Neal, new friend and Fairy-Godfather of Hotsprings who we met in Marathon TX, recently prompted me to go a little more in depth about some of the highlights of our tour and conclusions we drew from it. I found myself trying to get away with bite-sized answers, but I don't think its possible so I might just address some of his queries on a post-by-post basis over the coming weeks. These posts will be a little longer in general, I tried to shorten them but couldn't really get much more to the point than this...
DANGER/FEAR
What were some of the frightening/dangerous/scary situations you faced on your Great Bicycle Adventure?
Sadly, nothing epically scary or terrible happened—no insanely bad luck that, while horrible, would make for a good story later on. As for dangerous situations, a few things left enough of an impression to mention--but overall I'd say we're either really lucky or really tough. Zach said that, truthfully, the only thing he worried about was me getting run over, or him getting run over and me being left to pick up the pieces....
1/ THE BRIDGE:
Our second day out we had to go over the Amelia Bridge. It had been dead-flat in in Southern Louisiana until we came to this bridge—it was my second real day of riding (with the bike loaded), I was out of shape AND towing a trailer so….when we came to this short but steep shoulder-less bridge my heart sank. Huge dually pickups and tractor-trailers were zooming past and I really had no idea if I could physically make it, and what then??? What would happen if I couldn't?? Probably, I would die. There was no way around, so we had to go for it. I put every ounce of energy I had into getting over that bridge as fast as humanly possible, pushing as hard as I could. By the time we'd gotten safely across my body was shaking so hard that I thought my knees might give out, I pulled over and cried my eyes out for about 30 seconds before collecting myself and riding onward. Traffic, I have since gotten used to and hills are no big deal—BUT bridges remain windy, shitty, gauntlets that are generally no fun for me to cross at all….
2/ THE THUNDER:
Normally in a thunderstorm you can go inside a building. You sleep in your house, you’ve got nice hard walls—its all good. In a tent, however, very little stands between you and the weather. Thunder is a beautiful thing, rain too, especially when it’s pouring torrentially down—and normally I really really love a good storm. That being said, on several occasions while we slept in our little tent the thunder would become so LOUD and the lightning so BRIGHT and the wind so STRONG that I would sheepishly snuggle over onto Zach’s mat and hold onto him for dear life—my eyes wide open, completely unable to sleep, worrying that we would blow away, be friend to a crisp or maybe just drown in a flash-flood.
3/ A LONG WAY TO FALL, NO GUARD-RAILS:
If you’ve ever driven through the Rockies from Durango CO to Silverton over Coal Bank Pass, and then on to Ouray by way of the Million Dollar Highway you know that a simple slip of the hand on your wheel could send you plummeting to your death. We saw plenty of old cars smashed in the deep ravines to attest to this fact. Over the course of two days we were passed by hundreds of vehicles and RV’s while we plodded along, up up up for eternities and then curving down down down, sometimes coming precipitously close to the Edge of The World... It was very vertical, and vertigo-inducing and kind of like sky-diving—you just have to cross your fingers and GO. There’s nothing you can do once you’ve committed, and its so dangerous that you can’t really give it much attention at all…
4/ ABOUT PEOPLE
Once, only once, was I truly creeped out by people. Considering the hundreds we interacted with, and the thousands and thousands of cars that passed us over 6 months, this is not bad—I remain encouraged about the inquisitive and generous nature of people. But this is a post about fear and danger so, here you are. These people scared me, I'm not sure if they were actually dangerous. It was late in the day as we rode up to a small store in a smaller town somewhere in the Redwoods of Northern California; a group of 5 or 6 vacant-eyed zombies stood, languid in the evening light, draped and seated every which way over a parked pickup truck just outside. They weren’t talking with one another, just staring. They had a boney dog. They were probably just Blitzed Out Of Their Minds but the effect was really unsettling; they weren’t having fun, they looked lost and hungry and dirty and vaguely angry and very sad. It looked as if they’d had some dream dashed to pieces and that at any moment one of them might wander slowly off to die alone under a tree. Some part of me wanted to help, the other part knew there was no help to give and wanted to run away, bike away, very very fast. Zach stayed with the bikes while I went inside to pick up some beer and a sandwich for dinner, then we got out of there as quickly as we could. We rode the rest of the way to camp looking back over our shoulders to make sure that the ghost truck with its cargo of smokey sorrow and heart-ache wasn’t coming after us to run us down...