Be Brave, Be Strong

by Jill Homer

  “Damn, it’s hot!” I said out loud as I turned away from town and pedaled up a loose, extremely dusty gravel road. Sweat gathered in large beads on my skin, dripping acidic sunscreen in my eyes and pouring down my arms and legs. I neglected to pull out my thermometer, so I didn’t know the real temperature. It was likely in the low nineties, but to my northern blood, it felt like 110.

  The massive lunch sat in my stomach like a brick. I filled the rest of my gut with water, every sip I could physically ingest, but I still felt like my stomach was leaching water and somehow not absorbing the food. The climb out of Abiquiu offered no relief. The town sat on the shoreline of a large regional river at 6,000 feet elevation. Within thirty miles, my map promised, I’d be above 10,400 feet. And there was no real relief beyond the pass, no real descent, just climbing and dropping in steep spurts all the way to the next town, Cuba, fifty miles farther. My maps essentially promised me nearly endless climbing and no food services or reliable water sources for the next eighty miles. I braced for suffering as I spun slow rotations out of Abiquiu.

  The heat was relentless. It hovered around me in the calm air, and I was moving slowly enough to feel its suffocating embrace. Still, I kept a steady pace, and forced water down my throat because I had a lot of it and knew I needed it. I crossed onto the Polvadera Mesa, where the road conditions deteriorated substantially. The official path was scarcely discernible from the surrounding terrain as it climbed a staircase of slate slabs, dusted generously by unconsolidated, slippery granules of sand and rutted by violent erosion. Even with the error margin provided by the doubletrack road, I struggled to find a line clear enough to allow me to stay on my bike for more than a hundred yards at a time. I just didn’t have the power to hoist my front tire onto the rock slabs or wallow in the sand. Forward motion necessitated an infuriating pattern of walk, ride, wallow, walk, and ride. As I stumbled through another wallow, a wave of nausea washed over me.

  I halted in my tracks and drew slow breaths of air, but the sensation was too powerful to ignore. I threw by bike into the sand and darted toward the woods, only making it twenty feet off the road before I doubled over and vomited the entire contents of my massive lunch. The puddle was speckled with different colors of food that had hardly digested. I staggered back to my bike and sat on the road for a while until my head stopped spinning and I could stand again.

  “Well, that sucked,” I said out loud. “That was a whole lot of calories to just lose like that.”

  I immediately blamed the heat for my afternoon sickness. Or maybe I just needed more water. I took a few delicate sips and resumed the jerky, difficult climb. I still felt vaguely sick to my stomach, but my plummeting energy level was the larger concern. After a few minutes, I decided I needed new calories. I pulled a king-sized Mounds bar out of my feedbag. It had melted to nighty-eight-percent liquid, so I drank the hot glop out of the package. Not ten minutes later, the powerful nausea hit me again. This time, I didn’t even bother to wander very far off the road; I just jumped off my bike, turned my head and coated a small bush with a liquefied Mounds bar that looked very much the same going out as it did coming in.

  “Crap,” I thought as I waited for the hard shock of regurgitation to settle. “I must be sick.”

  I started to suspect I had food poisoning, and there wasn’t much I could do about that. I let my head stop spinning and resumed pedaling uphill. As the climb dragged on, the sickness started to settle. The once powerful but infrequent waves of nausea became a heavy, constant pit in my gut. I tried to force down a few Sour Patch Kids, but even those didn’t stay down long. For a while water seemed to stay with me, but eventually, after more than an hour without solid food, I started spewing clear fluid. I continued to climb. I didn’t know why I kept climbing. My ability to reason was slipping.

  Above 10,000 feet, I skirted the edge of a wide, barren ridge. I staggered on even the slightest hints of uneven ground, and pedaled like a reluctant child on a training bicycle, but mostly I walked. My head felt light and airy, almost enough to make up for the lead weights in my legs. I hadn’t kept a single calorie down since the first time I threw up, thereby negating nearly every calorie I had eaten that day. Near the crest of the ridge, my energy levels had plummeted to new lows. Black spots were starting to appear in my peripheral vision, and I felt only partially conscious.

  A herd of cattle grazed along the high grassland, just above timberline. Although I was only about twenty-five miles from Abiquiu, I convinced myself I had just met the loneliest cattle herd in America.

  “It must be strange for you, living all the way up here,” I said to one dull-eyed heifer. “And you,” I said to her calf. “What’s it like growing up on the moon?”

  I walked beside the herd, speaking to every single animal as I passed. “Do you know where I can find water up here?” I asked a big, black bull that had a murderous look in his eyes. “I’m worried I might be getting low on water.”

  He didn’t answer, so I asked the next one. “Obviously, you guys have found water on this ridge. I just want a little I can pump for the night.”

  Then I actually lingered beside the cud-chewing bull for several seconds, half expecting an answer, when my muffled voice of reason squeaked, “Are you crazy? You’re talking to cows!”

  A small smile escaped my lips. I was feeling crazy. Beyond the frustratingly silent cows, the features of the ridge throbbed and undulated like a bad 1960s movie about drug trips. The sky was the deepest blue I had ever seen; the puffs of clouds were whiter than white. Even as my nearly anchored feet trudged along the ridgeline, I felt like I was floating through a bright, cheerful corner of outer space. “Ha! I don’t think I can feel my legs,” I called out to the cows and the blue emptiness beyond. “I’m flying!”

  But I wasn’t flying. I was barely crawling. And I was still coherent enough to know I was in a bad way. I stopped at the summit, wondering if I should really continue the fifty miles into Cuba with what I suspected was food poisoning but feared might be something much more serious, such as a giardia parasite. I knew I was having a difficult time even keeping water in my body, and because of this I faced dehydration that could quickly become serious. The descent back into Abiquiu, on the other hand, would be relatively fast, losing 4,000 feet in twenty-five miles. I could grab a room at the luxury hotel I had seen in town and wait until the bug worked its way through my system. But if I turned around, could I really expect to coax myself up that climb again? If I really turned around, wouldn’t that effectively be the end?

  I never really made a decision one way or the other. I just lingered on the summit for a few minutes, looking at my shoes, wondering if I was about to vomit again, and when I looked up, I was facing the road toward Cuba. So I went that way.

  The summit, as the maps had promised me, offered no relief. I had barely descended 200 feet before the climb began anew, then dipped and climbed again, until I realized that all I was doing was skirting a parallel line just below the crest of the ridge, dropping and climbing steeply out of every minor drainage that cut vertically into the mountain. Over the first three short ascents, I made my best effort to pedal. But up the fourth climb, my legs stopped moving about halfway up the hill. I didn’t decide to stop; it just happened. It was as though I commanded my muscles to go and they refused. I was completely out of gas.

  I slumped off the bike and began to stagger, so drunk with exhaustion that I couldn’t even walk directly up the road, but had to weave and dip like an inebriated bar hopper. I pushed the bike to the crest and coasted down a few hundred feet of elevation, only to meet a new pitch climbing up the seemingly endless mountain.

  I walked a few steps and dropped to my knees. My vision spun in a dizzy stupor and I felt tears streaming down my cheeks. “Please don’t make me climb anymore,” I pleaded. My voice vibrated like that of a distraught child. “Please, please. I don’t want to climb anymore.”

  But the mountain did not care, just as the cows had not cared and the du
sty road of the Polvadera Mesa did not care. No one cared that I was sick and exhausted and descending into delirium. Part of me, perhaps the voice of rationality, wondered if I even really cared.

  The terrain started to descend more than climb. The sun slipped behind a distance horizon. Evening fell. All of these details only vaguely registered in my mind, as my body had switched on the autopilot known as “survival mode.” I no longer felt distress or drunkenness, or even much fatigue or sickness. I only knew vaguely that I had no power and definitely did not feel like consuming any food. But I knew I had to keep turning pedals, so that’s what I did.

  I came to a dirty green sedan parked right in the middle of the road. The sight of the car startled me, because I hadn’t seen a single person or vehicle since shortly after I left Abiquiu, seven hours earlier. It didn’t seem like the type of road such a vehicle should be driving on, either, strewn as it was with boulders and carved with ruts so deep that I couldn’t negotiate my bicycle out of them. And sure enough, the front wheel of the sedan was stuck in one of those ruts, high-centered. There didn’t seem to be anyone around. The car had been abandoned. Inside, I saw all the debris of a road trip gone awry. Clothing was strewn about the back seat, maps were torn open and food wrappers littered the interior. But the only thing that registered in my feeble mind was the cooler in the front seat.

  “There might be water in there!” I thought. Never mind that I still had several liters of liquid on my back that I had been carrying since Abiquiu, and never mind that the reason I was so thirsty was not because I was out of water but because I couldn’t drink any without vomiting. All I understood was that my body needed water, and coolers held water. I wrenched open the sedan’s partially stuck front door, knelt on the driver’s seat and opened the lid.

  Inside the cooler was a green and black soup of the foulest food rot I had ever encountered. A thick vapor of curdled milk, lettuce slime and moldy lunch meat blasted me in the face with all the horror of death. I slammed the lid shut but the damage had been done. I backed out of the vehicle, retching and dry-heaving until I finally vomited for the seventh time that day. An important lesson had been administered that evening — a universal lesson about the consequences of trespassing, the futility of hope, and the impermanence of every facet of civilization. However, I was too far gone to learn anything beyond regret for the tiny puddle of clear liquid at my feet.

  By dark, my body’s lowest gear started to sputter. Even survival mode was failing; I had tapped every known and unknown well of energy, and I had nowhere deeper to dig. I had no choice but to stop and sleep. I pulled off the road into a nondescript meadow beneath a tall canopy of ponderosa trees. I shuffled through my bike bags until I found the headlamp, bivy sack, and sleeping bag, not remembering where they were stored even though there were in the same place they had been every other night of the trip. I pulled out a Snickers bar and set it in my helmet next to my bag, hoping that sometime in the night I’d find the courage to eat it. I wriggled into my sleeping bag and immediately fell asleep, having made no decision or effort to do so.

  Hours passed in an instant. I awoke to muted dawn and the patter of raindrops on top of my open bivy sack. The most horrible hangover headache I had ever experienced pounded beneath my skull. I groaned and zipped up the bivy sack, listening to the rain hit harder.

  The voice of rationality spoke first. “If you let it rain on you for too long, you’re going to get all of your gear wet.”

  “Ugh,” I grumbled back. “I feel like I just want to roll over and die.”

  I turned over on my stomach, which was still heavy with a pit of nausea. My head throbbed. I wondered whether I’d even be able to summon the energy to sit up.

  “Crap, I really do have giardia,” I thought. “I’m not going to be able to get up and I’m going to die of giardia in the middle of nowhere, New Mexico. They’ll find my mummified body in a few years and they’ll rule it a suicide.”

  I turned back over on my back. The rain fell harder. My stomach gurgled. But as more consciousness crept into my brain, I began to suspect that the discomfort I was feeling wasn’t the oppression of food poisoning. I was just really thirsty — and really, really hungry.

  I sat up in a jolt of discovery and wrestled out of my bivy sack. Inexplicably during the night, I had put on my raincoat but torn off my shorts. Forgetting about the Snickers bar in my bike helmet, I stumbled toward my bike in my underwear and bare feet. I tore open my feedbag and reached for the first thing I found, a Nutrageous bar. It suddenly sounded like the most delicious morsel of food ever invented. I tore open the package and gulped it down. The cold clumps of candy tumbled down my throat and filled me with a renewed sense of health. I found a brownie and devoured it, followed by a package of nuts and moist handfuls of Sour Patch Kids. My hands seemed to involuntarily grab at the junk food, allowing me neither the time to decide what to consume nor the ability to stop it. I ate with blind urgency, shoveling in food like a starving wolverine. The voice of reason just laughed with a mixture of bemusement and embarrassment about the uncivilized way in which I was replenishing my badly depleted body.

  Eventually, my mouth became so dry that I could not swallow, so I reached for my water valve and took large, delicious gulps, savoring the water even more than I had the food. As I drank, I moved around my makeshift campsite, picking up the miscellaneous objects that had been strewn like an unkempt yard sale around my bicycle. During my apathetic delirium the night before, I had managed to disgorge most of the contents of my bicycle bags all over the ground, and then left them out all night at the mercy of animals and rain. Luckily, nothing seemed to be missing, and after about fifteen anxious minutes, I managed to put the whole damp mess back in order. With a couple thousand calories in my belly, I felt a blast of exuberance about my miraculous turnaround. In reality, my skull still throbbed beneath a pounding headache and I was still deeply dehydrated, but I felt like I had ricocheted off my own deathbed.

  Low fog draped the trees and veiled the grassy hillsides. Steady rain continued to drizzle from the pall. I put on all of my extra layers — hat, fleece jacket, vapor barrier socks and rain gear. I was annoyed that I still needed to dress so heavily in New Mexico. Except for a few warm hours in Wyoming and the day before in Abiquiu, the entirety of my Great Divide experience had been wet and cool, not unlike my year-round existence in Juneau. I hadn’t yet decided whether the relative lack of heat was a blessing or a curse.

  My renewed energy felt strong but my legs didn’t agree; still wobbly and weak, they seemed half detached from my body as I coaxed them up the first climb. I kept my head down, blinking against a steady stream of grit and puddle water. Unlike the wild thunderstorms I had encountered elsewhere on the Divide, the storm over my head was bland and thick, apparently settled for a long deluge. Luckily, I had already conquered the most primitive section of the long road, and the surface under my wheels was muddy but generously coated with gravel that provided a bridge over the goo.

  It was still before 7 a.m. when I started to see the cars. At first, there were just a few parked in grassy meadows. But after a mile, they sat bumper to bumper along both sides of the narrow road. There were dozens of cars, and then hundreds.

  “What’s going on here?” I wondered. “I guess it’s the Fourth of July weekend. But there’s nothing nearby. Even Santa Fe is a long way from here. How is this random place attracting so many campers?”

  The strangest part about the line of cars was that no camping gear accompanied them. I didn’t see tents or tarps or even sleeping bags strewn in the fields alongside the road. Another mile went by. The vehicles devolved from four-wheel-drive trucks and boring sedans to ancient Buicks, spray-painted Volkswagen vans, and decommissioned school buses decorated with tie-dye curtains. Some of the vehicles had made grievous parallel parking errors and ended up twenty feet down the steep embankment.

  The first people I saw were curled up in cotton quilts right on the grass, unconscious and drenched
thoroughly in the rain. Then I saw big tents mostly hidden in the woods below. Signs were hand-painted with advertisements such as “Breakfast Bus,” “Raw is Law,” and “Policemen are your friends.” At seven in the morning, only a sparse scattering of people milled about, by the meadows were littered with pots and toilet paper and Styrofoam containers. White plastic bags were stacked in large piles along the road. Dreadlocked hippies stood near the garbage piles with their thumbs out, their own vehicles no doubt parked several miles down the road. They yelled at me to “Get high on life” as I passed, which I found ironic, since I was the one moving down the road while they stood still.

  I slowed next to a stocky young man wearing a brown wool poncho and walking a sickly mutt. “What’s going on around here?” I asked, although I had already guessed the answer.

  “Dude, don’t you know?” he said in a slow, raspy drawl stolen right out of the stoner cliché handbook. “It’s the Rainbow Gathering. There are, like ten thousand people all here together. It’s amazing, man.”

  “How long is it going on for?” I asked.

  “I think a few more days,” he said. “I just got here yesterday. Maybe it was the day before. But, man, I never want to leave. It’s beautiful here. Incredible.”

  I looked up. Carson National Forest certainly wasn’t an unattractive place, with its green, rounded mountains, grassy meadows and tall spruce trees. But it wasn’t even close to the most incredible place I had seen so far in New Mexico, let alone the rest of the Rocky Mountains. And the Rainbow Family, with its miles of derelict vehicles, mounds of trash, and passed-out hippies huddled in the rain, definitely wasn’t doing the forest any favors. I wondered what they even did here all week long, besides eat organic raw vegan food and smoke copious amounts of marijuana. The idea of a few thousand people descending on this pretty if uninspiring piece of public land to live out delusions of peace and love through thinly veiled consumerism and open self gratification, trashing the forest in the process, made me feel both angry and sad. And in my state, those emotions were impossible to hide.