by Jill Homer
It was my twenty-fourth birthday and I was pedaling my loaded touring bike beneath a brutally hot sun toward Park City, Utah, on the first day of a 3,200-mile tour.
It was several weeks later and Geoff was trying to talk me down from a panic as a troupe of several dozen Labrador retrievers blocked the narrow rural road in front of us.
It was October in New York and Geoff and I were pedaling through a snowstorm, gleefully grinding out the last ten miles of our cross-country tour.
I was a twenty-five-year-old, pedaling frantically on a stationary bike in a dark room as neon strobe lights swirled overhead and my spin class instructor barked orders through a microphone.
I was twenty-six and venturing out for the first time after Geoff and I moved to Homer, Alaska, riding along a thin spit of sand that rolled like a tongue into Kachemak Bay.
It was February, dark and raining, and I was pushing my mountain bike through a chilling soup of slush in the Susitna 100.
It was summer and I was cresting the lupine-dotted alpine at the top of Resurrection Pass on the Kenai Peninsula.
It was fall and I was plying my skinny tires through an endless series of deep puddles during one of my first rainy road bike rides after moving to Juneau.
It was spring and I threw my bike down in frustration after attempting to ride with a painfully swollen knee, believing I might never be able to ride a bicycle again.
It was winter and I was pedaling a soft snowmobile trail over a frozen Puntilla Lake, facing at close range for the first time the beautiful and haunting peaks of the Alaska Range, wondering if I had ever before or would thereafter, in all my life, feel so struck by overwhelming awe.
I opened my eyes. A brown mound of a mountain rose out of the desert directly in front of me, much farther away than it seemed. I sighed happily. A vibrant parade of memories filled the empty landscape, reminding me that for everything I had lost, and for everything I had left behind, my past was something that could never be taken away from me. It had happened, it had existed, and it had made me who I was — the kind of person who could ride my bicycle across more than 2,700 miles of rough and rugged terrain in twenty-four days. It was a beautiful past, sparked by adventure and surrounded by the most spectacular colors. My imagination infused it with richness, and it nourished my soul from beyond the arbitrary barriers of time and space.
My mind drifted to the past that Geoff and I shared. It was the better part of a decade — most of my twenties, the best years of my life, and my youth. I had resented him for throwing it all away on a whim, on a notion, on a lark, for a twenty-one-year-old girl. Or, I remembered from our conversation the night we broke up — perhaps it wasn’t even her fault. Perhaps she didn’t matter. I was never going to be the kind of companion Geoff seemed to desire. What kind of companion that even was, I could only guess. I imagined a spontaneous romantic willing to follow him to the edges of the wilderness. I imagined an untamed stallion galloping into exciting adventures. I could almost see her long, dark hair whipping in the breeze on the edge of a sand cliff high above the sea.
But when she turned to face me, I realized I was looking at an idyllic version of myself. She representing the companion that I longed to be — adventurous, spontaneous, and beautiful. Maybe none of those dreams ever manifested, or maybe they simply didn’t work in the practical application of real life. Maybe Geoff’s and my entire history had been a failing effort to mash bloated ideals into the unfitting realities of our lives.
As the memories continued to swirl through the desert, I couldn’t connect the lines where our beautiful past dropped into this sun-hardened present. Despite our failed efforts to provide each other with happiness, I couldn’t accept the notion that we never shared love. But, then again, Geoff had never seemed the type to release the people he loved to the wind. He had always been such a rock. He had been my rock. It was still so difficult to understand.
And yet, at one point, he was there. He had been with me in similar moments of perspective-altering discovery, plying the lonely desert on a bicycle, in that distant past now irretrievably disconnected from this sand basin where I had landed. But our past still lingered in my memories. It shaped my life, and no one, not even Geoff, could take that away.
A border patrol vehicle passed. The driver turned his head and regarded me with a stony face, his sunglass-shaded eyes betraying no hint of suspicion. But I felt exposed. This was a no-man’s land, a true road to nowhere. I suddenly became uncomfortably self-aware.
I turned on my iPod and switched the settings to random shuffle; a selection of 1,387 songs promised to divert my mind from descending too far into the movie reel of my past. Soon Elliot Smith was singing about finding “a beautiful place to get lost.” The highway stretched straight and true over the curvature of the Earth. Every so often, a black cow would look up from a windmill a half-mile from the road, or a roadrunner would leap along the pavement. The wind continued to rustle the spiny brush, but the landscape was otherwise devoid of life.
I had spent so much of my summer fretting and panicking about being alone. Fear of solitude had cast such a thick cloud over my preparation for the Tour Divide that I had entirely forgotten that fear and solitude were precisely what I was seeking in this journey. I needed fear to quiet my ego, focus my mind and expose my true strengths. I needed solitude to reflect on how those strengths shaped my identity. The object had always been to unearth pieces of myself, new pieces of understanding and strength that I never realized were even out there for discovery. And yet I had let loathing and loneliness nearly blind me to my own presence in the existing moment, until the old and broken pieces threatened to bury me completely. Breaking up with Geoff had been a shuddering jolt to my life’s narrative, but it certainly wasn’t the end of the story. I felt grateful for the opportunity to open a new chapter after such a dramatic transition — the bottom of 2,740 miles of discovery and introspection.
Still, for all of the solitude I both struggled against and sought, the Divide had provided me with surprising and sometimes heart-rending human companionship. The strangers who were kind to me still filled my heart with gratitude. I reflected on my time with the people in Pie Town, the lodge owner in Platoro, Patti and Gary Blakley, the bike mechanics in Steamboat Springs, and of course Kirsten and Marjane. Their kindness reflected the far-reaching love that all people share, ultimately, and these threads of connection ensure that no one is truly alone.
As a Donna the Buffalo song cycled through my iPod, I wondered what John was doing at that moment. It was hard to believe it had been two weeks since I had seen him last. It was a Monday, so he was probably at work, clicking the refresh button on the Tour Divide tracker displayed on his computer screen. He was probably smiling with the satisfaction of a successful coach, knowing he had played a crucial role in my success. But how crucial was his role? John wasn’t with me during the hard times, the rain and mud and chest-convulsing cold. John had been a good companion and a good friend, but ultimately what both he and Geoff taught me was that I only had myself to rely on in the end. I had to truly trust myself when the going got tough. And when the going did get tough, I dug deep inside myself and I persevered. I had been brave on my own. I had been strong on my own.
These warm feelings jolted quickly away as iPod shuffled to a song I had come to associate with that rainy day on Indiana Pass, the day I encountered Pete in the ambulance: “What Sarah Said,” by Death Cab for Cutie. The intensity of the emotions I experienced that day continued to haunt me even though the source of those emotions — the conviction that Pete was badly hurt and might die — proved to be untrue. Even in my happy state on The Lonely Highway, tears filled my eyes as the lyrics began: “It came to me then that every plan is a tiny prayer to Father Time.”
Indeed, every pedal stroke I made was one of these tiny prayers, a reminder that my only real investment in my future were the steps I took toward it — everything else was just a dream, a plan, or a fear. When I was honest with myself, I
had to acknowledge that the lingering grief I felt for Pete’s accident was largely built on grief that I felt for the parts of myself I had lost, and that my fear for Pete’s future reflected my apprehension that I would never recover my own sense of self. But from the tentative steps I took to board the ferry in Juneau to the excruciatingly heavy steps that carried me into Silver City, I had proved to myself just how powerful unwavering forward motion can be. With every pedal stroke south, I wasn’t delaying the life “I needed to get on with” — I was getting on with my life. And in finishing the Tour Divide, I had given myself the most wonderful gift: a preview of the brave and strong person waiting to emerge from my shattered identity.
My leg muscles started to leak lactic acid and I responded by pushing harder. Even with the heat and the strong wind plowing into my face as much as my side, I was keeping my pace steady at fourteen to fifteen miles per hour, an almost unbelievable speed in my state of physical fatigue. The fatigue dulled my intelligence, and my emotions were still those of a child, raw and intense. But now they were tinged with hints of understanding, like a child on the verge of adolescence. Through my earphones, Bright Eyes sang, “Now I am riding … all over this island … looking for something … to open my eyes.”
Mile markers ticked down what seemed like ridiculously small numbers. There were thirty-three miles to go. And then, in what seemed like a swift moment later, just twenty-five. My legs ached; my Achilles tendons and knees burned. But I had moved beyond pain, to a place where anticipation trumped almost every other emotion. There were twenty-one miles to go. And then eighteen. I turned up my music louder, letting the miles disappear in my own private chamber of sound.
After mile marker twelve, a car pulled up beside me. I looked over to see my mom rolling down the passenger side window. I pulled one of my earphones out of my ear.
“We thought we might have missed you!” my mom called out. “We were driving down the road, and we weren’t passing you, and weren’t passing you, and your dad started to drive faster. We thought you might make it to the border before us.”
“I feel great!” I yelled back. “Just eleven more miles!”
“You are really cooking!” my dad yelled from the driver’s seat. “We’ll see you soon!”
“Yeah,” I yelled. “Just forty-five more minutes!”
After mile marker 4, the road climbed a miniscule mound of a hill and dropped back into the valley. In the near distance, a tight cluster of trees came into view. From my vantage point, it looked like a tiny island oasis in an ocean of rocks and sand.
“Holy cow, that’s Antelope Wells,” I thought. “I’m really going to do this thing. I really am.” My heart vibrated with a shock of emotions as electric and alive as any of the happiest moments in my life. “I never thought I could ride the Great Divide; I never even believed I could. Really no one believed I could, and I did it. I did it anyway.”
As I passed mile marker 1, I purposely hit the “next” button on my iPod to forever cement a finishing song, chosen by serendipity. The song that serendipity picked threw my rhythm off for a second, because it was song I neither knew I downloaded on my iPod nor even owned; in fact, I was only vaguely aware I had ever heard it before. But as the quiet melody filled my ears, the simple lyrics touched my soul. And through the electric echoes of truth, Cat Stevens sang, “Morning has broken, like the first sunlight. Blackbird has spoken, like the first song.”
I craned my neck to watch the stark blue sky, strung with ribbons of wispy clouds. The mountains stood in the distance, stoic and unmoving. A grin erupted across my face as the dry wind rushed between my teeth. “Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning; Born of the one light, Eden saw play; Praise with elation, praise every morning; God’s recreation of the new day.”
When I looked down again, I could see the arms of my parents, waving wildly like shipwrecked sailors who had just spotted a yacht. They stood in front of a closed gate, blocking the entrance to a border station no larger than a roadside coffee stand. A couple of sun-bleached houses and half-dozen haggard trees were all that distinguished Antelope Wells from the seemingly endless expanse of desert. It was everything I had pursued for twenty-four days — twenty-four days filled with enough joy and discovery and anguish to fill a short lifetime. I raised my left arm in a victorious fist, touched my wheel to the closed border gate, and stepped off my bike for the last time.
My mom rushed up to me and wrapped her arms around me. My dad had a smile as wide as mine. “Just as I thought,” he said. “One of the proudest days of my life.”
“Oops,” I said, “I have to check my time. I looked at my watch. It was 5:24 p.m. “I think that’s twenty-four days and um, seven hours. And twenty-four minutes.”
“My mom wiped tears from her cheeks. “So is that good?”
“Well, it’s the women’s record from Banff, by kind of a lot,” I said. “I only missed the border-to-border record by about eight hours.”
“I can’t believe you rode this entire way,” my dad said.
“I can’t believe I rode the entire Great Divide and the weather never got hot!” I said.
My dad raised his eyebrows. “Actually, the car thermometer said it was 98 degrees when we stopped here. I’d say that’s pretty hot.”
“Wow,” I said. “Really? 98 degrees?“ I shook my head in disbelief. “I guess the crosswind helps more than I knew.”
My dad turned and opened the trunk. “So what do you want?” he asked as he popped open a cooler. “We brought pineapple and yogurt and cookies and Diet Pepsi.”
“Ooo!” I said. “Diet Pepsi. And pineapple.”
“Anything you want to do while you’re here?”
“I was really hoping to cross the border and get my passport stamped,” I said. “But it looks like the border station is closed.”
“I think it’s only open from eight to four,” my mom said. “That’s what the sign says. It was closed when we got here.”
“Shoot,” I said. “I wished I’d known that. I would have gotten up earlier.” Which was a lie. As it was, I had ridden the entire 125-mile stretch in less than ten hours, a pace much faster than I’d expected to keep. Ten hours rivaled the time all of the race leaders took to travel that stretch of highway — something my dad had researched so he could guess my arrival time. Since it took the race leaders ten hours to ride from Silver City, my dad later told me, they figured it would take me about fourteen.
“This doesn’t look like the kind of place where they’d really mind if you just hopped the gate,” my dad said.
“Maybe,” I said. “But I’m also guessing they have guns. I feel okay just calling this gate the end. It looks like the end. There’s a big stop sign.”
“How does it feel to stop?” my dad asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It hasn’t begun to sink in. Right now it feels good, and tired, and a little bit anticlimactic.”
“I’m sure a few months from now you’ll look back on this and be really proud of what you did,” my dad said.
“Probably,” I said. “Definitely.”
“Here, I’m just going to take a few pictures,” my dad said, motioning at me to go stand by my bike.
I glanced across the gate to the open expanse of land beyond. “Wow,” I said. “I can’t believe that’s Mexico. It actually is.”
I continued glancing south as we removed the bike bags, wheels and seat post, and stuffed the mud-caked, battered bicycle in the trunk of my parents’ car. I felt a small sting of guilt as I ducked into the back seat, where my legs instantly cramped up and the desert heat suddenly hit me like a furnace blast. It felt strange to not ride, and to have nowhere left to ride. As there usually is with the accomplishment of any big goal, I felt a little emptiness at no longer having anything to work toward. As memories slipped away to the stark realities of the present, I could only ask myself the inevitable question — how far have I really come? Much more time and distance would have to pass before I could even be
gin to understand the answer. I closed the car door and took one last, longing look south.
There on the blank slate of desert, where the shadows of barren mountains blackened the sand, I exposed the pieces of myself that would never change — the pieces that drove toward adventure, that ached for truth, that had a limitless capacity to love. I held them open to the sun and wind, for the first time wholly confident that I could strip my body to the barest grains of life, and still these pieces would never leave me, never drift away. Scorched earth shimmered in the low afternoon sunlight, and the wide spine of the continent stretched over the horizon. It just kept going.
2009 Tour Divide
Banff, Alberta, to Antelope Wells, New Mexico
June 12, 2009
42 Starters | 16 finishers | 21 scratched | 5 relegated
Finishing times in days, hours and minutes
1. Matthew Lee, 17:23:45
2. Kurt Refsnider, 18:11:13 (top rookie)
3. Tracey and Jay Petervary, tandem, 18:13:50
4. Chris Plesko, 19:00:21 (single speed course record)
5. Leighton White, 21:05:15
Blaine Nestor, 21:05:15
7. Steve Wilkinson, 21:10:34
Joe Meiser, 21:10:34
9. Eric Bruntjen, 21:12:00
10. Alan Goldsmith, 21:12:59
John Fettis, 21:12:59
Cannon Shockley, 21:12:59
13. Jill Homer, 24:07:24 (female course record)
14. Trevor Browne, 27:05:42
Paul Howard, 27:05:42
16. Michael Komp, 31:22:35
Relegated
Dario Valsesia (course deviation), 22:00:30
Jamie Thomson (support violation) 25:06:28
Deanna Adams (course deviation) 31:07:30