by Jill Homer
“Yeah,” I sighed. “More of the same.”
“But seriously,” he said. “I’d bypass the Brazos. It’s a real bitch in the rain.”
“I’ll do the best I can,” I said.
The air was calm and dry, the gravel road was smooth and the grade mostly downhill, but the twenty-three miles into the next town over, Horca, seemed to drag, as though I was towing cement weights behind my bike. I pulled into the Horca store, which was inexplicably shuttered at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday in July. I walked around the entire building and peered in all the windows, but I saw no sign of the store ever being open or planning to open. Which meant no supplies for the day. But that seemed a relatively minor concern. The lack of resupply became downright frivolous when I discovered a payphone bolted to the far wall.
With the first shot of energy I felt all day, I sprinted back to my bicycle and grabbed my calling card and six or seven quarters, all I had with me. It turned out to be a pointless gesture because when I picked up the receiver, the line was dead. The pay phone wasn’t connected to anything. I blindly punched buttons and even fed it all of my quarters, to no avail.
That, too, was a small defeat, but it made my head spin. Frustration bubbled up from my gut and I lashed out by stomping around the empty parking lot, swearing and screaming, half hoping that some nearby local with a key to the store would see my temper tantrum and let the poor crazy person inside. The Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, in its quest to follow gravel roads and traverse mountains, had landed me in a backwoods so remote that I couldn’t even make a simple phone call for more than a hundred miles. It seemed a unique position to be in America, in general, let alone the Colorado Rockies. My inability to communicate amplified my sense of isolation.
I started up the switchbacks to La Manga Pass, no longer impressed by the act of climbing higher than 10,000 feet. In the early afternoon, I dropped down a steep gorge and crossed the New Mexico state line. The only thing to welcome me into my last state before the Mexican border was a cattle guard and a sign informing me I was in Carson National Forest.
A man in a diesel truck approached me from behind and slowed as he passed. “Hey, do you need any water?” he asked me.
“No,” I said. I needed food, but water was one thing I did not need. “Thanks, but I have plenty of water in my pack.”
“I’m just asking because I’ve seen other bikers coming through, and they always ask me where they can get water,” he said. “There ain’t much up here, I can tell you that. Plus, there’s a storm coming in and these roads can get pretty sloppy. I’d be careful if I were you. I have a ranch near here. When you get to the next intersection, take a right and it’s about two miles down that road. If you need water or a place to wait out the storm, just drop in.”
“Wow,” I said. “Thanks, really. I guess if a storm chases me off the Brazos, I might just take you up on that.”
The climb up the Brazos Ridge was relentless. The snaking railroad grades of Colorado were a distant memory. In New Mexico, roads were cut into the slope like scars, deeply rutted and bleeding with a wash of loose stones the size of tennis balls. I had to pedal with all of my legs’ not considerable power just to keep the back wheel rotating. “What are these roads going to be like if they get wet?” I wondered. “Am I even going to be able to walk uphill?”
I passed patches of snow streaked along the hillsides, which amused me because I was in New Mexico and it was July. Thinking back to my frequent brushes with hypothermia and frost on the Divide I thought, “I guess I’m just the kind of person who finds winter wherever I go.”
My GPS registered above 11,000 feet. The slope leveled out on a broad plateau, covered in mint green grass and dotted with clusters of small evergreens. Antelope, all taller than the trees, darted across the wide plain. Where the road scarred the plateau, the dirt was dark red, almost crimson, and as smooth as a ceramic bowl. I thought with dread that the road surface actually was dry clay, which tends to become wet clay when it rains.
All day long, the only concern on my mind had been Pete’s condition. Even the dire warnings about the weather from the Platoro groundskeeper and the ranch owner did little to rattle through my dark conviction that Pete had sustained life-altering injuries. But as I crested the Brazos Ridge, anxieties about my own wellbeing began to return. To the north, the ridge dropped dramatically into the sandstone canyons of the Cruces Basin Wilderness. To the south, the plateau stretched out as far as I could see. And to the east, the direction I was heading, a billowing thunderhead as tall as a mountain and as dark as midnight churned toward me.
I took deliberate breaths, trying to gulp down the panic that the clouds rumbled and ignited. Thunderstorms were bad enough to see from the safety of valleys. They were terrifying on high, exposed summits. I flirted with thoughts of turning around and descending back to the safety of the ranch house. “Be brave,” I chanted to myself. “Be strong.” It made me feel slightly better, so I chanted it over and over. “Be brave. Be strong. Be brave. Be strong. Be brave.”
As I chanted, a strange, shrill, almost otherworldly sound erupted from my backpack. It rang out into the calm air with such a piercing volume that I jumped off my bike. I froze in the still air beside my bike. My mind shuffled through layers of surprise and confusion, until I remembered that I had turned on my cell phone in the morning, on the unlikely chance that it found a signal. The noise was my cell phone, telling me I had received voice messages.
As far as I could tell, I was nowhere near anywhere. I had a rather large wilderness area on one side of me an unpopulated expanse of high-altitude desert on the other. There were no towns to the north and as far as I knew, no towns to the south. I felt like I was in the most remote region of the entire Great Divide. But somehow, at 11,000 feet, my cell phone had reached out into a great expanse of open air and found a connection to the larger world. My heart leapt with unexpected joy.
I stood in place lest my phone lose its signal again. I punched in the code for my voice mail. The night before, in Platoro, I had left a message on the Tour Divide answering machine, an 800 number that just happened to work on the Skyline Lodge’s courtesy phone. Only able to get through to an answering machine, I left a long, emotional message about what had happened with Pete below Summitville, so the Tour Divide organizers and spectators were aware. As strengthening winds charged up the Brazos Ridge, I listened to messages from six different people, from my parents to my Utah friends to Chris Plesko’s wife to Geoff, all reassuring me that Pete was going to be okay. The paramedics flew him to Denver, they told me. It appeared he had a broken collarbone and two broken arms, a lot of cuts and bruises, and a fair amount of pain, but he was expected to make a full recovery.
I called my parents. My dad answered the phone. “Jill!” he said. “Where are you right now?”
“I’m in New Mexico,” I said. “I’m actually in the absolute middle of nowhere. But I’m up at 11,000 feet so my cell phone managed to find reception.”
“Did you get our messages?” he asked.
“I did,” I said. “Everyone told me Pete’s going to be okay. That’s amazing news. I’ve been really worried about it, stewing about it, since last night.”
“We thought you might be worried,” my dad said. “We found the number of his parents and called them ourselves. It sounds like he’s disappointed about having to drop out of the race, but he’s going to recover.”
“That is such a relief to hear right now,” I said. “You have no idea.”
“And how about you?” my dad asked. “How are you doing?”
“Well,” I hesitated. The relief of good news about Pete released a new flood of apprehension that pooled in my throat. I was in the middle of nowhere New Mexico, I was alone, and I was facing a freight train of a thunderstorm headed right for me. I wanted to tell my dad that I was scared, wanted him to be able to wrap his arms around me and tell me that not only was Pete going to be okay, but I was going to be okay, too. Since he couldn’t d
o that, and I couldn’t do anything about the storms and the mud, it seemed pointless to draw him into my fears. “I’m doing fine,” I said. “I didn’t sleep all that well last night, but now that I know Pete’s going to recover, I’m sure I’ll sleep better tonight.”
“That’s good to hear,” my dad said. “Call us again if you need anything.”
I hesitated, trying to think of things I could say to keep him on the phone, but the receiver was already crackling and cutting out. “Not sure I’ll have reception much longer here,” I said. “But thanks, I’ll call again soon.”
Released back to my solitude, I charged into the guts of the storm. Lightning exploded on the periphery but didn’t venture too close for comfort. My heart pounded but there was nowhere to seek shelter for many miles. I resigned myself to the reality that fate was either going to carry me through, or it wasn’t.
The road sloped downhill and rain started to fall. After all of my forays into morasses of mud, rain was starting to scare me nearly as much as lightning. Large, frequent drops stung the exposed skin on my face and arms. I pedaled faster even though speed sharpened the stings. I didn’t stop to put on my rain layer. Mud was much more of a threat than hypothermia, and my only defense was to outrun it.
The road became slick and then gooey. I hammered down the hill, but where the terrain leveled out, I had to churn through an inch of mud the consistency of wet glue, and just as sticky. Dry pine needles littered the surface, and the mixture clung to my bike like tiny bricks. Just as it had at Brooks Lake in Wyoming, the adobe stopped me in my tracks. I dragged the bike through a long flat stretch only to be released from wallowing by the merciful slope of a steep hill, where the rain was still running off the surface of the road rather than seeping in. I’d start the process anew, chipping away the mud that froze my drivetrain and wheels and pedaling slowly up the ascent, if I could.
As I climbed the switchbacks of a larger drainage, even gravity didn’t stop the road’s descent into slop. A thick puddle grabbed my wheel, seizing the bike so quickly that it threw me off balance. I jumped off the saddle and slid backward in the goo, falling to a kneeling position as the bike leaned against my shoulders. I spewed out a torrent of frustration. The tourist in Poncha Springs was right. The groundskeeper in Platoro was right. New Mexico was bringing me to my knees.
After about an hour, the storm began to taper as it rolled west. Blue sky replaced the twilight shade of the clouds, and the sun appeared over the red sand valley. In the mercifully arid air, the puddles on the road began to shrink and dry. The gooey surface hardened and cracked. Clay encased my skin and clothing like a cast, but I was free to ride again. Ahead, both the landscape and the sky opened wide.
But it didn’t last. The route turned into another canyon as new clouds gathered overhead. I no longer had the energy to outrun anything, and actually escaping the storm didn’t seem very likely. Molded into the road were the tire tracks and footprints of at least three cyclists who came through before me. It meant that I hadn’t been the only one to become stuck in the rain, but it also meant that if it did rain, I would be stuck.
Blurry streaks of precipitation closed in all around me, but didn’t drop overhead until I turned off the clay Forest Service road onto the pavement of Highway 64. The rain fell hard for most of the climb, and after five miles and a thousand feet of elevation, it was time to turn off the highway onto yet another clay road. Below the clouds, the day had descended almost imperceptibly into evening. Perched on the bluff above Hopewell Lake, I could see sunset’s peach and gold streaks, stripped below the storm to the west. Warm light reflected off the rippled surface of the lake.
There was also a campground at the junction, a well-developed area overcrowded with campers and RVs. It also had a cooking shelter, an outhouse and a water spigot. I pulled my bike into the day-use shelter, which was set apart from the campground and pleasantly quiet. I dug through my feedbag and fished out a half-empty package of beef jerky and a small package of cookies, some of the last of my scarcity of supplies.
“Shoot,” I said out loud. “I’m going to have to start rationing.”
The rain continued to fall and I knew the road ahead probably contained more clay-like mud that would slow my pace to a crawl. The nearest town that promised any kind of resupply was still thirty miles away, and even if I reached it late that night, those stores would surely be closed. The smart thing to do, I decided, would be to stay at Hopewell Lake and hope to rain stopped by morning, allowing me to descend what would optimistically be dry roads. I felt a pang of guilt about the shortness of my day — only eighty-seven miles — but it had been a hard day and I’d have to be an idiot to pass up shelter when the evening only promised more rain and wheel-stopping mud.
I rolled out my sleeping bag and bivy sack on the hard concrete next to a sign that said “No Camping.” I changed into my dry clothes, strung the wet ones over my bicycle, and crawled into my sleeping bag. I gnawed on beef jerky and perused my maps. Before I even remembered to take my nightly sleeping pill, I dropped out of consciousness with my maps still strewn about me and the beam of my still-lit headlamp pointing directly out the one open wall of shelter, into the night.
Chapter Twenty-One
The High Desert
Peach sunlight bounced off the wooden beams of the picnic shelter, casting candy stripes of color and shadows on my concrete bed. The morning was warm and bright, and I awoke feeling strangely empty. I couldn’t quite pinpoint why. The sun promised dry road conditions and my family had assured me of Pete’s health, so I no longer had reason to worry. And still, I felt a dull sense of malaise. It was as though my grief and fear provided me with renewed purpose that I no longer felt. Grief about Pete’s condition drove me forward until I finally discovered the truth. Fear of mud and storms drove me forward until I finally escaped. Now I was back to wondering where I was going and why, and the uncertainty left me feeling hollow.
There were a hundred reasons to give up, but none were convincing reasons. The one thing that had taken over my thoughts and emotions for more than a day — Pete’s accident — didn’t have the hopeless consequences I had feared. My knees and Achilles tendons still ached, but not enough to keep me from pedaling up hills. I was nearly out of food, but I expected to reach a resupply point before my situation became desperate. As to my need to move on with my life, I only had a little more than 600 miles left to pedal. Surely the rest of my life could wait five more days.
But it’s hard to take back a decision to quit once it’s promised, no matter how unreasonable that decision becomes. I could still remember the joy I felt when I resolved to drop out of the race just minutes before reaching Platoro, and the ghost of that joy had haunted me every time I felt pain or frustration or fear ever since. I had already quit once in my heart and in my head. How easy it would be to let my battered body give in to the simple relief of defeat.
As I packed up my damp sleeping gear in my mud-caked bike bags, I fumbled for my motivation. I thought about how amazing it would feel to cross the Mexican border and know that I had done it on my own. I thought about the beauty that surely waited me in New Mexico, the redrock and desert sunsets and open mesas. And I visualized the final report I would have to call in to the Tour Divide podcast should I decide to drop out that day: “Hi, this is Jill Homer. I’ve decided I’m going to bag it. Yeah, I just realized I have an entire life to get on with. Wow, were these past two and a half weeks a waste of time or what?”
The thought made me laugh out loud. And set me to packing faster. It really would be ridiculous to quit the race now. There was no way I’d ever live it down. Just as it had when a store employee mopped up my puddle of rainwater all the way back in Clark, Colorado, the prospect of public humiliation gave me that final boost I needed to keep going.
I crossed the broad summit of Burned Mountain and plunged into a region forgotten by the past two centuries. Hidden in the wilderness-ringed valley of the Rio Vallecitos, the village of Canon
Plaza was little more than a cluster of boxy structures, built of cracked adobe and sun-bleached logs. The town and its sister city, Vallecitos, were settled in 1776, and the villages still had the look and feel of a faded oil painting depicting colonial Mexico. Goats bleated behind splintered pinion-branch fences and Native American children ran barefoot down the dusty streets.
I turned right off the main road into downtown Vallecitos, which looked more modern and therefore more rundown than Canon Plaza. Tarps were strung over roofs and every single house had a loose dog or four. The mangy creatures greeted me viciously, barking wildly and snapping at my ankles in gathering numbers. I launched into a wild sprint and grabbed my bear spray out of my backpack’s side pocket. As one medium-sized mutt closed in on my shins, I flipped the safety mechanism and pointed the canister directly in its bald, ugly face. I was a finger-flick away from uncorking a cloud of noxious fumes into the mob when I finally passed their imaginary property line, and the pack retreated. I later learned that the main street of Vallecitos is notorious on the Great Divide and even has its own nickname, “Dog Alley.”
The road smoothed out over the mesa and joined the corridor of the Rio Chama. I reached the decidedly “real” town of Abiquiu well before lunchtime, feeling the best I had in two days. I found the store and stocked up on everything, because I was pretty close to empty. Beyond my regular assortment of junk food, I even picked up a few local treats, including roasted pinion nuts and chili-flavored chips. The gas station had, much to my astonishment, a hot lunch counter. I ordered a chicken burger and fries, and ate it with an apple, orange, a pound of strawberries, and fresh milk yogurt. I was still hungry when I finished, so I bought a homemade brownie the size of my entire hand to eat for dessert.
Outside the store in Abiquiu, the air was choked with heat. The sun blazed high in the sky and I had to stand in the shade to apply my sunscreen and fill up my two bladders with nine liters of water. I knew I had a long, dry section of trail in front of me, and I did not want to take any chances with fluid.