I woke up today feeling more of the same nothing I felt yesterday. I got on my bike and accepted my fate for the day: biking through more nothing. And as I began my ride I realized a major flaw in my cycling clothes: the back of my neck and top of my head had no sun protection. While I have a very thick head of hair to mostly block the top of my scalp, the back of my neck and my hairline were greatly exposed. I was forced to adopt a more "desert-chic" look.
I guess that makes me Joshua Lawrence of Arabia.
After stopping to take my helmet off and rigging up my half-baked neck curtain, I remounted Kona and my bike felt...wiggly. My rear tire seemed too low, and my front tire, even when tightly locked down to my frame, wobbled laterally. Now, in the average functioning of my brain, this is annoying but nothing major. In normal situations, I'd probably just swear quietly under my breath before quickly doing the repairs. My brain felt the need to want to have a meltdown. I was boiling over with frustration and anger. An anger that I know is not rational and comes from the more animal part of my brain. It feels different physically than rational anger because it doesn't come from a place of reason. It's visceral.
As I took my bags off Kona and flipped her to begin repairing her, I could feel this irrational anger boiling up. I appeased it the best way I could: I yelled out a very big, very hearty strings of curse words in a style similar to Clark Griswold in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. All the while quickly changing my tire, tuning up my derailleurs, and tightening up the front cones on my front wheel. A short, ten minutes of maintenance. It was a bit therapeutic but as soon as I finished the repairs my brain snapped back to a state of emotional nothing.
And even as I remounted my bike and felt the wind at my back I felt nothing. And as I was rolling along at a quick clip of twenty miles per hour, I still felt nothing. And as I rolled into Eldorado, Texas I still felt nothing. But, Eldorado wanted to make sure I did feel something. As I entered into the downtown portion of Eldorado I tried to hype myself up by imagining myself tearing into the American Southwest like the forefathers of these areas. Speed and solitude my only companions in the vast space that is Texas. Instead of galloping through a barren landscape on a horse, I was following flowing stripes of cement on a steel bike. In the distance, among the mirages rising up through the road, I saw a long narrow piece of...something...in the distance.
I assumed it was the cover over a drainage ditch. Something I've run into plenty before, especially in cattle country. They allowed the water, and the manure they carry, to safely divert away from the ranches and town without flooding into the road and stinking the next few counties up. I continued pedaling, swiftly closing the distance without giving much second thought to the ditch. At fifty feet I get closer and see it has a grate as a cover, and not a plate. I can't quite see everything, but assume the grates are running perpendicular to me, as all the other grates were.
At twenty feet I realized the grates are running parallel to me, not perpendicular. I begin to tense, but know that the gap between the grates shouldn't be wider than my tire.
At ten feet I realize how big the grate was. The gaps between the grates is roughly six inches. A tire eater. Me and Kona, all 250 pounds of us, are still moving fast. I begin to panic as the distance closes, realizing the predicament I'm in.
At five feet I understand the damage the grate can do.
At two feet from the grate my brain finally kicks into gear and hits the brakes, but it's too late. I tried to align my tires to ride the steel and avoid the cavernous gaps that will ruin my bike. I pull the brakes harder to reduce speed but they're not responding. I line my tires up as a Hail Mary to minimize damage. At this point, I'm on top of the grate.
In this moment, I like to think I understood what 250 pounds of gear, machine, and man really weighs when travelling at 22 mph. That I somehow understood or thought of the physical forces that are exerted on the frame, the rims, the joints, everything when moving so quickly. I like to think that I have a basic understanding of physics and the power such knowledge holds. Instead, as I rolled over the grate, I only thought one thing to myself: "Oh shit."
Kona's front wheel rides the grate safely. The rear wheel misses and slams into the far side of the grate.
I come to a screeching halt in the middle of the road in the middle of nowhere.
I quickly picked my bike up and awkwardly shuffled her over to the curb. I hadn't yet seen the damage; I just knew that asphalt wasn't safe territory anymore and I needed to get Kona and myself off of it. And after I got on the curb I carefully lowered Kona to the ground and saw the damage.
My rim should be round. My spokes straight. My derailleur under tension. None of these were true. My wheel had nearly fully tacoed into itself from the impact and had ripped my derailleur hanger off and pulled my derailleur up and around my cassette. My entire rear wheel was totaled. Without question today's biking was over and I began to worry that the trip was over. I hadn't even made it coast-to-coast. I was just shy of 2,000 miles. Emotionally, I was still living in grey scale. I honestly felt nothing when I realized the trip was ending. I just knew I should be sad. As I sat staring at my predicament before me, I remembered some stories I had read online of some "horror stories" that other long-distance cyclists had encountered.
One guy had his bike stolen a few hundred kilometers into his Europe tour. He just bought a crappier bike off of some guy in Amsterdam and kept going. Another guy had a broken chain in the Rift Valley of Ethiopia and forced a small motorcycle chain to work with his backpacking setup. A woman had broken her front rim in Singapore and made the wrong-sized rim and tire work for the remainder of her trip in Southeast Asia. One of my favorite cyclists, Mark Beaumont, was cycling around the world when his bike succumbed to unknown stress fractures and damn-near broke in half. He found a small shop in Colombia with a "welder" (car batteries hooked up in series) and had them repair his bike. He completed the trip with big, ugly welds on his bike. He didn't seem to mind. And slowly the gears in my head began turning. Instead of being upset, which I was incapable of feeling at that moment anyways, I began to get to work.
"I can salvage this," I announced to no one. I called home to bounce around some ideas. I wasn't seeking any help or any ideas, I just needed to talk the problem out and get back on the saddle. And after a very brief call, I had a new idea. I had declared that I was "Seattle or Bust" for this trip. I was determined to get to at least Seattle. And the first step in doing so was the most important: getting Kona repaired. So I made a few phone calls looking for parts and quickly hit a roadblock: there were no bike stores nearby. Eldorado is the type of town that makes my hometown of 4,000 people seem like a metropolis. And the bike store in San Angelo, the nearest city at 45 miles away, wouldn't be able to get any replacement parts for nearly two weeks. The shop owner gave me the number of a bike shop in El Paso that would be more helpful and he wished me luck. I called the shop in El Paso and they said they could rush order the parts and have them within four or five days. They said that I'd be back on the road by Friday. Not ideal, but doable. The new problem was now getting to San Angelo.
And I HAD to get to San Angelo. There, I could at least get a rental car and push to El Paso. After a few calls, I found a fellow Michigander running a taxi service in San Angelo. He answered saying that he hadn't seen an 810 area code in nearly a decade. His voice was thin with the Michigan accent, but regardless it was there. As we talked about familiar road intersections and what parts of the state we were respectively from, A fellow Mitten native. He agreed to come to Eldorado from San Angelo, and for a reasonable price (thanks again Andrew). While waiting for him I coordinated places to stay and got new parts ordered in for Kona.
Kona, and this trip, are on life support but I can salvage both. As long as my legs still work and my bank account doesn't read $0 I'm pushing forward.
Seattle or bust.