by Jill Homer
Beyond these problems, my cables and housings were gummed up with mud and I could no longer shift the chain onto the little ring. I had already tried to lube both derailleurs and the cables to no avail, and suspected they would need to be deeply cleaned or replaced. The prospect of no low gear in the big mountains also was daunting.
I needed outside advice. The rational choice seemed to be phoning John. He would know exactly what I needed to do. If I had right tools, I thought with a smile, he’d probably be the type of person who could talk me through an entire wheel rebuild. But for some reason, I wasn’t quite ready to call him. There was still awkwardness there, a lot of things John and I left unsaid. And then, almost in the same stream of thought that prevented me from dialing John’s number, I decided to call Geoff.
“Jill?” Geoff’s voice came over the receiver. We had not spoken in several weeks. “What’s up?”
“Hey Geoff,” I said. “I started the Tour Divide. I’m in Rawlins, Wyoming.”
“I know,” he said. “I’ve been watching you. You’re doing awesome.”
“Well, actually, I’m not doing so awesome right now,” I said, and explained my predicament. “What do you think?” I finally asked. “Should I wait here on the unlikely chance that this mechanic can help me, or should I pack up and leave early tomorrow?”
He didn’t even hesitate. “I’d leave,” he said. “Try to get to Steamboat. They have a great bike shop there.”
“But what if I get stuck?” I asked. “And what about my brakes? I didn’t have much luck changing the pads in Atlantic City. I don’t know if it’s me or the brake caliper. Either way, it’s not good.”
“Just change them out and go to Steamboat to get replacements. You’ll be fine,” Geoff said as though he was certain of it.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to think about it.”
He paused. “So, how have you been?”
“I’ve been good,” I said. “You know, tired and sore and all that. Well, of course you know how the Divide feels. But I’m having an incredible time. This has been an amazing experience so far.”
“I see you’ve been traveling a lot with John Nobile,” Geoff said.
“Yeah, we spent the whole first week together,” I said. “It was great. After he injured himself he just wanted to take it easy and tour with someone, and I learned a ton from him.”
“But he dropped out?”
“Yeah, in Jackson. I’m alone now, trying to make it work. But suddenly a lot of things are going wrong.”
“You’re doing great,” Geoff said. “You’re going to finish this thing, not wimp out like I did.”
We chatted for a few more minutes. He told me he was back in Juneau after visiting Misty in Sitka for a week. He told me she was going to stay in Sitka, but he returned to Juneau. He didn’t tell me why. He told me he was back at work, and running again, and had some ideas for races in the early fall. But until then, he said, he was just going to run as many mountains as he could find and enjoy summer in Alaska.
“That’s great,” I said.
“I should probably get going,” Geoff said. “But remember that you’re halfway done now. You made it through Montana. The hard part’s over.”
“I sincerely doubt that,” I said. “But thanks for your advice. I’ll do my best.”
I hung up the phone in a wave of emotion — pride, hurt and anger mixed with a hint of nausea. Why did I think it would be so easy to speak to him again? Especially amid the emotional rollercoaster that was the Tour Divide? He was the one person I turned to every time I needed help during the past eight years. But I had forgotten he wasn’t there for me anymore, and he couldn’t help me, and I needed to accept that. Tears welled up in my eyes. I was safely hidden from the world inside a hotel room in Rawlins, but I wasn’t ready to cry about my potential failure in the race and I certainly wasn’t ready to cry about Geoff. I had to get out of my head, so I called home.
My youngest sister answered the phone.
“Sara!” I said. “I’m calling from Wyoming!” I tried to sound excited, but I heard my voice crack.
We chatted a little about the race, and then I asked how she was doing. She was engaged to be married in August. My entire month in Utah had been dominated by plans for her wedding. I had been fitted for a bridesmaid dress, made arrangements to fly home from Juneau after returning from the Tour Divide, and spent a fair amount of time hanging out with Sara and her fiancé, getting to know my future brother-in-law. I had struggled with mixed feelings of happiness and jealousy about the idea of my twenty-two-year-old sister getting married after my failure of a relationship. But I was genuinely excited for her, so of course I asked, “How are the wedding plans going?”
“Um, well,” she said in almost a whisper. “Well,” her voice choked up and I heard her set the phone down. My heart, already racing, already exhausted, developed a clammy chill.
Several seconds later, my mom picked up. “Jill?”
“Mom, what’s going on with Sara?” I asked.
“She, well, you see,” my mom stammered.
“What happened?”
“Oh,” my mom said, “Your father is going to kill me for telling you, but Sara called off the wedding. She decided she just wasn’t ready to get married.”
“Oh no,” I said. “That’s — that’s really hard. I’m really sorry to hear that. But why didn’t you tell me before? Why weren’t you going to tell me?”
“Well, you’re in this race, we know it’s hard and it’s a lot for you right now,” my mom said. “We didn’t want to add our problems on top of it.”
“Your problems are my problems!” I said. I felt hurt. Since I was a teenager I’d had a difficult time opening my life to my family, but they had been so helpful over the summer and my own awful breakup that I thought I had established a deeper level of trust. I knew my mom was trying to protect me, but she didn’t understand that the Tour Divide wasn’t about cutting myself off from the world, but connecting with it. “I just asked Sara about her wedding,” I continued, knowing my sensitive baby sister was probably somewhere in the background, deeply distraught. “I feel like an idiot.”
“I know,” my mom said. “I’m sorry.” She hesitated. “But Sara is doing much better and she’s going to be fine. She made the right decision. But how are you? How are you doing?”
I told her about my comparatively silly bike mechanical drama, leaving out how uncertain I was about fixing the problem. “So I’m going to stay here tonight and wait for the bike mechanic,” I said. “I’ll lose a half day or so of riding, but I should be fine.”
And with that, my mind was made up. I might be stuck in the depressed truck-stop town of Rawlins indefinitely, but I wasn’t about to throw caution to the wind.
Chapter Sixteen
Kindness
I was pacing in front of the Rawlins bike shop when the white-haired owner strolled up at 8:47 a.m.
“Is your mechanic going to come in early today?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t called him yet.”
I sighed. I was hoping she would have at least partially recognized my predicament and rallied the troops the night before. She unlocked the door and let me in. “Would you like to wait for him here?” she asked.
“Actually, do you mind if I start working on my bike myself?” I replied.
“No problem,” she said and guided me to the back of the shop. I unclipped all of my bags, balanced the bike on its handlebars and saddle, and set to work. With a garden hose, an old toothbrush, and a can of degreaser, I chipped away at two weeks’ worth of ceaseless mud and grime. When the bike reached a state of sparkle, I flipped it over and started lubing the cables and chain, adjusting the stiff derailleurs and tightening the brakes. I removed the front brake pads and tried once again to install my spares, but they wouldn’t slide in. I wondered if something was wrong with the pads, but of course the owner didn’t have anything resembling a disc brake pad in the
shop.
“If worse comes to worst, we might be able to install some rim brakes for you,” she said.
The mechanic, a tall, lanky teen with sleep still crusted around his eyes, showed up at 10:45.
First, I showed him my brake caliper.
“Weird,” he said. “I don’t see many disc brakes in here.”
“Really?” I said incredulously.
“Not on the bikes people ride around here.”
He grabbed a large screwdriver and started stabbing the center of the caliper. My heart pounded as I listened to the screeching of metal scraping metal inside a very crucial bicycle part that I had no replacement for. He tried several times to wedge the spare pads into the caliper before he finally stuck the screwdriver in and pried a cylindrical piece out of the center. I listened to it ping as he flung it away, and then I watched it bounce on the cement. After that, the brake pads slid right in.
“There,” he said as he mounted the caliper back to my bike. “There was that weird piece stuck in there before, but it seems to be working now.”
I wondered if he realized that the weird piece he was talking about happened to be inserted inside the brake caliper by the manufacturer itself, and it was probably supposed to be there. But I had been told he was a boy genius and I wasn’t in a position to question his judgment.
The mechanic went to work on the rear wheel. He didn’t have a single replacement part that would fit on my bicycle, even a freehub body, so he said the most he could do was open the hub, clean out my old freehub, and hope that the removal of a little mud and grime would keep it marginally functional through a couple more days on the trail. I couldn’t bear to watch the hack operation so I went to lunch, even though I had already eaten a huge breakfast just three hours earlier while waiting for the shop to open. My race had officially reached a standstill.
When I returned to retrieve my bike, the woman couldn’t decide what to charge for the work. She made a few calculations on a receipt tablet and said, “So, is $8.50 okay?”
“Are you serious?” I asked. “Eight fifty?” The mechanic had been working on my bike for more than an hour, and she had let me spend all morning in the shop cleaning my bike and using her tools. I guiltily handed her $20. “I appreciate your help. Here’s a tip for the mechanic.”
I was back on the road at 12:30. I called in the Tour Divide podcast hotline before I left town. “I lost half a day,” I reported. “But I had three huge meals, a good long rest, so in the end it’s probably a good thing. But I’m really excited to get back on the road. I’m really excited to be leaving Rawlins.”
The afternoon burned white and hot as I pedaled south out of town. Generic storefronts and wind-weathered houses gave way to more sagebrush prairie, as wild and undeveloped as it had been a hundred miles before. I crossed back to the western slope of the Continental Divide on a pass unceremoniously named Middlewood Hill, but the crossing felt satisfying. I always felt more at home on the Pacific side of the Divide. I was back in the West.
But I had also officially left the Great Divide Basin, and the renewed forest, with its sparse aspen trees and stunted spruce, seemed as lush as a jungle. The canyon closed in, the trees grew taller and thicker, and the road snaked higher into the mountains until there was no visual indication that I had ever left Montana.
Evening had fallen by the time I crossed the state line. I didn’t recognize the occasion when it happened. There was no bullet-ridden sign or any sign at all. I simply passed into the first town I had seen since Rawlins and noticed that post office display read “Slater, Colorado.”
“Yes,” I said out loud. “Two provinces and three states down. Just two to go.” The simplification made it sound so triumphant. In truth, I was still only about halfway done.
Because of my late start, I only managed to pedal seventy miles before sunset. I vowed to ride late that night. But like clockwork, fatigue began to needle at my brain with the fading light. Endurance racers sometimes call this phenomenon the “sleep monster,” because it is so overpowering that we feel helpless to fight it. Sometimes it’s all we can do just to hold up our heads with our own necks, to not tip over sideways into the first comfortable-looking patch of poison ivy, let alone turn pedals with any sort of effectiveness. Smart endurance racers know the sleep monster is a demand from the mind, not a need from the body, and that the twisted power play of “mind over body over mind” is in order. The strategy is simple if brutal. Turn your emotions to anger, to fear, to agony, to anything more powerful than fatigue, and the body will overcome the mind’s demand for sleep.
But as I churned up the gravel road into a black expanse of wilderness, the only emotion I found was loneliness. It swept over me like the fading light, soft and melancholy and almost indiscernible, until suddenly the landscape became almost unbearably dark and hollow. I recognized myself as a small speck against this great and gaping emptiness, and this realization filled my gut with unfocused despair.
A moist chill clung to the hairs on the back of my neck. The road climbed steeply atop several inches of loose pebbles. The gravel acted as a backward conveyer belt, leveraging strong downhill force even as I climbed as hard as my still-tender knee and overworked muscles would let me. I passed a farmhouse just off the road. Wood smoke puffed from a chimney, and soft golden light glowed through the draped windows. I felt like Ebenezer Scrooge looking in on his nephew’s cozy Christmas party, in a bad dream where I was no longer a person but a ghost moving through the night, with no hope of ever being let inside.
I continued pushing toward the unbroken darkness, each pedal stroke feeling more sluggish and more futile. It occurred to me that clouds must have moved in, because I could see no stars. I looked around for any hints of light on the hillside, something to reassure me that others still existed in this dark and lonely place. There were no lights and no buildings, but as I climbed, my headlamp started to shine on human-made signs.
“Private property next three miles,” one read. “No trespassing, stopping, or camping.”
I shrugged. “Maybe I’ll stop after the private property,” I thought, and the admission brought a glimmer of reassurance. I pedaled two and a half miles. Then I passed another sign: “Private property next six miles. No trespassing. Warning: Property under camera surveillance.”
I rotated my headlamp around, and sure enough, there were little cameras bolted to the trees. This was absolutely ridiculous. Where was I going to camp? Even the black and empty forest was shutting me out.
The sleep monster swooped heavy and low. I could hear it growling in the back of my mind, perched and all too prepared to make its killing blow.
Just as I hung my head and accepted my fate like a squirrel fallen limp in the jaws of a wolf, I rounded a tight corner in the road. A large log structure suddenly came into view. There were several vehicles parked out front, and warm light streamed through the front window. I squinted to make out the building’s rustic interior, decorated with dead animals and weathered wooden picture frames. It looked like some kind of commercial enterprise, possibly a hunting lodge, and somebody was obviously home. Maybe they had a room to rent to me. I looked at my watch. It was 10:35 p.m. Much too late to go around bothering people when I had no real reason.
Still, I lingered in front of the building for more than a minute, drinking in the warm light, inhaling the smoke fumes and relishing the simple existence of that cozy and beautiful place. I thought I saw shadows flickering in the window. I imagined hunters plopped down in front of roaring fires, cradling mugs of hot coffee and beer, and swapping tales about their triumphs in the woods.
I breathed a long and lonely sigh and turned my headlamp back toward the darkness. I hadn’t traveled more than fifty yards down the road when I heard a woman’s voice say, “Jill?”
I turned and pushed my bike back toward the building. “Are you Jill?” she asked as I approached.
“Yes,” I said, nodding with bewilderment at the idea that not only had this complet
e stranger noticed me standing outside, but she also knew who I was.
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, nodding vigorously.
“I’ve been watching your SPOT,” she said, referring to the satellite tracker I had been carrying to broadcast my location on the Tour Divide Web site. “I checked it a couple of hours ago and you were getting kind of close to here. But I was about to head to bed and, damn, I almost missed you! But come in! I have food for you.”
I set down my bike and followed her into the lodge. She told me her name was Kirsten. She ran the Brush Mountain Outpost which was, as I had guessed, an backcountry lodge for hunters. She said she was a big fan of the Tour Divide race, a good friend of race director Matthew Lee, and she made an effort to cater to the racers every time they passed through Northern Colorado. She directed me into the kitchen and showed me a big bowl of freshly sliced fruit.
“Everyone that comes through here always requests fresh fruit. I cut that for you,” she said. “And also for another guy that came through here earlier today, but I didn’t see him, and he kept going without stopping. He must have missed my sign.”
“Wow,” I said. “I, I don’t know what to say.”
“Would you like some coffee? I have cookies. And, um, I have some cheese. Oh! I can make you a quesadilla. Would you like a turkey quesadilla?
I nodded weakly, overcome with the sheer, overwhelming sensory overload of getting exactly what I wished for.