Chapter Five

Marin

 

Wisps of low clouds clung to the cables of the Bay Bridge when we entered San Francisco. The sea air was thick with salty sweetness despite the gas fumes from the traffic streaming beside us. I was homesick for everywhere else, with the fog painting a blurry image of my coastal Alaska home, and the traffic echoing the sounds of my sprawling suburban origins. The city beyond was just another stop in an opaque future, masked behind a curtain of gray.

I was ready to be anywhere else. The 3,000-mile drive left me numb to my own weariness, but I still felt the unease of movement without clear purpose. The periods of silence between Geoff and me only grew longer the farther we drove south. We spent a carefree day in Vancouver, avoiding direct contact with each other as we caught up with old friends. We spent two nights with a mutual friend in Portland. I spent as long as I could each day piloting my bike along the fog-shrouded streets of the city. The last night, I lost my temper with Geoff when he wandered back inside the house at 1 a.m. after spending more than an hour on the phone with Misty.

“How can you continue to build a relationship with her right in front of me?” I cried. “Even if you don’t love me anymore, even if I’m nothing more to you than a friend, or even just a chauffeur, I’m still here! Do you have any idea how that makes me feel?”

“This is hard for me, too” he yelled back. “I can’t just ignore everything else that’s going on.”

“I can’t believe you dragged me down here,” I fumed. “That was such an incredibly selfish thing to do. You think you can have it all, and the amazing thing is you seem to get it.”

The next day we pressed through the thick silence into northern California. I took out my anger and hurt on a small mountain, mashing the pedals up a sandy road as I climbed from 2,000 feet to 6,000 feet into what at the time was noticeable altitude. Mount Shasta shimmered in the far distance like a mirage. I returned to the hotel calmer and more grounded and crawled into bed. Geoff wrapped his arms around me and softly kissed my neck. “This still feels so right,” he whispered. Tears streamed down my cheeks because what he said was true, and it was the cruelest thing he had said yet.

The next day, I threaded a few more strands of hope around my fraying nerves. Geoff still gravitated toward me on some level. What if I could make him see that maybe that could be enough? It seemed pathetic to yearn for a partnership where love was only attached to one side, but people did that every day. So many marriages were based on partnership, and people didn’t give up on those because, as much as it pains romantics to admit it, partnership and survival are the basis for love. Geoff still needed me, somehow, and for that reason alone it was impossible for me to cling to the anger I felt toward him indefinitely.

But we had to push any threads of progress under the table again once we arrived at our friends’ house in San Francisco. My pain, and our breakup, went back in the closet. Paul and Monika lived at the edge of a ritzy neighborhood in the heart of the city. Their semi-glamorous urban lifestyle was intoxicating, and I started spending long days and nights with them, visiting Alcatraz, touring the Mission, walking the pier, eating Ethiopian food and sipping coffee at a sidewalk café. The more I spent fully immersed in the San Francisco tourist routine, the more Geoff withdrew into his cell phone and its hateful connection with Misty. He rarely went out with us, and when he did, he was quiet and distant. I was losing him fast.

I reacted by spending even more time away on my bike. When Paul and Monika were at work, I trolled the city streets without a plan or a destination, making turn after turn until I was hopelessly lost. I weaved the empty corridors of big industrial areas and tore through the clatter and screams of run-down neighborhoods. I raced behind streetcars and darted in front of buses. I stumbled into the Golden Gate Bridge and crossed it in fog so thick I could hardly see the bridge towers ten feet in front of me. Usually I didn’t even want to find my way back, but I always did.

The day before his race, Geoff finally spoke to me directly.

“Would you be okay with taking down the tent after the race starts?” Geoff said. “I think it would be best if I could just sleep as long as possible beforehand.”

I nodded. In our three days in the city, I had almost forgotten that the reason we had even come to San Francisco was so Geoff could run the Miwok 100, a one-hundred-kilometer foot race through the steep hills of the Marin Headlands. I had promised months before that I would provide support for him during the race, and reminders of that duty only cropped up occasionally after we broke up. Now it was here and I just wanted to head out alone on my bike, to get lost yet again in a wilderness of pavement and noise. But if I abandoned Geoff now, that truly would be the end. I clutched my strained threads of hope as I got in the car with him to drive to the race start.

Since my blow-up in Portland, we hadn’t talked directly about our cabin in Teasdale, Utah. As far as I was concerned, that option was still on the table even if both of us were silently acknowledging that was never going to happen. An actual open disavowal of the plan had yet to be voiced by either of us. And even as I loathed Geoff’s brutal honesty and even crueler emotional distance, I still wasn’t willing to let him go, not yet. I vowed to help make the Miwok 100K his best race ever. Maybe if he saw my devotion, he might think about me differently.

We crossed the Golden Gate Bridge into the thick, sustaining fog. For the area’s proximity to the city, the Marin Headlands are startlingly remote, a series of steep grass hills rising as high as 2,000 feet above the sea. The rolling landscape is webbed with fire roads and singletrack trails, but with the exception of a few small towns at sea level, it’s mostly clear of human-built structures. For early May, the weather was dismal — forty degrees and raining with a stiff, gusting wind. With some difficulty, we set up our as-yet-unused, new car camping tent at the campground closest to the race start. Given the state of the weather, I wasn’t surprised we were the only ones there.

While Geoff organized his race gear, I sat in the tent and warmed up leftover pasta for a late-night second dinner. As he ate, he detailed exactly what gear he wanted at exact checkpoints, the time range he expected to reach those checkpoints in, and what kind of schedule I would need to keep in order to drive my car around and reach them in time.

“How do you want me to get you the stuff?” I asked.

“Just hand it to me,” he said.

“So, you want me to stand at the checkpoint with stuff in my hand and wait for you for an indefinite amount of time?” I asked.

“Um, yeah,” he said, as though that part of my support duties made perfect sense. Hard rain was pelting on the tent. It was as near freezing as San Francisco ever gets. I envisioned an entire next day standing out in the cold dampness, waiting for the five seconds he needed me to hand him a bundle of race crap.

He pointed to a single checkpoint and said, “I won’t need you between these miles — just at this checkpoint both times I come through. There will probably be, I don’t know, about four hours between them. You can either wait there, head back to town for a couple hours, go for a bike ride, whatever you want to do. Just be there in four hours or less.”

“Okay,” I nodded. I had to devote an entire day, but his requests didn’t seem that complicated. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

Geoff’s cell phone alarm went off at 4:45 a.m. We rolled out of bed and he pulled on his shorts and shirt, and rain gear over that. “I’m going to hand all this stuff to you just before the race starts,” he said. “But I’d rather not freeze, so if you could stick with me right up until the race actually starts, that would be great.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “I want to see the start.”

“Then come back here and take down the tent,” Geoff said. “You might have to hurry, because I’ll probably be at the first checkpoint within an hour.”

The rain had diminished to an icy drizzle by the time we reached the race start. Hundreds of people milled around in the morning darkness. Shorts-clad racers did jumping jacks to stay warm. Large men bundled in down coats kissed their runner wives. I stood as a placeholder in the long line for the men’s bathroom while Geoff collected his number and registration packet, then handed him a banana and a couple packets of Gu. I followed him with one hundred or so other runners to the starting line. As the race director counted down from ten, Geoff quickly stripped off his rain gear and shoved it in my arms.

“See you in an hour,” he said tersely. “Remember it’s the vest this time, then the stuff in the drop bag the next time.”

“Um, good luck,” I mumbled, but he was already sprinting into a rush of headlamps as they bounded into the foggy morning.

Daylight broke, bringing with it a thick shroud of blue fog. I stood at the first checkpoint with Geoff’s hydration vest in my arms, and included a dry bag full of warm clothing because it was still in the low forties and raining, and I expected him to be soaked and cold. After about fifteen minutes, he bounded down the hill in first position and grabbed the vest out of my arms, not even breaking his stride as he discarded his used Gu packets and water bottles in a trail of debris.

“You cold?” I called out.

“I’m fine,” he yelled back, and continued running past the checkpoint station as a pack of five other runners followed close on his heels.

The next checkpoint was a long way around. I stopped for coffee and inched my car up the switchbacks on the narrow, shrouded road. The fog was still thick enough to prevent me from even seeing road signs ten feet away, and I was terrified that I was going to plunge off a cliff, one thousand feet into the sea. That was, if I was even on the west side of the headlands. I wasn’t sure any more. I reached the checkpoint, grabbed the latest bundle and stood outside, chatting with other forlorn-looking race wives who clutched running gear and shivered in the cold rain. I waited nearly a half hour before Geoff blasted through, showering me with more discarded items and yelling that he needed the vest refilled with water and drink mix for his next time through that same checkpoint.

“Still four hours?” I called out.

“Yeah, probably,” he yelled back.

I crawled back into my car and started the ignition to warm up. I started to pull on my own athletic gear — thick polar fleece leggings and jacket beneath heavy-duty rain gear. I figured I could get in about three hours of riding before I had to be back to attend to Geoff’s needs. It was a horrible day for a ride — all discomfort and no views — but I figured I had been fairly lazy in San Francisco and I could use the training miles.

As I strapped on my helmet and moved to open the door, I noticed Geoff’s cell phone wedged in the side pocket. I eyed it with intrigue and revulsion, both for what I knew was in that phone and for what I was badly tempted to do. I felt a tinge of shame, masked by my growing well of blind jealousy. I found my hand reaching for it with the guilty thrill of a child reaching into a cookie jar. I flipped it open and started shuffling through the text messages. Geoff had deleted his incoming messages, but his outbox was full of more than fifty, all directed to Misty.

“I miss u so bad.”

“Really wish u were here.”

“Lots of driving, not fun. Cant wait to c u in idaho.”

Blood drained away from my face and rushed into my brain. As much as already knew exactly what I was going to find, it was so much more difficult to see it in bold, black print. Before, in our silences, I could allow myself to read signals the way I wanted to read them. The signals displayed on Geoff’s cell phone left no mixed messages. And what did he mean about Idaho? Then I remembered. There was another race near the end of May in Idaho. He had told me that he was marginally interested in running it. Now I could see that not only was he actually planning on running it, but also was planning to meet Misty there. This clarified that Geoff had no intention of spending a month in Teasdale with me or driving to the start of the Great Divide race. This explained why the timing of my race had been so inconvenient for him. From this perspective, we were a dead relationship on wheels. He probably couldn’t wait to slough off the baggage and start his new life.

All the brave acceptance of reality I had mustered during the past two weeks could no longer cut through my devastation. Geoff and I really were over. He had already moved on. I knew where that left me — standing alone in the foggy rain, clutching the debris of our spent relationship. And I had followed Geoff along three thousand miles of lonely road just to land in this spot. I had embraced him when he reached out to me and I had taken down his campsite in the morning and I had held his stuff in the cold as he sprinted past without even looking me in the eye.

Tears returned to my eyes and I fought them back. I flung open the car door and pulled my bike down from the roof rack. I threw my leg over the saddle and stormed across the parking lot. A race official waved me down. “No bikes on the trail!” he yelled. I regarded him with a deadly glare. “Fuck you,” I seethed. “I’m going to the fire road, not the trail. At least let me out of the parking lot before you yell at me.” It was possibly the first time in my life I had openly cursed at a stranger. I felt no remorse.

I mashed the pedals up the muddy fire road. The fog quickly swallowed the parking lot scene, muffling the hum of generators and chatting race volunteers. Within seconds I thought I could hear the lapping of waves on the shoreline, but it could have just been the flow of fog so thick that was close to liquid. Anyway, the ocean was probably more than fifteen hundred feet below. But I fixated on the ocean sounds as my heart pounded like a pressure cooker. I pedaled with every ounce of strength in my legs, and still a strengthening hate boiled inside my core.

I fought to keep my heart rate near maximum capacity, in a place of dull darkness where thoughts only register in muffles and screams. Cloudy emotional pain could not enter this cave of intense but pure physical suffering. My vision began to blur. I didn’t know if it was fatigue or tears or the fog. It only made me pedal harder. The fire road rounded a sharp corner and began to drop steeply. The soft silhouettes of trees and brush blended into blurry shadows as I gained velocity. The road dipped into an opaque gray void. I hoped it would pull me all the way to the sea. I didn’t care if I was gone for three hours or three days. Geoff didn’t need me — not in life, and not in this race.

Although I couldn’t see the odometer amid the blur, I would later discover that it topped out at thirty-three miles per hour. That’s how fast I was likely moving when the front wheel skidded across a mostly buried metal pipe that cut diagonally across the width of the fire road. It was the same color as the dirt, coated with rain, and I didn’t see it until that last heart-stopping second when I noticed my front wheel connecting with slick steel. The wheel skidded down the length of the pipe and launched skyward like a snowboarder dismounting a rail. Then, as though the back wheel were an edge suddenly caught in a groove, the bike went from thirty-three miles per hour to a dead stop in a fraction of a second, slamming me into the gravel with a deafening thud. My right arm hit first, followed by my face. My rain pants and fleece tore as I skidded down the fire road for more than ten feet before coming to a stop. My bike landed a good distance from my body, both crumpled on the road.

I lay paralyzed with shock for several seconds. As my eyes blinked involuntarily against the pelting rain, I held my hand to my helmet and slowly pulled myself to my knees. My right arm throbbed with sharp streaks of pain. I could see blood seeping from a hole ripped in the arm of my jacket. I was too scared of what I might find to roll up the sleeve and look any closer. I stood up and staggered toward my bike. The pain in my arm rushed to my head and forced me to kneel back down on the gravel again. I was convinced my arm was fractured. There could be no other explanation for such blunt and intense pain.

Amid the electric streaks of pain rose a new sort of agony. It was distant at first, a quiet hum in the back of my mind. But like a long-falling nuclear bomb finally connecting with the ground, it exploded in a cacophony of emotion so overwhelming, and a darkness so complete, that I heard nothing, saw nothing, knew nothing but pain. The pain was almost merciful in its totality, long festering beneath a hard shell only to finally be detonated by the fuse of a bike crash. My possibly broken arm, the road rash on my face and legs … these things were just fleeting, unimportant, consumed by an abstract mushroom cloud of despair. It was the pain of loss, and like a nuclear explosion, it swallowed everything.

Still on my knees, I shuffled off the road and slunk beneath the low branches of a bush. I lay on my side and pulled my knees to my chin. There was nothing I could do but absorb the fallout. I clutched the arm I still believed to be broken and sobbed. My tears had no trigger or destination. They were just darkness settling, like ashes to a scorched Earth. Geoff didn’t love me. Possibly, he never loved me. Possibly, I wasn’t capable of being loved. But either way, I was alone in a dark, cold world, and I had no one I could rely on except for myself. The tragedy was that I wasn’t reliable. I was a broken person.

Long minutes trickled away as I sobbed beneath the bush. Slowly I started to return to self-awareness. I wiped away thick streams of snot with my good arm. The throbbing in my left arm had diminished slightly and I had started to doubt that the injury was as severe as I initially thought. My bike was still strewn across the middle of the road. Someone else might come along and see it lying there, and try to help me. Or maybe no one would come along. I didn’t really care either way. They could let me lay here a few minutes longer.

As soon as my sobs finally dissipated, I listened for the ocean. I could no longer hear the imaginary waves. My body remained in the fetal position and I wondered if I would ever find the courage or strength to crawl out from under that bush. Footsteps approached. I slithered out from under the branches and shuffled on my knees back to the road. A group of three cyclists were walking their bikes up the steep gravel. I had tossed my helmet aside earlier, and the bike was still in its original twisted position.

“You OK?” one cyclist asked me as he approached me.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” I said hoarsely. I was sure my eyes were bloodshot, and my skin blotchy and red. “I crashed my bike on that pipe over there. I’m still trying to collect myself but I don’t think I’m injured.”

“You need us to send back help?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I was just at Pantoll about twenty minutes ago. It can’t be a long ride back to there.”

“I think it’s about six miles, probably mostly uphill” he said. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Just give me a second. I’ll be right behind you guys.”

They left me alone and I slowly rolled up the sleeve of my injured arm. Long cuts sliced into my skin, and surrounding them was a large bruise already turning a dark shade of purple, but I couldn’t see any signs of a fracture. As I grabbed my overturned bike, the streaks of pain immediately returned. I righted the bike with my good arm and tried to grab the handlebars again, but even gripping the bars hurt my left arm more than I could stand. There was no way could I ride terrain like this, uphill, one-handed, and risk falling again on my injured arm. I resigned myself to the fact I would likely have to walk six miles back to the parking lot.

For the next two hours, rain fell hard, fog swirled around, my arm throbbed, and I filled the remaining space with self-loathing. How could I have been so stupid? So blind? What made me think I could ever ride a mountain bike? What made me think I could make this disaster of a trip work? When I finally reached the parking lot, I was drenched to the skin, and shivering so uncontrollably that every movement returned pain to my bruised arm. As I wheeled the bike to my car, I saw Geoff approaching from the race tents. In my single-minded march through the rain, I had genuinely forgotten why I was even out there in the first place. Seeing Geoff made me realize I was probably late for my race duties. He was going to be pissed that I missed his run-through. I didn’t really care. For once he could be angry at me. Anger would be a welcome relief from his cruel indifference. But as he got closer, I saw his skin was pale, his eyes bloodshot and his face twisted into a miserable scowl. That wasn’t the face of anger — it was the face of disappointment.

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled feebly. “Sorry I missed you. I went out for a ride and I crashed my bike. Bike’s fine but my arm’s screwed up. I’ve been walking for six miles.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Geoff said. “My race is over.”

I propped the bike against my car and clutched my arm. I wanted him to notice that I was really hurt, but he wasn’t even looking directly at me. He was glancing back at the race tents, probably watching for someone else to come through. “What happened?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he exhaled loudly. “I really have no idea. Things were going great. I was running well. I was feeling strong, holding first place, and then my stomach turned on me. I threw up like five times out on the trail. I couldn’t keep any food down. I’d try to eat something and I’d throw up again. And I just felt worse and worse and weaker and weaker. I came to that last checkpoint and I knew I was done. I caught a ride back to here, so I’m early anyway.”

“You just tossed it in like that?” I asked. “Weren’t you still in first place?”

“I maybe could’ve walked to the finish. But I wasn’t going to place in the top three, not even in the top ten at that point. The only reason to run this race was to get in the top three so I could get into Western States, and it wasn’t going to happen.”

“So what do you want to do now?” I asked.

“Now, I just want to sit in the car and warm up. Then I want to change my clothes. Then we can go home.”

“And then?” I started to ask, but he was no longer listening to me. He took the keys I had just fished out of my pocket from my outstretched hand and ducked into the car to start the engine. I watched him through the window. Even through streaks of rain I could see the frustration etched in his face. I had the strong feeling that this would be the last time I would ever see Geoff through old eyes, because no matter how many times I saw him after this point, he would never look the same. This was the real break up, the final moment of truth. The one thing both of us needed more than anything in the world was someone to comfort us in our pain, and that was the one thing we couldn’t give each other.