As I sat sipping coffee a few days ago, an hour before sunrise, I considered that I needed 30 miles to keep my weekly average on the bike at a hundred miles. It never even registered that I had watched it rain for over an hour the night before. Good rain too, the kind that makes all the Ranchers and Farmers happy.
It registered pretty quickly, though, when I arrived at the edge of town, and the pavement ended. There were dark, wet tire tracks with little ridges where the sand and mud had squished out from beneath the tire’s tread. “Oh, yeah, it rained last night.” I shifted the front derailleur, putting the chain on the small ring.
Trucker and I are heavy by bikey standards, somewhere around 225# together; nothing close to a pickup truck or a tractor, but the tires are much skinnier, so we were pushing little ruts into the soft, wet sand. It’ll get better down at the intersection where we turn west, I thought; nope. It felt like it got worse, but that was likely a figment of my imagination. There were more mud puddles, though.
I struggled through the quicksand to the eleven-mile mark. The original plan was to go another 4.5 miles west before turning north toward Firstview. The soft, rain-soaked sand and clay matrix were sucking the life out of me, however, and the last bail-out possibility was rapidly approaching.
So, I bailed. There was no inner dialogue; the right hemisphere didn’t consult the left hemisphere, and the ego didn’t lobby the higher self. Mind, body, and spirit were all in alignment. We just wanted to be out of the quicksand and headed home. I slalomed into the corner and headed north on Trucker. The road was still like quicksand, but now we were going uphill and into the wind.
I'm sinking in the quicksand of my thought
And I ain't got the power anymore.
~ David Bowie
“Nice bail-out,” I thought as I shifted into an even lower gear, the mud squishing out from beneath the supple, limited-edition, 85th-anniversary Rene Herse, Hatcher Pass, tires. The further north we went, the drier the road got, and eventually the tires began to shed a pound or two of sticky mud.
As we approached the intersection for the turn toward home, I heard a vehicle approaching from behind, so I moved to the side of the road and looked over my shoulder. It was Scott, a local Cowboy on his trusty four-wheeler, who pulled alongside and asked how I was doing as he glanced at the mud caked on the bike.
“I’m good, how about you?” “I’m awesome. The gauge showed two inches of rain this morning,” he said, smiling like a kid with a new toy. “The road’s pretty muddy,” he said, pointing to the turn towards town. “I think it’s even worse down south,” I responded, glancing down at my muddy Shimano sandals.
“Well, good luck,” he said as he rotated the throttle, gunned the quad-bike up the road, and turned left, away from town, to go check out the amazing gift he’d been given. Rain is like manna from heaven for the farmers and ranchers of the High Plains. Going home would only get me just north of 20 miles, and I needed 30, so I told the legs to quit whining and pedaled right through the intersection, continuing up the hill and into the wind.
