(Colorado)
Thirst is uncompromising, inflexible. When you bicycle on hills, you become stronger for whatever lies ahead. When something rattles your mind, you can teach it to be smarter and settled. But nothing trains you for or strengthens you against that relentless, recurring thirst. You never get any better at not getting thirsty.
I know I’m in for a hot ride as I head finally into the foothills of the Rockies from the outskirts of Pueblo. The first climb is a long loop that seems to disappear into the rock face and several times I dismount, pull the bike into the roadside weeds and take shelter in the miserly shade of scrawny trees. My maps tell me one store with occasional hours sits in the valley on the other side. By now I’m accustomed to businesses that don’t open until mid-week, and this is a Monday. Finally clearing the peak, I sweep hot and parched into the town, finding the store closed but a soda machine humming outside. At times like this, there is nothing more suspenseful than dropping change into the only machine around and praying for the clunk of the can. It can feel like a long wait. Two cans of ginger ale get me over the latest hump.
I spy Sonny across the lane, the only sign of life around. He’s disheveled, with shaggy blonde hair to his shoulders, and fiddling with his beat-up yellow pickup truck. I perk up. Wild looking dudes no longer faze me. I’m convinced they all have hearts of gold. He’s heading to Westcliffe, my destination for the day, and offers a ride over the 20 miles of hills ahead. Sonny, it turns out, is a big cyclist, and a big talker. He brags in a completely tolerable way and entertains me with tales of sailing over the mountains on his bicycle at improbable speeds. Driving into a valley, he points to a fence post in a meadow.
“See that? I fell off a horse and hit my head on that. I was blind for six months. My mind hasn’t been the same since.” I get only the smallest knot in my stomach.
Two miles short of Westcliffe, Sonny turns onto a gravel road and parks next to the shack he calls home. Refusing to take any gas money, he accepts my offer of lunch and orders a milkshake at the restaurant. That’s an indulgence, for Sonny, 45, is particular about his diet and doesn’t smoke or drink. Afterward he gives me a tour of the town on our bicycles, pointing out the church he attends. I silently congratulate myself on my instincts about people. Others would steer a wide circle around a man like Sonny. Not me. I see the essential goodness in people. Or something like that. So when he invites me to camp in his side yard, I happily pitch my tent and we go in to make tea on his potbelly stove. He’s a man of many ongoing projects, and has a half rebuilt motorcycle and a grand old bicycle from the early 1900s in his living room. Where others would see chaos, I see homeyness. Yes, I have reached a new plateau in character judgment. So I think.
Sonny has an uncanny way of dredging up a personal experience to match anything I can tell him about my life and journey. To counter my exploits, he says he rode with Lance Armstrong in a Nebraska group event. He says he climbed Mount Everest without oxygen. When I tell him about the soybean fields in Kentucky, he says he grew soybeans in Kentucky in his youth. The coincidences are cascading out of his pole-bent brain. I show him pictures on my laptop of the mountain man whose family I met back in Virginia. Sonny takes one look at Homer Davenport and comments, “I met him. I was there.”
This gives me another knot in my stomach. Sonny is the Forrest Gump of my life. Anywhere I have been, he has been. Anyone memorable I have met, he has encountered.
I tell him about biking and camping in Kansas. “I shot two guys there,” he says without emotion.
“You what?”
“I was in my sleeping bag at a rest stop and two guys started dragging me. I shot them in the head.”
“What happened to them?”
“They died.”
“What did you do?”
“Left.”
Sounds like good advice, for me. I feel a sudden need for fresh air and suggest we take the conversation outside, where darkness has fallen. I see the glint of a short chrome pipe in Sonny Gump’s palm. He draws a match to the pipe, inhales sharply, and repeats. He starts talking about his troubles with the sheriff and the way authorities have it out for him. He says they’ve roughed him up. He is growing upset as he talks about how some people in town lock their car doors when he pulls next to them in his pickup. He told me earlier he always packs a gun. I detect a touch of paranoia. Sonny informs me he’ll be staying in his camper next to my tent. Never sleeps in his shack.
“I think I’ll go for a ride,” I tell him.
“A ride?” he asks. “It’s 10:30, dark.”
“I know but I feel like a ride. I’ll be back in a while.”
I’m out of there in a hurry, pedaling like mad toward Westcliffe on a black night with no lights and my most valuable belongings in my tent. Everything in town is closed, including the motel. I ring the bell at a bed and breakfast and finally Mo comes to the door and offers a room for $80. When I tell her where I’ve been, she’s aghast. “You were at Sonny’s? No one goes up there.” She checks with her partner and cuts the rate to $50.
Instead of camping in the yard of a hospitable dope fiend, I sleep in luxury. In the morning, the proprietors suggest I take the police with me when I go back to Sonny’s to retrieve my tent, laptop, camera and other stuff. I opt to go alone. Sonny has done me no wrong. He gave me a ride, tea and company. And in the light of day, I didn’t believe he had shot two guys in Kansas any more than I accepted his tales of Homer and the Himalayas. But I ask the B&B people to call the sheriff if I’m not back in 30 minutes.
Sonny is standing in his yard, as if he’d never moved. He gives me a cheery greeting, shrugs off my apology for choosing a room in town and bids me farewell. I leave reasonably assured he won’t smoke something nasty and come after me on the lone highway west.
* * *
Westcliffe is on an 8,000-foot plateau looking out on the Sangre de Cristo and Wet mountains to the west, a spectacular setting for perhaps the most thrilling ride of the journey. Route 69, skirting the peaks, offers a gradual to moderate descent that lasts for almost 30 miles, sweeping past meadows and streams on smooth, lightly traveled pavement to Route 1A and Cotopaxi. It’s a day when I feel I can go forever; downhills have that bracing effect. For once, I have nothing to think about except the moment, the ride. No dogs, no aching climbs, no coal trucks. No looming thunder, or molasses winds, or stinking heat. Instead, clear sailing under a brilliant sky, the speedometer climbing to 30 miles per hour, toying with 40. These are speeds of Tour de France champions, only they pull it off without a downhill. A gentle tap of the brakes on spiraling turns is the only correction required. I had pictured many days like this one; there were few. The fun lasts until I hook up with hair-raising Highway 50. I’m suddenly in the thick of tourist traffic on a shoulder a few inches wide, the worst traffic since northern Virginia. Highway 50 takes me to Salida, where I make a beeline to Bongo Billy’s Salida Café, lured by the promise of fine coffee.
* * *
A few days later I roll into Telluride, the only tourist trap of the journey. It’s 10 miles off route but a can’t miss. The town is set against an Alpine backdrop; it looks like a painting. I am in an unaccountably foul mood. I take the outrageous grocery and restaurant prices personally, as if greedy merchants are out to get just me. Telluride is a funky town but seems to exist mainly to suck money from your wallet. People are as friendly as they need to be to land the cash. A tourist trap is truly a trap when you are on a bicycle and can’t motor to the burbs for a cheap burger. Telluride boasts of its sense of community, which immediately makes me suspicious, because I have been through so many places where community just exists without self-consciousness or promotion. I spend a cold sleepless night in the town campground, a pricey yet unsupervised playground for partiers. The night is filled with drunken revelry, Fleetwood Mac music at 4 a.m. and campers yelling obscenities at the noise-makers. This is not what the gold-diggers of the 1800s had in mind when they hauled their mules over the mountains to a place they nicknamed To Hell You Ride. But I feel connected to the pioneers of old, even if they didn’t have to put up with $4 Gatorade.
The climb out of Telluride to Lizard Head Pass takes more than three hours. Fighting off the doughy weight of sleeplessness, I’m able to stay in the saddle, weaving from one side of the road to the other to cut the angle of the ascent. I’m looking forward to a long, fast coast on the other side. But dark clouds move in and the descent is in a chilling deluge. Rolling into Rico in driving rain, I pass through a largely boarded up downtown, past an old theater for sale for $750,000, and stop at a café, the only place open on a Sunday in a town of 200. Brandi the waitress immediately takes charge of my sodden fate.
“Give me your sleeping bag, I’ll put it in the dryer,” she says. “And your pants. Go take your pants off.”
“I don’t have pants to change into,” I say.
Jazz fills the tiny coffeehouse, the Rico Blues Project jamming for a crowd of six, including wives and friends of the band members. Cheryl Weiscamp, wife of the guitar player, fetches a pair of her husband’s jeans from their van for me to wear while mine are dried.
“Take them with you,” she says. “And here’s a sweater. You need warm clothes, it’s getting colder. Do you need a tent? We have a nice tent.”
Stunned by the offer, I assure her I have a tent but accept the clothes, down two lattes and toy with the temptation never to leave this cozy place. But I’m warm, revived and have many miles to make up. Jeff, lost in his riffs, has no clue his pants are walking out the door. “He is very zoned when he plays,” Cheryl wrote later. “After the gig I told him I gave away his clothes and he said, ‘Good, I needed some Karma.’”
Life has improved since my dispiriting night in Telluride. Thirty miles from Rico, I find a campground, a sensational meat-and-potatoes meal and unafraid hummingbirds that hover so close I wonder for the first time whether hummingbirds bite. I can count on one hand the number of meals I’ve enjoyed since leaving home. On a ride like this, you come to regard food for what it is _ fuel. You stuff in what you think you need and what you can get. Sometimes, it’s a can of cold beans, or a banana, or salad from the grocery store. Eating ceases to be a source of pleasure. And I never made it a science, lacking the patience to figure out my body’s nutritional needs. I just take in fuel, make it as varied as I can, and forget about taste. But the hummingbird haven has served up fresh green beans, tender roast and homemade pie for $10. Sometimes you have to stop and taste the gravy. The campground is quiet except for a rushing stream and I’m glad to be wearing jeans and a sweater in this cold. Cheryl wouldn’t accept my offer to mail back the clothes. She said to give them to someone worthy on the West Coast.
The next day I give up on San Francisco. The “Western Express” that I’ve been biking since I left the Trans-America Trail outside Pueblo leads from southwest Colorado into the mesas and canyons of Utah. Then come even more desolate stretches of Nevada, including Route 50, famously called The Loneliest Highway in America by Life magazine. Then California. My time is running short and the maps show I’ll save more than 200 miles by diverting to Los Angeles. I know I’ll be winging it. The Adventure Cycling maps don’t cover that territory so I won’t know what’s ahead for water, food, traffic and places to stay. But I take a left and divert to Cortez.
I knew the road ahead would be tough, no matter which road. I knew I faced more thirst, worse heat, increasing isolation. But I hadn’t counted on the Skin Walkers. In Cortez, those who hear of my plan to bike through the Navajo and Ute lands discourage me from trying. I can’t get people to tell me why, exactly, I should not go. The reason turns out to be the Skin Walkers, evil spirits of the southwest desert. It seems that everyone in Cortez believes in them or, at least, is not sure they don’t exist. And because it is bad luck to speak of them, people are not eager to tell me about this spectral danger. I learn about them at the Main Book Co. bookstore and coffeehouse downtown.
Penny Welch believes a Skin Walker pooped in her barnyard bucket. These spirits are said to be able to adopt any life form they choose and, in Penny’s case, she thinks one turned into a fox and made mischief in her yard. Each morning in the winter she would find fox feces on the skim of ice in the tall watering bucket for her goats and consulted a Navajo medicine man, who thought the mess was the work of a Skin Walker. It has to be said that this intrusion, if a Skin Walker act, is a benign one for spirits reputed to do truly evil things. Others say they will not drive at night on Route 160 to Flagstaff, Arizona, five hours away, because Skin Walkers have been known to run alongside cars at highway speed, doing so in human or monster form. They are capable of popping up as your sister if they feel like it, or something really scary, like an in-law. The nuisance at Penny’s place was just a drop in the bucket as far as these evil-doers are concerned.
Behind the counter, Carla Weatherly tells me firmly to forget about biking into the Indian country. She makes me an incredible offer. “Take my truck,” she pleads. “Drive to Flagstaff and leave it there somewhere safe.” Somehow she would find a way to Flagstaff to retrieve her vehicle five hours away. Across the country I’ve been blown away by the openness of strangers. They’ve brought me into their homes, fed me, given me pants and now this. Back in Kentucky, where most of the counties are dry, the owner of the only liquor store around for miles laid a six-pack of beer on me. “Happy July 4th,” he said. I gratefully stuffed it into my panniers, only to head up a long, steep hill where I felt every ounce of the added weight. I’ve had a motel owner make room for me in her house when she had no vacancy. I’ve been escorted by police to town parks and told to call them if I needed anything. It’s occurred to me often that the bicycle is the only thing that separates me from a homeless man. Without it, I’m indigent. With it, authorities cheerfully set me up parks where drifters would be run off or locked up in a heartbeat.
It’s easy to develop an entitlement mentality after being looked after so well. What do you mean you will buy me a lemonade? I’m biking across country, how about lunch?
And now Carla wants me, a man she met less than an hour ago, to take her truck and drive off with it. The offer is so generous I have to refuse.
Carla invites her husband Warren to come by and meet me. She talks about their hopes for a life of travel and adventure. She writes later to say this man on a bike was a catalyst for those dreams. “We are two souls with a wanderlust and love hearing about others who are free to travel,” she said. “You would think we were settlers hungry to hear of outside news.”
Months later, she wrote to say Warren was killed in a workplace accident. Police said a frozen rock mixture fell on him while he was doing road work at Durango Mountain Resort.
