Chapter Thirteen

Beyond Idaho

 

The alarm clock blasted static noise at 5:30 a.m. John didn’t even stir. I quietly changed from my dry clothes to my still-damp clothes, packed up my bike and slipped out into the gray, drizzling dawn. The pine trees of Eastern Idaho were the tallest I had seen on the Divide, towering fifty and sixty feet over my head. Even the low branches were draped in satiny curtains of fog.

Just a few miles outside of town, I turned onto the old rail bed. Just as John had promised, the trail was covered in coarse sand. I closed my eyes and tuned into my best recollection of snow-bike slog mentality. I thought of the time I pushed my bike twenty-five miles along the powdered-sugar surface of the frozen Kuskokwim River during the last day of the 2008 Iditarod Trail Invitational. The course grains of wind-drifted snow were so loose that my feet sank deep into the trail, and I struggled to keep my speed above two miles per hour. I recalled the way the frigid wind blew hard at my back, the exhaustion and pain that needled at every part of my body, and the unchanging scenery of the wide river corridor that made me feel like I must have been mad to believe I was actually moving forward. It was all I could do to hold onto my sanity over ten hours of walking across that frozen wasteland. I took comfort in the idea that nothing on the Divide could even come close to that level of slog.

The Idaho rail trail was rippled with washboard bumps and larger waves of whoop-de-dos similar to the moguls made by snowmobiles, but it was hardly soft. In fact, the material that covered the trail was a fine, ashy sand, and rain saturation only seemed to pack it more solidly, like a sandcastle at a beach. If I ignored the jackhammer jolting of the washboard, it was easy to ride ten miles per hour, and not too difficult to increase to twelve or even fourteen miles per hour as the rain streaked down.

The rail bed carved a perfectly straight line across the broad plateau, spanning swamps and cutting visible notches into the pine forest. Lost as I was in memories of the Kuskokwim River, I was struck by how similar the Idaho rail trail was to the Iditarod Trail in Alaska’s Susitna Valley, where it followed a straight survey line across frozen swamps and continued, unbending, through pipe-cleaner strands of black spruce trees. The only difference between the Iditarod Trail and this Idaho rain trail was, of course, the absence of snow and the height of the trees.

Soon enough, even the absence of snow failed to register in my mind as the morning faded to a more monotone shade of gray. My memories became so intertwined with my reality that I started to picture myself riding across the frozen muskeg of the Susitna Valley. In my mind, it was still early March, my foot was still unfrozen, Geoff and I were still a couple, and everything still looked and felt very much the same — and yet, irreconcilably different. I shook my head and snapped back to the present, a present drenched in rain and towering trees, a present where John was sleeping back in Sawtell while I faced a broad, uncertain future, all alone.

Sunbeams had started to needle through the clouds as the mountains closed in on both sides of the rail bed. As the canyon narrowed, the trail started dropping toward the Warm River. The landscape was postcard scenic, with soft light shining on broad, bushy trees as the whitewater river roared far below. I imagined a polished locomotive perched on the precipice of that proverbial postcard. One aspect of my personality that makes me a good candidate for long-distance endurance cycling is the fact that I am always impressed by scenery, which translates into motivation to keep pushing toward beautiful new discoveries. The relative ease of the rail trail combined with the surprise emergence of sunlight put me in an incredible mood.

I crossed a campground and climbed out of the river valley, emerging onto another broad plateau striped with bright green rows of potato plants that stretched beyond the horizon. To the far west, the majestic peaks of the Grand Tetons stabbed at silver-lined patches of clouds. I realized with another pang of nostalgia that I was incredibly close to Idaho Falls, a small Eastern Idaho city where I spent ten months of the rockiest period of my relationship with Geoff, before our final breakup of course. It was 2005, four years since we struck up a relationship that never seemed to lift out of the “just having fun” phase. I couldn’t take our uncertain status and uncommitted life in Utah any more, so I accepted a job 200 miles north of Salt Lake City. While I didn’t break up with Geoff, I committed to moving on. My life centered on work and parties and going to the gym. I had few other interests. I stopped riding my bike. I adopted a cat. That was the summer before Geoff convinced me to move with him to Alaska. I had been mostly unhappy, and I had forgotten just how beautiful this region really was.

Eastern Idaho was also as close as the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route was ever going to come to Salt Lake City. It would be a four-hour drive, tops, for my parents to reach this point and whisk me away from my self-imposed sentence of loneliness and fatigue. The thought had crossed my mind several times in the past few days. But when I finally reached my bailout point, I found it to be surrounded in beauty, and it was easy to ignore that option. While I my mind was temporarily freed from the struggle and pain, it was easy to make the right choice.

It was just before 10 a.m. when I passed the turnoff for Ashton. I smirked at the idea of stopping to spend the night there, as John had suggested the night before. “That would surely be a grand tour,” I said out loud. “Racing three hours a day.” It occurred to me after I said it that most people would see three hours a day as a lot of racing. But I had fallen into a rhythm where I felt guilty if my pedaling time came in at anything less than twelve hours, and fourteen or even sixteen hours of constant crank-turning was starting to feel more natural.

As I approached the knife-sharp peaks of the Tetons, John pedaled up beside me. I hadn’t heard him over the music on my iPod, and the sight of his red jacket and stoic forward gaze surprised me so much that I jumped.

“Hey John!” I said. “I didn’t expect to see you coming this way. Did you get here on the road?”

“No,” he said, “I took the rail trail. I was starting to think I was never going to catch up to you.”

“Well,” I said, “that trail wasn’t nearly as bad as you said it was going to be.”

“It was well-packed,” John said. “Still, you’re flying.”

“So are you going to take that Ashton-Flagg Road to Jackson?” I asked.

“Even better,” John said. “I found a place we can stay tonight. It’s called Turpin Meadow Ranch. It’s just below Togwotee Pass. It’s a little beyond the Jackson cutoff, but they have cabins there and they do big family-style breakfasts. It’s normally a horse-riding place, but I told the guy we were on bicycles and he didn’t seem to mind.”

“Wow,” I said, genuinely taken aback. “Really?” I felt a rush of that old resentment about being told where I had to spend the night, especially at a time when I had felt so free and alive about my newfound solitude. At the same time, I was happy to see John, and the prospect of sleeping in a warm bed and eating a hot breakfast was always an appealing one.

As we climbed into the Tetons, John chatted as excitedly and amicably as he had on our first day through Montana. I mostly smiled and nodded, because I felt like I had already told him most of my stories, and I felt a newfound anxiety that he was going to find a way to hang around after the Turpin Meadow Ranch. It had become uncomfortably obvious that John was starting to develop feelings for me, beyond just a mutual liking as good bike-touring buddies. Whether this attraction was a recent development or perhaps had started all the way back at the starting line in Banff, I couldn’t be certain. What was even more uncertain was how exactly I felt about this attraction. John was definitely likeable — good looking, athletic, and smart. And he was one of the few men I had ever met who shared a cycling obsession equal to mine. But John was methodical while I was intuitive. John was rational while I was driven by dreams. John lived in Connecticut while I lived in Alaska. John was forty-five years old while I was twenty-nine. Everything about our backgrounds kept us on disparate sides of an unbridgeable divide. John seemed logical enough to recognize this, so I tried not to let my suspicions of romantic intentions worry me too much.

We crossed another state line. The sign was quaintly unceremonious: a rusty brown square that simply read “Wyoming,” so riddled with bullet holes that it really looked more like W**m*n*g. John told me to stop so he could take a picture.

“But you don’t have a camera,” I said.

“With your camera,” he replied. “Go stand over there.”

I faced him and smiled. “OK,” he said, “Lean a little this way.”

“What am I, a model?” I protested.

He just laughed and raised the camera. “Be sure to send this one to me after you get to New Mexico,” he said. “This is how I’m going to remember you.”

I stood stiffly next to the sign. “You should be proud, John,” I said as he snapped a series of shots. “I packed my baggy shorts away, so today I’m entirely aerodynamic.”

We crested the Ashton-Flagg Road only to see another dark thunderstorm looming over the eastern side of the Tetons. “This is bullshit,” I said as we approached the black clouds. “I’m sick of getting rained on.”

“We can outrun this storm,” John said.

“You can outrun this storm,” I shot back. “I’m going to go my own pace. I can’t keep your speed no matter how much I’d like to.”

“OK. I’ll wait for you at the campground,” John said. “Unless it’s raining. Then I’ll wait for you at Flagg Ranch.”

“Whatever works,” I grumbled. John disappeared into the distance, characteristically into me unless it was raining and the roads were wet, which seemed to be the most common condition of the Divide. Even though I certainly couldn’t blame him, I couldn’t help but file John away in my growing list of “men who abandon me when the going gets rough.”

Jeremy pedaled up beside me as I worked through the series of steep drainages. “Hey Jeremy. How’s the nine-speed treating you?” I asked him.

“It still hurts like hell,” he said. “But it gets a little better every day.”

“I really thought you were beyond here,” I said. “You must have left Sawtell after me.”

“Yeah, I saw your and John’s tracks on the rail trail. I guess you guys are still traveling together?”

“One more day,” I said. “He’s going to drop in Jackson.”

“I’m thinking of dropping in Flagg,” Jeremy said. “Stop me if I try to.”

“Tell John that,” I said. “You’re both going to beat me there. I’m fading here.”

With that, Jeremy passed, having no low gears to spin slowly up the hill.

But thanks to my low gears and unwavering cadence, I was the only one who got stuck out in the storm. Black clouds rumbled low and dropped quickly with surprisingly violence, light on lightning but extra generous with the rain. The road, maintained by the National Park Service, was mercifully well coated in enough smooth gravel to accommodate two-wheel-drive cars. Even so, my wheels cut a half-inch-deep trench into the mud, but the bridge of gravel at least made forward progress possible. I had been drenched so many times on the Divide that dampness was becoming the new normal, strange for a region that was considerably more arid than my rainforest home. What made the Divide different was that I had to live on the trail; there was no place to hide from the rain, at least for very long.

When I finally reached Flagg Ranch, the storm had cleared but I was dripping with chocolate-colored rainwater. I found John and Jeremy both plopped on a leather couch beside a fireplace. Although decorated with the heads of a dozen dead animals, the resort entry hall was ritzy enough that I felt sheepish about my muddiness, so I perched uncomfortably on the edge of the brick mantle.

“There’s a store over there,” John said. “You should probably stock up because I don’t think we’ll make it to Turpin Meadows before the kitchen closes.”

I grazed through the novelty gift store, picking up candy and chocolate and looking in vain for some source of protein. There were honey-roasted peanuts and two-ounce containers of tuna salad, but nothing that seemed too nourishing. Hopefully Turpin Meadows had eggs for breakfast, I thought. I walked out with a large cup of steaming black coffee and a chocolate ice cream sandwich that boasted a 560-calorie glut of energy.

“Forget those cheese wheels,” I said to John as I returned to the entry hall with the ice cream pressed to my lips. “Coffee and ice cream are my new rocket fuel. Where’s Jeremy?”

“He left,” John said. I frowned. “I did ask him if he wanted to ride with us,” John continued. “He said he had to get moving to make it to this campground up the highway before dark.”

“I’ve never seen a guy work so hard just to sleep outside,” I said. “And he’s not even gaining any ground by doing it. He’s still moving at pretty much the same pace as we are. Maybe we smell bad or something.”

“I don’t know,” John said. “I think Jeremy just prefers to ride alone.”

“I’m going to try to catch up to him tomorrow,” I said. “He is going about the same pace I am, and it would be nice to have some company after you leave. Maybe I’ll just come right out and ask him whether or not he wants to ride with me.”

It was John’s turn to frown. I thought I detected a slight air of jealousy. “You can go ahead and try,” he said. “I really think he’s a solo type of guy.”

Sunlight returned to the late afternoon sky as we joined the Grand Teton National Park tourist traffic on Highway 89.

“I feel incredible right now,” I told John. “That was really the most amazing ice cream sandwich I have ever consumed.”

“That’s good,” John said, “Because I see more storm clouds to the east. We still have forty miles to go, but it’s all paved. Let’s see if we can make it to the ranch by dark.”

We sprinted together, and for the first time I felt like I had no problem holding John’s more ambitious pace. My odometer shot into the twenties even though there was plenty of rolling uphill to match the descents. The reflection of the snow-capped Tetons sparkled in Jackson Lake, and the patchy thunderstorms did little more than fill the horizon with rainbows. We reached Turpin Meadows at 9 p.m., just a few moments after a neon orange sunset slipped beneath the mountains. The owner of the ranch walked outside to meet John and me, and directed us to a small log cabin at the edge of a horse pasture.

“I’m putting you guys in Osprey; hope that works okay,” the ranch owner said, referring to the name of the cabin. They were all named after different animals and they all looked exactly the same.

“I’m sure it will suit our needs fine,” John said formally. I wanted to add that we had just finished a 125-mile bike ride at the end of a thousand-mile week and were pretty much so happy for a chance to rest that we’d be willing to pass out in a pile of nails, so our needs were not hard to meet.

We propped our muddy bicycles against the porch and walked in the door. John turned on the light of the tiny room and my heart sank.

“Oh,” I said. “There’s only one bed.”

“Is that … is that a problem?” John asked in a low voice.

“No,” I said. “I mean, um, no. Not a problem. It’s still a bed. Of course I don’t mind sharing with you.”

We sat next to each other on the comforter with our respective dinners. John had managed to score a cup of soup and a pre-packaged tuna-and-cracker snack. I had my Flagg Ranch gourmet brownie and the rest of the almonds that I bought all the way back in Butte. As we ate quickly and quietly, John continued to shift his weight on the mattress with a fidgety sort of nervousness that made me feel extremely uneasy. I focused on the mashed brownie I was eating like it was the most interesting thing in all of the world. The silent tension between us only increased until my already fatigued muscles felt frozen in place. Still, I felt myself flinch as John leaned back to grab an energy bar and brushed his shoulder against mine. Finally, after several short but uncomfortably drawn-out minutes, John stood up.

“Mind if I take the first shower?” he asked.

“Of course not, not at all,” I said. As he disappeared behind the bathroom door, I flirted with the idea of skipping my shower for the night. Surely that would make me a little more repulsive, but at the same time, the route was only going to get more remote and I had no idea where my next shower might be. My eyes drifted down to the bed I was sitting on. It wasn’t even a queen-sized bed. It was a full-size at best, small and piled with extra pillows. Did John know there was only one bed in this place? Was this intentional? Was John going to try to sleep with me tonight? He seemed more gentlemanly than that, but I couldn’t be certain.

How would I react if he did make a move? I thought back to Hansel’s truck cab, on the only date I had been on since Geoff and I broke up. It was the day before I left Salt Lake to fly to Denver and then travel with my Colorado friends to the race start. Hansel called out of the blue and asked me if I wanted to go to a baseball game. I met him at the stadium. The home team was terrible and lost by nine points. Hansel took me to his house, made me a Texas barbecue sandwich, and drove me back to my car. As we wavered beneath the florescent lights of the stadium, he asked if he could kiss me. I leaned in and planted my lips against his. As thrilling as the initial sensation had been, I felt so awkward and strange that I was truly grateful I was unlikely to ever see Hansel again.

I looked out the window at my bicycle. John would be in the shower for at least another ten minutes. It would be completely feasible to pack up my things, hop on my bicycle and disappear into the night. Of course, John knew exactly where I was headed and was perfectly capable of catching me. Maybe I could hide in the bushes. I laughed out loud. The notion was so silly, and yet to me, the single bed was a real predicament. It wasn’t even fair. This wasn’t a high school drama; it wasn’t a daytime soap opera. This was the Tour Divide, the hardest mountain bike race in the United States. We already had enough to worry about without adding the conundrum of sexual tension. But I had landed myself in this situation. I had welcomed it and coddled it, and now I was going to have to ride it out.

John walked out of the bathroom wearing only a towel and a wide smile. I couldn’t help but fixate on this tan, tightly muscled legs and silently acknowledge my equal share of the fault in this chain reaction of sexual chemistry. Still, my stronger urges told me I needed to put a stopper on all of this before my entire Tour Divide experience flared out beneath something I might overwhelmingly regret.

“They have great showers here,” John announced.

“Good,” I said. “I’ll be fast. I’m actually feeling really tired, and I want to get an early start tomorrow, so I’ll probably just take a quick shower and hit the sack early.”

I carried all of my dry clothing into the bathroom with me, then closed and locked the door. For the first time on the trip, I didn’t wash my dirty clothing. I had already decided I could wear the clean stuff for a couple days and hopefully find a washing machine in the next place where I spent the night indoors. I showered quickly and pulled on all of my clothes, even my arm and leg warmers.

“Cold in this room!” I said as I walked back out.

“Do you want me to turn up the heat?” John asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m good.”

“You said you wanted to start early, but they don’t serve breakfast here until 8 a.m. Do you want to wait for that, or do you want to start earlier?”

I sighed. I probably could have dealt with one day without a shower, but I couldn’t handle another day without protein. “No,” I said. “I’ll wait for breakfast.”

I crawled into the bed and John settled in beside me. He had at least put on his street clothes since he came out of the shower, but his demeanor was naked with anxiety and expectation. I turned and met his wide-eyed gaze, then sat up quickly. “Almost forgot!” I said as I jumped out of bed. I grabbed my little medicine container. “Ambien,” I said as I popped a pill in my mouth and swallowed it without water.

“I didn’t take mine tonight,” John said. “It’s just a short ride into Jackson tomorrow. It won’t really matter if I don’t sleep all that well.”

“If I don’t take sleeping pills, my heart will keep me up all night,” I said. “I don’t think it’s dropped below 150 beats a minute since I left Banff.”

“I’m sure it has,” John said. “You would have had a heart attack by now otherwise.”

I climbed back into bed. “Maybe,” I said. “I think my heart is just taxed. I feel like I’m both undertrained and overtrained at the same time. Sometimes it’s really difficult to cope with the physical strain. There are just so many ups and downs on a ride like this. One minute I feel like I could sprint up Everest, the next I can hardly turn the pedals.”

“It’s important to keep your energy level in check, and consume some calories before you start feeling down,” John said.

“Yeah, well, it’s emotional, too,” I said. “You spend this much time on a bicycle, and you’re bound to hate it once in a while.”

“Well, I think you’ll find that those moods are directly tied to your physical state,” John said. “If you pay attention and avoid becoming too cold, or hungry, or depleted, you’ll almost certainly feel happier while riding no matter how long you’ve been on the bike.”

“So all these big emotions can be controlled simply by stuffing a few more candy bars down my throat?” I responded. “Don’t you think that sometimes, maybe just sometimes, the things we feel are more powerful and lasting than the things we do?”

John turned to me and smiled. “I think everything has a tangible origin,” he said. “But if I really knew how to stay in control all of the time, I wouldn’t have scratched from the Divide three times.”

“Perhaps,” I said. “I guess I’m just one of those people who still likes to believe I’m somehow more than the sum of my parts. But who knows, really?”

“Yeah, who knows,” John repeated in my same tone of fatigue-addled resignation. He reached over me and turned off the night stand light. About six inches apart from each other, we laid stiffly in the dark silence. I blinked rapidly with anxiety but the Ambien and the fatigue of the day worked swift and strong, powerful enough to cut through even the tightest tension. Just as I was beginning to drift away, John sidled in closer.

“Jill?” he said with wavering nervousness in his voice.

“Mmm?” I replied, already skirting that vague and paralyzed place between consciousness and dreams.

“If I came to visit you in Alaska, would you teach me how to ride a snow bike?”

“Yeah,” I mumbled. “Course.” I felt like I was speaking to him through a tunnel, becoming deeper and narrower with each ticking second of the mechanical alarm clock next to the bed.

“And you’re okay with me leaving tomorrow?” he asked.

“I’ll be fine,” I said, the words drifting slowly to the surface like bubbles in an ocean.

He pressed his hips against mine. I could feel his arm reaching across my waist. “You okay?” he asked again.

“Mmm mmm,” I mumbled. The last syllable clung to a frozen breath, because I was already gone.

The next morning, we walked to breakfast together. John was as cheerful as ever, doling out advice about bicycle maintenance, good places to stay on the route, and the best places to acquire food. Neither of us said anything about the night before, nor did we ask any questions about it. I ate eggs and fresh fruit with rabid enthusiasm.

“Where are you planning to stay tonight?” John asked me.

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” I said gleefully. “Wherever the wind takes me I guess.”

“You should try to make it to Pinedale tonight,” John said. “It will be a long day, but there’s not really going to be anywhere where you can buy supplies before then.”

“I still have plenty of Flagg Ranch brownies,” I said. “Full of caloric goodness. I can make it days on those alone.”

We finished breakfast and walked into the bright morning.

“You know how to get out of here?” he asked.

“Yes, of course,” I said.

“And you know that Brooks Lake is coming up and there’s likely to be snow there?”

“Yes, yes,” I said. “Don’t worry about me, John. I’se all growed up now. You just go home and rest and take care of that knee.”

We wrapped our arms around each other in a lingering hug, our first embrace. “Thanks again for everything, John,” I said. “The first week of this race could not have gone more smoothly.”

“Thanks to you, too,” John said. “It didn’t turn out like I’d hoped, but I couldn’t have had more fun.”

We wrapped our arms around each other in one last hug, mounted our bicycles and turned in opposite directions, riding away from each other for good this time.