bikers come through?”
She shook her head.
“Strange,” I said. “There’s probably been close to twenty.”
A man that had been sitting in the table next to me turned and said. “I saw them. They came through here three days ago! You’re way behind.”
“And believe it or not, there are people who are three days behind me, some more,” I said. “It’s a long race. We spread out.”
“I think I did see one person in town earlier today,” the woman said. “He had a lot of stuff on the front of his bike.”
“That was probably Jeremy,” I said. “I wonder if he’s around.”
The woman introduced herself as Marjane and asked me if I wanted to bring my plate over to her table, where her husband, Terry, was polishing off a large pile of ribs. We made our introductions and I explained in more detail what the Tour Divide entailed. It was a race, I told her, but I was really more interested in the tour aspect of it. Marjane told me she had been a wanderer in her own youth, but she married Terry and they settled down in an old gold mill, built of rounded stones, that Terry himself converted into a home.
“We love Atlantic City,” she said. “We’ve been all over but we can’t imagine living anywhere else.”
As we chatted, she asked me where I was going to stay that night.
“Actually, I should get going soon,” I said. “I was going to go a little ways into the Basin to camp, and it would be nice to do the riding before dark.”
“Camp out there?” Marjane shook her head. “It’s supposed to be a cold one tonight. Why don’t you come stay with us? You can take a shower and make breakfast in the morning. It’s going to be a cold night for camping out.”
I blinked but didn’t hesitate long. “Yeah,” I said. “That would be great.”
A draft carried through Marjane and Terry’s old stone house, but it was cozy and reassuring. Terry told me he had built the house himself on top of a mill that had been part of a now-defunct gold mine. Atlantic City had the feel of an old mining town that never progressed past the 1930s. But unlike other historic towns that catered to tourists, that feeling was genuine. Atlantic City was so far off the beaten path that its citizens had little reason to change how they lived over the decades, and the dusty road and creaky whitewashed houses held an air of timelessness.
Marjane showed me pictures of her children and grandchildren and the brochure she wrote for the Atlantic City Historical Society. She pointed me to her computer but admitted she didn’t really know how to use it. She gave me a bag of ice cubes for my knee. She opened the cupboards and pointed to the cereal and fruit and filled up the coffee maker with grounds and water so all I had to do in the morning was press “start.” She showed me the spare bedroom and shower and gave me a hug goodbye, because I told her I planned to leave by 5 a.m. and there was “no way” she’d be out of bed that early. Her eyes were moist with compassion. My heart was full with gratitude, because although our entire relationship would only span a handful of hours on a Tuesday evening in June, those few hours were filled with all of the warmth and caring of family.
Chapter Fifteen
The Great Divide Basin
A layer of frost coated my bicycle as I packed up my stale pastries and Spam and pedaled out of Atlantic City. A chill hung in the pre-dawn air, which was thick with frozen vapor. My right knee was still slightly swollen and stiff, and protested loudly after just a few strokes up the hill out of town.
“Lucky for you, the Basin’s pretty flat,” I said as I hoped off the saddle and started pushing. The gravel road cut steeply up the bluff, gaining 500 feet in just over a mile. Cold oxygen burned my lungs as I labored around the switchbacks, trying not to think about my knee or the remote miles that lay in front of me.
As I rounded the last switchback onto a plateau, my shoulders relaxed and my jaw dropped. The Great Divide Basin yawned over an unbroken horizon, as vast and open as an ocean. Rolling drainages rippled like waves, clusters of sagebrush appeared as islands, and tall grass shimmered like seawater as it swayed in the breeze. The warm light of sunrise saturated the surface in iridescent colors. Greens took on a florescent glow, browns became bronze, yellow turned to gold. I pulled out my camera to take a few photos, but understood the images would always be a disappointment. Such is the price of great beauty, because while eyes can see and cameras can mimic, only experience and presence can reflect the sublime.
Of all of the regions along the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, the Great Divide Basin has perhaps the most notorious reputation, at least among racers. Veterans speak of it in dismissive tones and warnings: “There’s no trees, there’s no water, there’s no people, and there’s nowhere to get food. There’s only wind and heat.” It was hard for me to believe that a lack of crowds could be a bad thing on a cold, calm morning, with a pack full of food and water, and the absence of trees to open up a spectacular view. It’s on these open plains where the true shape of the world becomes apparent, with its scoured surface and arching horizon. For all of its jagged contours and conventions, from a distance the globe is just that — plain and round.
I felt deeply drawn to the Basin for personal reasons as well. My family on my Dad’s side comes from a long line of Mormon pioneers, hearty stock who immigrated to Utah in the 1850s after traveling through this region with a human-powered handcart company. The Great Divide Mountain Bike Route closely parallels the old Mormon Pioneer Trail, crossing historic sites where my ancestors and their families and friends toiled, struggled and sometimes perished in a harsh, high desert that hasn’t changed all that much in 150 years.
Of course I had modern gravel roads to follow, the modern wonder that is a bicycle to propel me forward, and modern knowledge and technology to help guide me. But on some levels, my struggle was not entirely different from the struggles of my pioneer ancestors. Like many of them, I carried my whole life on a contraption that I had to move with my own power. I had to cope with similar isolation and uncertainty. I had to battle a primal sort of pain and fatigue that even 150 years of progress hasn’t stripped away. As I gazed out across the prairie, I liked to believe that I was seeing the same things that my great-great-and-so-forth grandparents saw, that I was feeling the same things they felt. Their blood pumped through my veins, their sacrifices inspired me, and their faith drove me forward.
As I pedaled into the rising daylight, a small group of antelope grazing next to the road became startled and sprinted beside me, loping through the brush with enviable grace. I passed the cutoff marker for Willie’s Handcart. Marjane had told me this was the site of a Mormon tragedy, where sixty-seven pioneers became trapped in a severe October snowstorm and died. I asked Marjane why they were traveling through Wyoming so late in the year. She told me the pioneers had difficulty with their handcarts. They had built their wheels in the humid east, and when they reached the west, the wooden hubs cracked and
broke. The collapsed wheels and required repairs slowed them considerably until winter caught up to them. It was a quiet reminder of that precipice everybody straddles; that sometimes all it takes is one thing going wrong for entire lives to spiral out of control.
The first thirty miles of the day passed in dreams about the distant past, until the present was all but lost to me. Grass shimmered in the sun and breeze, antelope darted beside me, and my imagination didn’t have to stretch too far before it was 1854 again. I was still floating through the time machine in my mind when I started up a hill and my crank suddenly stopped working. The bike slowed to a stop. I spun the pedals frantically but the back wheel stayed planted in place until I nearly tipped over. I jumped off the bike. “What the hell?” I said out loud.
I lifted the back end off the ground and spun the crank with my hand. Even as I turned it as fast as I could, the rings did nothing to engage the wheel into motion. I checked to see if the chain was broken somewhere, but it was still intact and the rear cassette still turned with the cranks. I thought with sinking dread that the problem must be my freehub — one bicycle part I definitely did not have the capacity to fix.
A freehub is an internal part of the wheel hub that allows a cyclist to coast. When the cyclist spins the crank forward, the pawls inside the freehub engage and catch the hub, turning the wheel. Then, when a cyclist stops pedaling, the pawls release, which allows the wheel to spin free even if the crank and pedals are not moving. It seemed my freehub was stuck open, which caused the pawls to disengage even when the pedals were being turned. My bike was locked in “coast” mode, a mode that only works if you have gravity working for you. Without a working hub, my bicycle was as useless as a laundry cart.