March 13, 2013
Day 19: Near Florence, AZ to near Winkelman, AZ
It's a rough night in the desert. In part that's because it's tough to relax as birds rustle around the cactus behind me, coyotes howl not far to my north, and something of unknown type and size circles the tent and then quietly snuffles a few hundred feet away. But the human element turns out to be the bigger factor.
Most of the trucks — and they're all trucks out here — blow past the spot where I'm camped at well above the speed limit. They're here and then gone in a few seconds, then exist only as a faint rumble for another minute or two. But one goes slow — very slow — with the windows down and classic rock booming from fuzzed-out speakers. If it were any lighter, the driver might be able to see the tent as he rumbles past with some song by Boston echoing out into the desert night. He's looking for something, like a minor side road or an unmarked trail, and it makes me anxious to think that I might be camped 30 feet from it.
After about 45 seconds that seem much longer, the truck's tail lights fade from view. Not long after the sounds of exhaust and tight harmonies blend into the silence of the night.
And then all of a sudden they're back. Or it seems that way. An hour has passed and I'm woken from a dead sleep to the same sounds of a loping cam and a song I've heard dozens of times but don't know who sings it. It's the same truck, going the same speed, still looking for something. Again he passes by me, but a few hundred feet farther west he hangs a right and starts to bang down a rutted side road. I watch the truck's headlights play off the trees and cacti and slowly — so slowly — fade back into the dark. That's about the time I start to think, What if he takes another turn, heads down the trail I'm on, and comes across me out here alone, with a few thousand dollars worth of gear and no way to protect myself besides charm and some foul B.O.
What if? What then? Solitude and darkness together make my mind go crazy places. The most logical answer is that the guy in the truck is drunk, lost, and looking for his buddies so that he can stop driving and throw back a few more cold ones. Robbing and doing whatever else to a random camper out in the weeds just isn't in the cards. The real danger, of course, were the hours of riding along busy roads and narrow shoulders earlier in the day that brought me here. Both statistically and practically, America's a safe country filled with good people who don't mean harm to anyone. Yet even though I know this, my head cross-references the situation against every newspaper article, TV news blurb, movie, and second-hand story it's ever heard. I feel vulnerable for the first time in as long as I can remember, and no amount of rationalization can clear it all away.
I fall back asleep 20 minutes later — not from a relaxed mind, but the exhaustion of an all-day ride.
I see fresh coyote tracks next to my shoe and bike tire marks from last night on the ATV path that leads back to the road. It's another beautiful a.m.: clear skies, crisp air, the shadowed outline of mountaintops in the distance. The grade isn't bad, but the morning turns into a long, slow, wobbling grind because of the wind that howls like a siren straight from the east. It makes the trees and bushes dance and sends me down into five-mile-per-hour territory. Soon the road turns to dirt, and I hold out hope that it won't end up like some of the rocky, sandy disasters of last week.
The road turns out to be great. It's isolated and empty of traffic and hawks soar in jerky patterns on the breeze high above the desert floor. I have hours and hours to take in everything that chirps and squeaks and buzzes around me, because the steady wind means I'm not traveling anywhere with speed today.
Until I reach the pass, of course. Then, in a span of about six miles and 15 minutes, I dump almost 1,500 feet of elevation. Even though the dirt is well packed from lots of use, it has soft patches mixed in with sections of washboard that rattle in even-spaced shocks like automatic weapon fire. It needs care and attention and slower speeds, but I only manage the first two. Two-and-a-half hours of brutal, windblown climbing warps your perspective like that. The front tire wobbles and shakes a handful of times. The brakes fade and whine under the load and steepness. The road twists left and right and back again between dropoffs at both edges. It's spectacular and demanding riding, but I keep things upright. I soar down into a valley where the fingers of several mountain ranges intertwine and make me anxious about what's to come in the hours and days and weeks ahead.
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There's a short climb after the drop bottoms out. It's one of those crazy steep deals where the grade runs about 15 percent and turns the ride into a bargaining session. I'll stop and rest if I can just make it to that rock; I'll stop and rest if I can just make it to that cactus; I'll stop and rest if I can just make it to that black and yellow striped sign. Every tenth of a mile feels like the greatest achievement of my life.
Rolling hills and pouring sweat lead me to Kearny, where half of the women under the age of 22 walk around with kids dragging behind them, and the other half range between kind of pregnant and about to burst. It's a town where the pizza place serves pizza and also ships and receives UPS packages for the locals. The police department has two patrol cars and the courthouse is smaller than a Cracker Barrel restaurant. Kearny's also in the middle of a late winter heat wave, and by mid-afternoon the temperature hits 85. Between the heat and hills and headwinds, today is the first time on the trip that the desert has jumped up, smacked me in the face, and shown how rough it can make my life.
And so, sweating like a whore on a cowboy payday, I push deeper into the heart of Arizona. I pedal slow and with way too much effort past mountainsides stripped and cut and changed forever by copper mining. With special rail lines that exist only to haul the stuff away, it's no secret what industry drives this part of the state. Or maybe it's less drives and more strings along. The conjoined twin towns of Hayden and Winkelman lie just to the east of the mine and the smelter. Both are filled out with single-story houses and mobile homes at different levels of disrepair. The streets are full of dust, only a few people stand or walk around outside, and the restaurants and stores and motels of decades past have long since been boarded up and left to slowly fall apart.
A few miles north on Highway 77 I pull off, ride down a steep drive, haul my stuff over an embankment, and set up for the night along the edge of the slow-running Gila River. After the sun dips below the mountains, the quiet world comes alive with the chirping of crickets and the whine of a thousand somethings that sound like cicadas. On the heels of two straight nights of shit sleep, I layer up and turn in early to give my body time to rest for the huge mountain pass the morning has in store.
Today's ride: 43 miles (69 km)
Total: 794 miles (1,278 km)
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