A Fundamental Part of Me Has Changed

March 2, 2016

The stone and mortar walls of our little cabin hold in the day's heat and keep us warm all night long. We're surprised when we throw open the front door and feel the cold of a forty-degree morning starting to wrap itself around us. It's gloves and hats and rain jackets on the ride to the grocery store to power up with coffee and multiple tiny breakfast burritos.

We ride toward the end of the broad valley we entered yesterday evening, looking at the line of mountains spread across the horizon in front of me, knowing that we're going to wind our way through them in the hours to come using only our own power. It's a deeply satisfying feeling.

The rising sun takes away the chill of the dawn almost at once. We look out on a world of dark gray creosote bushes, some stubby little pines, the long white stalks of flowering yuccas, fence posts being swallowed up by fat clumps of knee-high cacti, and broad sweeps of tiny yellow wildflowers. It's all so big, so beautiful, so quiet. And it's so little disturbed by the hands of humans. Our love for West Texas continues to grow.

Like a switch has been flipped, the winds go from nothing to very much something in a matter of minutes. The long dry blades of grass that stood still all night and all morning now dance and thrash and sing to us in this high, constant hiss. But contrary to what the weather forecast told us, the winds aren't blowing straight into our faces but almost square at our backs. Where we thought we'd be grinding at six miles per hour we fly to the west at sixteen like a couple of out of control futhermuckers. We don't question it. We don't stop unless we have to. We just give thanks for the amazing gift we've been given and crank and crank and crank.

Whatever wonderful, magical, unreal combination of wind patters and mountain geography created the funnel of fun vanishes seven miles short of Alpine. As quick as the helpful winds appeared, that's how quick they leave us. Fighting to ride at six miles per hour becomes an all-out war. The ankles and knees and asses that felt like nothing only a few miles earlier now ache and creak with newfound weakness. Any feelings of triumph we once had blow out across the plains and on toward New Mexico.

At the edge of Alpine a car rental place appears. We stop. Our plan had been to ride to Van Horn by tomorrow night, but that's still more than a hundred windblown miles away. We expect we'd show up tired and hungry, then right away have to pack up Kristen's bike, go to sleep, and prepare to wake up and say our goodbyes at like 4:30 the next morning before she catches a bus to El Paso. But when the rental place tells us they have one car left that plan evaporates. We decide to spend the night in Alpine, take an easy day together driving to Van Horn tomorrow, and then I'll drive Kristen to El Paso before returning to Alpine on Friday afternoon to get back to riding. How we're going to get one and maybe two bicycles in a tiny hatchback along with so much gear I'm not sure, but that's a task for another day. What matters is that we have a plan and that all the riding left to do for the day is to a motel half a mile down Highway 90.

Within four minutes of walking into the motel room Kristen has switched into packing mode. When she's done, she's done. The end of her ride and the fundamental shift it's going to have on the character of this trip all of a sudden feels very real.

We walk into downtown Alpine to grab an early dinner. It's hard to decide which part of the experience is my favorite. There's the waiter, who has this unique air of earnest, friendly goofiness that you only find in men who have been getting stoned five times a week for the last ten years. There's the pasta, the spinach and artichoke dip, the spinach salad, and the locally brewed IPA and Hefeweizen, none of which we've had anything like since back near San Antonio. Halfway through eating, an old man rolls up in his Toyota Prius. His aviator shades, plaid shorts, and brown sandals with white tube socks pulled up to just below his never-seen-the-sun-white knees are a bold statement all on their own, but while he waits for his pizza to finish baking he sits at the bar right next to a couple of twenty-one-year-old girls and chats them up like a man a third his age. Super bold. In the background a Rihanna video plays, leading Kristen to lament how female pop stars don't sing about race issues or women's rights or female empowerment. All I can do in response is stare, my loss for words total and complete.

We've been telling people we're heading to California, because we had to tell them something. But from before we left we've always known there was a chance we'd never make it. Our window for finishing that kind of trip was small. We knew there were a lot of outside factors working against us. Now those factors have elbowed their way in and my outlook on the road ahead has shifted.

It's one thing to charge west across America toward the Pacific when you're cranking through the Sierras or Cascades and it's impossibly beautiful and it's light from six in the morning until almost ten at night. It's something altogether different to charge west across America toward the Pacific when you know that what lies ahead is desert, strong headwinds that will never become tailwinds, interstate riding, and short daylight hours to get through all of them. That's what's coming for much of New Mexico and Arizona and California. But that's not even half the story. Knowing that I'll have to face all of it without my best friend, comic foil, favorite traveling companion, and now wife no longer with me takes away so much of the appeal that still existed. For so long I didn't realize that. It's only now that Kristen is about to leave the road and head home that the intense weight of those truths has come to bear.

There's more at work than weather or terrain or the relative chance of finding craft beer in whatever towns I'd pass through along the way. We could be in this same situation during the most beautiful summer the world has ever known in the most beautiful place the world has ever known and I suspect I'd feel the same way. For so long cycle-touring was this thing that I did by myself. I liked the solitude. I was good at it. The experiences that self-directed travel gave me and the obstacles I overcame on my own along the way helped define who I was. But now, today, in this motel room in Alpine, I realize for the first time how that's no longer the case. A fundamental part of me has changed. 11,000 miles of traveling with someone like Kristen will have that kind of effect. Without her I know that the highs won't feel nearly as high and the lows will feel far lower. Phone calls and emails and text messages can't close that gap. The journey will feel incomplete in some major, irreparable way.

What exactly this means for the next few weeks, I'm not sure. It would be complicated and expensive to join Kristen in Portland, only to turn around a few days later and head to Los Angeles to pick up our van before turning around again and heading north a week later. Kristen says she'll come pick me up wherever I am after she's back in L.A. eight days from now. There's a good chance I'll take her up on that offer.

Today's ride: 31 miles (50 km)
Total: 2,025 miles (3,259 km)

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