It turns out the unease in my stomach has nothing to do with the weather. I wake up an hour later feeling sick, with the kind of whole-body queasiness that means only one thing: I'm about to puke. Only it doesn't happen right away. Instead I have time to walk to the bathroom, lift up the toilet seat, and wait for five minutes as the sickness churns and rises in my gut. I haven't felt like this in at least 15 years.

And then the train crashes at full speed into the station. Brownish liquid shoots out of my mouth and nose and in an instant I understand what the term projectile vomit looks and feels like. Every round hits stronger than the one that came before. Much to the horror of the person in the next room, every puking action is followed by this pained, guttural, retching sound that I lose all ability to control. It's obscenely loud. Embarrassingly loud. And so it goes — five times, six times, seven times — until at last I find myself coughing, sniffling, and shivering in a cold sweat in the fetal position on the tile floor. That gives me the chance to pick away the chunks of, well, something, stuck to the sharp facial hair that surrounds my mouth. Then I drink a few glasses of water, try to compose myself, flash a What the hell just happened? look into the mirror, and go back to bed.

An hour later it happens again. An hour after that I make a third trip with the same results. The taste stays in my mouth and my world smells like puked-up kebabs until I konk out some time in the morning's early hours.

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Around 8:00 I wake up with a dry, pasty mouth and grab another glass of water. In less than a minute I feel sick again. That's when I realize that the puking didn't come from what I ate, but what I drank. The motel sits just six miles from Mexico and, as near as I can tell, that's where their tap water comes from.

Later in the morning I go outside for five minutes to buy Gatorade from the gas station across the street. I spend the rest of the day holed up indoors — weak and sleepy and disgusted at the thought of ever eating food again. Riding a heavy bicycle into the mountains seems a more daunting task than ever.