Almost as soon as I hit the pavement I heard a car approaching. It was barreling up the grade from the next bay, and it sounded awfully close. Larry had managed to stay upright in the turn because he and his bike weighed more than I and my bike. He heard the car too. He ran to the middle of the road and motioned for it to stop.
“Get up!” he screamed. “I don’t know if this guy sees me!”
I was still crawling out from under my bike when the car’s brakes started to squeal. The driver slammed to a stop fifteen feet away from me, and I quickly pulled myself and my bike across the road and up against the cliff.
I wrestled my bike around the rest of the curve and partway down the incline before I climbed back on and tried to pedal again. It was all downhill to the back of the next bay, but even so, I had to pump hard to keep moving forward in the wind. Not until I reached the back of the bay was I free of the gales.
For four hours we battled the twenty miles of coastal mountains to the Plaskett Creek campground; grinding up the grades, dragging our bikes through the curves, and struggling downhill against the wind. Every half hour I had to stop, pour water over my face and lips and into my parched throat, and lie on my back to rest my aching muscles.
After our first two hours in the mountains I was physically exhausted, and there were very few places on my body that didn’t hurt. My left shoulder muscle felt as if someone had thrust a butcher knife into it and was slowly turning the blade back and forth. My throbbing rear end refused to go numb. I was tired from not having slept much the last couple of nights, and I felt as if I’d burned up every last calorie of the lunch I’d eaten four hours earlier. The thought of two more hours of wind and mountain ridges was almost overwhelming, and to keep myself pedaling I tried pep talks. “Come on kid. You can do it. Come on now. Toughen up. It’s not much farther. Just keep pedaling. Just get to Gorda.”
Gorda was the dot on our map where we planned to buy our supplies for dinner and breakfast and gorge ourselves on enough food and drink to propel us through the last five miles to the campground. It was over an hour from the time I began my pep talks to the time we got to Gorda. The last few miles were touch and go; Larry kept telling me that Gorda was “just around the next turn,” and I managed to push my pedals through turn after turn and climb back onto my bike each time the wind tossed me off it.
At six o’clock we crept into Gorda. The grocery store had closed at five-thirty. I wanted to cry, but I was too tired. Instead, I pushed my bike back out to the road and prepared to expand my upper limits for pain, hunger, and exhaustion. As we pedaled out of Gorda I hunched my shoulders against the wind and fell into a near delirious chant: “Come on Barb. Come on Barb. Come on Barb.” About a mile north of Gorda the pavement suddenly gave way to a loose dirt path sprinkled with rocks. As soon as we hit the dirt, the cars that sped past blinded us with suffocating sprays of dust and gravel, and I quit chanting.
“I hate this!” I hollered. “My shoulder is ripping apart, my muscles ache, my face is scorched, my lips are blistered. I’m dead tired, and I’m shaky ’cause I haven’t eaten in over six hours! I’m all scraped up ’cause these tornado winds keep chucking me off my bike, and now there’s no road! And don’t you dare tell me the campground’s ‘just around the corner,’ cause I know damn well it’s not!”
Larry couldn’t see me through the cloud of dirt that engulfed us, but he could hear my every word. He knew that I’d hit my limit and that there wasn’t a thing he could say to help me. He kept quiet and prayed that I would keep pedaling. I did, and after a mile or so of the dirt and rocks the pavement reappeared.
It was seven o’clock when we reached the campground. We had been on the road for eleven hours, creeping along in our lowest gears in the blazing sun. I coasted to a stop next to the picnic table in the first empty campsite we came to and eased myself off my bike and across the top of the table. Larry set to work pitching our tent while I lay on the table staring blankly up at the sky, marveling that every ounce of my body was in pain. And I wondered why, after the last time I’d experienced such excruciating pain, the day we had pedaled from Santa Barbara to Ojai and back, I hadn’t learned my lesson and abandoned bicycle touring altogether.
Once the tent was up I made my way across the grass. My legs continued to move as though they were still pushing pedals, and my torso refused to straighten up out of its hunched-over position. I “pedaled” on into the tent, curled up on top of my sleeping bag, and promptly passed out. If Larry hadn’t started ranting hysterically about an hour later I would probably have slept straight through the night. He’d pedaled up the road a mile to the grocery store in Pacific Grove, a two-building town, and had just returned with a can of beef stew and a packet of won ton soup only to find that our stove wouldn’t start up because it was missing a gasket. It seemed the gasket had fallen out unnoticed when he’d cleaned the stove after breakfast in Morro Bay.
“What’s the matter?” I asked as I climbed out of the tent. The nap had helped. My left shoulder still felt like it had a butcher knife in it, but I wasn’t feeling as drained as before. Larry explained about the stove, and I shrugged my right shoulder.
“Don’t you understand what this means?” he pleaded.
To me it meant we didn’t have to bother with cooking and washing dishes and we could go to bed earlier. I had passed the point of being hungry even before we got to the campground.
“It means I’m going to die of hunger right here and now before your very eyes!” he shouted. “It’s been eight hours since I’ve eaten anything! I’m beat and I’m starved. I’ve got to eat something right this minute or I’ll die!”
I wanted to tell Larry that he only thought he was going to expire; that nobody who weighs one hundred sixty pounds and is in top physical shape has ever starved to death overnight simply by skipping dinner, but I decided that wouldn’t be a good thing to say at the moment. By the look in his eyes and the tone of his voice I knew he was no longer capable of rational thought; exhaustion and hunger had finally taken their toll. Larry could endure a lot more physical pain than I, but when it came to hunger—well, that was another story. I tried to calm him.
“Look, I’ll go borrow a stove from someone,” I said. “It’ll only take a minute.”
I spied a campstove with two burners sitting on the picnic table in a neighboring campsite, and its owners were glad to lend it to me. When I carried it back to our site, Larry was sitting on one of the picnic benches rocking back and forth, whimpering softly to himself. I lit both burners and heated up the soup and the stew. The moment Larry started shoveling the hot food into his mouth, the look of hysteria began to fade from his eyes. By the end of the meal, it had disappeared altogether.
After we washed up our bowls and returned the stove, we climbed into the tent. We rolled around on our mats for a while trying to find a spot on our bodies that wasn’t quite as sore as the others.
“You know,” Larry mumbled just before he started snoring. “It’s been one helluva day. We’ve sure gotten off to a thundering start.”
The first rays of sunlight that filtered down through the pines and into our tent coaxed us awake early the next morning. We lay in each other’s arms and watched the blue jays and squirrels and listened to the breeze dance through the pine needles. The chilly morning air felt good against our sunburned faces. Our bodies still ached, but we felt rested, and that brightened our spirits. Just as we were about to fall back to sleep someone’s voice snaked in through the tent walls.
“You two asleep in thar?” a man asked in a southern drawl. It was Mr. Marston, the fiftyish fellow from Houston we’d met the night before when we hobbled into the campground. He and his wife had parked their truck camper in the site below ours.
“No, we’re awake,” Larry answered. “What’s up?”
“Breakfast. All the eggs, sausage, toast with blackberry jam, and coffee you kin force down inta those stomachs o’ yers. It’ll be ready pretty quick now, so ya’ll come on down as soon as yer up.”
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