Erica's Cross Country Bike Tour - Arizona to Canada 2003
June through September - Visit the online version of my publication, Read It Here! I guarantee, it, too is a great read.

Travelogue 1 | Travelogue 2 | Travelogue 3 | Travelogue 4 |Travelogue 5 | Travelogue 6 | Travelogue 7

Travelogue 1

Prescott, AZ to Flagstaff, AZ

Welcome to the first travelogue of a bike tour which will carry me from Prescott, Arizona to the Minnesota-Canada border. At the time of this writing, I am travelling alone, having already ridden 100 miles from Prescott to Flagstaff, Arizona. Sunday, I will enter the Navajo reservation, home to much mystique and lore. I am scared, but full of faith.

I am riding a Trek touring bicycle, and carrying my belongings in panniers, including everything I need to camp out. These words are written on a PDA and keyboard weighing less than a pound, and any pictures you may see will get there by way of a film camera and scanner. Right now, my bike weighs in at around 92 pounds, including food, gear and water, but I will be carrying a novel and extra water when I cross the reservation.

The first three days of my tour were challenging but exhilarating. The really great and bad parts were both intense; I guess that when you travel by bike in this manner, it is like peeling off a protective layer of skin, one normally made up of vinyl, glass and steel. I left Prescott at 2:45 PM on Monday, having slept very little the night before. Preparations stretched late into the day, but I was determined to start the tour on the designated date, even if it meant not getting far. As it turned out, I climbed most of a mountain.

It was a less than auspicious start to a multimonth tour. My friend Tom accompanied me for the first two days, and together we fought hot headwinds while climbing for the entire 4 hours that we rode the first day. Serious questions about the sanity of the tour formed in my mind. We seemed to have gotten almost nowhere when we stopped and pitched camp.

The next day, Tom warned me of the endless false tops that would follow as we climbed the rest of Mingus mountain, part of a range that forms the southern border of the Verde Valley, named for the meandering river that traces its bottom. In less than a mile, however, we had reached the top, and it was downhill into Jerome, an old copper mining ghost town now famous for its arts district, popular with bikers, and thriving on tourism.

There was a bicycle race from San Diego to Atlantic City taking place on the day I left. Its riders passed us along the way, each followed by his own support vehicle. I talked to a man following the race who told me that the cyclists had been racing for less than 24 hours when we saw them.

After a friendly breakfast in Jerome, I rewrapped my handlebars, moving more padding from near the brake levers into the drops, and we rode down into and across the Verde Valley. The valley has numerous small canyons and creeks, each with its own hanging garden; small farms line the river. The river eventually drains into the Salt River and provides water for the people of Phoenix.

We descended as low as three thousand feet from a maximum height of seven thousand early in the day. As we crossed the valley, the air temperature must have been 105 degrees over the asphalt, and we poured the water in and the sunscreen on.

On the north border of the valley, the border formed by red rocks and marking the division between the valley and the Mogollon rim, lies Sedona, known for its rock formations, vortexes, crystal readings and Oak Creek Canyon, a picture of redrock riparian lushness. As we climbed into Sedona, the wind was picking up. Black clouds swirled in the canyon to the north, and tornado warnings had been issued in Flagstaff. We got some groceries and water and hurried up the canyon to where we found an out-of-the-way, scenic camping spot.

In the morning, we biked further up the canyon to a coffee shop, and stopped to talk to some other travellers. One man who passed through had a metal house perched on the back of his Harley for his brown eyed and gentle mutt, Bear. He claimed that she was the best dog that he ever had, and indeed, by the time we left she had crawled into her house and was waiting for her partner to finish his coffee.

Later in the day, after swimming, I bid Tom goodbye and completed my second major climb in three days, winding my way out of the canyon. At the top, I peered down to where I had been, watching tiny white birds fly thousands of feet below.

That night, in Flagstaff, I slept as though dead. I had come a long way, but it had cost a great deal, and still there are many miles left to cover.

I write this from Flagstaff, a map of the reservation beside me, and in a week, I will write of what I found there. I pray for cool weather and friendly people in the days to come. I will have faith in God but keep my sunscreen bottle handy.

Thanks much to everyone who helped get me on my way. Please drop me a line if you don't want to get updates of my tour in the future, or better yet, use them to determine the positive nature of my life status and delete them without opening them. Until later on...

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Travelogue 2

Flagstaff, AZ to Cortez, CO

An hour after I sent out my last travelogue, I developed a fever which kept me in bed at my friend Michael's house for several more days. Still shaky, I got on my bike on a Wednesday, one full week after arriving in Flagstaff, not even sure if I could still call myself a cross country bike tourist. I was planning to meet my father in Cortez on the 30th of June, and so had some miles to cover. What follows are a few stories of what I found after departing Flagstaff and entering Diné country.

I left feeling optimistic, which wasn't the mood that I had entertained while in Flagstaff. There, I vascillated amongst fear, anxiety, pessimism, and dread. Rarely did I feel good about the trip. In part it was due to the fact that I am woman travelling alone, and in part because I am an inexperienced tourer and camper.

My inexperience with camping stems from my fear of the out of doors at night. My first night out of Flagstaff was only my second time camping alone ever. The first time was when I was nineteen, nine years ago.

I chose not to go too far outside of Flagstaff. I climbed through a pass in the foothills of the San Francisco Peaks, near Sunset Crater and Wupakti National Monument. I liked that there the area was forested, the ground thick and soft with pine needles. I found a place in a gully that hid me from view of the road and set up camp. It was a cloudless night so I saw no need for a tent, besides, I was hoping to set up and break down camper faster than the many hours that it took while camping with Tom.

All was going well until I saw some bones hanging in a tree several dozen yards from me. Big long ones. I dropped everything and went to check them out, intent on, if nothing else, making sure that they weren't human. To my relief, they had furry hooves attached to them, probably elk, put there by god knows what yahoo.

I decided to climb the hill that rose above my camp, and did so, topping out on a pile of lava rocks upolstered with lichen. The view revealed the reservation to the north and the inner basin of the peaks to the west. It was sunset and the rocks were drawn in dark shadows and the last bit of warm light. Everything was, for me, painted in magic. I continued to walk, going always in the direction that took me up. Each rise gave way to another, and in this manner, I experienced three or four sunsets. Finally, I could see all the way back to the Mogollon Rim and deep into Navajo country. The floor of the valley closer to me was littered in small calderas, pouting next to their megalithic counterpart, the bowl that has as its jagged edges the tallest mountains in Arizona. The feeling of peace and flow that had eluded me in Flagstaff took hold, and I worked my way back down to camp, using the bones as a landmark as I got closer. It seemed a blessing that I had picked the scariest campsite in that part of the forest because it would not have occurred to me to explore otherwise.

Camping turned out to be one of my favorite parts of the tour. The solitude and quiet vastly overshadowed what vestiges of fear remained. One night I slept across the street from Tsegi, a village consisting of little more than a motel, nestled in an ancient-looking canyon 1000 feet higher than the dustbowl of Kayenta ten miles down the road. I asked at the hotel about camping and was told I could camp on the side of the road or in the burned out trading post next door. That being poor advice, I went outside to sit and think. I had a good feeling about the place, and wanted to stay there. Here and there I saw sheep farms and hogans little changed for hundreds of years. Places where seep springs had worn away the sandstone left overhangs that housed the ancestors of the Hopi and Pueblo people. XXfinish this story, willya?

It is nice to breathe clean air and look at the stars as you are falling asleep. From here in Cortez, Colorado, I look to the mountains in the east showing bare rock at their crowns and wonder what sorts of camping lessons I will learn there. I suppose I will hang my food to entertain the bears, who, I understand, like a challenge when they are going for your poptarts and red beans 'n rice. Maybe they get bored if they are able to tear through half a milimeter of taffeta to get to your food. Bored, or perhaps even insulted. I wonder if anyone has ever thrown a gameboy or rubic cube in with their food stash, just to be polite.

The camping was good everywhere, but the riding got better and better the closer I got to Colorado, in a large part due to a dying off of traffic. As I mentioned earlier, when I started from Flagstaff, I climbed a big hill right outside of town. The next morning I came down the other side. Into the reservation I rode, on a divided highway populated by trucks, RV's and vehicles pulling boats. The scenery spoke of no regular nor recent rain. To my eyes, the austerity held its own inimitable charm. Ridges of rocks rose exposed out of the thin grassland, and occasionally a juniper tree grew, shade behind fences, mocking and unattainable.

I stopped in a shady courtyard at the Anasazi Inn at Grey Mountain, Arizona, and ate a grapefruit. It was sweet and juicy, wet in this ocean of dryness; it seemed to me to be the best thing that I had ever eaten.

I got back on the road and fournd myself riding between formations that looked like piles of ADOT gravel. Nothing grew, not even shadows, nothing crawled except for ants, and nothing flew except for crows. All at once, I realized that I was in the painted desert. Around lunchtime, I took refuge in a shack of the variety that the Navajo use house roadside jewelry selling, three clapboard walls and a clapboard roof. After I was done eating, I read a few stories out of one of my books and lubed my chain. When I was quite ready to go, and some of the heat of the day had passed, I got back on my bike. Despite the remote emptiness of the landscape, the sound of the traffic deafened me. To escape the noise, I took a little-traveled shortcut to Tuba city.

I was hesitant to take the back road, worried that I would be too isolated if something were to happen, but the noise bothered me far more than my fear. I turned onto the road and never looked back, except to snap a picture. The dirt road was filled with ruts and dust drifts, and I had to pedal hard to stay on the bike. For several days thereafter my knees were sore. Even so, it was comforting to learn that I was capable of riding my tour bike on rugged roads. Also, I found that I carried enough food and water to hold me over long distances, even in desert heat. This influenced the routes I chose thereafter, including the routes that took me into Cortez and Gunnison and eventually, out of Colorado. Besides showing me what I was capable of, I had a blast riding those nine miles of Navajo back road. The only sounds were birds and the crunch of gravel under my tires. Appropriate to the setting, the sky was a deep, cloudless blue, the earth terra cotta. I half expected Clint Eastwood to come out of some gully on his horse and shoot me some smart ass remark out of the side of his mouth, maybe spit a toothpick at me. I most loved lonely, removed roads while riding, and that stretch of road was my first

Occasionally, a pickup with a few Navajo men would pass me, and I wondered if they were going to bother me. They didn't, and I would soon learn that the Navajo are good, friendly helpful people. This lesson was reinforced later on on the reservations in South Dakota. One of my main regrets is that I took main roads across the reservation. I look forward to going back one day and exploring the back roads. I have no doubt that the experience will be positive.

Towards the end of the road, I came out overlooking a canyon strewn with boulders of all sizes. It was impossible to gain visual perspective. The canyon floor could have been twenty or a thousand feet below. I felt powerful being out there, powerful in an Alice in Wonderland look-it's-growing, now-it's-shrinking sort of way. Eventually, I rejoined the main road and road up an incredibly steep hill into Tuba City. The only thing that kept me in my saddle was fierce pride. If I had come 60 miles today, some of it on technical terrain, I was sure as hell going to get up this hill.

I stopped at an fire station at the top of the hill and ran into an old friend, Danny Barney. He had been my partner when I worked up on the reservation several years earlier, and now he owned the ambulance company there in Tuba City.

Danny is half Navajo, and has lived on the rez most of his life. He is married to a woman who has been quite active in the Tuba City community, and together, are quite a force in that area. XXXCall danny for an interview- cover him here in this part for cultural perspective. We caught up on old times, and then he directed me to a campground next door.

I was able to camp for free because a travelling nurse offered to share his spot with me. He was one of those guys who doesn't really fit in in the mainstream, and so made the trip every week from Las Vegas, NV to Tuba City to work for the Indian Health Services. He had many tall tales which he told well. It was late in the evening when I took a shower and washed my clothes. He fed me dinner, and took a shower as well. When he came back without a shirt and smelling like after shave, I took the cue and said goodnight with a handshake rather than the customary Arizona hug.

All next day I rode up hill in heavy traffic. The only manmade structure that I came across during the morning was a reclamation site. Escheresque, mining tailings stretched across the desert with odd geometry, showing first this side and then another, until finally collapsing into a plane. Out of the entire length, some 400 yards, only one plant grew. Behind them, I saw the swoop of canyons and the ripples of the typical Navajo desert, and off in the great distance, the San Francisco Peaks. In the foreground radiation symbols and Department of Energy signs warned of the uranium poison that was this place.

As I rode through the heat, lizards would dart out of the brush and run ahead of me before ducking back into the cover. The road side was filled with frousy pink flowers that looked like they would fit nicely iin a Victorian garden. The contrast between the delicate blooms and the otherwise dessicated landscape was striking.

That day I stopped twice, the first time under the two junipers, the first trees that I had come across in 20 miles. From the time that I could see them in the distance and when I reached them was over an hour. They had been pruned to be shade trees, respite for sun poisoned bikers such as myself. I was thrilled to see that other bike tracks led to the shade, and later met the people who had made them, a pair of Japanese tourists named Arata and Mina.

I rode for several more hours through the stultifying heat, and stopped under one of three elm trees next to a long defunct Standard Oil station. Birds nested in the towering sign, and behind it, the building was tagged with pithy discussions of God and the Devil.

When I got there, I saw one dying elm, and one elm with three old Navajo women under it. I took my post under the last, and from my vantage, I got a good look at them. Each had on the uniform of a rez grandmother, flowing skirt, velvet shirt decorated with a silver and turqoise brooch at the collar, and long hair, braided and pinned up. One of them had on hornrims like my own grandma, and I felt like I should say something familiar when she looked at me. I don't know what they were doing there. Those trees may have been what passes for a park in those parts. In any case, they sat and talked to each other in Navajo and looked out at the traffic. One of them got up and pulled a handful of weeds, which each of them took turns smelling and shaking. After a while, they climbed into the mid-eighties Chevy Celebrity they had come in and drove off. It struck me then that these three women, their world as mysterious and impervious for me as that of the gods were like the three fates. They had weaver hands and the air of immortal youth that vigor sometimes produces in old age.

After the grandmothers left, I sat and ate my food, and in the course of doing so, chewed and swallowed a red ant. I had to adopt a lassez faire atitude about red ants because they were swarming the only shade for miles. Normally, the little red monsters with their overbitten blood-colored tusks send me into hysterics, but today, I just flicked them off by the dozens. I suppose that, given the millieu I just described, I should have had kept closed my Fritos bag (ingredients: corn, corn oil, salt- function: provide Erica with salt), but it was just that set of circumstances that had driven me to the point of apathy. In fact, when I dove my hand into the bag, came out with that fateful handful and threw it into my mouth, my only response to the new flavor was,' hmm, I think I ate an ant. I had better chew extra well.' So I did. Thereafter, the first thing that I noticed was pain on the side of my tongue. The words formic acid came to mind- I remember my father referring to their venom as formic acid. After that, the pain blossomed in my mid back, a happy agony. It hurt a lot but didn't kill my mood; these days, pain, like beauty is a constant.

"In French and Spanish, there are many cognates," said my friend Candace, "That's why you have a word like fourneau in French, and horno in Spanish for stove." I heard her words, what I remembered of them, in my sun starched head. 'Likewise hormiga, the word for ant in Spanish, sounds similiar to the word for ant in French, fourmi, which is similar to formic acid, borrowed to name a poisonous, painful product of ants.'

I reflected on those phantom words as I abandoned the shade for another 30 miles of riding. I mused that the pain in my butt, my shoulder, and my neck would distract from the burning in my ribs, front and back. It didn't. Two hours later, it still felt as though I had eaten a furnace, un horno, when in fact I had only eaten a big, nasty ant.

The first days on the reservation turned out to be miserable, or at least as close to miserable as a bike fanatic can be on a bike. I didn't know that until I had ridden on quieter, more beautiful parts of the reservation that weren't entirely uphill like the shadeless section between Tuba City and Kayenta is, parts that didn't have tractor trailors and motorhomes going by bumper to bumper at breakneck speeds.

So, on the third day on the reservation, I settled into the best and most scenic riding of my trip so far. The silence was bliss, the scenery made me wistful for the southwest even while I was in the middle of it, fearing that the midwest, even Minnesota and its north shore wouldn't be able to hold a candle to it. In many parts of the world the stretches of emptiness in which I rode that day don't exist.

Perhaps it was the auspicious scenery, but the answer to a big question came to me while I was riding. The question, "What makes me a good person?" had been plaguing me for months. I couldn't just say it was because I'm nice or because I do good things. That seemed inadequate. The answer that finally struck me as adequate was that I was a good person in proportion to the degree that I was honest with myself and, in a loving, considerate way, with others. That piece of wisdom stayed with me and aided me for the the rest of my tour, coming at the end to challenge me to the depths of my senses when I met Eric, the man I rode around Lake Superior with.

North of Kayenta, I came to the turnoff to Monument Valley. A row of shacks full of jewelry sellers lined both sides of the road, and, nestled amongst them, two restaurants served traditional Navajo food. I chose the cheaper of the two, and met a slew of interesting people, both tourist and local. Up until then, even when I stopped at populated places to rest, I hadn't seemed to attract much attention, but here, perhaps because it was the middle of nowhere, people had all sorts of questions for me. A woman named Jeannie came and sat down next to me. She is Navajo, from Kayenta and she was selling used paperbacks while her daughter walked around with a tray of jewelry. I was shaken by an earlier encounter with another person at the restaurant and I didn't immediately trust her, but in the end, I found that she warm and caring. She made me promise to call her to say that I had made it across the reservation.

My bad experience was with a man who had stared at my breasts through my long sleeved cool max shirt while asking if I was travelling alone. Suddenly, I noticed that I was 20 miles away from anything. Every fear that I had bedrocked out of my consciousness broke to the surface. I reflected on my experiences with men in the previous days. I did not trust them, and my trust fled further when they hit on me. Perhaps this was normal. I was a solo rider, a woman, and I already felt vulnerable. So when he said that to me my impulse was to be terrified and ascribe to him scurolous motives. I wasn't sure what to do about this. Some people had told me to carry a gun. I already had pepper spray and a cell which felt like about as much protection as a fly swatter for a mountain lion. Down, you bad kitty. I just hoped that people who want to hurt me are as rare as pumas. I was tired of being afraid. My intuition had led me into this adventure, and I wanted to rely on faith rather than a firearm.

I rode out of Monument Valley, and found myself speeding down a winding section of road that led to the bottom of a wash. Up toward the top of the other side of the wash, still a ways off, bipedal gazelle-looking things appeared to be playing in the middle of the road. It had been a striking day, riding alone through the red spires of monument valley, and this seemed par the course. Curious, I sped up the hill as fast as I could.

Above me, the people clustered in the road, only scattering when cars, the few that there were, sped by. Soon enough, their long bare limbs carried them back to the centerline. I had no idea what they were doing, and so, when I finally reached them, at their position most of the way up this huge hill, I asked them what they were doing. Amid calls of "you aren't gonna stop NOW are you?" someone told me that they were taking pictures. A girl with a British accent asked, "What are you doing?"

"It's an equally good question," I replied over my shoulder as I pedalled past. I rode to the top of the hill and turned. I could see that the first view of Monument Valley from that direction was indeed a stunning one.

Many miles later, signs appeared warning that grades of six, eight and ten percent were ahead of me. Since passing the busload of British tourists, I had experienced a hot calm that can only be achieved by travelling at the same pace as a tailwind. I hadn't realized the strength of it until I passed two flags standing in the breeze. This same wind pushed me down into the San Juan river valley.

I had been looking forward to reaching the river all day, but now I reconsidered. The juniper stands at Monument valley had given way to a landscape of prickly desert shrubs hardly higher than a high top tennis shoe, and down below, I could see only bare, scorched rock. It was so hot that I was reluctant to apply my brakes, but the road was too bumpy, too curvy and too vertical not to. I imagined my brake pads melting into my rims as they fired red like the open gash of earth rising to meet me. On the opposite side of the valley, quite close, hung an anacline sandstone formation that looked as though the mesa above had melted on a particularly hot day into the river. The sandstone layers spiralled down to smother each other so gruesomely that it seemed like the type of artwork the devil would hang over his mantle. After a third, terrifying drop, I rolled into Mexican Hat, Utah, a town filled with philosophical cowboy dropouts and river rats.

I talked to the owner of the hotel-laundromat-RV park-gift shop-restaraunt in the middle of town- a clean looking middle aged cowboy named Shelton. He seemed to live in a world of private jokes, and was happy to have someone to tell his stories to. His wife was Navajo, and one of their three children was born in Wickenburg, Arizona just like me and Val Kilmer. He was a self-proclaimed fatalist, and offered me a list of pandemic events that he thought could destroy humanity, ranging from overbreeding to tectonic catastrophe. He sold me a tent space behind his plethora of businesses, and I spent the night there in the company of two brothers from Michigan and their combined five children.

The next morning I packed up and bought some water for my trip. I turned to snap a picture of Shelton's spread and saw in the distance a tiny speck that appeared to be, of all things, a bike tourist. I rode back to meet her, bursting like a puppy with happiness. Another tourist appeared, and I made my acquaintance with Mina and Arata, self-styled crazy drunk ski instructors.

They had been on the road for a month and a half, having started in Portland. In contrast to mine, their bikes were bursting all over with bungees, rolls of toilet paper, tin cups and flags. I supposed that in a month and a half my bike mightl have that much character. We rode together to Bluff, ff, Utah, about 30 miles up the road.

When we got there, we stopped for lunch, mine of apples, Fritos (out of a sealed bag), and peanut butter, theirs of rice and a sauce made of a chopped jalapeño and soy sauce. We took a nap and when I woke up, I packed my things and we said our goodbyes.

EDIT XXneed to expand this part and talk about sheep, dogs, and bonking.XXXI spent the rest of the day and all of the next focused on getting to Cortez to meet my father. My legs were getting tired, and had I not wanted to see my dad, I would have slowed down. I took a back road called Country Road G, or McElmo Canyon Road that winds to Cortez alongside a creek that is used to irrigate numerous hay farms in the canyon. The air was cool and heavy with the smell of water and alfalfa. Cottonwoods lined the creek and irrigations ditches near the road; in their shade I ate lunch and read. At around three o'clock I got to Cortez, which is the least bike-friendly town I have ever ridden in. The road was torn up and there was no place but the sidewalk to ride. Twice people honked to encourage me into the gutter. Cortez is home to the Silver Bean, however, a coffee shop housed in an airstream trailer, and run by a woman from Chicago named Gigi. Gigi is a friend of a friend, and has been running the Silver Bean in Cortez for five years. Before that, she was a ski instructor and itenerant. I sat in her shop into the afternoon revising my travelogue and swapping stories. As I got ready to leave, she offered to let me camp on her land east of town. The Silver Bean is near where Highways 666 and 160 converge in Cortez. In the mornings all of the human wildlife of Cortez meets there for coffee. Space is limited, but the atmosphere is worth it. Thanks to Gigi for her hospitality.

I shall be in Colorado for as long as it takes me to climb at least one pass over 11,000 feet. Again, though I am a loaded tourist, and theoretically self-contained, I have relied on the help of many people, strangers as well as friends along the way. Thanks to everyone who has

made this trip possible or just easier.

Until the next time,

-Erica.

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Travelogue 3

Cortez, CO to Gunnison, CO.

Hello from Gunnison, Colorado. For those of you who aren't sure what I am doing, or what this is, allow me to explain that I am on a solo bicycle tour from Prescott, Arizona to the Minnesota-Canada border, and perhaps beyond. These travelogues will be polished and edited in the future to be part of a book; what you are reading now are my first attempts to be a serious writer. Thanks to every one for the graciousness with which they receive this motley collection of words.

Everyone has their own way of touring. Some people focus more on the riding, others on the scenery. Some people prefer preplanned routes and group rides, while others don't know where they are headed until they look at a map in the morning. I met three boys in a park in Ridgway, CO who were riding ten speeds across the country. Before departing, they had hardly ridden bikes of any kind, but had called churches along their planned routes to ask for lodging. Their planning centered on knowing their route and stops ahead of time, and not on gear. By contrast, I bought the best gear that I could find, and a solid bicycle, but have only the vaguest idea of my route. My gear has stood up to being dragged to stealth camps on sage brush covered hills, to rutted dirt roads and high mountain passes, and to backcountry jaunts that take me days away from civilization.

On any given day, I normally do two long rides separated by a two hour long siesta in the afternoon where I eat, rest, read and write. By seven or eight o'clock in the evening, I start looking for a place to sleep.

After my first tentative baby steps into solo camping, I have hit my stride. Ideally, I pick wild places away from campgrounds, where I can enjoy the falling light, and wake up to untrammeled landscapes. It feeds my need for solitude and it's cheaper.

Food has been more of a challenge. My arduous ride up McElmo Canyon road into Cortez should have been a pleasant and easy but for the calorie debt that I had spent days building up. Despite eating like a horse in Cortez, for a couple of weeks thereafter, my legs felt weak.

Having left my cookstove in Durango, I mostly eat cold foods, such as apples and peanut butter, cold oatmeal, Fritos and Poptarts (the height of healthy eating- I know), a grapefruit in the morning, and sharp cheddar cheese. It has been suggested to me by cyclists far more experienced than I to visit all-you-can-eat places once in a while to take up the slack. I think that for dinner, cold bean burritos might also be nice. Dumpster diving isn't out of the question.

If I haven't mentioned it before, two themes guide my trip. The first is to write and share this travelogue. The second is to develop my spirituality, which means to follow God and my guidance, to explore the grand mystery of the world unseen, and to deepen my connection to it all. I would not be doing this at all if it weren't for strong gut feelings that led me to quit my work, sell or give away almost everything I owned, including my car, to move out of my apartment, and to embark on this pilgrimage. Every day, this same guidance helps me find people to meet, places to eat, to sleep, and experiences to have. When I have come to impasses in decision making, I have found myself sitting and waiting quietly until what is to be done becomes more clear.

I sometimes wish I had that slim copy of the new testament that a missionary in Guatemala gave me. I am a mystic, but I have to admit that at times Christian concepts give the best symbolic explanation of the state of the world and of the processes that I find myself going through, like sin (which I believe is best defined as anything that separates us from god), redemption (the rejoining). I want it for picking the right words for the prayers I utter, and for staying connected with something spritual outside of myself. I slink into AA meetings, ambivalent about my drinking to be sure, but also hungry for spiritual fellowship with people who are walking through their lives in a conscious, deliberate manner. I am convinced that the twelve steps are a recipe for mysticism, that personal connection to God achieved in every culture, every religion, every age, achieved by some, though certainly not by all.

My favorite group of mystics, though they would rue the label, are open hearted inerrantist Christians. They believe every word of the Bible, describing it as a tapestry of the word of God written by many men but in one unmistakable voice. Each of them describe having had God having come into their heart; theirs is a personal experience of Him. I suppose that they are my favorites because, despite the evangelism that always attends my encounters with them, their beliefs are standardized by their inerrantism, they do not pick and choose amongst the latest and most fashionable of new age beliefs. Their results are consistent, as are the results of many of those who attend AA. Miracles happen regularly in the lives of these people, as they do in my own.

Every day on the road leads me closer to inner peace and fulfillment. I am not always sure that I am practicing a program of spirituality, but when I take a step back, I see that the entire trip is an exercise in it. Every mile that I ride, I ride in beauty; every campsite I find, I find with guidance; every person that I meet, I try to meet with an open heart. The miles go by slowly; each day is a stroll into the unknown. Not to acknowledge why and how I am out here would be denying you all a big piece of my adventure.

Days spent with my father passed quickly, and soon enough, I was back on the road. I spent all of one day in Cortez trying to publish my log. I failed, and was miserable for all of that. I camped on Gigi's land and was found in the morning by a gruff man who told me to be careful of bears. He left and before long, his wife came by in a big truck, and asked if I would like to wash up at their house. I kinda liked my dirt, but accepted the invitation.

Their house is set in a piñon-juniper forest near Mesa Verde National Park, site of so many Anasazi ruins. You can see the mesa from the porch of their rental, standing in silent, ponderous guard over them, the house, and their animals. Cyndee was excited to have me visit. She had prayed about it before extending the invitation, and with God's approval, set about showing me every corner of her house, annotating the decorations as she went. She spoke at length of Jesus Christ and her face was full of joy. She is a handsome women; a few years ago she was beautiful. Over coffee she told me of a medication error that nearly killed her.

"It was God's will," she said, "whenever I questioned why this happened to me, I heard 'I am making a Christmas list of names'. Later, I found out that I had been given a newly developed medicine for epileptics that had been killing children. The drug company wouldn't admit that their drug was responsible because of the host of drugs all epileptics take, but my bloodstream was clean and after a week of taking the wrong medicine, I was on my deathbed. Everything hurt, my skin was blistering; I was in the third stage of total liver shutdown. The fourth is death."

She showed me pictures of herself before she went into the hospital. She had light blond hair, brown skin, and in each photo, her chin is up in an expression of victory, of consummate enjoyment of that precise moment.

"I finally went into myself, into a deep place where I realized that I didn't have to feel pain. In that moment golden angel's wings were wrapped around me and I heard the words 'you are wrapped in nurturing warmth'. I was in that state when the doctor came in, threw himself down in a chair and stated that there was a experimental therapy that might save my life. I had been in constant pain for weeks, and then, just when it lifted, the doctor comes in and tells me I am going to live."

She was in the kitchen then, adding cream to my coffee.

"It is a miracle that I lived without going blind, or losing limbs. If this hadn't happened to me, many more children would have died. God used me, but sometimes I wish it hadn't had to be me."

We sat most of the morning, talking about God and Jesus, whom she never failed to credit for the good in her life. She let me use her computer to email my travelogue.

Her husband came home in the afternoon, and we had tomato and bacon sandwiches. As I left, I passed her garden, passed the injured bird that she had saved, passed the stonepaths she had built in the two months that she had lived there.

"Call me," she said, "if you need a ride up the hill to Durango."

I didn't make it far that day, just to a campground a few miles down the road. I shared a campsite with two Navajo men from Utah. They had waved as I rode past, and when I came into their campsite, I ate with them and we told stories. Most of Jimmy Hadley's centered on his ex-girlfriends, several of which reminded him of me.

"Just remember, when you get married, make sure you get yourself a good Navajo man," he said.

I agreed that it would be nice to live on the reservation.

He said that he couldn't understand why my father had let me go riding out by myself.

"It's because he knows that good people like you are looking out for me," I told him.

We sat out by the fire until dark. Jimmy had me split wood and keep it going. It was hard for him; he had sustained several injuries while working for a natural gas company His arm was covered in an ace bandage to protect the grafted skin. He cradled it like an injured bird as we talked.

As a young man, he had joined the service to see the world and had ended up fighting in World War II. He came home after four years and found that the reservation seemed empty to him, that he had outgrown it. He married, nonetheless, and had children. His wife had recently left and was now pursuing a master's degree. He said he felt left behind.

I fell asleep in my tent, wearing earplugs to soften the country music that Jimmy played as he sat alone by the fire.

It was cold when I left in the morning, but it got warmer as I climbed towards Durango. I was riding directly into the sun, and by nine in the morning it felt like midday. Halfway up the pass, I stopped to read a sign about about a peaceful journey a group of Jesuits made around the San Juan Mountains several hundred years ago. As I was reading, another touring cyclist rolled up. At first glance, he appeared to be a bum. I said hello, and he dismissively returned my greeting. After awhile, however, we began to talk. He had toured throughout the world over the last twenty years. He rode a Trek 520 like mine, but it was lightly loaded, with two small waterproof panniers in the front and bundled tent, sleeping bag, tarp and pad bungeed to the top of his rear rack. He had no rear panniers. He carried only one change of clothing, and a 44 ounce Big Gulp cup.

"Over the years, I have really gotten fond of Big Gulps. I don't know if it's the sugar or the caffeine, but they really keep me going."

He told me that when he started touring, his bike looked a lot like mine, but that, over the years, he had pared down. He no longer carried a cook stove nor a camera.

I asked him how much he spent each day. He said that he was able to tour on five dollars a day, and almost always stealth camped.

"In twenty years, I have almost never been hassled. If someone catches me in the morning, it's no big deal, because I am leaving anyway."

He was thin and tanned, with long fuzzy hair that was a little less gray than his equally wild beard. His ribs showed in the armpits of his ripped t-shirt; his well developed arms where shot with veins.

"People used to put me up when I was younger. That doesn't happen anymore. Now I just look like any other homeless person."

He wasn't displeased; like me he prizes solitude. He departed, riding much faster than I. Beside his, my rig is a behemoth. He inspired me to lighten my load; I unloaded clothes and my cookstove before riding the passes.

Later, rolling through Durango on the bike trail insulated me from the stream of traffic on Main Street. Instead, the Animas river snaked blue-green to my left through narrow grassy parks. I wove my way through town and doubled back to explore its center. I stopped at the Newstand Coffee house and stayed for hours, nursing the incredible free refill of coffee so rare in coffee shops these days. As the shadows grew long, I headed for Horse Gulch, indicated on my tourist map as a collection of trails on the edge of town, to do some mountain biking. I stashed my panniers undersome cardboard in the gulch and headed up the hill.

Anyone who has ever mountain biked on a cross or touring bike knows that while it is possible, it doesn't give nearly the ride of a mountain bike. I came back down a while later determined to rent a proper bike, never mind the cost.

First, however, I had to meet my friends Candace and Angie, who were up from Prescott to visit with Angie's son David and to pick me up for a visit to some hot springs in the San Luis Valley. Valley View Hot Springs have been a bohemian Mecca for twenty years. They occupy a land trust and have been developed to some extent while still maintaining the natural feel of a forest hot spring. Cabins and saunas dot the area, populated by nudists. The people are a collection of hippies and hicks and professionals; some are there just to bather, others to be nude and socialize. The springs themselves are actually warm springs, never hot enough to be uncomfortable. Mornings and evenings, deer, bats raptors, and all manner of wildlife come to drink from the pools, paying the bathers no mind.

I was feeling reclusive, so I spent my time reading excessively. A few times, I wandered away without meaning to, leaving my gracious friends to wonder where I had gone. If I am on a pilgrimage, it is as much internal as external. Moments passed alone are another form of prayer.

We stayed for several days and returned to Durango where I had left my bike. After Angie and Candace left, I rented a mountain bike and David showed me a couple of his favorite trails in Durango. Some were set on decomposed shale slopes that were steeper than anything I had ever ridden; the elation of having done something new on a mountain bike rocks.

Durango is full of amiable people who work service jobs in order to play in the river and mountains surrounding the town. I had heard that the people there were competitive, but I found them encouraging and kind. The town has wide, tree lined streets with well-used bike paths clearly marked on most of them. It appears to have been designed with actual human beings in mind, instead of just their cars.

I left late in the afternoon by way of the Animas River Road, a county road that winds north for sixteen peaceful miles parallel to Route 550, eventually crossing over a shallow canyon where scenes from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were filmed. Having left late, as I always do from towns, I camped in the woods right before where the county road met Route 550. That night, I pitched my bike and gear over a fence, hung my food in case the bears were in the mood for a late night tetherball game, and laid my sleeping bag out. A few mosquitoes attended all of this, but being the novice camper that I am, I paid them no mind. I was to regret that by morning. All night long, the mosquitoes tried to carry me to their queen. I appealed to the DEET gods but there was no answer. I thought of all the gold that I would have given for that hallowed liquid. In my hidden and illegal camp, I covered all but my nose with layers upon layers of fabric, sweating in the warm night air, and still they found a way to get me. I dosed, somewhere in half sleep, ready all night long to flail when I heard them whine, expecting to see thousands of broken mosquito bodies scattered about my head in the morning. They were almost bad enough to keep me from ruminating on the disturbing thought that had crept into my mind during the night: The bears, with their tetherball court of food nearby were happy, but what about the kitty cats? The really, really big hungry ones? I was laid out in a Colorado forest, a warm juicy banquet of feathers and sweat and the rest of me. I never came to a satisfactory conclusion regarding mountain lions, but it could have been that by morning, I wanted to be dead anyway.

I set out towards Silverton, still feeling groggy, and had stopped on a steep hill when three men with loaded bikes came past me. I realized immediately that if I drafted them, my trip up the passes would be much easier. For the rest of the day, over two passes and then down a screaming hill into Silverton, I stuck with them. At the top of Coal Bank Pass, their friend Tony, an endodontist from New Zealand was waiting for us. As we ate candy bars and drank cold Gatorade, they explained to me that they were a group of eleven bikers and that the three of them were riding the San Juan Loop self contained, but that the rest of the group rode only sections while being sagged. "We like to pretend to be loaded tourists," said Ed, the most sardonic of the three. Craig and Tom, the other two, that Tom had slept with Craig's sister for eleven years, but now slept with Craig. When we set up camp in Silverton, I saw that they did indeed share a tent. As we rode the passes, Tom told me his life story. Born to Lutheran missionaries in Africa, he and his wife had left the church when he was twenty eight and had become deeply involved in a new age church, eventually setting up a commune with money he made being an electrical engineer in the software industry. He had left that church and remarried, and was now working for a non profit that designed software to help people. He talked about his present wife a great deal; I was heartened to know that after several decades such a close relationship could be maintained. "I believe that while relationships need maintenance," he said, "they shouldn't be all work. If they are, you should look at leaving. Not a day has gone by in all of the years that I have been married to Lorie that I haven't told her I love her. I send her flowers and candy and write her poetry. But that's not work; I do that because I'm a romantic. Being with her is a good and easy thing."

Where a map of the San Juan Rockies rested under the plastic on my handle bar bag, Tom had a picture of his wife under his. The conversation distracted me from the pain of climbing Coal Bank and Molas pass, and later he bought me dinner in Silverton for having had to listen to him. I should have bought him dinner. I love a good story.

The countryside around Silverton reminded me of Switzerland; the town is filled with rough hewn American boys, simple and polite, who play hackey sack and BMX their way through the wide streets of their quaint town. In those streets, whose ephemeral asphalt is shrugged off each winter, I walked, looking as I went at buildings whose bright colors do nothing to beautify dingy alleys emptied of all signs of Colorado green. From up on the hill, near the Christ of the Mines shrine, I see what could easily pass as the Matterhorn. Directly above the town, unreachable but only a few thousand feet away, the naked rock still bears snow; the forested sides lower down part here and there to allow a waterfall to pass. The town is strikingly flat, flat, but cupped by sharp mountains which on all sides rise above the treeline. It is a study in contrasts: the locals are easy to pick out as they cruise the both streets with rap music coming out of open car windows, as they serve the cookie cutter tourists who film staged gunfights that take place throughout the summer. Viewed from one angle, the town is ugly and full of artifice, and from another, lovely- a rainbow of colored houses with peaked roofs, filled with easygoing folk who will greet and exchange words with anyone, even a tourist like me.

From my vantage at the shrine, built in the fifties by a priest hopeful to restart Silverton's mining industry, I watched the fading alpen glow on the peaks; over my shoulder, the form of Christ stood frozen in a pose of eternal blessing. Below, the wide streets with their bare hint of paving traced a line away from the confluence of two yellow creeks that forms the Animas River. Above them, the ledge of road that lead into town sparkled with headlights. On that road, acrophobia had earlier made my riding less sure as I passed by the sheer cliff leading too rapidly from the pass to the quaint town below.

As I sat near the statue of Christ, the moon rose over a naked mountain flank to the east. I could see, in this tiny town, my tent pitched in a field, near the tents of the eleven or so people that made up Tom's group. I was somehow comforted to be there in that tiny town. I paused to consider Christ, my recent yearning for a copy of the new testament, and my spirituality, still so much a focus of this trip. In the morning, I would ride, alone or accompanied, but always north, always up, always to God.

Before dawn, all twelve AIRRHeads (Adventures in Riding and Running Heads), including me, set out early from Silverton. We stopped for coffee first, and I read the astrology report for the day, which said something like "hurry up and wait."

They drank their coffee in a hurry and started riding. I felt like taking it easy, and they soon ditched me. About four miles up the road, I stopped to admire the scenery, and to dig out my map. Tony waved from his sagmobile as I stood there. I dug in my bag for my map and realized that I had forgotten my wallet in Silverton. Though I did not know it at the time, so began a long comedy of errors. The day was by far cursed with the worst luck that I had had, the red ant episode notwithstanding. After getting my wallet, I rode until I found a dirt road, which I followed to a peaceful spot to eat breakfast. On the way back out, the cable housing on my front derailleur cable, which had been fraying since Durango, failed in earnest, and despite all manner of adjustment, I was left with only nine gears with which to climb my first 11,000 foot pass. Thank God that they were the bottom nine gears. When I got to the road, I grabbed my sunglasses, and one of the lenses was missing. I hiked back up the road and found it in the dirt, coated with dust. All I could think was that I had to get on the road as fast as I could.

After all of that, the ride up the pass was idyllic. At the bottom of where the road began climbing in earnest, I ate my lunch in a cloud of insects which I have found to be endemic to all of the alpine country that I have visited so far.

I had been warned to avoid Route 550, known as the Million Dollar Highway by many people. As I climbed the pass on the outside shoulder, the road was undercut so that nothing but air supported the asphalt underneath my tires. It was built on rust colored mining tailings in places. I remember thinking, 'This is really scary- I wonder what this road will be like when it really gets bad.'

I reached the Red Mountain Pass in what seemed like record time. For the first time in days, my legs felt great. I had been forcing myself to eat more than I wanted, and it was finally paying off. I wanted to climb some more. Without resorting to hiking, however, it was not to be; it was downhill for the next twenty miles.

I passed through Ouray, a canyon town famous for its hot springs and winter ice climbing. I asked around for a bike shop and was told that I would have to go eleven more miles down the canyon to Ridgway. The bike shop in Ridgway, to my near despair, was run by a profoundly drunk man who assured me that I could not replace the the cable housing on my own. I finally convinced him to sell me the part on condition that if I failed I would come back in the morning and beat it out of the shop as fast as I could. As shadows slanted through late afternoon light made hazy by numerous forest fires, I made my repair in the town park. I had help from Rick, the man working in the town's health food store, who had warned me in advance about Ridgway Outdoor Experience. It was nothing short of a miracle that he had; I am sure that the drunk would have won had he not.

XXIf astrology tracks the currents of the ocean of the universe, then it would make sense that the movement of the planets would reflect the movement of our lives because we are all interconnected and all is one, at least according to every single major religious tradition that I know of.XX I certainly met other people who also had a hard time that day. I can only say that despite losing and forgetting my wallet, lens, and a lock which I had to replace, despite some bad interactions, I at least kept my good humor; I at least still felt safe and protected.

At seven in the evening, I rode north out of town. I had no idea where I would stay, but I didn't want to be in a town that night. I consulted my map when I came to County Road 10, and saw that it was a forty mile backcountry shortcut to Gunnison that would take me over a 10,000 foot pass. I decided that I had enough food and water to go for it. It was ten or twelve miles to the national forest, and as twilight fell, I stealth camped in the far reaches of a freshly cut hay field, putting the green fly up for camouflage. Peeking out of the tent, I watched the full moon rise over distant mountains. I slept well and got up early in the morning to climb the dirt road leading to Owl Creek Pass.

It took me six hours to climb the ten miles of rutted road to the top. Stopping was fraught with peril, as the black flies and mosquitoes swarmed me whenever I did. By the time the road had leveled out, I had given up ever finding the pass. I worked on the assumption that at some point I had died, and was occupying a version of purgatory wherein I would keep going uphill until all of my food and water was gone. Even this, however, was preferable to roads teeming with RV's and tractor trailers.

When I finally crested the pass and rolled six bumpy miles downhill, I was cooked, done for the day. I came to a campground called Cimarron Forks and stopped to explore it on a hunch. Even without this intuition, I knew that I had to find some water. Getting over the pass had taken a long time, and I had hardly any left. I wasn't there five minutes when I met Les, a professor travelling to Reno to speak at a conference. He handed me a cup of coffee and asked me how I liked my steak done. The company was good, the campground fee and peaceful, and I could have spent weeks there except that I had emailed my friend Scott from Ouray telling him I would meet him in Gunnison in the next day or two.

I did stay until mid afternoon the next day, long after Les had packed up and left, napping and hiking along the river that ran through the campground. I saw a weasel, and a porcupine. As I waded, trout wound around my feet past smooth river rocks of every color. I had only seen elk once before in my life but that day I had two sitings, one in which the elk and I regarded each other with equal suspicion. In addition, I saw deer on a half a dozen occasions.

I didn't quit riding until it was dark. Finding a campsite proved difficult as I had descended into high desert filled with sagebrush. I had to ride a couple of miles up a steep dirt road in the failing light and hike around to several different places before I found a bare patch big enough for me and my cathedral of a three man tent. I kept thinking of everyone who told me to be careful, particularly women. Riding up a dark, lonely road at nighttime does not fit into anyone's definition of careful. Once I found the spot, I dragged my poor, loaded bike through the brush, laying it down and covering it with my green sarong to hide my bright red panniers with their reflective tape.

I pitched my tent, and layed naked, staring at the stars in the black sky through the open door of my tent until I fell asleep.

I made it to Gunnison the next day, and completed this monstrosity of a travelogue. Thanks to everyone who actually made it to the end of this thing, and as always, thanks to all of you who have helped me along the way with encouraging words or with tangibles like food and shelter.

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Travelogue 4

Gunnison, CO to Jonestown, CO

Summer was happening elsewhere and the wind was determined to keep us from Leadville. We rode past a parking lot for fishermen overlooking a meadow called Crystal Lake. Traffic was steady- steady at 75 mph, giant trucks pulling us into their wakes, sick smelly sirens in collusion with the wind beckoning us to death on the centerline.

We persevered.

Days before, I had found Scott in the Gunnison City Library. Gunnison recalled Cortez in the way that heavy equipment shops and ATV dealers lined the grimy highway before giving way to a more acceptable downtown district. Scott was also on a bike tour, but a mountain bike tour that had kept him off the highways until he injured his foot on a mountain bike ride. When I came to town, he was convalescing in a churchyard beside the Gunnison City Park.

We had met the previous October in the Spanish section of the used bookstore in Prescott. He was interested in learning Spanish and I insisted that he meet me for coffee so I could explain how I learned Spanish in Guatemala. At the time he was living in a car, a mountain bike itinerant of the ilk that works partial seasons in outdoor education in order to do whatever it is that they truly love. Scott stayed with me for over a month, and changed my life, teaching me to live more simply, and opening my eyes to paradigms that I had not previously seen.

We both want to transform the world we live in. I was already bent on simplifying my life when I met him, having devised a question to test all of my purchases- Is this thing worth my continued oppression? What was nascent in me, however, was fully developed in him. A self-styled revolutionary, and a definite rabble rouser, he was embarrassing to be with in public unless I was in a frame of mind to draw attention and to anger people. Where I tended to be diplomatic, he was inflammatory. Without brilliance, he would have been oafish and unbearable, with brilliance, he was inspired and unbearable.

We had talked about doing a bike ride to Argentina, but our plans died in the undertow of our fleeting love affair. We parted ways, he to Guatemala, me to teach science for a year, and we faded from each other's life.

I bought my bike anyway, picked out my panniers, and started thinking about where to tour. Rather than hunting for a partner, I decided that I would go alone. I would set out after the school year ended, going north into cooler weather. I decided to go east for the tailwinds, and to Canada on the slim chance that I could learn French. Minnesota, I had heard, was a good place to find work with troubled teenagers.

As I was planning this route, I was aware that Scott was working in Durango, but assumed that he would be in the field when I passed through. In Flagstaff, however, I got the email telling me that his job had ended and that he was touring Colorado.

We had spent a couple of days in Gunnison while I wrote and he rested his foot, and then we took off toward Crested Butte. Scott was sorry to leave, for he had developed an inordinate fondness for the dumpster behind Safeway. Offerings that issued hourly out of the back door included eggs, cheese, yogurt and produce, as well as cookies and chips. He exploited the dark secret that most of the food thrown away by grocery stores is still good. It's easy to see why rifling through a dumpster could be habit forming. He prayed that other dumpsters along the way would be as bountiful.

Traveling north out of Gunnison rewarded us with views of rolling scrubland and ponderous storm clouds. When we turned up Cement Creek to camp, it was getting dark, and sprinkling rain. We both wanted to find a place to sleep, but our notions of what that was diverged. While I wanted a place in the trees, preferably near water, Scott didn't care about trees and didn't want to be close to the water that he would be drinking. He said that he definitely didn't want to be in a developed campsite, "I don't want to sleep with my head over where other people cooked", he said, "a bear might chew on it."

He had a point; two boys had been attacked just that week in Rocky Mountain National Park. After an hour of kvetching, we settled on a place in the trees not so far off the road. Exotic flowers grew in the clearing between our camp and Cement Creek. As we set up our separate tents, the sky darkened and was split by thunder and lightning. We hazarded a trip to some nearby trees to cook and eat and slept soundly thereafter as rain fell on our tent flies.

Backtracking in the morning led to a dirt road that winds up and over Cottonwood Pass. It was a long smooth ride, in stark contrast to previous back country pass experiences that we had both had. As had been the case since well before Gunnison, the route was marked in orange paint with arrows and yee haws laid down by the Ride the Rockies

crew. It was but one of numerous organized tours that ride through Colorado in the summer.

I was exhausted by the time we coasted down the other side of the pass. I had led the way down the first part, and then Scott overtook me, I gave chase and failed, more competitive than interested in the views of the mountains.

After gliding into Buena Vista, I collapsed in a donut shop while Scott went to check out the town's dumpsters. He found the local relief service and asked for food. They said that they had no food, but gave him a fifty dollar gift certificate to City Market, the local grocery chain. "It's only fitting," he said, "if they didn't compact their food, we'd be able to rescue it."

Scott had decided that he was the champion of thrown away food. A new town meant new culinary possibilities. After he got the gift certificate, he went behind a bakery, where a woman caught him scrutinizing the soggy bagels in the trashcan.

"Oh you don't want to eat THOSE," she said, "Here, let me get you some day olds." Her southern accent underscored her indignation; she came back out with a huge bag of bagels that took us days to eat.

I personally felt that I couldn't ask for food since I had money, but when Scott suggested that we poach a Motel 8 hot tub, I was all for it. We slipped in a side door; I tried to act casual, but I felt terrified. In retrospect, the worst that would have happened was that we would have been ejected, and even then, preferably in the direction of the next hotel with a hot tub.

The focus of my trip deepened traveling with Scott. He is an unlikely teacher, very much like me, but more accomplished in the ways of iconoclasty. We think alike, and yet I am on a spiritual journey, while he is on a mission to change minds, and by extension, the world. In the parlance of Robert Heinlen, we are rational anarchists, who live in the manner that makes the most sense, rather than by following all laws at all times. In reality, almost everyone is. If you ask the average person why they don't murder, the reason they give will likely have nothing to do with the law.

Having sterilized ourselves with motel chlorine, we left to find a place to camp, picking up a few beers to enjoy in the twilight. The place we found was in a desert flat between a country road and some train tracks. There, cactuses ran amok in the soft dirty sand, junipers grew like shade trees, and lumps of granite lolled on the ground like pillows. Beyond the tracks was a swimming hole in the Arkansas river into which I jumped the next day. Only the lifejacket bummed from a raft guide kept me from sinking into the cold water that collapsed my lungs as it swept me downstream. It was a dirty girl's heaven. I thought seriously about coming back next summer to starve as a raft guide.

We decided to stay another night, riding back to Buena Vista to get some Seamgrip for my Thermarest, which I had dropped my knife on. Sitting in the town park later on, we watched children blow out their birthday candles and sweethearts kiss over burgers and milkshakes. Herds of little kids ran by, a stampede on a miniature savannah, and in the distance, I could see thirty year old men playing football.

"This is a lot like the Midwest," Scott said.

"I kind of figured," I replied, thinking of how I had the whole Midwest in front of me. I craved it, craved lazy hours spent in parks like this one, craved miles passed quickly on flat empty roads. I hoped that the Midwest was like this.

I was becoming discontented with traveling with Scott. Though I still loved him, our friendship cost me my sense of peace. Maintaining an amicable distance took a tremendous amount of energy. It felt unnatural to pretend that the feelings weren't there. Our conversations covered the nuts and bolts of bike touring, solving the problems of the world, and books we had read, but never strayed into the less certain territory of relationships and feelings.

We all make choices when we are children, choices that we think will keep us safe and sane. I chose to close my heart. My father, the center of my universe, traveled away from home on a regular basis as a geologist. Each time he left, I grieved, and anticipated his return constantly. I think that after years of that routine, I numbed myself, and put a deadbolt on my heart. When I reached adulthood, I was always the one who left, never the one who cried, and my relationships suffered as a result.

I am not sure what gave me the idea, but when I met Scott in October, it was an echo from my childish past. He was in my life for a only short time, and that fact circumscribed our relationship. Knowing this, I fell for him anyway. I decided to wedge open the door of my heart, to keep it open, to suffer loss and to grieve like a woman. The plan worked well. I guess what I didn't count on was that the door wouldn't close once I stopped the experiment. For whatever perverse reason, I had trained myself to love this man, and that's all I can do.

To hang out with him in Colorado, I tried a host of defensive behaviors, they failed. Love, like a bacteria, developed a resistance to each one, until all I could do was keep my surly distance. I decided the day after the park to tell him that I would travel alone, but didn't summon the wherewithal to do so until we were in Leadville.

To get there, we traveled next to the Arkansas river, watching the rapids tumble with increasing ferocity. Near Buena Vista, none of the rafters wore helmets. Five miles north, the children had them, and ten miles north everyone did.

The corridor from Buena Vista to Leadville is lined with many of Colorado's "Fourteeners", mountains over fourteen thousand feet that form the Collegiate range. They are especially impressive as they rise out of the low elevation of the Arkansas River valley. They rose to our left, and later on, we passed Mount Elbert, Colorado's highest peak and later on Mount Massive, it's second highest, being only nine feet shorter. Grassland runs up to the base of each; old wooden buildings jut out of the grass, looking as though they grew there.

Like many roads in Colorado, the route to Leadville was crowded. Colorado's cities and towns are growing; west of Denver, the roads aren't. They snake over passes and through canyons, and are often engineering marvels, but marvels that are three lanes wide at the most. There aren't alternate routes, and in the summer, tourists compound the problem by flocking to the mountains en masse. The best that I could do to avoid the roar of the traffic was to wear earplugs.

As I came into Leadville, I heard a great commotion up on a hill and, seeing a profusion of glittering bicycles, I rode up to find the Courage Classic in full swing. I chose a bad route and entered apologetically through the finish line, trying to explain that I had won no race, but only came from Arizona.

It turned out to be a tour not a race, and as I picked my way through hundreds of bicycles laying on their side as though beached, I kept my eyes glued to the road below where I imagined that Scott would come riding through. I had left him, angry at some slight, and he had subsequently gotten a flat tire and damaged his chain.

He found me in a restaurant later on, where we spent the rest of the evening. Leadville has a more urban feel than the other mountain towns that I had been to. Deadheads and hippies who living in smelly above business apartments lounged on the streets talking about shows that they had been to, and which service job was the best to have. They all agreed that Tracks, the place we were at, was the best place to work.

An endearing girl named Ashley offered to let us crash at her apartment, and we gratefully accepted. After a couple of beers, we went up and wilted on the carpet, while Ashley painted in another apartment upstairs, and some guy named Ken slept in her bed.

Over coffee the next morning I told Scott. "I've been feeling kinda disquieted lately, and I think it's because I'm not over you."

He elbowed me. "Shut up."

"No," I said, "I'm serious."

"Well, do you want to split up."

"I think that would probably be the best thing."

"Well, okay," he said, "can I trade you my cheese for your peanut butter?"

I pedaled out of Leadville at noon after consulting with a bike shop regarding a click in my pedal. They recommended greasing it- contrary advice to what they told me in Gunnison. Every revolution of the crank yielded that click, which I periodically attempted to relieve with a large rock. I finally realized that if I pulled up on the upstroke, it quieted. This technique took a lot of effort, however, and I took frequent breaks while climbing up the pass between Leadville and I-70.

It had been several days since I traveled alone, and I found myself enjoying it; I practically shed my pain regarding Scott, though in the back of my mind, I knew that we were following the same route and that I might see him again. I enjoyed the freedom- that I might make decisions without consulting anyone, that I might stop or go as I pleased, and that I might travel at my own pace. Even in a headwind, going uphill, I felt a degree of equanimity. "Go ahead and blow, wind," I said, "I don't have anywhere to be." It seemed to hear me, and allowed me passage to the top.

The Climax Molybdenum Mine was perched at the top of Fremont Pass. Over the years, tailings, the crushed and digested rock waste that mines leave behind, had been spread over an entire valley floor, covering two former town sites which had thrived during the silver rush in the 1880's. A road sign overlooking the psychedelic swirl of mineralized rock and water stated that it seemed a fitting dispatch for a mining town to be covered with tailings. Another sign depicted an idyllic meadow that would be the result of future remediation. Even under close inspection, it was hard to see the mutations and physical defects of the deer and trout pictured in the futuristic rendition. I supposed that was due to artistic oversight.

At the bottom of the pass, I saw a man standing on the side of the road with walking sticks and a large pack. I stopped and asked him what he was doing.

"I'm hiking the Colorado Trail from Denver to Durango." he said, adding that he had never hiked before.

It was exciting to think that someone would undertake that kind of a project without experience. It was a lot like what I was doing; suddenly I understood better the enthusiasm with which people sometimes greeted my own adventure. He and I walked down the hill for awhile, talking

"I just climbed over that mountain," he said, indicating a huge mound of tree covered rock over his shoulder. "A guy I met who did the trail before me said that the price of the admission is steep, but the show is worth it. When I got up to the top over there, I just started laughing. It was so amazing."

The man, whose name was Denny, said that he sold heavy equipment. I mentioned that he must be good at his job to have gotten two months off in the summer to go hiking.

"I'm not a good salesman, but I am willing to take time to study manuals and learn about new equipment. I'll go down to Dallas on a weekend for an inservice if I have to. I am not the best salesman at the company, but out of twenty or so, I'm number three or four"

"So you're a really solid employee," I affirmed.

"I guess so. But I have to say, that on some of the steeper hills, where I hardly can take two steps before resting, I curse my boss for having given me the time off."

I walked with Denny down to the bike path that allows cyclists to bypass I-70- no mean feat with a touring bike, and we said our goodbyes. I got on the bike path, a narrow band of concrete that wound along a creek and past wide quiet ponds. The canyon walls were shear, rising above the riparian willows. I looked up; cumulus clouds rose to their stratospheric heights above the rock, creating a dizzying display of natural scale. I stopped in amazement to stare. Some guy came by me and said, "What's the matter, you never seen Colorado before?"

"No," I said, "I haven't." Unless you counted the entire last month and five passes done by bicycle.

We didn't get time to make any more small talk; the grade steepened, and my heavier load carried me past him.

Cyclists were everywhere, thick on the bike paths, moving themselves along in their separate lanes. Road bikers intent on training nodded their hello out of their concentration, while whole families on comfort bikes called encouragement from the side of the trail. I rolled into Frisco with a sense of wonder.

I also had a sense of frustration, because my pedal was still clicking. I had developed what I felt was a deeper understanding of Edgar Allen Poe's death watch. Click click click. I warned the pedal that I would knock it with a rock, that I would throw it out, that it would end up on a Huffy. At times it would listen, pausing for a beat or two before taking back up its inexorable click click clicking. It was time for a solution. I would spend a hundred dollars on new pedals, if I had to. That's a big chunk of my wealth, belonging as I do to the leisure class at the bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum. But I was desperate. Instead of skipping Frisco as planned, therefore, I went into its center to find a bikeshop.

Instead, I found a gigantic street party. Back in Leadville, there had been a droll bunch of cyclists, but they had nothing on the crowd I found in Frisco. The street had been blocked off and live music boomed from a stage surrounded by cyclists and their rides, as beer poured forth in the streets, courtesy of Fat Tire. I immediately spotted Scott's bike but not Scott, and decided to eat lunch on the grass and wait for him. I didn't wait long. Pulling out my kitchen bag, I realized I had taken his spoon, and when I looked up, he was close enough to hand it to.

"Here you go, dude." I said.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, amazed.

"What are YOU doing here?"

It turned out that we had stumbled onto the entertainment set up for the Bicycle Tour of Colorado. They had the next day off, and were enjoying themselves. Neither Scott nor I could resist it. In contrast to their supported tour, we were fully loaded, and everyone was curious about our bikes. I had to explain what I was doing over and over again.

One of the medics following the ride handed us both some of the mad money being used in town by the cyclists. "Hey, you guys deserve this. You're doing this for real."

His name was Simon, a happy-go-lucky physician's assistant who lived to ride his bike. He was there with his girlfriend Greer, who worked for Pridemark Ambulance. I had heard of Pridemark from my work as a paramedic, and was excited to meet someone who worked for them. As is the case with all ambulance companies, however, the reality didn't measure up to the lore.

We swapped a lot of EMS stories over dinner later on, and Simon talked about his experiences as a medic during the war in Afghanistan. He had been several hundred miles behind enemy lines then, part of a special forces unit hunting down the bad guys. "You can't imagine how backward it is, unless you've been there," he said, "Some of these people thought we were RUSSIANS. They had no idea what was going on."

He talked at length about the culture, how it was illegal to read or write unless you were a cleric, how there was no sanitation, and that, as a result, the dust that blew around the villages was fifteen percent fecal matter. There were many things that he talked about that pointed to the institutionalized evil of the culture, evil that lingers still, although under a new leader. It was a fascinating window into a world I knew little about, and it got me to thinking about the nature of good and evil, thoughts that I carried with me when I met my Uncle Bruce the next day.

He and I agreed to meet in Idaho Springs, some fifty miles away from Frisco, and on the other side of Loveland pass. I got back on the bike path. Coming from Arizona, I had never had the experience of being one of a throng of bikers. There, I felt like Mad Max, or a crazed chinchilla fighting for my very life in traffic thick with old blind pissed off people. Here, I had to practice courtesy, and stay in my own lane. I just haven't developed these skills as well as I should have, especially when I have to go up a hill dragging a hundred pounds. Then, I look like a giant drunk chinchilla- a big red one.

Coming off of the bike path, I climbed a giant hill on Swan Lake Road, which connects Frisco to Keystone. I was well fed, having eaten something like three dinners the night before, and it felt good to climb. In fact, when a shaggy headed roadie with no helmet came by at a slow pace, I chased him almost to the top of the hill. I was still wheezing as I slid down the other side into Keystone. From Keystone, the climb to Loveland Pass begins. Excepting Owl Creek, that purgatory of a dirt pass, it is longer than the other passes, eight miles to the typical four or five. The vegetation had gotten greener as I moved north. The understory reminded me of that of northern forests in Washington and Oregon. I filled my bottles from a spring on the side of the road and climbed past Arapaho Basin, a ski resort that is mostly above treeline. Turning around, I could see other ski hills, carved swaths glimmering in the rising monsoonal mist. This was ski country, to be sure, the domain of the leisure class on the other side of the spectrum.

I ate lunch above Arapahoe Basin, pausing to pick my Uncle Bruce some alpine flowers. Two miles from the top of the pass, two old men came past me on road bikes. When I ride alone, I don't pay attention to my pace, so it is frequently snail slow. I took the opportunity to pace off of them, and was to the top of the pass in no time.

Denny's words echoed in my mind as I stood at the top of Loveland. Admission is steep but the show is worth it. It was by far the most stunning pass that I had climbed. We were well above tree line, and patches of snow decorated the smooth contours of the mountain tops. Heedless of Scott's admonitions regarding lightening, I climbed the ridge above the pass, scooping up snow to eat as I walked. Something like a giant hamster trilled at me from a pile of rocks on my left. I had forever wanted to hike from the top of the pass, but was afraid to leave my bike. Even now, as I did this, I had misgivings, but I decided to leave it in God's hands, and hiked about for an hour before the wind picked up and thunder boomed.

It had started to rain as I got on my bike, cold and bitter. I put my rain pants and flew down the pass. The nice thing about riding thirty or forty miles an hour down a pass is that you don't get overtaken by cars. Often, bikes go faster down passes than their infernally combusting counterparts because they corner better. This was not true of I-70, however, which I had to ride for five miles before retreating to frontage roads.

The rest of the ride that day was peaceful, either bike paths or frontage roads, empty because of the interstate nearby, and golden with afternoon light shining past storm clouds.

I stayed that night in Denver. The contrast between the mountains that I had lived in for the last month and the megalopolis of Denver upset me. I wanted to see my Uncle Bruce, but I didn't want to be inside, and certainly not in a city. I didn't know Uncle Bruce well enough to know if it was going to be a safe and comfortable visit. Already he had yelled at me about hellfire when I tried to explain to him that I wasn't Christian but did believe in God. Exhaustion, however, led me out of the corridors of life in Denver and quickly into those of dreams.

I had, in fact, come to Denver to find out more about this Christian uncle.

Seeing Uncle Bruce, a man with my forehead and jaw, my skull and fine hair, reawakened my interest in my own family. This was the first time that I gotten to know a relative other than one of my parents. The joy and delight of realizing the similarities and differences between he and his brother, my father, was like listening to variations of the same melody peeling out of our familial symphony. Uncle Bruce looks like his father, my grandfather, who, with five of his siblings, came to America from Sweden. In a picture of all of them together, my grandfather was the most awkward of the bunch. He had dark hair, thick features and a weak chin, while the rest were blond with strong features and stern gazes. Uncle Bruce told me that in fact my father and I take after his mother's side of the family, the German Wellers from Wisconsin.

All of the Rybergs have tempers. Most of Uncle Bruce's stories were peppered with accounts of the police showing up to break up fights, to serve warrants, or to take one or another Ryberg down to the pokey for the night. This was told casually; a normal occurrence in a family of hot-blooded Swedes. To my knowledge, my own father, whose temper is less quick, but no less fierce, hasn't had a punch thrown at him since he was in college. I never knew what a rowdy bunch of characters I was related to.

Uncle Bruce's passion is muscle cars, coupes, never sedans, with eight cylinder engines. At sixty, he still gets stopped for speeding, and indeed, as we drove down the interstate one day, a highway patrolman trilled his siren reproachfully as Uncle Bruce sped past him. He looks and acts younger than his age, comporting himself with an endearing emotional vulnerability.

He is totally willing to follow God, innocently and without reserve. His heart is open, and his feelings, for better or worse are worn on his sleeve. He is a lot like me in this respect; he has no hidden agendas, just a desire to find what is true in life and live by it.

We talked about God and religion late into every night. Though I haven't converted to Christianity, he seemed satisfied that I was well on my way, and didn't evangelize. On Saturday, he bought me a tiny copy of the New Testament, and on Sunday, I put off a mountain bike ride to go to church with him. It seemed fitting, after all, the dominant theme of my visit had been to explore spirituality with him. Because he had an injured back, he was home all day; it almost felt like a religious retreat. I am not sure that either of us changed our minds or hearts about anything, but I do think we both felt strengthened in our respective faiths.

All that we have here is by grace. The beauty, though, is that grace is everywhere and available to everyone. Mine had taken wing and followed me all the way to Denver. I feel stronger now than ever before, living a precarious existence over the well woven net of grace. I am safer than I have ever been, safer because I know what to credit with my safety. As far as I can tell, there is no true security in jobs, family or home. All of these things shall pass, and so shall I.

The world is a much more magical place than we normally realize, filled with miracles and blessings that happen whether we are aware of them or not. We are surrounded by a loving intelligence, and our difficulties are but opportunities for the growth of our souls.

At this juncture, I feel that it would be harder NOT to follow my guidance than to follow it.

In a canyon near Golden, I had a choice of two campsites. One was in a stand of trees, soft pine needles on the ground, overlooking the canyon, and the other was by the side of he road near a dead coyote. My guidance told me the latter was a good choice and the former a bad one. I threw my bag down in the weeds, parked my bike near the up ended rib cage, and, in the morning, broke camp in full view of Denver's intractable 6 AM rush hour traffic. Who knows why? I don't question it; I am just grateful that I have it.

These last words are being written from a farm community in the front range called Johnstown. In the last years, it has grown, and now you can choose between an overpriced patio or estate home in a suburban development on the edge of town. The roads on the front range, even the remote ones, are choked with suburban traffic, as people move farther and farther from the city in order to buy affordable houses and live the 'American Dream'. Denver spreads like a cancer, fingers of development metatastizing from its center, wisps of smog following them like sorcery. I wonder, too, if we can find a different, less deadly way to live, where people are more important than cars. I wonder if the people who notice the soul muffling quality of suburban life are in the minority.

In a day, I will be in Nebraska, following farm roads into towns where land costs less, and life is, I hope, more gentle.

Many thanks to those who have helped me during this leg of my tour, Scott, Uncle Bruce, Greer and Simon, from whose house I write this, the bald guy wearing Carharts in Frisco who finally fixed my pedal, Christine in Longmont, Buzz and crew at High Gear Cyclery in Longmont, Cousin Alicia, Seth in the computer shop in Gunnison, Ashley in Leadville and everyone else. The next time I write will be from the Great Plains, writing of gentle rises rather than passes, of subtler beauty than what I have previously described.

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Travelogue 5

As I was considering whether or not to write more of my spiritual and internal experiences, I heard a keening, and looked up to see that I had upset a hawk stationed on a telephone pole. I turned followed him down to the next pole, where again he took off with a cry.

I never talked about the night north of Buena Vista , when I had an overpowering urge to stay in town. I found the swimming hole while trying to walk off the anxiety I felt. Having fallen into the trap of hoping that something would happen between Scott and me, I wanted to stay and drink with him. Having committed to follow God, I wanted to return and see what the feeling was all about. I walked instead, thinking about the relationship between spirituality and addiction. It seems that addiction is when you make something other than God your higher power. It always grows in its power over you, the demonic spirit of the insatiable. It wants you dead. God, on the other hand, wants you alive, or so says the Christian mythology. So that night, I sat with my choices, watching myself wavering between addiction and the love of God.

At the risk of sounding hackneyed, my days on the road are attended by the awareness and realization of God. Sometimes I love him so much; it's like a fit of ecstasy. I feel set apart in this- how can you tell the random stranger that you love and serve God first and foremost? The only ones who understand are radical Christians, and they're pissed that I don't get the whole Christ thing. Sorry, guys.

In any case, here I am, in the corner of northeastern Colorado , in an ecosystem referred to as a short grassland steppe. Last night, I looked out of my tent through the gamma grass up to where the crescent moon was setting in the western sky. It reminded me of the last time I stared through that same grass at the moon and felt safe and loved, back in 1998, after having been canned from an ambulance job on the reservation. The difference between then and now is that I feel like that almost all the time.

Not that I don't know that what I am doing is dangerous. You all don't have to tell me. And I mean that. Well meaning emails telling me about serial killers upset me. They don't make me do anything different; they just cast a shadow over my trip. There is an odd phenomenon that occurs to travelers wherein people tell them that where they are going is horribly dangerous and that they are going to die. I might die. I know that; I had to come to terms with it before I left. So, instead of telling me how a serial killer is driving around in a blue tractor trailer looking for loaded tourists, consider for a minute that I am actually IN whatever part of the nation you see fit to warn me about, and probably have a better idea of what's going on, anyway. Don't ruin my trip, please. It's bad enough being a woman, meaning that I have something integral to my being that people might want to take from me, without getting fear mongered on top of it. And I mean that.

I read part of a book by a 65 year old British lady who had traveled around the world by bicycle. She had gone through Muslim countries, as well as the Australian Outback and the Gobi Desert . It certainly drained whatever fear I had about traveling through the Midwest alone. Grandma's sending us reports from Peru , and finds that the guerillas really do take very good care of you, if you're polite. Before reading that, I thought that I would need a partner to do Central and South America , but now, all I want is an extra set of tires and some mosquito netting.

In any case, I picked up a few new possessions in Denver . I got a Lightyear CD, which is a tiny, lightweight tent that you can hide almost anywhere. I woke up this morning on the grassland a bit wet from condensation but quite pleased with its performance. I don't need a whole lot of space, because, unlike other tourists, I like to leave my bags on my bike. It makes the bike harder to steal, and it is far less of a pain in the ass to break camp in the morning.

The other thing I got is a dead rat named Kristine who rides on top of my rear panniers. Before she was a dead rat, she was a beanie baby, with soft fur and a long tail. She didn't die until she had dangled upside down from my bar bag for a couple of days. For being dead, however, she is remarkably good company. Her namesake is a bartender in Longmont , Colorado . A friend of a friend, Kristine is brilliant, articulate and salty as hell. I had been in Boulder to pick up a package, and went to Longmont to meet her. To get to Longmont , I decided to take back roads. The roads between the two towns cut through what should have been the middle of nowhere. What looks like the middle of nowhere. I was confused, then, when every back road I chose had a cadre of unrelenting traffic. "Who are you people?!?!?" I screamed into the headwind, "Where are you going?!?! Quit having babies and go the f#@! home!!!"

They acted as though they didn't hear me. In desperation, I struck out on a dirt bike path. A single track spur cut northeast, the direction I was headed. I took it, and everything was going great until I hit a fence, beyond which some farmer, hoping, perhaps, to be immortalized by buying and then securing a patch of dirt, had placed razor wire. I looked around and saw that I was between two irrigation ditches. I had no choice but to turn around.

The grass was three feet high, and when I hit it with my front pannier, it jerked me off the trail. When I rejoined it, I followed the main bike path west, and was horrified when it turned south. I was on a horseshoe trail that finally dumped me out in some suburb. Maintaining the remaining vestiges of calm that I had, I asked a little girl how to get out. She gave some very good instructions, and soon I was back out in thick traffic screaming about birth control.

Someone finally explained to me that the entire Front Range is a gigundous suburb. All of the traffic on those lonely farm roads was commuter traffic from Denver .

It was with relief that I finally rode into Longmont . I located the Third Avenue Grill, and went upstairs to meet the woman for whom I would name my dead rat.

That day, Christine had short burgundy hair, which she bemoaned. She smoked cigarettes and swilled wine and told me about her smoke jumping boyfriend whom her family hated. As we talked, I realized that she had the same difficulties with men that I had, falling too hard, treating them like a hard drug. She had decided, however, that when her boyfriend started to get entangled with his last girlfriend that she would leave him.

“I told him that I am the best woman that he would ever find. Most women play head games. I would never do that. I don't treat men badly because I'm cranky, and I don't get PMS. If I get my period, I just plug it up and move on.”

He called her for months, but she would have nothing to do with him. Finally, he got through when she picked up the phone to make a call, and heard him on the other end. A date for coffee turned into a reconciliation, and now she was talking marriage.

“I'm thirty years old. This isn't a time to mess around. Either marry me or get lost,” she said.

We sat and talked, and I waited for my cousin Bonnie to show up. She had called me that day from Denver , sorry that she had missed me and anxious to see me. She had been my caretaker when I was seven or eight years old. My father traveled for his job, and Bonnie stayed with me, sewing Halloween costumes, entertaining me, being my best friend. She had been twenty four at the time, and now she was in her forties, with two daughters.

When she and her family arrived, we spent time catching up, and then I played fuzzball with her daughters. After dinner, we said our goodbyes, and I went back inside to wait for Kristine to get off of work.

The next day, I went with Kristine back to the Grill and wrote while rain fell and Kristine worked. I got restless and wandered down the street to where I found a bike shop. I met Buzz there, a road biker in his fifties who had a gorgeous steel Lemond road bike. It had to be the prettiest bike that I had ever seen. Buzz offered to check my bike over, and gave me a water bottle, and then escorted me most of the way to Johnstown .

I spent several days in Johnstown with Greer and Simon, friends who I had met in Frisco a week or so before, taking day trips into the mountains and writing. I left on the first day of August, and rode to the Pawnee National Grasslands.

Like the National Forests, the Grasslands were open to free camping. I joyfully set up my tent, and crawled inside. Coyotes woke me in the night, and I wondered sleepily if I should be worried.

The next day, I rode out of Colorado . I was more exhausted that I could account for. It had been all day, but I had gone only thirty miles. It could have been the headwind; it could have been the dirt road that degraded into singletrack by the time I reached Wyoming . Whatever it was, I found a park in a roadbump of a town called Carpenter, Wyoming and I wasn't moving. I tried to nap, and dozed, in any case, but had gotten back up when a woman on a quad came chugging up to the park.

She got off and began talking without preamble. "I have got to move the hose. This park has a sprinkler system, but it just doesn't reach everywhere, and someone's having a huge picnic tomorrow, they are, and I thought that I would clean the place up."

"It looks like a nice park." I said, quite sincerely." It had trees and grass and a picnic table, in stark contrast to the surrounding country that had wheat and corn and overgrazed prairie, but no shade.

She came walking up to where I was gathering my belongings. "Is that the best you can do?" she said when she saw my bike.

"Well, I had a car but I sold it."

She shook her head in some combination of pity and disapproval. "I couldn't live without mine."

"There are benefits. I never get stiff like I do when I ride in a car."

To my unutterable relief, this sidetracked her. "Oh, I know just what you mean. I go to Cheyenne twice a week to exercise. It's the arthritis, you know. If I didn't exercise, why, I wouldn't be able to get out of my chair."

She looked like she did okay. Shorter than me, she was muscular with a peaked nose and rounded shoulders. Except that for her gray hair and wrinkles, she seemed like a much younger person. Her arms were dark with tan, and you could see by where the wrinkles ended abruptly at the base of her neck that they came more from sun than age. Perched on her head was a baseball cap, equipment for an active person.

A group of kids came into the park.

"Here come those bad boys."

"Their supposed to be bad, aren't they?" I asked.

"Yes." she agreed.

I didn't seem to be going anywhere, so I asked if she had kids. She said that she had several kids and grandkids. "My granddaughter Amy is really smart- a lot of the kids here are really smart. They get scholarships and go up to school in Casper or Nebraska . Well, my granddaughter is deep into those computers and makes very good money in Cheyenne . I have two grandsons two, but I haven't seen them five times in their lives. They are bad boys. They never went to college and now they live up there in Tacoma with their families taking any job they can get."

I was starting to get worried that she would ask me what I was doing with my life, but she was already turning to leave. I supposed that my fate with her was sealed when she realized that I couldn't do any better than a bicycle. She gave me directions to the next town north, desperately needed, since I had no map, and got back on her quad, not even waving as she left.

Three bikers went by me, their cycles loaded to the hilt with camping gear. The last had an American flag. They were headed north, like me, and I suddenly remembered that the Sturgis motorcycle rally was coming up.

It turned out that it was starting that day, to run through the following weekend. I realized that I had to go, not only for myself, but as an emissary of bike tourists everywhere.

It would take several days of hard riding. For that, I would need to eat a good meal. It was a little out of the way, but I road to Pine Bluffs, Wyoming, where a truck stop restaurant promised to load me up with thousands of cholesterol-laden calories that would give me the wherewithal to pedal eighty or a hundred miles. I was a woman on a mission.

I had gotten a good night sleep the night before- Burns is a hamlet of around 250 ornery souls, according to the man at the Antelope truck stop, a man who in loud and vulgar tones decried the exodus of his wife of twenty years. His companions had their own tales of marital woe, and I thought 'I have to get the hell out of here before they decide to burn me at the stake.' To Burns it was.

The towns in this part of the country stick out of the grass like mushrooms. They offer the shade and respite that is almost absent on the open plains. Even at dusk, the glare of the sun was on me, until I pedaled into Burns and started appraising the sides of buildings for a campsite. I found a spot that was concealed on almost four sides next to the Burns Presbyterian Church, but a car went by as I was pushing my bike in. I abandoned the church and continued my quest. I had decided to find a hay field out of town, but took one last tour around the city park and noticed a mound of ragweed covered dirt on the west end of town. Quicker than Anna Nicole Smith cleans her plate, I rode to the other side of it, and found the holy grail of stealth campsites, the Valhalla of biking accommodations. It was sweet. Two dozen cyclists could have camped there for days undetected. At some point a bulldozer had pushed some earth aside to create a place to lay a foundation. For whatever reason, they had gone no farther, and so now a berm shielded the site from town, and gave shade from morning light. The depression left behind sheltered me from the remaining 270 degrees of flatland; sunflowers grew by the thousands in the disturbed earth on the edge of the site, which itself was free of vegetation, and was flat as I was on my fifteenth birthday. The view at eight o'clock at night afforded cirrus colored like sherbet, awaiting the scoop of the waxing moons to serve it up to the gods. It didn't suck.

But, as I said, I was on a mission. The bikers of the world had to know that we without motors were tourists too. So, on that premise, I dutifully got up at 6:30 AM, the middle of the night, as far as I was concerned, and set out for that hot breakfast that would fuel me to South Dakota.

True to my mission, I rode north out of Pine Bluffs at a fast clip. It was hot out and for some reason I was climbing. I was in the high plains, where everything is flatter than the economy since George Bush absconded with the presidency, and I found myself climbing hills. At my normal, leisurely pace, the huge breakfast that I ate would have set nicely, but riding fast, I could feel my hash browns and biscuits 'n' gravy starting to edge their way up my esophagus. 'Must keep down,' I grunted to myself, 'payed good money for stomach contents.'

I grimaced and kept riding. I had tightened my laces and Velcro this morning- no more wearing my Shimano shoes like tennies now that I was a biker with a scheduled rendezvous in Sturgis. Loose shoes are for wimpy tourers. I was no longer one of THOSE.

With a sense of hilarity, I entered Nebraska . A front that had been to the West all day reached me and blew me the next twenty miles. The wind whistled through the power lines, but it was silent in my ears as I moved at the same speed as the air. It was a spooky sensation, and I thanked God not to be fighting that wind, as I surely would have lost. I turned north and came to a park, where, missing the sign that announced free camping, stealth camped on a nature trail. It was up in some hills covered by ponderosa pine, and an understory of grass, mountain mahogany and yucca, exactly the same as the vegetation in Prescott , and I was determined to stay the night there no matter what.

I awoke the next day feeling a vague self-recrimination. Part of it came from the fact that I had taken that which would have been freely given, namely my campsite. My energy level was low, in part because I had no coffee, which was in town, eight miles away. I crawled there, turning the pedals only when I had to. The intensity of the traffic forced me onto a canal path through a field of goat heads, so I stopped at a gas station not only to use the bathroom and look at a map, but to repair a flat front tire.

It had been a long day of riding the day before; today was going to be the same. I found a Perkins with an early bird menu that offered the cheapest breakfasts in town. I ordered a lot of food, and put some of my thoughts down before I drank my coffee. Where my head is at pre and post coffee are usually two different things. Today, however, my mood changed little. I had been thinking in the last days that it was time to look for work, that to wait until the tour ended to send out resumes and make inquiries would stall me once I was off of my bike. Now the mandate was like an existential reproof in my brain. I thought of the homeless man I met who was touring. He rode a K-mart bike which had more gears than he had teeth. When I said that I was part of the leisure class on the low end of the economic scale, I meant him too. I was sure I didn't want permanent membership in that club.

God seemed an abstract, like he so often does. I took a bite out my country omelet, hash browns on the inside. Cyndee Lauper piped out of the ceiling. "If you're falling, I'll catch you, I'll be waiting." A tear fell on my eggs. It was silly, I know, but it meant something to me. I have this sense that everything would fall apart, that I would fall, were it not for the grace of god. In my fragility, a pop song was a promise and a reassurance.

Such is my life these days.

The wind had been blowing since I had gotten up at five thirty that morning, blowing steady from the west-northwest. My map showed seventy-two miles of empty country between me and the next spit spot of a town. I loaded up with as much food and water as I could carry and headed into the wind.

I had done some remote riding, but this had to be the most remote. I rode for hours, seeing nothing but empty, uncultivated miles of undulating grassland. It might have been the headwind, but I swear that the uphills far exceeded the downhills. In any case, this wasn't flatland. Every bit of it had a grade, and try as I might, I couldn't go quickly.

According to my map, the road took a 90 degree turn east about 27 miles outside of Scottsbluff. The promise that I would have a tailwind if I stuck to the riding kept me going. As I hit the curve, at six at night, I was raving. It had just taken too long to get there. Maybe if I were a guy, I wouldn't admit this, but I was screaming at the road, "Turn you sorry chunk of asphalt. I hate you!" I didn't stop until I was hoarse.

In addition to all of its other charms, this particular highway had not been repaired with tar where it fractured, which was at least every thirty yards or so. My wrists and back and elbows somehow put up with the rhythmic, jarring kawhump. Needless to say, I was the only cyclist crazy enough to be out there.

Finally, my shadow lengthened. I promised myself that I could stop when the road turned north again. I was attempting to enjoy the tailwind (kawhump whump whump) when I passed a man my age in a pickup.

"Hey," he said, "I'll give you a ride to town. You're still about thirty miles out."

Was not. Twenty six, maybe.

"I wouldn't consider it," I said. Blunt, but true. Then came the old trick played upon us poor bike tourists day in and day out, everywhere.

"Well, I wouldn't offer, but the coyotes can get kinda bad out here. You'd better be careful."

Like I knew how to be careful of coyotes. When I asked, apparently he didn't either, apart from going to town. He just said that people had been attacked out there.

"Like how recently?" I asked, attempting to give perspective to this latest fear-mongering.

"Oh, six, seven months."

He drove off, and I controlled my laughter for just a moment, and then let loose, laughing like I was dancing on my own grave. I had been through a hellish day, (and it should be noted, that I still loved it), and somehow in that moment, the idea that someone would warn me about coyotes struck me as hysterically funny. He could have warned me about the sun, the wind, bad drivers, bad asphalt, mosquitoes, ranchers, whatever. I told God that if he thought it were a fitting end for me to feed some coyotes, it was fine with me.

I found a beautiful place to camp in a corn field. It was like having my own apartment; I was perfectly hidden in these little rooms formed where the corn didn't take. A startled deer bounded down a row, his two, proud points on each side marking his exit from the field with every jump.

The coyotes didn't start their singing until around midnight . I tried to think of what I would do if they surrounded me. The idea of being dinner suddenly seemed real, and seemed gruesome. I thought how rarely it is that people have to look predation in the face. Mostly our worries center on money, career, and other imaginary things. For me, remote as the possibility was, this was real.

At around three AM , they were singing between me and the farm house behind the field. A shot rang out, and then comforting silence. They sang once more that night, and once in the morning. The night passed with less sleep than I would have liked, but no coyotes ever bothered me.

I awoke early in the cornfield, but stayed in bed until eight o'clock . It had been a difficult night because of the coyotes. Their plaintive yips and howls translated to me to cries of aggression. I laid in my tent waiting for them to draw closer, to be made dinner by them. I called my friend Chad , who told me that they were just out having fun and chasing bunnies and not to worry. He set my mind at ease; imagining them as playful rather than bloodthirsty went a long way towards believing I might see morning.

Just as I was changing into my bike clothes, the farmer came by. His truck stopped, and I knew that, bare bummed, I had been caught. In one less-than-fluid motion, I tugged at my Lycra and stood up. A teenager was just headed my direction. "I'm a cyclist; I just camped in your field for the night. I hope you don't mind."

I spit out the words in a hurry. I'm sure that the farmer, when he caught sight of my filthy blond braids and the rest of me, was unable to believe otherwise. "Oh, that's ok. We just didn't know what was going on."

"Well, thanks," I called back, "Have a great day."

"Same to you." he said out of the window of his moving truck.

I was shaking. I always shake when I get caught stealth camping. I'm not sure why. Logically, I knew it wouldn't be a big deal or I would have left hours before. It just unnerves me.

I was running low on water, and I had to poop. Nothing but fields and grasslands were in evidence, and I tacked all of my hope on a town to the north called Marsland. It was a bust, so I kept riding. I figured that I could make Crawford, two dozen miles up the road, but that I would be thirsty. Plus, I still had to go.

I had noticed that, since entering Nebraska , the state car seemed to be the mini-van. No Toyotas or Subarus ever went past me. It made me slightly homesick. One of the first Toyotas that I finally saw was driven by a man who had just done the mass-tour across Iowa . He slowed down next to me, and I stopped my bike. "No," he said, "Keep riding. I'll drive next to you."

I didn't bother to explain that I really wanted to stop, and that, in the absence of shade, he might be my only reason to do so. We talked for a while and then he offered me a cold Pepsi. For the above listed reason, and out of a mad desire for caffeine, I accepted. It turned out to be diet, which I spurn, so he offered me water. It was blessedly cold, and I topped it off with ice from his cooler. "This is a godsend," I told him, meaning it. I have noticed that when people refer to something as a godsend, it often literally is.

His name was Jim and he was a boat builder out of Tacoma . Short in stature, built wide like a bull dog, he had silver hair and bright blue eyes. I liked him immediately. We exchanged tour stories, and he showed me his bike. It was a nice Trek road bike, aluminum with a triple chainring that people use on sagged tours. He told me of the sailboat that he was building, and how he planned to sail it down the Pacific coast and hang a right in Southern California . I wished him all the luck in the world.

He asked me. "Do you read often?"

"Oh yes," I replied, "I read quiet a bit."

"Then I have a book for you."

He handed me Miles from Nowhere, by Barbara Savage. It was written in the early eighties after she and her husband toured around the world. I had heard of it, and had wanted to read it.

After an hour of talking, we parted ways. An hour after that, a biker pulled off the road in front of me and waved me towards him. He pulled out a Pepsi in a bag of ice and told me that Jim had sent it out for me. I was doubly blessed.

Several more bikers showed up. They were from Switzerland , and were riding bikes that had cost $700 to ship across the ocean. One of the bikes was a 1948 Harley shovelhead, which meant, I gathered that the cylinder head was U-shaped. They were a motley bunch, looking like they had been rejected for bit roles on a Mad Max movie set. This was getting rich. I bummed a cigarette off of one of them, and smoked while they investigated each other's bikes and talked motorcycles. It was a bit like what dogs do when they meet each other.

After the previous, arduous day in the middle of nowhere, I was delighted to be meeting people and socializing.

I had water now and nine miles to go to Crawford. I still had to poop.

I pushed hard against the wind, pedaling down the hill from where I had met the bikers. When I got to the convenience store in Crawford, the Swiss bikers were there. "Man, you are fast on that thing," one of them said.

You would be too if you had been waiting all day to go. I went to find a restroom, and instead found a sign announcing that the septic system was out of order.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Something in my face made the woman, Cindy, behind the counter reconsider the bathroom closure. "Ignore the sign, hon, go on in."

It was good that the bathroom was closed to the public. I was in there a long time. When you eat constantly, it is not a good idea to hold onto anything. I decided that, come hell or high water, I would never be anal retentive again.

After a meal in downtown Crawford, I rode twenty more miles, which got me into the Oglala National Grasslands. They were different than the Pawnee. The fences of private pasture remained; periodic gates marked entrances into Pastures 22, 22N and so on. I turned off of the road, directly into the wind, and climbed a hill overlooking the highway. Assembling my anti-coyote munitions, I piled rocks outside of my tent, and threw a few inside for good measure. Dinner was short and scant, a handful of dried Cheerios and a Luna bar; I was anxious to be in my tent with the zipper closed before it got too dark. The Cheerios bag went in with me as a noisemaker. The coyotes would come, I was sure, and I would be ready.

They never came, chastened by the wind, perhaps. It blew steadily throughout the night, changing course from the day before so that, when I got up, I had a strong tailwind.

I was ten miles from South Dakota , and was in a wonderful mood when I came across the border. Twenty or so miles into the state, I stopped at Cascade Falls to eat and go for a swim. There, I met a photographer from Alabama named Skip Baumhower, who gave me some advice for getting sponsors and for taking pictures. He offered to take some pictures of me while I was riding, which he did, holding up all the traffic behind him as he told me to smile for the camera.

“Hey,” I yelled, “Is there any possibility that I can get God to sponsor me?”

“I think you've already got that.” Skip said with a drawl.

They drove off, and I slowed down my pace, realizing that I had been riding as fast as I could, my own bike and pony show.

When I got to Hot Springs, the first big town north of the border, a man walked up to me and asked "Were those boys from Alabama bothering you?" I told him that, in fact, I was harassing them. It turned out that the man was a truck driver who had been keeping track of me ever since I had crossed into South Dakota that morning. He was sufficiently worried by the way Skip's car drove up next to me to let the police know.

I had been looking forward to riding in the Black Hills ever since I found out about a rail-to-trail that ran up through the middle of them for over a hundred miles. The George S. Mickelson trail has almost flat grades, with kiosks, water sources and points of interest set at regular intervals over its entire length. I caught the Mickelson Trail the next day in a small town called Pringle following a breakfast that wouldn't settle. I had been sick since the night before, a repercussion from my bout with pooplessness in Nebraska . The nausea was building, and I could feel chunks climbing up my esophagus. I threw up, leaving bits of pancake in the grass now colored by coffee and non-dairy creamer. Feeling better, I rode to Hill City .

I was preoccupied by whether or not to pay the fee for the trail. I didn't feel that, in all good conscience, I could. RV's, motorcycles and cars carrying tourists passed without toll on roads far more expensive to maintain than the trail I was on. I felt that it was an example of misplaced values to provide endless miles of highway for free and to charge pedestrians and bicyclists for their own safe and scenic passage. It was one more installment in my "what do they care more about- cars or people?" tirade.

The closest I ever came to resolving the difficulty was to define it better in my mind. I had at first just felt an uneasy outrage at the prospect of being charged, which clarified itself to the above manifesto. If we are going to have a huge government, then let it pay for good things like bike trails, not just things that facilitate money making, like defense contracts and oil subsidies.

I rode and pondered what to tell the rangers if they asked if I had paid. I knew that I should be enjoying the scenery, but I remained obsessed with the problem. I went through a town called Custer, picking up apple juice and bananas, which seemed to stay down okay, and got back on the trail, headed for the next town.

Hill City was awash in motorcycles. They lined the streets and poured through them, exotic, howling two wheeled creatures among those with doors and air conditioning. I had stayed ahead of a thunderstorm all afternoon, but almost as soon as I arrived, rain came, followed by hail. I pushed the bike under an eave on Main Street , jostling for a place among the thousands of now stranded bikers. With nothing to do but watch huge hail stones assail the objects of their pride, they talked to me.

My belly was indicating that it might share company with rice and beans, given the opportunity, and I started conversations by asking where a Mexican restaurant was.

I received positive and incredulous responses from everyone I met. Feeling a bit guilty for the attention, though I had pedaled hundreds of miles to get it, I asked them where THEY were from, and how they had gotten there. To the women, I asked if they rode their own motorcycle. The grand majority of them said yes.

A woman name Georgiana offered to show me hers. I looked around, but she was digging through her wallet.

"I have to know," I said, "Do you have pictures of your children in there, or just your bike?"

She laughed and flashed me a picture of her daughter before handing me a picture of her and her husband on almost matching Harleys. They were huge. Hers was the black and silver anniversary edition, while his was purple and silver.

"I would have guessed that you would be on the purple bike." I said.

"That's what everyone says." she replied. She gave me her email address and I wandered down Main Street .

A man wearing a bandana and denim turned the tables on me. "Is that a Trek 520?"

I nodded, and he said, "I was thinking about getting one of those and a Trek 5500, carbon fiber."

I was warming up to this man very quickly.

"I bought an Italian road bike for a thousand dollars twenty years ago, and I've been riding it ever since. I look at it as an investment. I am 52 years old, in good shape, no medical problems, and I would say a lot of it has to do with that bike."

He took a step back and appraised my bike. "I plan to do some loaded touring when I retire."

"I love this bike,” I said, “Everyone who has one loves their Trek. It's the best touring bike that you can get for the money."

Bob had ridden out from Florida on his BMW. I commented to him that he seemed to be a cycling crossover. "Yes," he replied, "I love anything with two wheels. Riding is my Om , I guess."

He paused. "That occurred to me while I was coming out here, about the Om. I got shivers down my spine. It really fits for me."

The rain let up, and streams of motorcycles began coursing down the streets out of town. Bob and I walked to a restaurant to get dinner.

"So what do you do for a living," I asked.

"I'm an air traffic controller."

I looked at him. He had on the uniform of a biker, but I could easily seem him directing air traffic, or sporting Lycra on a road bike. He rose above his station, his uniform.

He had offered to buy me dinner, an offer that I accepted, despite the fact that earlier in the day I had sworn to eat only fruit and juice in an effort to heal my wounded intestines. An offer of free food surpasses dietary restrictions. I had a funny feeling in my gut, however, as I joyfully bounded up to the buffet to load my plate.

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