Day 22: O’Donnell to Big Lake

148 miles

When I was one year old, my dad taped wooden blocks to the pedals of a tricycle so I could reach the pedals because I wasn’t tall enough to ride the bike otherwise. In the 19 years of riding since then, today was the worst day of them all. Yesterday I tried to focus on the positives. I tried to keep my head down and my chin up. Today I’m not going to do that. I’m just going to tell it how it was. It was demoralizing. It was heartbreaking. It was alienating. It was miserable. It was exhausting. It was a lot of really bad things. I cried. I cried a lot actually. I honestly don’t have any good takeaways from today. There were two moments today where I felt happy for even a second, so I’m going to start with those moments.

This morning I saw a cluster of wildflowers that reminded me of someone I really miss and I was happy for a minute. The other moment today I remember being happy was when my dad sent me a picture of my dog in the morning. I put those two photos first below the text because they are the only positive things that I want to remember from today. There is value in the hardship as well, but that value is lost to me at the moment. Hopefully I can return to this day in the future and elucidate the value then.

I woke up to a 15 mile an hour headwind. I knew it was coming, but it still hurt to see. I felt exhausted. The heat yesterday took more out of me than I realized until I was trying to fall asleep last night. Not only did the heat tax me and dehydrate me, I didn’t eat enough and I didn’t replace my sodium or sugar like I should’ve and I felt it in my muscles as I tried to fall asleep. Last night was the first night where the heat has been an issue. It was 81° when I got into my bivvy. I was able to cool down after about 10 minutes, but I was not able to fall asleep immediately. Luckily this is still a dry heat so I wasn’t lying in a pool of my own sweat like I will be in Central America. When I woke up I didn’t feel that much better. My muscles were tired and sore. Yesterday had depleted me physically and mentally. I tried to pucker up because I knew today was going to be much worse. I didn’t have anything to look forward to. I didn’t have any big cities to go through or landmarks to pass. I wasn’t going to get to the border like I wanted to. I pretty much had another day riding through flat farmlands, oil fields, and semi desert flatlands. I didn’t want to get on my bike, but I did. I hopped on and started peddling right into the headwind. For the first couple hours I managed to keep it together. I was pretty unhappy. I definitely wasn’t having a good time, but I realized there wasn’t much to do other than keep peddling into the headwind. I’ve had stronger headwind before my life, but I’ve never had such a consistent 20 mile an hour headwind straight on all day for days on end. Yesterday when I was at the outdoor store, I asked the employees if this wind was normal. No, they responded. This wind is very abnormal. The majority of the time the wind comes from the north. If I had been coming through at almost any other time of the year other than this couple day stretch I would’ve had an excellent tailwind through the entirety of Texas. I looked at the forecast and sure enough all of next week, the winds are coming from the north instead of the south. This obviously didn’t make me feel much better. Anyways, I prepared myself for today to be absolutely miserable, so when it was absolutely miserable for the first couple hours it wasn’t much of a shock and I just dealt with it. I stopped in Lamesa for breakfast and filled up my water bottles and hydration vest in preparation for another hot day. I took about 30 salt packets and an equal number of sugar packets from the gas station. I need to be replacing my sodium and the foods I’m eating simply are not doing it. In hot weather I ideally should be getting about 1000 mg of sodium per hour. Yesterday I got about 1000 mg for the entire day. I turned one of my bottles into a sugary salty slurry of Dr Pepper and sodium. From Lamesa I continued south and by 10 o’clock the wind was 20 miles an hour. On the outskirts of town I was chased by dogs on two separate occasions. I saw each of them coming from a distance.  In normal conditions, it wouldn’t have been a problem. I can usually out sprint a dog if I have a couple seconds of warning. However, with the 20 mile an hour headwinds my full sprint couldn’t even reach 20 miles an hour. The second pair of dogs that approached me nipped at my heels for about a mile before I was able to scare them off with the help of a passing truck. It clouded in and on the horizon I saw what looked like a wall of rain approaching me. Rain wouldn’t have been all that bad. It would’ve felt nice in the heat. However, as I approached what had looked like rain, I came to realize that it was actually a wall of dust kicked up by the winds. As I got closer to the dust, oil fields started popping up all around me. The road quickly became busy with oil tankers, company trucks, and semis carrying various drilling equipment. There have been oil wells on the side of the road since I was in Canada, but all of the suddenly they started springing up everywhere. There were also much larger operations with tall drilling towers and the telltale towers, spitting flames. The reason for all the dust became immediately obvious. The oil companies had stripped all of the land for miles around of any vegetation. The land was simply dirt. I don’t know why they have done this, why they have gone through and killed all life. The soil is now exposed to the wind. With no vegetation to hold down the soil, the ripping winds picked up particles of dirt and the air soon became thick with dust. Trucks rumbled all around me and drilling equipment moved across the barren plaines, kicking up clouds of thick dust laden with smells of machinery and oil and all the chemicals that come with it. Dust clouds ripped across the road and particles began to cling to my sweat and body. The folds of my jersey became receptacles for piles of dust. The dust permeated everything. It found its way around my sunglasses and stung my eyes. It flew up my nose and my snot ran black. It found its way down my throat and burned my lungs as I gasped for air. I began coughing and my eyes were watering. Dust clung to the spittle on the edge of my lips and lined my nose in an outline of red. Dust clung to any surface where it could find purchase. It was particularly attracted to any moisture. Grit found its way into my mouth, and ground against my teeth. Every sip of water I took felt like I was drinking dirty thunderstorm run-off. The winds, unable to lift the larger pieces of dust and sand higher than about 2 or 3 feet, slammed these larger particles into my legs. My skin begin to sting and everything on my body accumulate layers of red and brown dust. The wind was goaded along by the open plaines. It slammed into me and it like it was pushing me backwards. Oil wells rose out of the dust. Talk, ugly, mortifying, mechanical structures scourging the earth, sucking the last drops of life from the ground before one day packing up and leaving behind a scene of utter destruction. I looked around me and wondered how any of this is legal. How is it legal to absolutely destroy the Earth in this way? To strip it of any life and allow the pollution to be carried away and become other peoples problems. Some day in the not too far future the oil companies will take everything they want. They’ll waddle away laden with the profits of their venture. They will leave behind scars on the landscape, pollution, and the wreckage of their life sucking oil wells. When they leave the money will dry up and local communities will be left to the same listless, lifeless, barren fate as the natural world around. It was the ugliest thing I’ve seen in my entire life. I’ve used the word dystopian multiple times in my blog entries, but this truly was a post/apocalyptic dystopian hell scape. I genuinely have never seen a landscape so depressing and unnatural. I’m simply dumbfounded how any of this is allowed. It’s like the oil companies, intentionally decimated everything for no reason other than to cause death and destruction. Our worlds runs on oil, I fly in planes, I drive in cars, I benefit from oil every day just like everyone else in our country. But we can do better than this, Texas. We can take measures to make our extraction practices less harmful. I felt awful both mentally and physically. The wind was beating me down, the traffic was buzzing at my heels, the heat was drowning me, and the dust was suffocating me. I was already pretty confident that this was the worst bike ride of my life. I can’t really remember ever feeling so demoralized. I passed by a gas station in the middle of nowhere, put there solely for the purpose of service to the oil tankers. There were a couple houses scattered around, but it was essentially just a fuel depot in the middle of the oil fields. I rode past the gas station and continued south.

Across the road I heard a bark and looked up in time to see two dogs streaking towards me. I tried to scream at them, but it was too late. My scream died halfway out of my throat, as my voice cracked, and a guttural gasp passed through my lips. The leading dog looked up just in time to see the oil tanker careening towards him. He opened his mouth to let out a yelp, but the only noise that could be heard was a sickening thud and crunch of bones as his body was thrown into the air by the grill of the oil tanker. His lifeless body spun through the air before slamming into the pavement and sliding off the road. His now unrecognizable mangled body lay in a heap as blood begin to pool in the dust flowing freely from what just a second before had been his face, now caved in beyond recognition. The only identifying feature was a paw sticking straight up, bent at an unnatural angle. I looked away, but I had already seen too much. I felt like I was going to be sick. I felt the bile at the back of my throat, but I forced myself to keep everything down. Even in the tragedy of the moment, I knew that I needed to retain all the calories I could. I didn’t want to stop, but I didn’t want to keep riding. I peddled on in numb shock for a couple of minutes. The oil tanker hadn’t even slowed its roll, as if driven by a robot, like seemingly every other unnatural thing around me. The wind kept whistling, the oil kept pumping, and the dust kept flying. Every time I blinked the vivid image of the dog in a mangled heap flashed across my eyes. I knew it wasn’t my fault that the dog got hit, but I couldn’t help but feel guilty. The poor thing. It probably had never seen a cyclist before. It wasn’t his fault, he just wanted to come and check me out. If I had taken a different road, if I hadn’t been there at all, he would still be alive. I know it’s not fair to me, but I couldn’t help but think it, and it’s true. If it weren’t for me, that dog would still be alive. You can’t argue with that. I thought of his owner. One of the greatest joys of my life is coming home at night to the unmatched love and excitement of my dogs who have been waiting for me to return all day. Somebody is going to come home today and be met not by the joy and excitement of an exuberant dog, but the heartbreak and distress that comes with loosing something so dear to one.

All morning, I felt like the world had been testing me. I felt like I’d been pushed to the ground and was getting kicked over and over. Watching such an unexpected and random act of violence occur right in front of me sent me over the edge. I couldn’t keep it together anymore and for the first time this trip, I felt emotionally torn. Tears began streaming out of my eyes. They ran down my cheek, picking up the dust that had settled on my face and carrying it down in dirty streaks. But before my tears could drip off my chin, they dried up under the Texas sun and whipping wins. They left behind tracks of dirt streaming down my face, telltale signs, scars, marks, of the day I was having. I cried for my own misfortune, but mainly I cried for the dead dog. The trauma wrapped me up in a suffocating embrace of shock and pain and anger and heartbreak. Guilt stabbed at my heart and depression crept into my mind with visceral potency. I just wanted to curl up in a ball on the side of the road and cry and cry and cry. I tried that, but instead of feeling any better my tears now just slid off my face and landed in little puffs of dust on the side of the road. The oil tankers kept flying by me. The oil wells kept spinning. The dust kept flying. And the wind kept whistling. I wanted to freeze time. It felt like a simulation. This place couldn’t be real. It looked impossibly bleak. The weather and then the dog being hit right in front of me felt like targeted acts. I was expecting someone to jump out and say “OK OK, he’s had enough end the simulation, turn off the fan, take down the green screen, wake the dog back up.” But that didn’t happen so I got back on my bike and like the trucks and the wells and the dust and the wind, I kept moving because there was nothing else to do. Crying off the bike didn’t help so I just let the tears flow on the bike.

I arrived in the town of Stanton at around 2 o’clock. The 20 mile an hour winds had kept my average speed so low that I could almost look back and see where I had started in the morning. If it weren’t for the dust, the land was so flat it looked like I would’ve been able to see all the way back to Prudhoe Bay. In the moment, it felt like I was pushing a wall of bricks in front of me and dragging emotional chains behind me. I sat down and tried to eat food, but I wasn’t hungry. I couldn’t force anything down. The only thing I could do was drink water, so that’s all I did. I’d ordered solid food at a restaurant in the gas station, but I hardly made a dent in it. For the first time in three weeks, I simply could not eat. I had no appetite. I tried to force myself to eat, but I felt like I was going to be sick. Everything just looked unappealing and seem to scrape my throat on the way down. I tried to clean up in the bathroom, but as the water splashed my face it made the dust and sunscreen run into my eyes, and they started watering up again. As I was getting back on my bike to head back out to war with the wind, a man came up to me and said “this wind must be nice on the bike, huh?” He was being dead serious. That’s the thing, for everybody else in Texas this wind is probably really nice. It makes the 95° heat much more tolerable. It’s actually quite pleasant if you’re just standing still. It felt good through my hair and on my skin. It only made me feel more alienated; knowing that I was fighting this battle all alone. Of course it’s not actually a battle, it’s just wind. I’m getting so worked up about a little bit of wind. It’s so stupid. I know there’s nothing I can do about it, there’s nothing anybody in the world could do about it. I should just keep peddling and not think about it. Eventually, the wind will stop or I’ll out pace is and everything will be OK again. But in the thick things, it doesn’t feel like that. I know that’s the truth in the back of my mind even when I’m crying, but sometimes my emotions run amonk and take over reason. All afternoon I let my emotions take control over reason. I was alone with my thoughts, and I was in a bad headspace. My thoughts were dark and I begin to wonder how long I can take this beating before I break. I have a breaking point, everybody does. I don’t know where mine is, but if the world wants to keep testing me like it did today for the next 10,000 miles, we’re going to find out where my breaking point is before I get to Ushuaia. Since my first day with a 20 mile an hour headwind in the Yukon I’ve been telling myself “this can’t last, you’ll catch a break. Eventually, that tailwind day is coming.” That was 3000 miles ago. Since day three I’ve had a headwind for 17 out of the past 19 days. I had a short break outside of Calgary and on Day 20, but even then I had a headwind for the last five hours of my ride. Every day I wake up and say “well, maybe my big break is coming tomorrow because it’s not coming today.” But of course I’m not guaranteed a break. This wind could continue all the way to Argentina. And if you told me on day 4 that I’d have a headwind every single day all the way to Mexico, I would’ve told you that’s impossible. The odds of that are so incredibly low. I think a break is coming, I certainly hope so, but I can’t say that I know it will come. It’s theoretically possible that I never get a break. This afternoon it felt like maybe I won’t ever get a break. I got inside my head this way and in so many other way. I began wondering  what all this distress and pent-up frustration and anger and fatigue is doing to my mind. Day after day all by myself with all these things to work through. I’ve been happy with how it handled most days and I think this blog is a great way to write down my thoughts and organize my mind a little bit. I’ve been able to call people and they’ve been able to help me a little, but being alone with all these trials day after day week after week, it has to be doing something to my mind. Maybe I’m changing for the better, but what if I’m not? There’s no one here to tell me how I’m changing on a daily basis. What if I’m being desensitized to the things around me? I’m slowly losing the joy that I used to get from riding my bike. Every day I wake up and it becomes more of a chore less of a privilege in my mind. The sunsets never seem so glamorous as they were a week ago. Perhaps that’s because I’m in Texas and the air is poor and the landscape is objectively ugly, or maybe it’s because I’m losing my appreciation for beauty. Maybe I’m living in my head and failing to live in the moment. Am I losing track of my privilege? Will I be a fundamentally different person when I come back home? Will frustrations follow me around? Will I find myself being bitter and angry and upset with the world like I was this afternoon? Will I always feel like things are out to get me? All of these thoughts were swirling through my mind. I plodded along struggling to reach 10 miles an hour all afternoon. After Stanton, the tears stopped flowing, but the hardships kept coming. I was distraught and torn up and demoralized. In nine hours I hadn’t even covered 100 miles. I should’ve made it to the US-Mexico border by tonight easily. If there hadn’t been any wind the past couple of days. Now I’m worried about getting there before tomorrow night. I was so caught up in everything that happened to me, I couldn’t escape. There was nothing to look at and nothing else to think about but the wind. My load of bricks seemed to be getting larger and my emotional chains behind me seem to be dragging deeper and deeper, getting longer and longer. My emotions were shackling me down and the wind was making sure I couldn’t break free. I tried to tell myself how stupid I was being. It’s just a little bit of wind. It’s literally such a simple thing, a beautiful thing. I should love the wind for what it is. My misfortune is another’s fortune. I’ve been unlucky. Things have been dull. Today was rock bottom so far, but I can climb out and my hole can—and will—get deeper. I’m sure it’s going to get harder. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not in the next month. But it will get harder eventually. Today I was torn up, but I wasn’t broken. I want to bend not break. I bent a lot today, but I was still really far from breaking. I cried a lot and got lost in my head and it was miserable and awful, but the thought of stopping early on the day never even crossed my mind and quitting this project isn’t even an option. In my head, quitting is actually not an option. I’ve been dreaming about this opportunity and this moment for so long that I’ll break before I quit. I know it sounds like something you’d see on the front of a Nike tech, graphic T-shirt, but it’s true. Getting to Ushuaia, it’s hardwired into my brain at this point. It’s more than just a bike trip, it’s the culmination of everything I’ve worked for in life. There might be people out there, shaking their head “there’s more to life than biking” but this is what gives me meaning, this is my passion. This is it, this is all I have (aside from relationships), this is all I want. I pick up my tools after today and continue working. There’s nothing else to do. As hard as it gets and as much as I complain, I’m right where I want to be, so what’s even the point in complaining? Why am I putting it out there for the rest of the world to see? I’m not really, I’m writing this down for myself and it just happens to be published. I’m not writing for the reader, sorry. I hope my stories and my thoughts are a good read and perhaps provoke others’ thoughts and maybe there’s even a small chance that they inspire others, but I don’t care if people read this and judge me or think I’m crazy. But at the same time, I feel stupid saying all of this knowing that it means nothing. But at the same time, it means everything to me. But it doesn’t change anything for me. All the thoughts I had today are pointless in that tomorrow I will wake up and bike for 12+ hours again. That doesn’t mean they are meaningless, but perhaps pointless is fair to say. Then why even bother recounting them? Well they were thoughts I had so I want to capture them, even if they are pointless and misguided.

My realization from today is that I’ll let this trip break me before I’ll quit. I already knew this, but it hadn’t really been tested. Today was the first strength test of this theory and it reaffirmed what I already knew. It doesn’t scare me, but it does provoke thought and a little bit of concern. My motto has been bend don’t break. Well, maybe after I’m done being bent I won’t return to my normal form. That’s OK, if I were to come back from this trip and be the same person I was when I left, I think the trip would be a failure. But what if I come home bent the wrong way? Who knows. I’m in a bad place. I feel lonely and a little anxious. I really do believe that things will get better soon, but I know that they could get worse and I know there’s nothing out there that guarantees that they will get better. I brought this upon myself. I could theoretically walk away at any moment. No one’s making me do this except for myself and I’m honestly not making myself do it. I’m giving myself the privilege of doing this. I need to ground myself. I need to find the joy in riding that I’ve lost the past couple of days. I need to get out of Texas. This state has not been kind to me. The United States has not been kind to me to be honest. The riding here has been so incredibly difficult, day after day. I’ve seen a side of America I didn’t know existed culturally and geographically. I haven’t been that impressed to be honest. I haven’t exactly chosen was scenic route through the US but nonetheless, I am ready to be onto the next country. I go to sleep tonight knowing that tomorrow the winds will once again batter me. I’m close enough to the US-Mexico border that I will almost certainly be there tomorrow night. I plan on taking a hotel room on the US side of the border in Del Rio no matter what time I get to the border tomorrow night. I’ll reset, I’ll let myself sleep in. I’ll eat lots of food, and when I wake up on Monday morning, I will enter a new country, a new headspace, and a new era in my journey. It’s going to be hard to sleep tonight, knowing that I have to do this all over again tomorrow. I know the thing that really tore me up today was watching the dog die in front of me, so hopefully that doesn’t happen again, obviously. Today was going to be miserable regardless, but perhaps if I hadn’t seen the dog die I would’ve been able to keep things together. I guess we’ll never know. It’s irrelevant, it’s in the past, doesn’t matter. I tried to focus on what I said yesterday, the good days bring memories that last, but perhaps the bad days are subliminally more impactful on one’s character. Perhaps I’m much stronger for what happened today. I feel weaker, but perhaps that is not the case.

After nearly 12 hours of riding, I ended the day with less than 150 miles. My average speed for the day was 12.8 miles an hour. Not for lack of trying. An equivalent effort on a windless day would’ve yielded well over 200 miles. It wasn’t until the ninth hour of the day that my maximum speed broke 20 miles an hour when I got to the first descent of the day. For context, on Day 20 when I had very little wind, I averaged 20.4 miles an hour for 276 miles. Today it took me nine hours to reach 20 miles an hour for even a split second. I truly felt like I was beating my head against the wall all day. I expected this from Patagonia, maybe, I did not expect this from Texas. Today is the first day of the trip that I am below world record mileage. Today, Michael Strasser pulled miles back on me in our fight for the world record, which isn’t even really a fight. He doesn’t even know of my existence, but I think about him every day. He truly lives in my mind rent-free. I’ll save that conversation for another day. Today feels like a failure. I just have to remind myself that every pedal stroke is one pedal stroke closer to Ushuaia. Just yesterday I was talking about how I could take off days or take short days if I need them. I don’t feel like I need them. I don’t want them, but I’m being forced to take them. There’s nothing to do about it though. I’m tired of riding in this wind and I’m doing so much complaining that I’m even getting tired of complaining. I feel like I can’t do much right. I feel like there’s no way to win. I just keep biking.