Larry and I reached Burns Lake around six o’clock. Three hours later, Chris dragged in. I felt sorry for him. He looked a lot like I had at the end of each day during the first week of our trip; exhausted and hunched over in pain. I tried to offer him some sympathy after he’d slouched onto the picnic table in our site, but he refused to admit that he was worn out or riddled with aching muscles. Instead, he asked if we had any food we could spare. All the grocery stores had closed by the time he came into Burns Lake, and he was out of provisions.
“I just need a little bit to eat, that’s all,” he said to Larry. “If I eat something I’ll be fine.”
Larry handed Chris the pannier with all our food in it and told him to help himself. That, we quickly found out, was a big mistake. Chris helped himself all right—to everything we had except for the half dozen eggs and the tea bags. After he’d nearly wiped us out of food, he rolled out his sleeping bag next to our tent, crawled inside it, and pulled his waterproof cocoon around him. He didn’t thank us for the meal or offer to share the camping fee.
In the morning Chris asked for a bite of our eggs. He polished off half the batch and most of our tea. I tried to be understanding about the whole situation. After all, I told myself, he’s been touring for less than a week now, so he’s plagued by all the beginner’s aches and pains and that gnawing combination of exhaustion, depression, and constant hunger.
“Today I’m going to try and stay up with you two all day,” Chris announced as we pulled onto the highway after breakfast. But in less than a half hour, he started to lag behind, and we didn’t see him again until late that evening, when he limped into the free campground at Vanderhoff. Pain and fatigue were etched even deeper into his face. He leaned his bike against our picnic table, dropped onto one of the benches, and lowered his forehead and arms onto the table. I sat down beside him and attempted once again to console him and offer some words of encouragement.
“Chris, don’t get too down on yourself about the way you feel. It’s hard at first. I know; it took me a while to get in shape too. I started out slow just like you, and every night I felt like I didn’t have an ounce of energy left in me. But what you’ve got to do is to try and—”
Chris’s head popped up off the picnic table, and the look in his eyes froze my vocal cords. I thought he was going to cry.
“Listen,” he said, almost in a whisper. “It’s not the beat up, sore, dead tired way I feel all the time. That I can handle. I know that’ll go away eventually. What’s really eating me up is the fact that you, a woman, can bicycle harder and faster than me, a man. Look, I don’t care if I’m just starting out and you’ve been at it for a while now. I’m a man; I should be able to keep up with any woman, no matter how out of shape I am. But you know what? The ugly fact of the matter is, you can bicycle twice as fast as I can. Now, do you know how frustrating that is for me? Do you? I’m telling you, my ego will not accept the notion that a woman can bicycle better than I can. It just won’t accept that. Hell, I started out this morning pedaling as fast as I could, and you blew by me like I was standing still.”
Chris rocked his head in his hands, then lowered it back onto the table. I don’t remember exactly how I felt toward him right then. Maybe I pitied him, maybe I didn’t. There hadn’t been any anger in his voice, only remorse and frustration. Neither of us said anything to each other for the rest of the evening.
It turned cold during the night and rained, and Chris emerged from his cocoon in the morning looking a lot like a drowned rat. His hair was matted, his clothes were sopping, dark troughs underlined his eyes, and his lips had taken on a bluish tint. He was too proud to admit it, but his cocoon hadn’t done its job.
“You look like you’re on the verge of icing over. Come over here and drink some of this hot tea. It’ll help defrost you,” Larry said as he placed a cup on the table.
“I-I’m f-fine,” Chris stammered, unable to control his shivering.
“Well you don’t look fine to me,” answered Larry, “so go ahead and drink this stuff.”
Chris moved his right hand next to the plastic cup; the skin was bright pink, and his fingers were so stiff they refused to clasp. Larry reached over and molded Chris’s hand into a half circle, then inserted the cup and closed his fingers around it. The moment Larry let go, Chris’s trembling palm shook the scalding tea into both of their faces. Chris was still trying to rally his body temperature when we pedaled out of the campground after breakfast, and he didn’t catch up with us until after the flood two days later.
The flood hit on July 10, the day before we reached the Rockies, and it caught Larry and me at a bad time. We’d already pedaled seventy miles that day, and we still had another twenty to go before we would reach the town of McBride. It had been a day and a half since we passed a town, and we were down to the very last of our food.
At four o’clock we stopped alongside a stream to rest and eat a snack before tackling the final twenty miles into McBride. This would be our first attempt at pedaling more than eighty miles in one day. Our butts and muscles were already sore, but since there were seven hours of daylight left, we figured we could take it easy the last twenty miles. We figured wrong.
Four miles past the stream we saw the wall. Up ahead, the clouds that had sat overhead all day, without dropping any moisture on us, blended in with the trees and the road to form a single dark barrier.
“It’s dumping up there,” Larry groaned. “We’d better get out our rain gear. We’re headed straight for it.”
I pulled on my rain jacket and wool socks and cycled into the darkness. As the clouds closed in around us, water tumbled out of them in a solid pounding torrent. The temperature fell, and within a mile our bare hands were so cold and rigid we could barely steer. Sections of the road disappeared under the water, and our brakes quit functioning. The rain filled our shoes, turning our feet into heavy bricks of ice. Passing cars and trucks dumped mud and more water over us; the brown water gushing into our mouths and penetrating every thread of our clothing.
After fifteen or twenty minutes, we were too wet, cold, and exhausted to keep pedaling. The cold had sapped our energy and stiffened our joints.
“Let’s pitch our tent and wait out the storm,” I shouted over the roar of the deluge.
“Fine with me,” Larry hollered back. “Pull off and we’ll set up in the forest.”
But when I turned onto the shoulder of the road, my bike slammed to a stop as the bottom half of my front wheel sunk into a foot of water. I climbed off the bike and waded to where the forest started, hoping we’d find dry land, but even under the shelter of the trees, the ground was flooded.
“We’re had,” I muttered. “I haven’t got the strength for another twelve or thirteen miles or whatever it is we’ve got left to McBride.”
“Me neither. But we’ve got to do it,” shrugged Larry. “We’d drown camping here.”
I knew there was nothing else we could do, so I waded back to the road and started pedaling again. Every time I coasted down an incline, blasts of arctic air whipped my body and threatened to freeze my legs into place. Pushing the pedals and holding onto the handlebars became incredibly painful work. Out of pure desperation I started to sing. It was a long rambling song, which I made up as I struggled to keep my legs moving. I called it “The Ride to McBride,” and it talked a lot about what stupid idiots we were for not stopping and setting up camp when we first saw the storm coming toward us; about the quart of frozen water in my shoes; about the tears streaming down my already saturated face.
While the storm loosed its fury upon us, Larry and I had a tough time hearing or seeing much of anything. If I wanted to say something to Larry I had to pull up alongside him and yell. But even then he couldn’t catch all I was saying. So it surprised me when, not more than a half hour after I’d started singing, I heard a faint rustling sound. I turned my head to the right, toward the shoulder of the road where I thought the noise came from, and there, thirty feet away and charging straight for us, was a gigantic