by Jill Homer
Kirsten sat me down in a spacious dining room and placed a huge plate of food, coffee and the fruit in front of me. She sat down next to me and started scrolling through her computer.
“Matt’s riding into New Mexico today,” she said. “He’s leading, and I think Chris Plesko and Kurt aren’t far behind.”
“Wow,” I said. “New Mexico. Pretty amazing.”
“And Cricket, she’s the next woman, right? She’s only left Atlantic City. Even though it sounded from your call-in like you had trouble in Rawlins, she’s still a couple days behind you. That other woman, Deanna, I’m not sure where she is. Her SPOT hasn’t been working.”
I nodded. “That’s interesting,” I said.
“The other guys that come through here always want to know the race standings,” Kirsten said. “What do you want to know?”
I shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. What’s going on in the world?”
“What’s going on ... Oh!” she yelled loudly. “Did you know Michael Jackson died?”
“He died?” I said disinterestedly. “Really?”
“You didn’t know that?”
I shook my head.
“How could you not know that?” Kirsten shouted scandalously. “Seriously, how could you honestly not know that? There’s no way to even look up without being blasted by news about Michael Jackson. It happened earlier today. I think drug overdose or something.”
“No kidding,” I said. “I hadn’t heard about it yet. Riding the Great Divide is pretty much the cultural equivalent of living under a rock.”
Kirsten laughed. “Ah,” she said. “That would be the life.”
Kirsten offered to rent me a room and I enthusiastically took her up on her offer. “What time would you like breakfast tomorrow?” she asked.
“You have breakfast here?”
“I actually don’t have any guests right now, but I’ll get up and make it for you. What time to you want it?”
“Ah, I don’t know. Is seven too early?”
“Seven?” she said. “Ha! That group of Brits that came through here a few days ago made me get up at 4:30!”
“Well, back here in Tour Divide mid-pack, we have a lot more fun,” I said, and she laughed again.
She showed me to a large bedroom in an adjacent building. I lay on a soft twin bed beside a rustic table, listening to the heater hum softly, surrounded in the kind of luxurious comfort that no amount of money can buy. “Human kindness,” I thought as I finally embraced the sleep monster in its waiting repose. “Without it, all would be lost.”
Morning broke through a solid cover of gray, with a light drizzle amplifying the high mountain chill. Kirsten made me an enormous omelet and a pot of coffee, and we chatted about more current events and race progress. She filled my gaping news holes with more Michael Jackson gossip and refreshingly dire and therefore real stories about Iran and the economy. We exchanged hugs and phone numbers just like new friends. She stood out in the rain to bid me goodbye.
“That road ahead can get pretty muddy,” she warned. “Be careful.”
I churned up the loose gravel. The road climbed into a large alpine meadow speckled with white flowers. The route turned off the main road onto a primitive forest road blocked by a gate. The rugged trail was merely intended as equipment access to a watershed divide, and promised to gain nearly 2,000 feet in about four miles. “Note,” my map warned. “This pass is closed to all but bicycle and foot traffic May 1 through July 1. If you ride during this time, be prepared for snow drifts and/or very muddy and unmaintained conditions.”
I pedaled up the rutted but smooth dirt, a relief after the loose pebbles of the improved gravel road. The trail steepened until I was surrounded by snow. I had to cross a few patches on foot, but it didn’t block the route. The path narrowed and jutted up a pitch so steep I had no choice but to walk. The drizzling clouds sank and closed in. Thick fog obscured everything more than a few bike-lengths away, draping every rock and tree in eerie satin gowns.
Rain started to fall hard and fast as I crested the top of the watershed divide. The clay surface of the road began to soften. I hurriedly pulled on all of my rain gear, stressed about the quick advance of impassable mud. I had a lot of downhill in front of me and it would be horrible if I was forced to walk most of it.
On the eastern side of the pass, the face of the trail changed completely. Instead of rutted dirt, the road traversed a narrow boulder field, with streams of terra-cotta-colored runoff cascading down the center. I mounted the saddle and vowed to do everything in my limited technical skills to outrun the onset of wheel-sucking mud. I threw all of my weight directly over the rear tire and launched into the descent. The bike clattered downhill like a nearly-out-of-control go-cart, weaving around boulders, splashing through puddles, and bouncing over ruts so big it was all I could do to straighten the handlebars. I throttled the brakes and released them before clamping down hard again, lunging and stopping, weaving and lunging, jerking through an obstacle course on a slope so steep that my chin was practically hovering over my seat. In the roar of the rain and rushing runoff, I didn’t notice how bad the brakes had started to squeal. Through my cold-numbed fingers, I couldn’t feel how loose the brake levers had become, until I squeezed down on them, and nothing happened.
I had no brakes.
I let out a high-pitched scream and out of sheer panic threw myself directly onto the ground. My left knee smashed into the sharp edge of a boulder. I heard a dull crunch echoing through my helmet, felt my rag doll body go limp and skid several feet across the slick road, and listened to my bicycle clatter to a halt. And then there was only a sharp silence — a single, stunned moment — followed by an electric shock of pain so intense that its muted screams blocked out the roar of the rain. The screams rushed to my throat and I let them out in a loud, long wail. My knee throbbed with rage, truly an angry knee if ever there was an angry knee, and it was my left knee this time.
I allowed myself to lay in disbelief for several minutes. Then I sat up to assess my injuries. I took off my helmet and saw it had cracked near the bottom, but didn’t seem too badly damaged. The nylon fabric of my rain pants had torn open, and my tights were sticky with blood. I rolled them up and saw what I expected: a badly bashed knee, already turning purple, swollen, and smeared in wet blood. But nothing seemed broken.
I stood up and limped toward my twisted bicycle. There were several new gouges in the frame. I had managed to completely loosen the seatpost bag during the crash, but none of the straps were torn. The shifter cables were stretched loose but I could set them back in place. I examined the brakes. The rear brake pads, which were nearly worn out before I left Rawlins, had been rubbed down to just a few fractions of a millimeter of thickness. When I tightened the brake caliper as far as it would go, I could coax them to grab the brake rotor, but just barely.
The front brake rotor, on the other hand, was coated in dark gray goo, thick and sticky like glue. As I wiped the sludge away from the caliper, I found only shiny silver metal where the pads had been. The brand new pads, installed just a hundred miles back, had completely disintegrated. There was nothing left.
With a lot of downhill to ride and virtually no braking power, the prospect of getting stuck in the mud didn’t seem so serious any more. I picked up my bike and commenced limping down the hill, wincing in pain every time I put any pressure on my left knee. The days-old injury in my right knee, perhaps in sympathy pain, started to throb as well. I had become soaked to the skin in the cold rain, and the slow walking did little to help me build up body heat. I started to shiver with the onset of hypothermia. I was still thirty miles out of Steamboat Springs, so I was going to have to come up with a better plan.
The road grade leveled out ever so slightly, and I decided it would be a good time to try my brakes. I had no front brake. That was a lost cause; I might as well unhook the brake lever. But my rear brake still grabbed. As the route steepened, I squeezed as hard as I could. The bike lurched downw
ard and the brake screeched horribly where metal grabbed metal. I knew using it in that way was going to destroy the rotor, but that was something I could replace in Steamboat. I only needed the bike to carry me down a few more miles of downhill and then I could pedal into town.
My bashed left knee throbbed horribly as I braced my stiff body on top of the saddle. I squeezed the brake lever and inched down the hill, not daring to let gravity take away even an ounce of its tentative stopping power. If I gained any speed at all, I’d have to bail from my bike into yet more unchecked pain, so I rode as slowly as I would if I had been climbing the hill. Without the heat and distraction of physical effort, I shivered in the cold and winced with the jolting pain of even the smallest bumps.
After an hour of downhill struggle, I managed to make it to the bottom of the valley. My hands were so numb I could no longer feel the brake levers beneath my fingers. My frostbite toes had become dead lumps of meat and even my good toes were tingling with cold. I pedaled into the town of Clark and stopped at the store. I was coated from head to foot in mud, quite literally. I saw a hose dangling from the side of the building so I turned it on and ran the entire thing over my head. The hose water felt warm on my skin, even though I suspected the water was not warm. I carefully removed my rain layer, wrung out my hair, and limped into the building.
The Clark store was mobbed with people, and despite my best efforts to clean up, I felt like a caveman stomping into a formal restaurant. I ordered a burrito and a giant cup of coffee and settled into a table located in a dark corner. As much as I had longed for human company a mere twelve hours earlier, all I wanted in Clark was to be left completely alone to soak up my own cold malaise. The people inside the tourist novelty store and lunch counter seemed perfectly happy to oblige me of my solitude, probably only glancing at my disheveled appearance before looking politely away. I sipped the coffee and held a bag of ice to my knee, an almost idiotic-seeming gesture as I continued convulsing with hypothermic shivers.
My knee stiffened up quickly. I stood a few times to grab the burrito I had ordered at the counter and refill my coffee, and each time I had a difficult time just walking across the room. When I sat back down, the joint refused to bend. I stewed in a cauldron distress and defeat. It was just a bashed knee, but if I couldn’t bend it enough to even walk across a room without considerable pain, how in the world was I going to pedal twenty miles into Steamboat Springs, let alone another 1,300 miles of Great Divide?
A half hour passed, and then an hour. I sat in the corner, sipping coffee, staring blankly into the unceasing rotation of tourists and wondering if this was real, if this was it, if I was actually contemplating quitting the Tour Divide in Clark, Colorado. But how could I contemplate not quitting? I sipped my coffee. “Just be strong,” I chanted to myself. “Be brave.”
The inside of the store was so warm. My body was so cold. My knee was so stiff and my bike was so broken. “It’s only twenty miles,” I told myself. “It’s pavement. It’s easy.”
I sipped my coffee. A woman approached me holding a mop. Without a word, she slipped behind me and plunged it to the ground. As I looked down, I noticed the large puddle of rainwater that had amassed beneath my chair. I looked up at the woman, but she continued mopping without looking back at me, until the puddle was sufficiently smeared out of sight. She lifted her mop and walked away.
I flushed with deep humiliation. It was bad enough to walk into a rural lunch counter and spend nearly two hours stewing in my own failure and defeat. But it was far worse to have someone make a gesture like that on my behalf. I felt like an animal that had pissed all over the floor, something far less than human. I left my coffee on the table, stood up quickly, and with my head down, walked shamefully out the door.
There was no triumph in climbing back onto my bike and pedaling toward Steamboat. My bashed knee screamed in protest, but after a few dozen strokes, the joint pain finally muffled in defeated submission. I spun softly but with unstopping determination, covering the distance in about eighty minutes. It was a respectable speed after a long break in Clark, but the damage to my progress had been done. It was after 4 p.m. by the time I arrived at Orange Peel Bicycle Shop.
“I need to get some work done on my bike,” I told the first mechanic I saw. “Can you squeeze me in?”
The mechanic grabbed a roster hanging from the wall. “Let’s see,” he said. “We can get you in on Wednesday. Do you want to drop it off around nine?”
“Wednesday?” I squeaked. That was a full five days away. “Listen,” I said, “I’m just traveling through town. Is there any way you can do a few emergency repairs, um, like right now?”
“Oh wait,” he said. “Are you with the Tour Divide?”
I nodded miserably.
“Oh, well, yeah, we do rush jobs with the Tour Divide.” He directed me to the back of the shop, grabbed a bike down from a stand and replaced it with mine. “Okay, what do you want done?”
“Well, um, how much time do you have?”
“We close at six,” he said. He looked at his watch. “Just about two hours.”
“OK, well, there’s a lot,” I said. “But in order of importance, I need either a new freehub body or a new rear wheel, two new sets of brake pads, a new front brake caliper and rotor, probably a rotor for the back, too, all new cables and housing, new chain and cassette, and, oh yeah, my odometer’s been acting up. Do you have a bike computer I could buy?”
He breathed out. “Um. Okay.”
“Do whatever you can and whatever you have to,” I concluded. “I don’t care what it costs.”
He scribbled down my long list of requests and I stumbled off to buy something for dinner, even though my stomach was still full of humiliation and a massive burrito from Clark. Every time I sat down, my knee stiffened up like a rusty hinge until the joint was almost unrecoverable. Slowly, with great pain, I could work it loose, but I limped dramatically as I walked down the street. With my broken gait, torn rain gear, and mud-caked hair, I looked less like a bicycle racer and more like a drunken hobo. I wondered if the bike mechanic at Orange Peel was even inclined to take me seriously, or if he had just been humoring me to get me out of the store.
I was guiltily aware that I had only traveled fifty miles that day. If I stayed in Steamboat, I was essentially conceding the loss of an entire day of my already relaxed race pace. But with my bike on the operating table and my knee potentially not far away, I couldn’t face the prospect of pedaling out of town that day. I booked a hotel room and called the Tour Divide hotline to broadcast my latest predicament.
“It’s just a bummer, bad luck day, but hopefully it gets better,” I reported. “The weather is getting better, at least for now. I won’t give it any points for lasting more than a few minutes. That’s kind of how it’s been this entire trip — the weather.”
I limped back to Orange Peel at 6 p.m. Five mechanics, seemingly everybody in the shop, were gathered around my bicycle still placing parts and tightening lugs. One mechanic met me at the register and started ringing me up. Despite my assertion that I didn’t care about the cost, I watched with dread as he punched in all the numerous parts I had asked for. But it also occurred to me that he was entering everything I had asked for. That meant they had been able to fix every problem I had! He reached the end of the list and said, “I can give you the ten-percent shop discount. It’s really just a bulk discount.” He punched it in and hit total. I noticed he didn’t charge a cent for labor. I smiled and handed him my credit card. Four hundred and fifty dollars was all it took to buy joy.
I watched as the mechanics stayed a half hour after closing time to finish up the work on my bike. It was almost hard to understand. Five complete strangers, who owed me nothing and charged me far less than the work was worth, dropped everything they were doing to fix my bicycle’s myriad problems. And there was Kirsten at the Brush Mountain Lodge, calling me in from the dark night. And Marjane and Terry, who offered me compassion and comfort in a vast regi
on of solitude. With its unrelenting physical demands, wildly fluctuating conditions, and sweeping loneliness, the Tour Divide seemed the kind of challenge that no one should be able to take on alone. But thanks to consistent if random human kindness, we didn’t have to.
Chapter Seventeen
Turning Right
As I slept in the Steamboat Springs hotel room, my left knee went completely rigid. I could feel it throbbing even before I emerged from the sleep fog that hovered over my head at 5:30 a.m. I swung my leg onto the ground and leveraged it out of bed, but it showed no indication that it was capable of bending, even as I sat back down and gently coaxed it with my hands. The surface of the skin was black and purple, and solidly swollen, like a fresh grape, with a single pathetic band-aid stretched over a continent of still-moist road rash.
Things did not look good. And yet, I had finally surpassed the two-week mark of the Tour Divide and had become a creature driven by habit more than motivation. I packed up my bike, still mud-caked and scratched but sparkling with new parts, like silver jewelry on a very old woman. Together, we limped into the thick mist of morning.
Fog encased the bagel shop, which was as empty and quiet as the air. I wheeled my bike to the shuttered door where the hours were posted. I walked by this same shop the day before just to make note of its hours, then synchronized my wakeup call so I could show up right at opening time for badly needed coffee and warm carbohydrates. But as I looked closer, I saw that the shop opened at 6 a.m. every day of the week except Saturday, when it remained closed until 6:30. It was, quite conveniently, Saturday.
I groaned out loud. In my pessimism of the evening before, I had failed to buy many supplies. I still had a few candy bars left over from Rawlins and a few organic fruit-and-nut bars I purchased at the natural foods store next to Orange Peel Bicycle Shop. It was enough calories to get to the next town, but nothing I was really looking forward to eating. Still, I realized that if I waited for a half hour for the bagel shop to open, there was a fair chance I was going to lose my nerve and never leave Steamboat Springs. I gulped down this latest defeat and walked my bike back into the mist.