A Portrait of an Amateur: Part III

You've now climbed 2000ft and the windless day has turned into quite a kicker. As you leave town, the highway narrows briefly into an interstate-like chute with high concrete walls to channel traffic. The wind funnels through these ferociously and throws bits of dust and gravel into your face, some whipping past your sunglasses and into your eyes. You squint for a few minutes until the concrete walls have fallen away to be replaced by wide, alpine plains. The single dominating mountain is now to your South, and you have a whole new view of it than you normally get from your apartment at its base. It always startles you how quickly you move around the monolithic peak while riding your bike. The familiar ridge line is now dramatically foreign. The peak looks long and sloping, with many summits. From this angle, you can't even make out the true summit.

As you continue to climb along the highway, the narrow part of the pass now behind you, you look out into the high, mountain fields and feel your remoteness. You pass an unrecognizable carcass along the fence line. Houses come less frequently now with many acres of ranch land between them. The highway crosses streams with their banks of mud and snow trampled by a million cow hoofs. To your right you notice an ancient sod house built into the side of a hill. You are pedaling hard again, even though your climb has decreased significantly in grade. The wind is fighting you like an elastic band anchored somewhere behind you. You've grown less frustrated with headwinds in the last year of riding, but this is an intense headwind. You try to crouch. You put your hands into an aerodynamic position. You pedal with your knees slightly turned in. Loose weeds are tumbling past you and grasses are bent low. Flags flap in your direction, shivering rectangles. The trees hum. The whole mountain seems to hum. In your imagination, you see Aiolos unfastening his bloated animal skins on the Western slope of the mountain range. He is laughing. "At least," you say to him, "when I turn around, these winds of yours will press me from behind." This thought circles through your brain as it sinks again into the dull repetitions of physical exertion.

Soon enough you arrive at the summit of Ute Pass. 'Summit' is a strange word for this; there is higher ground to the left and right. You come up with a satisfactory definition to clarify the situation: "the summit of a pass is the highest point along the lowest path over a mountain range." You begin your gradual descent with at least 20 more miles to go before you reach Wilkerson Pass, the point at which someone continuing Westward would descend onto the Western Slopes. You will not reach Wilkerson Pass today.

As you descend, still pedaling steadily because of the high winds, your various discomforts begin alerting you of their presence. Your hands have hurt for some time now, but you hadn't noticed; you begin adjusting their positions more frequently on your handlebars. The muscle that connects your shoulder to your neck is cramped and you concentrate on relaxing your arms and shoulders and carrying the weight of your forward-leaning torso with your core muscles. Your legs are sore too, but eating another energy bar seems gradually to give them back their strength. After a while, the ache in your lower back becomes distracting enough that you stop at a pull-out along the highway and try some stretches. You twist around and flop your legs across eachother, trying positions that feel right and hopefully look professional to passing motorists. Slowly you begin to feel your back and even your shoulder relaxing, and you mentally slap yourself for not having thought of this before. With the wind still whipping, and having been off your bike for a few minutes, you suddenly realize you are chilled. You begin to make a causal connection between this new unpleasantness and the cotton t-shirt you are wearing, but stop the logical progression before it makes wisdom out of your friends' advice. You throw on your long-sleeve shirt, check the time on your phone (3:20pm), and begin pedaling again.

You are really beginning to feel your miles now. You don't know exactly how far you've come, but you guess 35mi. Still descending, you pass fantastical piles of rocks, like those you've seen in Joshua Tree and Hueco Tanks. You pass a few more mountain towns, with names like Wagon Tongue and Saddle Creek. You eat your last energy bar, but notice very little increase in your energy. You pass a herd of cattle and moo at them. You cannot tell if you have gone 15 more miles or 5, but you estimate that it is about 4pm, and you turn around on the highway to begin the long process of retracing your path. Facing eastward now, back towards the dominating peak, you notice a long trail of smoke that obscures most of its ridgeline. The particular hue of the smoke makes you think that sappy conifers are burning. A forest fire. And you hadn't even noticed it on the way out. Perhaps it has just begun.

You decide to check the time, to mentally catalog your turn-around. You sit upright in your saddle and pedal without using your hands while you pull off your backpack and sift through its contents for your phone. You look at its display: 5:05pm. "Good," you think. "Only five minutes overdue." Then your brain registers what you just saw. 5:05pm! Five o-clock! You're an hour and five minutes overdue! The sun will set in another hour, and you've been riding for 5hrs already, not four, like you had planned. How could you have made this mistake? You wonder if you misread your phone when you stopped to stretch. Or maybe you blanked out and rode for an hour and forty minutes rather than just forty since your last stop. You look at your phone again to verify that it's really as late as that. It is. You have no idea how it happened, but you know how your sense of time gets warped when you are fatigued. "Really," you tell yourself, "it isn't that big of a deal:" you have your riding lights, and you have extra layers to put on. But somehow the ride before you begins to look utterly impossible.

In the first three minutes after you have turned around, you have plummeted from moderately tired to completely defeated. In near despair you remember again how very remote you are. The food you have left is obviously inadequate. The water you have left is only a few sips. "How could I be so stupid?" you ask yourself. You stop at the general store you passed in the town just 10min before, Starky's General Store. But the lights are out and a 'Closed' sign hangs askew on the inside of the door. It presses on you like a clamp, you've crossed into Hell.