Be Brave, Be Strong

by Jill Homer

  “Um, Jill?” Pete said hoarsely.

  “Yeah, Jill,” I replied.

  Pete smiled. “Heh. This is pretty crazy, isn’t it?” he said.

  I didn’t smile back. “It’s intense. How long ago did this happen?”

  “It’s been about a three-hour process getting here,” he said. “But I don’t even know ... where are we now?”

  “Stunner,” I said at the exact same time he did.

  “Stunner Campground,” he repeated. “That’s what I thought. Did you get hit any rain?”

  I managed to crack a smile. Clearly, Pete had no way of seeing my dripping hat or soaked hair or rain jacket streaked in mud. “A huge amount of rain,” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s why I left Del Norte right away,” he said. “I wanted to beat the rain.”

  “Smart man,” I said.

  Pete laughed. “I’d say your timing was better than mine.”

  I mustered my own chuckle. It was such a bizarre accident, in such a remote place. I couldn’t imagine an instance of worse timing. “How did it happen?”

  “I was coming down the road, doing about twenty-five, and these rednecks were coming around a corner on the wrong side of the road, probably thinking no one else was around. I saw them and swerved, but they slammed right into me.”

  “Are you in much pain?” I asked.

  “It’s not too bad,” he said. “Now. Those rednecks who hit me were walking around me, talking about what they were going to do with me. That was the scariest part.”

  We paused and the silence echoed. I looked down, muddling for anything to say.

  “So did you see me at the campground last night?” Pete asked.

  “Storm King? Yeah, I heard you come in. I was going to get up and talk to you. Sorry I didn’t.”

  “That’s okay,” Pete said. “I didn’t want to wake you up.”

  “I’m still sorry,” I said. “I’m really sorry this had to happen.”

  “Yeah,” Pete said. “Shit happens. Just sucks right now, three days from the end.”

  Three days,” I laughed. If he really thought the next 700 miles was only going to take him three days, it would have put him in a fifteen or sixteen-day finish from Banff. Pete would have obliterated John’s Divide record. “I was thinking more like seven,” I said.

  It won’t take you seven days,” Pete said. “Where are you staying tonight?”

  “I think Platoro,” I said. “I’m thinking about just going to Platoro.”

  “Platoro’s good,” Pete said. “The cabins there are expensive, but they have good food.”

  Another pause lingered in the thick air. I felt a strange surge of panic that had no origin or direction, and let my shivering return just to gulp it down. “Well, I should let you guys go,” I stammered. “You’re in an emergency and stuff.”

  “Yeah,” Pete said. “Good luck.”

  “You too.”

  Outside the ambulance, the rain had stopped. A shock of sunlight escaped through a crack in the clouds, casting a nearly opaque rainbow over the Stunner Valley. The two ambulances passed directly beneath the rainbow’s arch as they rumbled away. It seemed life-flight couldn’t land in this remote hole in Colorado after all.

  I watched the vehicles to disappear into the woods. My own helpless inertia lingered long after they were gone. I rubbed my eyes with ice-cold fingers, wiping away a well of tears that felt frozen in place. My hands shook wildly as I pressed them against my cheeks, scraping away clumps of wet mud that were plastered to my skin. I struggled to connect the clasps of my helmet strap over a soggy hat and dripping hair. I straddled my motionless bike. The last climb into Platoro loomed like a sleeping dragon. I stood and faced it, making no movement toward it. My childlike emotions lay in wreckage, disemboweled and scattered along the battlefield of the Divide. I could not cry.

  What just happened? Pete was immobilized in an ambulance. He had been hit by a truck. A large trailer-dragging truck, and they had both been traveling fast. He had survived; that was a relief. But how could he not be badly injured? Dread pierced my cold-numbed skin. Maybe Pete had been paralyzed. Maybe his legs or back had been irrecoverably broken. Maybe his whole life had just changed in an unspeakably cruel instant, right there on the lonely descent from Summitville.

  Where my joy and anticipation and even fear had dissolved, I felt only grief. I lifted my feet and pressed down on the pedals, turning slow circles that promised no reward. Pete and I had both been out there on the Great Divide, riding the same muddy roads, climbing the same sweeping passes, watching the same spectacular sunsets. Despite our mutual solitude, we had both been bound by this one thing, this totally unique thing, this effort to ride across the spine of the continent as fast as we possibly could. And to what end? To what end? What did we possibly stand to gain? Pete rode heroically for two weeks right into a head-on collision. I rode into a place of lasting isolation, where no friends could wrap their arms around me and tell me everything was going to be okay.

  The sunlight disappeared and the clouds plunged the tight canyon into more midday twilight. The rain returned and released my grief from the initial shock of discovering Pete’s accident. It trickled through my veins and dissolved the intense focus that had sustained my sanity through the Tour Divide. The race may have been hard, but it was all I had. My eight-year relationship lay in ruins. My demanding job simply waited to fill that empty space with workday drudgery. I no longer had a home. I barely had a car. My bicycle had become my closest companion. And I was lost in a fruitless struggle, chasing phantoms toward nowhere.

  Hopelessness loomed and I fought it back with thoughts of the things that were important to me. My family was important to me, my mom and dad and sisters. No matter what stupid decisions I made, or crazy adventures I embarked on, they had always been there for me. My old friends were important to me, the people scattered across the country in Utah and Colorado and California, people I had known for years and even decades, who had watched my entire journey and knew exactly where I came from. My new friends were important to me, my friends in Alaska and acquaintances from the Internet, who understood and shared my passions. My career was important to me; even stressful and demanding as the job could be, journalism embodied the very meaning of life, the pursuit of knowledge and recording of experience. And Alaska was important to me, with a yearning for its beauty and scope that even the Great Divide could not quite fill. And all of that, I thought, was nowhere near. In fact, the longer I pedaled south, the farther I distanced myself from my family and friends and the simple fact that I needed to get on with my life. The future was a shapeless mass that contained nothing I loved. Suddenly, following maps in a silly bicycle race seemed monumentally unimportant.

  I crested Stunner Pass in a depth of sadness. Pete had been on pace to break the Great Divide record, something that at least on paper looked important. But what was I? A straggler. An imposter. I stopped pedaling and let the coasting bicycle creep down the road. I could not see beyond the next bend; vile forest swallowed the road into darkness. Above the trees, cloud-filtered sunlight mocked my grief with stoic indifference. I wiped more rain from my eyes, or perhaps the moisture came from tears. I tried to summon the energy to move forward.

  “You just have to get to Platoro,” I told myself. “There’s certainly nothing you can do out here.”

  I coasted a few hundred feet and stopped again. Through the grayness of grief, a single hopeful idea cast a dull light. I could quit the Tour Divide in Platoro. I could board a bus and head back toward Denver, then fly home to Utah, where I could return to the love of my family and friends and start the daunting journey of getting on with the life I so obviously needed to get on with. This new idea pushed energy back into my legs, and I started pedaling harder down the hill.

  I leveled out in a wide valley that still stood above 10,000 feet. Trees choked out the view, but through the woods I started to see cabins. My heart soared. I rode a bit farther and saw more cabins, and a
sign that said “Sky View Lodge.” I flew beyond that, looking for the gas station or bus station or something that could supply a swift exit from a world of purposeless suffering. Beyond the Sky View Lodge, the town abruptly ceased. I rode to the next bend, but the unpopulated forest persisted. There was nothing ahead but more hateful wilderness, mountains, and rivers stretching beyond the horizon. Platoro was noting more than a small mountain resort community. There was no bus station. There was no store. There was almost certainly no cell phone reception, and I’d be lucky if there was even a public-use phone. Waves of sadness, no longer relegated behind a dam of shock and confusion, suddenly burst out in a gush of tears. There was nothing in Platoro. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  Chapter Twenty

  After the Storm

  I approached the Skyline Lodge with trepidation. A dank, deep-set chill lingered in the air and shivering continued to rock my core, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to face the strangers inside. It was a private lodge, which meant I might not be welcome there. I was dripping rainwater, convulsing involuntarily, and I was covered in mud. The people inside Skyline Lodge wouldn’t see my shattered emotions or pressing doubts. They wouldn’t see the struggle of the early afternoon or the fear about my friend. They would only see a dirty, homeless biker. They might even ask me to leave.

  A fireplace wider than a wall and taller than my head roared in the front room. Before I could open my blue lips to utter a meager greeting, a woman rushed from behind the front desk and ushered me beside the orange flames. “Oh, you just look like a popsicle,” she said. “Here, you can take off your wet clothes and hang them up around the fire.”

  “Um, thanks,” I stammered. I lifted my cold-stiffened fingers to my helmet strap and began the laborious process of peeling off several soaked layers of clothing.

  The woman turned and approached a white sheet hanging from a wall about ten feet away. “You must be Jill,” she said. “Mmm hmm. And it’s 5:30, uh, June thirtieth. OK, I have you marked as “In.” Before you leave here, can you mark your time and date out on the line next to your name? We’re trying to keep track of everyone that comes through here.”

  “So you guys are tracking the Tour Divide?” I asked.

  “Of course. We see nearly everyone that comes through here, so naturally we started paying attention to the race. It’s a lot of fun to watch y’all bike through. I even talked Matt Lee into sleeping a full night here. I’m serious. He was here eight hours. Ate two meals. It’s probably one of the few times you’ll see him acting like a human.”

  “That’s really great,” I said. “Thanks for the, um, fire.”

  “Oh, and let me grab you a menu,” she said. “I assume you’ll be wanting dinner. How bout a room? I have cheap rooms upstairs. Fifty dollars and it’s yours. Were you planning to stay the night? It’s early but I can tell you there’s not much beyond here.”

  “Not much, huh?” I said. I breathed out. “I think I do want that room. Do you guys have a pay phone?”

  “No,” she shook her head. “We have a courtesy phone outside, but it doesn’t seem to work with calling cards. It’s really only good for local numbers and some 800 numbers.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Shoot.”

  “Why?” she asked. “Who you gotta call?”

  “Well,” I said as my lip quivered. My shivering became more pronounced even as I stood next to a roaring fire. I took a few deep breaths and launched into an explanation of Pete’s accident.

  “Oh,” she said. “We had heard there was an accident up near the pass, but we didn’t get much information about it. You say he’s a friend of yours? Another biker?”

  “I know him,” I said. “He’s from Alaska. He’s riding the Divide, too.”

  “Pete, let’s see,” she said slowly, glancing back at the list on the wall.

  “Oh, he’s not with the Tour Divide,” I said. “He’s doing his own thing.”

  “Well, tell you what,” she said. “I’ll go make some calls around to the regional hospitals, see if I can drum up information. But if you said they were calling a helicopter in, it sounds like they’re taking him to Denver. I’m not sure I’ll find out much, but I can try.”

  “Thanks so much,” I said.

  As she walked away, I first noticed two men sitting on the couches around the fireplace. One wore a trucker’s cap and a flannel shirt. The other was a rotund youth with cropped brown hair. Both of them had laptop computers in their laps.

  “That’s a big bummer about they guy in the truck crash,” the guy in the trucker’s cap said. “I don’t think I’ve heard his name. Is he on the Web site?”

  “Well, he’s not in the Tour Divide,” I said. “What he’s doing is similar to our race, but it’s different. It’s, uh, I guess it’s kind of complicated.”

  “Oh,” the man in a disappointed tone. “Yeah, big bummer. Hope he’s okay. But listen to this — Matt Lee’s just a few miles from crossing the border. He’s going to win the race any minute now!”

  “Wow, that’s great,” I said, feeling a small surge of happiness about Matt’s success. “That’s about, what, eighteen days? That’s really incredible, given how horrible the weather’s been and all.”

  “Yeah,” the man said. “Guess that won’t quite beat the record. But that’s still pretty good; it was already his record. I guess that’s seventeen days and a bit.”

  “From Banff,” I added. With the Tour Divide still in its infancy, few people outside the race understood that there were two distances on the Great Divide with two different records.

  “But look at you,” he continued. “You’re way back here in Platoro, and they’re still reporting that you’re on record pace. They have you pegged for a twenty-five-day-race!”

  I breathed out. “Maybe.”

  “Yeah, you should think about moving a little faster,” he said. “There’s a guy out in front of you less than a day. I bet you could catch him, easy. Overall, you’re in fifteenth place right now.”

  I smiled weakly. All of my fears about the Skyline Lodge, about being treated with cool indifference, had melted away, only to be replaced by something that was almost worse — the friendliness of people who not only had heard of the Tour Divide but were following it closely and judging every move I made as a racer. Meeting a fan was such a rare occasion, and this one just happened to come at a time when I could not care less about the race. I wanted to scream at the guy in the trucker’s hat. I wanted to tell him to shut up. My friend had been injured in a terrible accident. He might even be paralyzed. Why in the world would I care that I was in fifteenth place in the stupid Tour Divide?

  The woman’s calls proved fruitless. I thought about asking the man in the trucker’s cap if I could use his computer, but I doubted the Internet would yield much information this soon after the crash. I wondered how many people even knew about Pete’s accident. He probably pushed the emergency 9-1-1 button on his SPOT, which meant Mike Curiak would know. And Geoff would know. But the chance that they had any information beyond what I already knew was slim.

  For most of the evening, I sat alone in the upstairs room. Every so often I heard peels of laughter from downstairs, where a large crowd of people gathered around the hearth during the after-dinner hours. Their chatter scraped through my ears like a nail on metal. During any other night of the Tour Divide, I would have been thrilled to join them, and relish in the warm company of friendly strangers. But in Platoro, every joyful sound echoed in my mind as hollow screeching, piercing through my thin veneer of stoicism. I just wanted them all go to sleep and leave me in quiet and darkness.

  Rain continued to pound the window. My temporary relief brought on by my plan to quit the race dissolved with my conviction to do so. Even if I did quit, I would still have to ride out of Platoro to the nearest real town. I had no idea where that would even be, but the maps promised it wasn’t anywhere nearby. And I had a feeling that by the time I arrived at a good exit point, any comfort I would have found in quitting
the race would be gone as well. But either way, I was going to have to leave in morning. I had no choice but to pedal myself out of Platoro. I set my alarm for 5 a.m., but before I even went to sleep, my undulating doubts caused me to re-set it for 7:30.

  Homesickness stalked around the empty corners of the room. At ten, I finally took a sleeping pill and laid in the darkness. For the first time on the Divide, the drug did nothing to cut through my pounding doubts and fears. There wasn’t anything I wanted more than to slip into unconsciousness and wake up in my own bedroom in Utah, and find out the whole Divide business had been nothing more than a dream. I could hug my mother, and Pete would still be healthy, and I would be free to go about the business of getting on with my life.

  Eventually, I drifted to sleep. I hit snooze on my alarm the following morning. By the time I gathered my stiff, mud-caked clothes from around the fireplace and walked out into a valley drenched in sunlight, it was after 8:30 a.m. — a full fifteen hours after I arrived in Platoro. I could almost feel the disapproving glances of the race spectators where they still sat on couches with their computers.

  Outside, a thickly muscled man who introduced himself as a lodge caretaker asked me where I was headed that day.

  “Going to the Brazos Ridge today,” I said, referring to a high alpine ridge that ringed a large wilderness area in Northern New Mexico.

  “The Brazos?” he nearly shouted, then shook his head. “Not a good idea, not with this weather. I fought wildfires in the Brazos for five years. You’ll be up to your knees in mud. I’m not exaggerating. Your knees.”

  “What is the weather supposed to do today?” I asked.

  “More of the same,” he said. “Nice for a bit, then a lot of afternoon thunderstorms and rain.”