March 8, 2013
Day 14: Tonopah, AZ to Glendale, AZ
I wake up to colder temperatures and gusting winds. I poke my head out of the tent to find gray skies all around, with the shades tending toward black in the direction of Phoenix. A check of the weather shows thunderstorms passing to the east, dumping half an inch of rain in an hour with hail and strong winds. It looks imposing, but in Tonopah the situation isn't quite as dire — and there's a tailwind to make the push back to civilization easier.
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The road runs rough, but for about ten miles it's reasonable. Then I round a corner. All of a sudden, no more road. Strictly speaking it's still there, but on anything but a four-wheel-drive truck it's impassable. Within a hundred feet the road goes from pavement to gravel to sand — a yellow-orange sand with a texture like what you might find on a distant tropical beach. So I do one of my least favorite things: backtrack. Then I head south into another of my least favorite things: a raging headwind. And then, with no other options, I turn onto maybe my least favorite thing: the freeway.
Interstate 10 is an ocean of noise, a sea of shit. 18-wheelers roar past every 15 seconds. Car tires howl and squeal against the concrete as drivers whip by at better than 80 miles per hour. When not watching my mirror for oncoming death, I dodge sections of busted tires, chunks of metal and glass, sections of pipe, spent flares, orphaned mud flaps, license plates, and a dozen other kinds of roadside garbage.
It takes tremendous focus to swerve around it all, and I almost manage to make that happen. But halfway through the 11-mile stretch a quarter-inch-wide, U-shaped piece of metal goes under the front tire and shoots up, wedging itself into the chain rings. It stops the drivetrain dead and sends me skidding to a stop. Yet everything looks fine and the pedals still crank. Amazing. I feel lucky because it could have been so much worse.
I'm exhausted by the time I hit the exit ramp and leave the freeway, but boosted by the fact that I don't have to ride another mile of interstate between here and Maine. The only thing that bugs me is the pulsing, uneven feel of the rear brakes when I pull on the lever. I haven't felt that before. So I pull off into a truck stop parking lot, unhook everything from the racks, and start to mess with the brakes and the wheel. It seems like the wheel isn't quite sitting flush in the mounts, but no amount of tweaking and attempted alignments can make it work.
I'm about to punt on the problem and worry about it later, but then I decide to give the spokes a check. They look fine; no breaks at the hub or the rim. And then I start to squeeze the spokes, checking each for tension. Halfway through I grab a pair and feel them collapse into my fingers. But they aren't broken. My eyes fall to the hub and that's when I see the problem: one of the two flanges is cracked. A chunk of it now sits somewhere along the freeway shoulder and two of the 36 spokes on the rear wheel no longer have any tension. The piece of metal that jammed into the drivetrain must have done it.
Shit.
The wheel's already out of true, which explains the jacked up braking. But as long as I disconnect the rear brakes, the rim won't bump into the pads and I can keep riding. So on I go, into the sprawl of the suburbs west of Phoenix, where developments named Tuscany Falls, Palm Valley, Camelot, and Wigwam Creek sit full of affordable, closely spaced houses separated from the wide arterial streets by walls six feet high. It's not much to look at, and I could do without all the traffic, but I get through it ok — for about an hour.
That's when the sky makes good on the storm it's been teasing all morning. In the span of ten minutes the temperature drops 15 degrees and the wind starts gusting to 40 miles per hour. That brings swirling clouds of dust picked up from the desert floor to the west. The grit sandpapers the surface of my eyeballs and flies into my open mouth and down my throat. The force of the wind slows me almost to a stop. 30 seconds after I roll under the awning of a sports bar, the sky splits a seam and massive drops of rain start to fall to the earth in sheets and waves. Safe inside, I set to work on trying to get a replacement hub ordered, shipped, and installed in less time than the one week everyone tells me it will take.
When the rain passes I make my push to the northeast and Glendale, where I'm staying the next two nights. The sun is back, but the temperature hangs just above 50. With the dampness in the air it feels like a chilled morning ride in the springtime in Seattle. Along the way I pass miles of new and near-new master-planned communities and commercial developments. I'm struck by the fact that nothing's more than ten years old. These are places with no roots whatsoever. I try to imagine how strange it must be to never eat in a restaurant run by a family's second or third generation; to buy most everything from people who just moved here from somewhere else; or to walk in a park where that tree on your left was placed there by an engineer some time last year, and the tree lines up at the exact right angle with the shrubs across from the tennis courts.
Fear, frustration, and confusion fuel the rest of the ride. Bike lanes start and then stop at random. Dirt paths that would have worked three hours ago become mud pits that throw chunks of rock and slop all over the bike and the bags and my gorgeous legs. I ride on narrow shoulders, busy six-lane roads, the wrong way on sidewalks, and on trails that never quite connect to one another. I focus square on what's in front of me and what looms behind. I block out the faces and signs and the landscapes in the distance. It's surgical, uninspired riding.
By the time I pull up to the home of my hosts Andrea and Tony I've lost the will to find joy in bicycling. I replace it with the will to lay down on a real bed with soft sheets and fluffed pillows and warm air pumping from a nearby vent. It's a relaxing place to hammer out the stressful work of tracking down a solution to my hub problem and figuring out how long I'll be stuck more or less in the same place.
But morale runs low.
Today's ride: 59 miles (95 km)
Total: 626 miles (1,007 km)
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