Jeremy's Bike Blog

I gotta say, Tempe is pretty great.  I stayed three nights there, and while I’m still not inclined to do a play-by-play, I have to say that Veronica and Michael were both super great to get to know.  I met three sets of their friends, rock climbed, yoga’d, ate my first PB&J&Fried Egg, and honestly had a hard time motivating to leave, there was just so much fun to be had.  I actually had to pass on a fancy party because I wanted to do yoga and was afraid I didn’t have anything fancy enough to wear.  All the same, I was in stitches getting the debrief afterwards.  But come Friday morning, I managed, just barely, to get back on my way.

I’m checking my tire pressure for the first time since getting it from my friend’s shop in Seattle, from a bolted down pump in a free, all hours repair station a few blocks from their place, when an older black man comes up and tells me about when it had opened.  I assume he’s going to ask me for some change, but he doesn’t.  He just wants to chat for a bit, and it’s nice to exchange good mornings and nice to meet yous within a few blocks of getting underway.

I ride a few miles to a Trader Joes, which is mostly on the way.  The cashier asks me, randomly (modulo bike gloves) “have you ever ridden you bike across the US”.
“I have not.  But I am on a tour right now.”

He’s surprised at how spot on his question was and we have my second nice chat of the day.

Stocked up, I eat breakfast out front.  I have too much food to fit in bags (along with all the water), I might need to reconfigure.

I apply sunscreen and then am a few miles on my way when I realize I’m not wearing my gloves, the replacements I ordered to Veronica’s, and have made it 6 miles and 2 stops before being misplaced for the first time.  One of them is still on my rear bag where I put them both.  I double back and the other one is in the parking lot, feet from where I had parked.

The day is quickly getting scorching.  I’m going through office parks, then big box stores, than upscale housing (with boats on docks on a very artificial seeming channel-system).  I’m vigilant about filling my bottles.  Problem is, it’s hard to know for sure when the last chance for a long stretch will be.

Cutting through a completely desolate stretch of indian reservation, the only scenery is a wall of dust gust going across the super flat terrain. 

I stop for lunch in meager shade, and when I resume, there’s a hefty side wind, and enough breaks in traffic that I do some pretty solid bike-sailing, using the trunk of my unbuttoned collar shirt for sails

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I’m down to the last 1.5L of my water when I get to Coolidge where the first thing to my avail is a huge Walmart.  It’s my first time in one in ages (seriously, at least 10 years), but I want to make sure I get this taken care of.  Say what you will about Walmart, it’s pretty great that they have a filtered water dispenser right inside the front entrance, by the shopping carts.  Or at least this one does.  I want to thank someone for this, like an employee.  Any one of the many employees entering and leaving the store will do, but none of them will return my smiling gaze.  They don’t seem happy.

I go check out the Casa Grande ruins National Monument down the road.  It’s a fascinating thing.  It was 4 stories tall, and a centerpiece of a thriving society built on stick-dug irrigation ditches off the Gila river, but it had a sudden and mysterious decline that nobody is sure how to explain.  I kinda love almost nodding off in the cool dark movie theater in the visitor center.

I talk to the rangers.  One is 70 but looks much younger and pores over maps with me, suggesting alternatives that seem more or less equivalent.  He’s perplexed by the route that Google Maps (GM, from here on) is giving me, and his colleague looks up where one of its roads meets a paved road in GM Street View on their computer, and sure enough, it’s unpaved and gated.  I agree that the paved way makes more sense, but by the time I’m at the decision point, I’ve had my fill of cars, and take the unpaved way.  I’ve also since seen this ghost bike, reaffirming that cars are my biggest threat.  Or at least one of them.

The route runs on unpaved roads, of decreasing scale, along irrigation channels and into farming pastures, is completely car-free, and I’m loving it.  I take a right turn at a T, which I think is according to the GM route, but it’s not.  The right turn that GM wants me to take is further on, through the top of the T.  But along the top of the T is a well maintained barbed wire fence, as I’ve determined surveying it on my 1/4 mile backtrack from my wrong turn.

But then I find a spot where the barbed wire is spread apart by a pole, tall enough that I can almost walk my bike through.  I do that and I’m back on course.  There’s a couple more gates, but they’re only chained closed, not locked, so I continue going.

The sun is about 20 minutes from setting, and the full(ish) moon is already out in force, and there’s a little shrub in the middle of the road which seems to beckon, so I set up for…just dinner.  The rangers talked about a picnic pull off on the main road that was 25 miles more from there, and we discussed me sleeping on one of the picnic tables, and I like that idea. 

So, maybe this is just a break.

I finish dinner and am commencing stretches and exercises and stuff, absolutely loving the warm evening desert breeze when I spot a car’s headlights in the distance.  I wait a long time for them to come closer, and it’s hard to tell if they’re moving, but finally, yeah, they’re definitely coming, and I have to hurry just enough for it to be exciting to get re-clothed and moved off the road.  It’s a bright moonlit night by now, so to truly hide I’d have to make a real effort.  I’m not that bothered about being spotted, but if it’s all the same, I prefer that nobody know where I am at night.  So, I angled my bag reflectors away, lay low and watch a pickup pass.

Back to yoga and stuff and another pickup passes in the other direction, with women in the bed talking loudly enough that I can make out every word perfectly.  Nothing interesting.  They turn up the road a ways, and shoot guns for a while, then head back the way they came.

I could easily go to sleep, but I have 13 miles to go to the picnic area, and about 3L of water left.  From there, it’s another 25 miles to the first chance for water.  I’m cutting it a little close.  I’m also not tired, and I can see the road well enough by moonlight that it makes sense to cover some of those miles in the dark.

It’s my first time night biking on this tour, and it’s pretty great.  I give up on using my eyes to catch sand spots, and just ride in a way so that when I hit them, I don’t fall.  I might stop cold, but I’m able to clamp down and stay upright.  It’s other-worldly, biking among giant cactus trees that loom above and cast cartoon-like moon shadows on my path.

I get off the unpaved road, and on to the main road at 1:30 am and there’s about 1 car per 15 minutes.  The odd thing is you can see the headlights for a full 15 minutes before the car tears by at 55mph.  I don’t want to be spotted, so I pull off perpendicularly to the road to deactivate my reflectors, behind a shrub when they’re close, but it takes some practice to do this with 30-60 seconds to spare instead of several minutes.  It’s fun to sneak about, trying to not let people spot you, on a full moon night.

I get to the picnic area, and alas, no water.  I eat and brush my teeth, and by 3 I’m on the picnic table, light coat, fleece bottoms, no sleeping bag.  Next time, I’ll just start with the sleeping bag, as I’d needed to pull it out by the time I got to actual sleep.

I wake up to a pickup truck pulling in.  It’s 5:30am.  I have 1.5L of water left and 25 miles to go.  More urgently, I have to drop a deuce, like, 5 minutes ago.  I pack hastily and take off down the road to find a place to dig a hole.  Disaster narrowly averted.

I’m trying to conserve my 1.5L, but I keep having bone-dry throat.  I feel like I’m living the actual hydration pre-crisis that I described in my last post, and that then I must have been dramaticising it.  I’m trying to keep my mouth closed, and force myself to go slow enough that I can do so (not have to breath more than my nose can accomodate).  I’m taking mouthfulls of water and holding them in my mouth to help keep my mouth closed and my throat un-parched.  I’m down to half a liter, and I still have 17 miles to go along the same steady uphill grade.  I try to calm myself down, but I’m also woozy like I haven’t completely woken up yet and I have this nagging fear that I’m gradually getting closer to just giving into the wooziness. There’s no two fucking ways about it, I’m critically low on water.  Traffic is not infrequent, so if I have to pass out, as long as I don’t get killed in the process, someone will find and rescue me.  And I’m increasingly sure that getting the rest of the way is going to involve someone’s help, one way or the other, so better before passing out, and it’s time to beg…again.  I really have to get out of the business of needing to do this.

I don’t want to be too alarmist, so maybe I can do it casually at first, and if the driver is paying attention, they’ll get it.  When the next car is approaching from the opposite direction, I grab my bottle with my left hand, sit upright and wave large with my right arm and smile.  As they wave back, I go to my elbows and point to the bottle in my left hand and shake it slowly back and forth.   It all happens in under 3 seconds, and I’m thinking there’s no way they could have registered the gesture as I watch them continue on in my rearview, but after about 5 more seconds, their brake lights come on.  I turn around, and they’re turning around.  I’m tearing up now, writing this, thinking about how relieved I was, but at the time I was just so impressed that the very first car understood what I was asking, and accommodated.   I express as much to the two young women as they give me a 16oz bottle, and open a gallon bottle to fill my 1L bottle.  The passenger woman says “yeah dude, there’s nothing out here for a long ways.  Be careful!” as we fill my bottle, and I thank them over and over.  The driver says something like “we gotta get out of the fucking road” and is apparently kinda stressed about being stopped in the highway.  So after the fill up, the passenger who gave me the water says “peace OUT” in a cool, casual yet enthusiastic way, and they turn around again and take off.

I drink most of the liter straight away.  I immediately feel many fold more awake, and know now that I’ll make it fine.  I’m so grateful and humbled for the help, and disappointed in myself for needing it, that I get chills when I see a roadside memorial with little water bottles under each cross.  I wonder if I would have desecrated the memorial by stealing some of them had I not just succeeded in begging for help.

The Senoran desert is not to be trifled with.

I’m in Lupe’s mexican restaurant, writing this.  It’s the first anything since leaving Coolidge 45 or 50 miles ago, drinking my fill of water, and coffee, waiting to hear from the friend of a friend that he’s back from his morning appointment so I can meet him.  It’s just going noon. Our mutual friend and I intialy estimated that I’d be there the night after this one.  I ended up covering the 110 miles in about 24 hours instead of 60, not because I was in a hurry, but because the scorching heat is firmly in charge of what goes on.  I’m very glad that I covered the miles at night that I did.  That was key.  My major mistake was making the last-minute decision to go un-paved, but not making sure my water was sufficient to support this choice.  I need to establish zero-tolerance for optimism (for luck and good fortune) playing any role in my water planning.  Several times now I’ve recalled Vlad the Bulgarian, expressing surprise that I didn’t have more with me on my bike, while I casually notice he had 2 x 2 liter bottles on his rear rack, in addition to what’s on his frame.  They were coming from the Sonoran desert, after all.  I think I need to get a couple of 2 liter bottles and bring my capacity up so that I have at least a liter to drink per 10 miles, more if there’s climbing involved, plus an emergency liter.