Be Brave, Be Strong

by Jill Homer

  “Thank you,” I said in continuation of my morning prayer. “That was a good day.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The Gila

  I awoke to shrill chirping. A red-breasted robin hopped frantically between a several branches directly over my sleeping bag. Her cries echoed through the narrow canyon, still hidden from the sun in the early morning.

  “What’s the matter?” I said to the bird. “Did I camp beneath your nest?”

  I wriggled out of my bivy sack and squinted through a tangle of pine branches. The sky was the color of broth, clear and golden. The robin dropped closer to me, chirping right over my head. “Okay,” I said irritably. “I’m getting up.”

  As I pulled my sleeping bag away, I noticed a small clump of feathers that hadn’t been more than a few inches from my head where I slept. I looked closer until I saw tiny feet, beak, a few droplets of blood and a grotesquely twisted neck. A baby bird. Its blood still glistened; it didn’t look like it had been dead more than a few minutes.

  The adult bird fluttered from branch to branch. Her high-pitched screeching rang in my ears. I jumped backward quickly, dragging my sleeping bag as I went. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry,” I whispered.

  As I backed away, the adult robin zeroed in closer to the baby but didn’t land directly beside it. Her mournful cries continued to echo through the calm air. “What happened?” I blubbered. “Did it fall out of the nest? Did I scare it?” A well of sadness for the dead baby bird and its grief-stricken mother gurgled up from my gut. “I’m so sorry,” I gulped. A few tears trickled down my cheeks. “I am so, so sorry.”

  I sat down in the grass next to my bike, sniffling and blinking as I rubbed my face. There was so much cruelty in our lives, so much suffering and pain, and we had no choice but to accept everything the world doled out to us in its indifference and chaos. Sandstone cliffs, carved into twisted and grotesque shapes by millennia of heavy erosion, cut an arching shadow over my camp. The robin’s grief rang out in a harsh geography built on decay, and the overwhelming scope of it filled me with despair. I hung my head and let my tears fall in the grass, until the voice of rationality finally prodded me: “Do you realize you’re crying over a bird?”

  I shook my head a few times and tried to pull myself together. I wanted to put sufficiently numbing distance beyond the robin’s haunting chirps, so I quickly packed up my bike and ate a brownie while I pedaled up the canyon. Calming silence returned to the air, but physically my body was as good as sprawled out beneath a cluster of ponderosas. Although I tended to feel sluggish most mornings, the effort of this morning mined a low-grade well of energy that was all but tapped out. Even with 600 calories of sugar in my gut, my legs turned as though held together my fraying threads. There was movement but no power, not even when I willed myself to push harder. Lactic acid coursing through my muscles told me I still had fibers to burn, but they were operating at minimum capacity.

  “Ugh, rough go of it today,” I said to myself. “I guess I have to pedal easy for a while until I get my legs back.”

  I crossed the Continental Divide twice on tiny bumps of an open plateau, then dropped into open grassland speckled with ranches. I watched a motorcyclist approach from a long distance. His wheels kicked up enviable clouds of dust, and the mosquito whine of his machine mocked my lack of power. He stopped beside me and killed the engine.

  “Where you coming from?” he asked.

  “I camped in the forest just a few miles back,” I said.

  “You headed to the Beaverhead Work Station?” he asked.

  “Yeah, that direction,” I said. “After that, I’m headed back into the Gila for a while. Eventually I’ll get to Silver City.”

  “Silver City? You traveling south on the 150?”

  “Possibly,” I said. “I pretty much just go where these maps tell me to go.”

  He shook his head. “Not a good day for it. All this lightning set off a bunch of wildfires, and there are more storms on the way; probably going to bring a lot of rain. I won’t even take my dirt bike down there when it’s raining because I’d never get it out.”

  “So pretty bad mud ahead?” I asked. “Sticky mud?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Not even passable with a motorcycle. If all you have is a pedal bike, then, well, good luck.”

  “I guess I’m going to need it,” I said.

  “Just remember that all of that is wilderness down there, or at least surrounded by wilderness,” he said. “I wouldn’t count on anyone being around to bail you out.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said with a defeated sigh. “But thanks for the warning.”

  A few miles after the motorcyclist and I parted in opposite directions, I reached the Beaverhead Work Station. The ranger station was closed on a Sunday morning, but there was a soda machine outside. The plastic case advertising cold Dr. Pepper sent a rush of electric desire through my lukewarm blood. I rushed the machine, only to discover that it could take only coins, no bills. Half-panicked with disappointment and indecision because I didn’t want to make a long stop but didn’t want to forgo my only treat of the day, I tore through my backpack and bike bags, finding a nickel here, a dime there. I finally emptied the contents of my seat post bag — the hardest to repack — and came upon the mother lode, a quarter. With all of my possessions erratically strewn across the lawn, I walked triumphantly to the machine and fed it seventy-five cents.

  I settled in the grass beneath the shade of a large willow tree, savoring tiny sips of Dr. Pepper and plotting my next move. According to my maps, I had about 200 miles left to travel to the Mexican border. It made the most sense to pedal the seventy-five miles to Silver City that day and knock out the remaining 125 on Monday. But it was still early in the day — about 10 a.m. And with the replenishing fuel of the soda, my legs were finally starting to feel a spark of life. Equations and times floated through my mind, and I felt a buzz of excitement when I realized that I had a shot — a real shot — at the overall Great Divide Race record.

  The border-to-border record had been set by Trish Stevenson during the 2005 Great Divide Race, and stood at 21 days, 23 hours and 47 minutes. Stevenson was a pro mountain bike racer, and I never even dreamed of challenging her record. Plus, starting with the Tour Divide in Banff threw a wrench in that goal, anyway, because it gave me a 270-mile disadvantage, and I couldn’t start the clock at the Montana border with fresh legs. But Tour Divide racers still clocked their border-to-border times separate from their race times, and I had crossed into the United States at 9:45 a.m. Sunday, June 14 — exactly three weeks before. Which meant if I could travel 200 miles in less than 23 hours and 30 minutes, I had a shot and shaving a few minutes off the overall record, on top of shattering the Banff-to-Antelope Wells record by five days.

  My heart raced with the sudden prospect of tangible victory. Riding 200 miles in less than twenty-four hours would be an incredible feat in my physical state, but not outside the realm of possibility. For the most part I had been traveling faster than a ten-mile-per-hour average through central New Mexico, and the route ahead held a fair amount of pavement. I would of course have to pedal all through the night, thereby battling the sleep monster for an exponentially longer period of time than I had dealt with yet. But I would be mere hours from finishing the race; I could fight the sleep monster off with sheer excitement of just being done with the damn thing.

  There was the small issue that I wasn’t racing the Great Divide Race and had knowingly broken one of its rules — cell phone use. But even if the race organization refused to recognize my border-to-border time, I would know I had done it, and that would be enough.

  The warnings of the motorcyclist, however, subdued my excitement. I knew that even if I gave it everything I had, the record was far from in the bag. Any amount of mud and walking would thwart my forward progress irrevocably, and there was nothing I could do about it if it happened. But I vowed to work as hard as I could through Sunday, and if I arrived in Silver Cit
y in good time and feeling even remotely energetic, I would keep going without sleep.

  The wind kicked up as I climbed out of the Beaverhead Work Station. Amid the swirling clouds of dust, my GPS screen flicked off. I stopped the bike and emptied most of the contents of my frame bag, again, until I located spare batteries. With fresh batteries, it turned on for a few seconds before turning right back off.

  “Oh no. Oh no, no, no,” I muttered. “You can’t be broken.”

  I removed the lithium batteries I carried solely for GPS use and inserted another pair of regular old alkaline batteries. Again, the screen flicked on for only a few seconds and then disappeared in a blip.

  “No,” I stammered. “Please, not here. Not now.” It wasn’t that I was solely dependent on my GPS. I still carried all of my maps, which contained all the directions I needed to guide me to the end. But GPS had been with me since the very beginning, since the Spray River trailhead in Banff, when I pushed the start button and reset the elevation profile while forty-one better-prepared racers took off without me. I left GPS on the entire time I was moving, as I climbed and descended, as I plodded beneath wind and rain, as I powered myself across a large chunk of the continent. We had always been together, and together we had logged 2,500 miles and more than 170,000 feet of climbing. GPS told me whether I was on the right track. It told me how far I had to travel to the nearest town, how many feet of elevation I had left to gain before cresting the next pass, and how many turns I had to ignore on the maze of dirt roads surrounding the actual route. It told me the names of the rivers I pedaled beside and the topography of the mountains I crossed. It was not just a constant companion. GPS was my friend. And there, in the rugged and wild Gila National Forest, GPS was my only friend. I did not want it to be broken.

  But electronic devices don’t have the same affinities toward affection as humans, and GPS’s screen stubbornly stayed dark. I removed the device from its handlebar mount, wrapped it inside my hat, and cradled it in the womb of my frame bag. “OK, you’ve been jolted around a lot in the rain,” I said. “You get a break for now. But please start working again soon. This is rugged country coming up. I don’t want to get lost.”

  A few miles down the trail, a loud zipping sound spat all of the air out of my rear tire, again. I grudgingly pumped it back up to forty pounds per square inch. The sealant seemed to be sticking, but I could see solidified green gobs bubbling out of several sections of the tire. With closer inspection, I noticed a dark web of cracks had appeared throughout the sidewall, and that the tread had been worn to tiny nubbins. It appeared that the only thing holding that paper-thin strip of rubber together was the tube itself. Even the tiniest thorns were creating puncture wounds. I groaned. “Please don’t melt down on me, too,” I said to the tire.

  Right on schedule with the passing of the noon hour, black-bottomed clouds rolled over the distant cliffs. The deeper I pressed into the Gila, the darker the sky became, until I could see a torrent of rain form a solid wall a few miles in front of me, even as I pedaled beneath bright sunlight. I crossed into the initial strike zone before I reached the far edge of the storm. Just a few short minutes of downpour had rendered the once-solid road into a chunky sludge the color and consistency of peanut butter. I could only pedal a few strokes into the goop before my rear wheel seized up like the mouth of a greedy kid who had taken too large a bite of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

  I stumbled off the saddle and picked up the bike. As I attempted to stagger to the edge of the road, the mud caught my right shoe and tore it clean off my foot. Before I could catch myself, I pressed my sock directly into the mud. I could feel the cold sludge pushing between my nylon-covered toes. “Gaaaa!” I screamed, throwing my useless bicycle down on the road as I grabbed my shoe and inserted my peanut-butter-mud-coated foot back inside it. None of it mattered any more. I was stuck in my tracks. In front of me, the storm stretched over the farthest horizon — many miles of frustration, maybe dozens.

  The intelligent thing to do in a circumstance like that would be to sit by the side of the road and wait for the muddy road to dry. But while the storm was traveling slowly away from me, it only seemed to be growing outward in every direction. There was no escaping the rain and if I waited for it, I’d surely have to wait all day and night. The border-to-border record still beckoned. It hadn’t become impossible yet. “Maybe,” I whispered to myself. “Maybe the road gets better.”

  I picked up my bike and dragged it several feet off the road, where I could wheel it through the brush. I veered around junipers and stopped to scrape chunks of dark mud off my wheels and shoes fairly often, but walking along the obstacle-strewn shoulder was infinitely more passable than the road itself. One advantage of moving at so slow a pace was that, while I continued to wallow in the storm’s remnants, I had yet to catch up to the storm. But the effort was fierce; my shoulder muscles burned and sweat beaded on my forehead.

  After two miles of bicycle dragging that consumed more than an hour, I arrived at the edge of the plateau. At the very least, I wanted to believe I had traveled two miles. My GPS was still turned off and my odometer only registered speeds above two miles per hour, a limit I had yet to surmount since the mud had set in. My eyes struggled to focus as I gazed over the red buttes and deep juniper-studded gorges in front of me. My head was still spinning and my heart raced under the strain of the brute effort — for two measly miles (if that), it had been one of the more physically difficult hours of my cycling career. During my 350-mile traverse of the Iditarod Trail in 2008, I had grappled with unrideable trail conditions, brutally slow forward movement, temperatures down to thirty-five below zero and a twenty-four-hour period wherein I didn’t see another person. But in my memory, each of the hours in that six-day race held at least some glimmer of hope, some reason to keep putting one foot in front of the other. In the rain-drenched Gila desert, with more than 2,500 hard miles behind me, my body was left irrevocably exhausted and seemingly incapable of fighting this sticky mud. Worse than snow, worse than wind, worse than thirty-five below, the mud became as insurmountable as a brick wall. I flicked ochre sludge away from my gloves and rubbed my eyes. Over the vast wilderness hung a dark gray pall that filled the sky. It wasn’t just a passing afternoon thunderstorm. It was a full-fledged deluge.

  The descent into the gorge was rocky and technical, but the steep gravity allowed me to ride through the mud. I passed into the realm of the storm, where hard rain fell in full sheets. Every time I fooled myself into believing it was letting up, the noise of droplets hitting my helmet amplified until it sounded like a thousand hands smacking a metal roof. Rain stung my face and fingers and slowly seeped in through my meager nylon and plastic defenses. Streams of icy water trickled down my legs and back.

  At the bottom of the gorge, the road immediately swung upward, climbing more than a thousand feet in three miles. Despite the rockier surface, mud clung to the frame and I struggled to push the bike up the slope. Every step left me panting and sweating, though I could no longer tell the difference between sweat and the rain.

  More hours passed this way — climbs so sticky and steep I could barely walk up them, followed by descents so steep and slathered in wheel-grabbing mud that they were only navigable with intense focus and a Zen-like shutdown of natural fear. The torrent continued to fall with duration and volume I scarcely thought possible in the desert. The sheer amount of rain seemed to match the wettest storms I had encountered while riding through the rainforests of Juneau. It pushed me deep into the hopelessness those gray rides often instill — a certainty that it will never stop raining, ever, throughout the span of the rest of eternity.

  As I trudged up another thousand-foot climb, the thick aroma of the forest air started to permeate my consciousness. It was a singularly unique fragrance — a savory and spicy blend of cedar and sage with hints of charcoal and wood smoke — remnants of long-snuffed forest fires, perhaps. Infused with the fresh sweetness of the rain and the pungent oils of pinion nu
ts, the scent swirled around my nose with overwhelming intensity. As soon as I noticed it, I became wholly immersed in its charred, sugary, juniper-imbibed perfume, until I started to feel physically ill. I knew I would never forget that smell, and that it would always haunt me in sickness and pain, the way I always recalled a vanilla air freshener that once hung in my parents’ car whenever I came down with motion sickness. Just as that artificial vanilla had become, the smell of the Gila was permeated in repulsiveness so vile that it evoked a hundred memories of suffering. The smell of the Gila was a hate smell. For as beautiful and wild as the landscape was, I hated the Gila.

  The road atop an 8,000-foot plateau amid the Gila Wilderness was still too muddy to ride. I trudged a few steps along the relatively level ground before I dropped to my knees in a sink of frustration. Tears spilled over and I rubbed my face aggressively with cold-numbed fingers. “It’s impossible,” I moaned. “It’s just impossible.” My shoulders and abdomen were starting to convulse with the deepening chill. The drain of hopelessness tempted me to just sit there, forever, until hypothermia brought a slow but pleasant end. But my ambition and my will to live were stronger, and I lashed out.

  In the throes of a temper tantrum, I started to smack the wet skin on my face. “Get up!” I screamed. “Get up!” I slapped at my cheeks until my fingers balled up into a fist. Without any rational reason or decision to do so, I swung hard and punched myself right between the eyes. The sudden blow startled me so much that I stopped sobbing immediately. My temple throbbed, and when I held my quaking fingers up to the skin, it felt bruised and tender. “Did you really just punch yourself?” I said out loud. It sounded almost as crazy as it felt.

  I stood up again, knocked cold back into reality, where the road was still muddy and impassable, but I was alone and without other options. Breathing the relief that is involuntary resignation, I moved to the side of the road and started bushwhacking through the shoulder. I walked another half mile or so until gravel strewn over the road seemed more likely to add traction. I climbed back onto the saddle. The tires managed to continue rolling on top of the mud, but I found little joy in my ability to ride. The shivering throughout my body had become so pronounced that I had a difficult time rotating my feet on the pedals. My nose and lips were going numb; my fingers and toes were long gone. Even if I kept moving, I had no guarantees that hypothermia wouldn’t wrap its icy fingers around me before I could gather enough energy to work up heat.