Be Brave, Be Strong

by Jill Homer

  I thought back to my coldest rides in Juneau, January days when sleet fell and the temperature was thirty-three degrees. All of those wet winter rides had felt similar, perhaps even more comfortable than this summer day on the Great Divide. The difference, really, was that during Juneau winters I was generally equipped with significantly warmer gear than what I carried for a summer race through the Rocky Mountains. Also, in Juneau, I at least had a home where I could retreat. In New Mexico, wearing everything I had with me, I felt deeply chilled. My only option for shelter was a down sleeping bag and a water-resistant — not water-proof — bivy sack. The sink of frustration closed in again.

  “It’s July fucking fifth!” I raged. “I’m in Southern fucking New Mexico! I should have heatstroke, dehydration; I should be licking the edges of sun-blackened milk jugs dropped by illegal immigrants! Anything but hypothermia. Please, anything.”

  But, as it never had and never would, the Gila did not care. The road seemed to stretch endlessly over the plateau. Since both my GPS and odometer hadn’t been working all day, I wasn’t completely sure where I was or how much farther I had to travel. I only knew I had to battle my way through this mud-road purgatory until it released me onto pavement — sweet, hard pavement.

  Above the gorge, the sandy shelf of the plateau provided an even faster surface, on a rutted track rippled with whoop-de-dos. Still, I couldn’t shake how cold and broken I felt, and I continued to cry intermittently as my spirit lashed out against the increasing waves of hopelessness. The rain never left up, not even for a minute, in the eight hours it took me to travel forty-five miles. I was so tired I could feel my heart sputtering.

  When I reached the intersection of State Highway 35, I felt like Moses had stepped out and parted the Red Sea. While rain continued to drizzle, I could see hints of sunlight cracking through the clouds over the valley. Streaks of gold lit up groves of deciduous trees, a Garden of Eden in the mud-soaked desert. Despite my limited energy, I sprinted down the pavement in an expression of my relief and joy. I passed a ranger station and stopped at a water faucet to wash the prodigious mud from my body and bicycle. I felt like a Christian reborn. I had been delivered from the Gila! I had walked through the shadow of death and emerged in the light! I was done! It was all fun and pavement to Silver City!

  But I was wrong. In not having my GPS to indicate the route farther ahead, I had to turn over my map to learn that the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route didn’t follow the highway into Silver City, but in fact crested another thousand-foot pass on the clay surface of the Georgetown Road. The rain had finally faded, taken over by rainbows and the soft pink light of sunset. But an entire afternoon of precipitation isn’t going to dry up all that quickly.

  And sure enough, fresh, shin-deep truck tracks greeted me at the entrance. Even if I walked inside the tracks, peanut butter mud clumped on my shoes until they adhered to the ground, tugging away from my feet as I walked. The idea of riding my bicycle was a joke, a distant dream; it was never going to happen on the Georgetown Road. I glanced at my maps. The mud road was five miles long. The longest five miles in the history of distance.

  Darkness fell as I walked. Another hour passed. Resignation and hopelessness won the final battle in this draw-out war of emotions. There was no longer reason to cry. A few stars came out, but for the most part, the unseen clouds remained. There was no longer reason to think or feel. All of my extremities were either numb or plodding through a detached sort of auto-pilot. Except for the occasional manifestation of quivering lips or shivers through my core, even my hypothermia had reached equilibrium. I was a dead woman walking.

  When I finally reached the pavement of Highway 152, I felt none of the joy I had expected. In my numbness and resignation, even this positive development failed to inject renewed hope. The surrounding landscape was empty and black. There were flickers of lights from a distant city, most likely Silver City, though they looked so lonely and far away that for all I knew, they could have been Las Vegas or Tokyo. I mounted my bike on the highway. The wheels started to move before I even began pedaling, propelled only by simple gravity. I shook my head in astonishment.

  “What an amazing invention, a bicycle,“ I thought. “It can move on its own without any help from me.” I pedaled toward the lights, and then they dropped out of sight.

  Later, John would ask me what I thought of the “infuriating hills before Silver City.” Apparently, as John told me, there are actually a lot of steep climbs after the initial drop from the Georgetown Road, as the highway crosses a series of drainages that surround the city. I remember none of these climbs or descents. I only remember lights and pavement, and the numbed sensibilities that made me aware of everything and nothing at the same time.

  And then, eventually, I arrived at the Silver City twenty-four-hour Wal-mart. I don’t remember walking inside. The first minutes of shopping have also been lost to the haze of inattention. When I “came to,” I was standing in the produce section beneath the glaring florescent lights of the store. After a day in the gray, wet, unpopulated wilds of the Gila, the sudden barrage of colors and objects was overwhelming. I blinked rapidly amid genuine and utter confusion.

  “Where am I? What am I doing in Wal-mart? What year is this? Am I still living in Idaho Falls?” I wracked my brain for any events that took place after 2004, when I was a copy editor at the Idaho Falls Post Register and did all of my shopping at Wal-mart because that was the only place open after I left work. Like a trickle of rain, details started to come back. It was 2009. I was in Silver City, New Mexico. I was riding the Great Divide. And I was nearly done.

  I looked in the basket I was holding. I laughed out loud at the food my autopilot had grabbed while I was lost in a daze. The basket held a twenty-four-ounce package of imitation crab flakes, a cup of strawberry parfait, a Snickers bar, a liter of Pepsi and, inexplicably, a glass bottle of sparkling apple cider. I abandoned the cider on a nearby shelf and grabbed a box of crackers, a pound of strawberries, as well as a few packages of cookies, cheese and Sour Patch Kids for the following day. The pound and a half of fish flakes seemed excessive, but I had been craving protein for most of New Mexico, so I decided to keep the package and see if I how much of it I could force down, with crackers, strawberries, and parfait for my late dinner.

  It was 11:30 p.m. when I left the store, five hours after the 6:30 p.m. arrival time I had made my goal when I left the Beaverhead Work Station amid a sunny Sunday morning that seemed a lifetime before. My eyes hung so heavy I could barely keep them open crossing the parking lot, and my chilled body, brought partially back to life inside the store, ached throughout. My knees burned and my Achilles tendons screamed. Even if I wanted the Great Divide border-to-border record more badly than anything I had wanted in my life, I still had only nine and a half hours to travel 125 miles if I wanted to shave even a minute off Stevenson’s 2005 time. In my physical and psychological state of decay, I was doubtful of my ability to pedal even one more mile to the nearest hotel. I was glad the goal had become all but impossible. Even the prospect of pedaling 125 miles after a good night’s rest filled me with a dread I was all too willing to embrace. Still, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I felt an urge to keep pedaling as I rolled up to the Silver City Super 8. My body and mind were all but broken, but the guilt of a racer burns deep.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The Lonely Highway

  A sliver of morning light penetrated the thick brown curtains over the window. They were the same thick brown curtains that blinded the large windows of every room in every small-town motel in America. I opened my eyes to a print of an oil painting, an image cowboy riding solo through an open prairie — tranquil, unmemorable, and pressed against glass, just like every piece of art in every room in every small-town motel in America. I threw open the generic beige bedspread and rolled out of the stiff, pressed sheets to greet a morning that was like every morning in my new way of life.

  I hobbled stiffly to the hotel sink, brushed m
y teeth, applied sunscreen on my wind-chapped face, and peeled off my dry outfit so I could apply the wet clothing I had washed in the shower the night before. I put on my spare pair of clean, dry socks and mud-caked shoes, and limped into the hotel lobby. I filled up a paper plate with stale muffins, bland pastries, and unripe oranges, then limped back to my room and flipped on the Weather Channel. The numbers flashed vaguely along the bottom of the screen. The simple glut of information was difficult to comprehend with my reduced mental capacity. But one report registered: Silver City, high of ninety-four degrees.

  “Hot in Silver City today,” I said out loud. I munched on the free motel breakfast that was like every free breakfast in every small-town motel in America. The routine had become so entrenched that it took several more minutes for the true uniqueness of my situation to sink in. “Wait a minute. I’m in Silver City right now. I’m 125 miles from the border. Today could be my last day!”

  I jolted upright with renewed sense of purpose, threw my stale muffin on the bed, and concentrated harder on the television. The weatherman called for southeast winds — unfortunately a crosswind in the direction I was heading — blowing steady at fifteen miles per hour. “Could be worse,” I said. “Ninety-four with a crosswind. Could be worse.”

  It could be a lot worse. I still had forty miles of sandy clay road to ride, something rain could turn into the same horrifying wheel trap I had slopped through the day before. In fact, humbled as I was in my fear of more rain and storms, the news of heat and wind could not have been more welcome.

  I packed up my gear, methodically stuffing my dry clothing back into my seatpost bag. I gathered the rest of my sparse belongings, the toothpaste tube and drug case, and placed them in the exact spot where they had ridden beside me for twenty-four days. I cinched up the straps and closed the zippers. I couldn’t believe this might be the last time I’d ever do this during the Tour Divide.

  Outside the motel, I found a garden hose and attempted to remove the red clay that had hardened to my bike like cement. I scraped away the brick-hard blocks from the drivetrain, revealing a number of small stones that had become lodged inside the rear derailleur, grinding away at delicate parts and the chain for who knows how long. As I ran the hose around the paper-thin tires, streams of mud revealed webbed cracks in the rubber, threatening to shatter at any moment. A large chunk of foam hung off the saddle. My bike was literally falling apart.

  I stood up, turned off the hose and rubbed my stiff knees and throbbing Achilles tendons. “Just 125 more miles,” I said. “Please just hold it together for 125 more miles.” I was speaking to my body as much as I was to my bicycle.

  On the way out of town, I stopped and bought yet another pair of sunglasses and a large jug of Gatorade. At 7:30 in the morning, the pavement already reflected a barrage of heat. The air was not only warm, but also humid with leftover moisture from the previous day’s storm. A stiff crosswind licked at my side.

  I followed a ripple of a highway through arroyos and over tiny, dry streams. After my rain-soaked crossing of the Gila, the desert had returned full circle, a desolate panorama of bleached sand, yucca, and cactus.

  I turned off the highway onto a sandy washboard called the Separ Road. The sky blazed with a deep and lasting blue, broken only by tiny wisps of white clouds and barren mounds of mountains many dozens of miles distant. The road followed a narrow ridgeline over a sweeping plateau, piled with sand dunes. The mostly flat horizon blurred behind a sparkling heat mirage. Only a twisted barbed-wire fence broke the illusion of perfect inhabitability.

  Everyone who had raced the Great Divide before told me that the section between Silver City and the border was the absolute worst 125 miles of the entire route. “It’s flat and desert and it’s mostly pavement,” they told me. “It’s hot and the wind is always in your face. And you just want to be done, and it feels never-ending. You just have to put your head down and suffer through it. It’s a brutal grind.”

  Nearly everything I had been warned about was turning out to be true. The flat, hot desert stretched out in front of me and the crosswind grew stronger with the fading morning. But I had no interest in putting my head down and suffering through it. Like the weather, my body had made a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree recovery during the night. Despite my sore knees and heels, I felt like an entirely different person. Rather than feel sore and helpless and plodding, I felt sweeping gratitude for the opportunity to ride my bike in this otherworldly place. By pedal power alone, I’d propelled myself into a stark, colorful desert that so few ever bothered to visit. I had the whole unscheduled day to travel through it, absorbing every delicate color and shape, from silver cactus needles to smooth, red stones. Every scenic vista and mile marker was a simple but finite source of joy, and I consumed them with the exaggerated relish of a child trying to savor a quickly melting ice cream cone. I was struck with understanding that the things I would see and experience that day would be my last on the Tour Divide. For all of the difficulties, the struggle, the pain and grief and occasional hopelessness, my life on the Tour Divide was a very good life. It was a full life, and every pedal stroke I made was a small decision to leave it behind.

  I arrived at the intersection of Interstate 10 in an incredible mood, and stopped at what I knew would be my last convenience store on the Divide, a trinket shop simply called “Continental Divide.” I purchased a plastic-wrapped sandwich and an ice-cream bar almost out of habit, and sat outside in the direct sunlight, smiling at the gray-faced truckers and frazzled families that shuffled inside. It was a truly hot day; sweat cascaded down my face even as I sat still, sipping a large jug of Cherry Coke. I was seventy miles from the finish and in no more of a hurry than I would have been seventy miles from the start. It was simply too beautiful of a day, and too rich and full of life, to just rush through it.

  Beyond the convenience store, the route paralleled the freeway on a rough frontage road, where I approached what would be the final turn of the entire trip, onto a two-lane highway that didn’t go anywhere, really, except Mexico. A half-mile distant, I could see the sun-reflecting glow of a vehicle parked at the intersection. As I drew closer, I could see the waving arms of two silhouetted figures. In the relentless glare of the sun, I didn’t even realize the figures were my parents until I pulled up beside them and felt my mother’s arms clasp my sweat-drenched back.

  “You made it!” my mom cried. I looked up and saw flecks of tears in my dad’s eyes, which brought a rush of tears to my own eyes.

  “You made it, too,” I said. “I’m so glad you’re here. I thought I wouldn’t see you guys until the border.”

  “We wanted to see you before the finish,” my dad said. “We had to call up your sisters to track your SPOT. They told us you were nearly here, and we had to rush from our hotel. You’re really flying today!”

  “I’m having a good day,” I said.

  “I just can’t believe you made it,” my mom blubbered, tears still streaming down her cheeks.

  “I’m not there yet,” I said. “I still have sixty-five more miles to ride.”

  “You feeling up to it?” my dad asked.

  “I feel good,” I said. “But lots can happen in sixty-five miles. At this point, though, I have to get there. If I have to walk the entire rest of the way, I’ll get there. If I don’t make it to the border, please just run me over with the car.”

  “So how long do you think it will take?” my dad asked.

  I looked at my watch. “Um, maybe six hours. Six or seven o’clock. This crosswind has been slowing me down all day, but at least it’s helping keep me cool.”

  “We’ll see you at the border,” my dad said. “It’s going to be one of the proudest moments of my life.”

  I smiled. “Me too.”

  I pulled away from my parents and turned onto the long, unbending arm of pavement dubbed “The Lonely Highway.” I knew that, barring a car accident or a catastrophic bike breakdown, my struggle was over. There was no more mud, no more mount
ains or streams. There wasn’t even a gravel road in front of me. I had won the fight. I only had to complete my victory lap, the necessary run around the bases after hitting a home run. I closed my eyes amid the sheer satisfaction of it all, the end. And as can often happen at the threshold of an inevitable end, my entire bike life flashed before my eyes.

  I was a seven-year-old with pigtails and Keds shoes, coasting on my banana seat Huffy down East Ridge Road, squealing wildly and holding my feet in the air as the fixed pedals spun in powerful egg-beater circles.

  I was a sixteen-year-old in baggy jeans and a Smashing Pumpkins T-shirt, riding with my friends to the mall, that time my friend Casey was hit by a car and talked the driver into giving him two-hundred dollars to keep him from reporting the accident to the cops.

  I was a nineteen-year-old borrowing a friends’ bike to pedal home late at night, feeling the rush of wind through my hair as the dark world stood still.

  I was a twenty-two-year-old in a brand new jersey and bike shorts, standing next to the gaping hole of an old uranium mine outside Moab, Utah, preparing to mount my heavily loaded touring bike for a 600-mile ride across deserts and mountains.

  I was a twenty-three-year-old struggling through the tight singletrack along the Yukon River out of Whitehorse, Yukon, living out a dream of riding my mountain bike in the Far North.