July 1, 2015
33 – What Could Have Been
It rains as we pack up the bikes. Then it stops. Then it starts again three miles down the road. I'll say it: we're tired of our summer of rain. This is the eleventh day of summer and we've been rained on during seven of those days, often in downpours. It isn't like the rain is crushing our spirits and driving us to the brink of a madness that will send us naked and screaming into the woods, but we'd like to go more than a day or two without the stank of wet socks hanging around our bodies like some kind of horrendous aura.
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Within an hour the rain stops. But in its place comes a new enemy: big fucking hills. We worked hard to route ourselves through Pennsylvania in a way that both took us off busy highways and kept the amount of climbing we had to do as low as possible. But we've come far enough west that the long valleys and wide shoulders of earlier in the week have gone away. The hills that take their place are short but steep and constant. And it doesn't matter if we take highways or back roads, we always end up on the same roads chosen by so many cars and trucks.
The riding is difficult, stressful, and narrows our focus only to the pavement in front of us and the threats that loom in the vertical-oval shape of our rear view mirrors. It's only in short bursts of attention that I notice how the hound dogs that everyone around here has for hunting bark and howl at us with excitement when we roll past their yards at three miles per hour. Somewhere in the gap between the snarling dump trucks I also have the time to decide that if I ever feel the desire to create some vast personal fortune I'm going to move to Western Pennsylvania and start the area's largest lawn mower sales and service business. Every day I expect that I'll stop feeling awed by the volume and quality of the lawns out here, and yet every day the exact opposite happens.
It's in this daze of exhaust fumes and gravel shoulders and split seconds of terror that we turn right about a quarter mile before we should turn right. Instead of crossing U.S. Highway 422 and heading down a quiet minor highway we head on to 422 and keep on trucking. At first it seems okay; two lanes wide and busy but with a broad shoulder. But within half a mile it turns into this four-lane thing with a massive grass median dividing westbound and eastbound traffic. We'd like to turn around when we realize our mistake a few minutes down the road, but the median and all the traffic kill that idea. All we can do is keep going the two or three miles it'll take to reach the next exit.
There's a twinge in my stomach when I see the flashing lights of a State Police car coming up behind us. But as soon as the lights appear they speed past, bound for some car accident or escaped convict situation up the way. Five minutes later another set of flashing lights appears. This time an SUV slows as it passes us and parks in front of the shoulder where we ride, blocking our path.
A heavyset guy with ill-fitting brown trousers of about sixty-five exits the driver's door as we stand watching. He walks back toward us and then stands with his hands on his hips trying to look official.
"This a limited access highway you're riding on," he says. "You're not allowed out here."
"Well, we made a wrong turn and ended up here by mistake," I tell him. "There weren't any signs telling us bikes weren't allowed, so we didn't know. We're just going until the next exit and then we're turning off."
But it's not enough for him, this logical reason and logical solution. It's like he needs to assert some authority because he's wearing a belt with half a dozen law enforcement gadgets hanging off it. And so he asks us what our names are and the city and state we live in, like he's going to run a background check on us or write us a ticket for breaking some minor Pennsylvania state highway law. But whatever it is, it's going to have to wait. He fumbles through his pants and shirt pockets and magical tool belt for a few moments before realizing he doesn't have a pen and has to go back to his idling car to get one.
It's absurd and pointless. I want to make up a name like Johnny Chidboy and tell him I'm from Fart Bubble, Alabama. I want to tell him that this road with its wide and clean shoulders is so much safer than any others we've been on today and all of the others we'll see for the next three days. But he's taking this inane situation like it's a serious breach of the law so I skip all of that. After a few minutes and so many guarantees that he's going to be watching us, the SUV pulls away and the lights turn off and we continue on.
When we round the last bend before the exit we see him sitting there, waiting, watching to make sure we don't continue west and get on the interstate like a couple of incompetent mouth-breathers who somehow got out of the low-security mental health facility we've been committed to and decided to go on a bicycle adventure. The dumbest part of the whole thing is that he isn't a State Police trooper but a State Parks police officer. He may very well have stopped us based only on the fact that he was bored from sitting around waiting for dispatch to call him out to investigate a theft of graham crackers from the campground store.
My mood lifts soon after we roll into Portersville and park the bikes along the side of a grocery store. That's where I meet Greg. He's somewhere in his early forties and wears a dirty backward ball cap with the massive yellow price tag still on it. It goes well with the gray-tinted sunglasses and the black t-shirt with a motif of two wolves howling at the moon screen-printed on the front.
"So yer tellin' me the two a youse is ridin' to Warshington State on them two bicycles over dere?" he asks with a heavy Pennsylvania accent. "That's like so amazing, man. I can't believe it. You mean yer just like campin' and takin' back roads and meetin' people all over da country? Man, that's awesome."
He asks all kinds of questions, so I try to explain the details about how we figure out where to go, what we eat, how we make our money, and so on. But it's clear that some of them get lost in translation. At one point he turns to me and asks with a serious look, "You afraid of flyin' or somethin'?"
The conversation loops back over onto itself three or four times over about fifteen minutes, but a slow-burning cigarette somehow stays pinched between his yellowed teeth no matter how much we talk. When I excuse myself to go into the store to find Kristen, Greg shakes my hand at least three times. He's not like anyone I know. He may not be like anyone I'll ever meet again. But he's a big dude with a curious mind and what seems like a kind soul, and I feel better about my day and myself for having met him.
The highway turns more mellow after Portersville. It gives me moments to look down at Walter through the clear roof in his trailer. He lays with his front feet extended like a sphinx, his head always looking around at something different, and his nose always twitching and sniffing out some new smell. He looks happy. He looks content.
A few miles from Ellwood City the highway crests a rise. Kristen coasts down in front of me and I lag maybe fifty feet behind. I've been doing this more in Pennsylvania because the shoulders are forever littered with patches of gravel, piles of dirt, chunks of wood, beer cans, and a dozen other types of crap that has either fallen off of passing vehicles or been chucked from their open windows. The farther back I am, the better chance I have at missing whatever garbage sits in my path.
But at twenty miles per hour it turns out fifty feet isn't enough. I see a piece of wood in my path dead-center in the shoulder. It's the end of a tree branch, maybe eight inches long by about two inches around. I see it, and I try to swerve left to avoid it, but I can't. Most of the time this wouldn't matter, because most of the time the branches are both thin and sitting width-wise across the shoulder. But this isn't most times. In this case the wood runs parallel to the road. It means that when the front tire hits the left half of the little wooden nubbin, instead of bouncing up and over it and continuing on, the balance of the tire turns uneven and the handlebars jerk an inch to the left.
No worries, goes the instant reaction in my brain, Just turn them back to the right and you're good. And I do. But the careful balance required to keep both me and the giant bicycle I'm riding upright has been thrown off in a way that can't be saved. I turn right, then left, then right in short, quick bursts driven by some unknown mix of muscle memory and a self-preservation instinct honed by the thousands of generations of people who came before me. But in a span just longer than the time it takes for your eye to blink it becomes clear that there's no coming back from this mistake. I'm headed for the ground.
I grab the brakes to try and bleed off speed but it makes no difference. I'm still going at least eighteen when the left-leaning angle of the tire becomes too steep and starts to change from vertical to horizontal. As this happens, the handlebars crank left at about a forty-five degree angle. The sudden change tears the bars away from the grip of my fingers and palms and leaves me staring into a wall of pavement with the full weight of a loaded cargo bike and one thirty-two-year-old dude pushing my face straight toward it.
The half-second that passes between when I realize I'm going to bite it and the moment when I slam into the ground feels ten times as long. I know what's coming and all I can think about is how much it's going to hurt. Adrenaline surges throughout my body to get it ready for some serious shit. But that half-second also gives the self-preservation instinct another chance to kick in. It's in that span that my arms extend out in front of me to brace against the impact. That's what saves my head and my spinal cord from bearing the kind of weight and force they were never designed to survive. Even though I understand how all of these mechanisms work, they all seem like so much magic, like the most impossible but beautiful system ever created.
When I think about it that way — about what could have been — nothing that comes after matters all that much. My first thought is that both of my wrists are sprained or broken, but they aren't. Both knees are missing a layer of skin; my right elbow is missing two or three layers and has long fingers of blood running out it and down my forearm; and my right thigh screams because the handlebar was jammed into it when I slammed into the pavement. But I know those will all heal in time. I also know enough about wrecks like these to know that low-level shock is coming, so I sit on the metal guardrail next to the road with my hands on my thighs, my head down, and my eyes closed. I feel light-headed and weak and my heart pounds, and even without looking in a mirror I can tell that the color has drained from my face. When the dizziness and grayed-out vision turn stronger, I lay down in the gravel on the other side of the guardrail and use one of our rolled-up air mattresses as a pillow. Although it seems strange to say that all of this stuff feels good, knowing that I escaped so much worse and knowing that our trip hasn't come to its sudden end makes the pain and sickness seem like some kind of blessings.
As all of this goes on, Walter plops down in the corner of his trailer and falls asleep.
I'm sore but I can still ride. The bike has bent handlebars and the front wheel was knocked askew in the dropout, but everything attached to the handlebars still works, the wheel takes five seconds to realign, and the fork and disc and the wheel itself all stay straight and true. And so we pedal a few miles farther and then regroup in a small park in Ellwood City. Kristen cleans out my scrapes with help from a tiny first aid kit as passing cars honk at each other and an angry mother yells at her kid to get back here right fucking now. I want to keep cranking on toward Ohio, but Kristen's worried that I'll hurt myself by riding farther. When I see the stress caused by the crash spread her face and hear it in the heavy exhales of her breathing I give up the fight. We only go far enough to cross into Beaver County, cross over the Beaver River, and then get a room for the night in Beaver Falls at the Beaver Falls Motel.
We decide we could both use a beer after an exhausting day, so we head to the only option around: the bowling alley next door. As kids bowl with their parents we slip into a dim-lit and empty bar and drink a pitcher of Yuengling from clear plastic cups. The Pittsburgh Pirates' pre-game show blasts at some insane volume on the television. Framed photos of breasts in bras that must belong to some of the bar's regulars hang on the wall above the liquor bottles for no reason we can figure out. I have to raise my beer with my left hand because my right elbow is so swollen.
The hills and the receding of the afternoon's adrenaline leave me tired, but aside from sore hands and wrists and the wonky elbow I feel fine. I hope that's still true when I wake up tomorrow morning.
Today's ride: 40 miles (64 km)
Total: 1,190 miles (1,915 km)
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