Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
miles of gravelly or chewed-up pavement on the road either being caused by or repaired
by construction crews; I couldn't tell which.
But all this gave me an unexpected sense of an audience. Half a mile from the pass,
road workers had been halting traffic in one direction, then the other, letting single
streams of vehicles go by. I waited with three or four other cyclists as a few cars rolled by
us, then we followed behind a tour bus to the summit, riding past a line of cars waiting
their turn to go down. Most were full, adults in the front seat and kids in the back, and
the windows were open.
They were all cheering for us.
Of course, there was the reward not just of the unexpected applause, not just of
reaching the crest, but also of riding down the other side. The eighteen miles to Saint
Mary, the tiny town on the east end of Going-to-the-Sun Road, went by quickly—too
quickly—though I prolonged them with picture taking and simply by being awed at the
landscape I was hurtling through. If you can be thrilled and humbled at once, today I
was.
But in truth the downhill simply wasn't as memorable as the climb, which was an ex-
perience that revealed me to myself. I can confess it now: the first two weeks I nearly
gave up and flew home half a dozen times, thinking I could feign an injury. But I didn't.
The stick-to-itiveness I needed to build up the stamina in my legs and my lungs was
something I didn't know I still had. As I approached the Rockies, I'd grown sad, disap-
pointed, weary, self-doubting. I was living with the kind of perpetual lump in my throat
that I have associated for forty years with the aftermath of a broken teenaged heart.
Today was the turning point. Provoked by a stranger at a lunch counter to put aside
my intimidation and do what I'd set out to do—meet the challenge of riding across the
country, which of course means climbing over the Rocky Mountains—I did. After all, he
was obviously right.
It was a truly difficult ride, a real test. I crept uphill, but, importantly, I kept creeping.
For the last three exhausting miles, I found myself turned inward, searching inside my-
self for the will to keep pedaling. Guts: Where are you? That I actually found them was
a tremendous satisfaction.
At the pass, I stood alongside my bicycle, breathing hard, suddenly aware that I was
soaked with sweat and feeling a deep chill in the high-altitude breeze. But the relief, the
wonder, the thrill of the moment were previously unimaginable. The seventeen-year-old
girl I longed for as a seventeen-year-old boy had just kissed me. It was exactly like that.
