Riding Through Dreamland
Chapter 7: Against the Wind

“On the dark ride to the witches’ sabbath where you meet only yourself, yourself, yourself.”

Dag Hammarskjold, Markings

Nebraska is called the Cornhusker State, but it would be days before I would see King Corn. The previous day’s clear blue skies were now covered with a layer of high-altitude ash blowing down from fires raging in Canada, dulling the already faded butterscotch grasslands. Heading east on two-lane US 20, the longest highway in the United States, I was chipping away at the miles. Sitting outside a café in the small city of Chadron (the Dawes County Seat) later in the afternoon, a kindly woman told us that US 20 was a popular route for cross-country enthusiasts of all kinds; she’d even seen cross-country roller skaters pass through town.

Unlike public lands, for which we have such great affection and are known in some circles as “the people’s lands” we don’t typically refer to public roads as the “the people’s roads” (ignoring for a moment the irony that so much acreage of the “people’s lands” was forcibly stolen from Indigenous tribes). As a cyclist, my relationship with public roads is ambivalent, at best. On the one hand, when I pedal on these carriageways, I become a second-class citizen thanks to a hierarchy in which cars and their drivers assume greater privileges, even if they are technically supposed to yield to slower moving traffic. Driving behavior is a visual extension of human emotions; it is unsurprising then when I observe how getting behind the wheel of a moving vehicle makes people possessive and develop a self-inflated sense of privilege (“Hey!” drivers often scream. “Get out of my lane!”). When I’m on the bike, I adopt the mindset that cars are the enemy because of the mortal threat they pose. Cyclists don’t just have to compete with the many forms of driver distraction, such as food, phone calls, or increasingly sophisticated dashboard displays; it’s also that drivers simply don’t expect to see a bicyclist ahead of them because, the presumption is, what’s a bicyclist doing on my road?

On the other hand, paved public roads enabled me to make and complete the ride. Which was one more living paradox whose tension I had to hold throughout the trek. The very means on which I used to reach my goal also contained the instruments that threatened to kill me.

The stretch of US 20 through northwest Nebraska is called the Buttes to Bridges Scenic Byway, and by mid-morning I had dropped into a valley where the prairie grasslands rose up to meet imposing sandstone buttes crowned by pine trees. To further counter the conventional image of the Cornhusker State, for about 30 miles from that point, the highway ran northeast and parallel to the Nebraska National Forest, which is now the largest human-made forest in the United States. As I rode towards Chadron, in the distance I saw not the expected open prairie and grasslands but instead a solid mass of blue-green woodland cover.

Later that morning I stopped for a break in the small farming town of Crawford and witnessed first-hand how farm mechanization that began in the mid-twentieth century had altered the communities in the region. Crawford had seen its population shrink by fifty percent since its peak in the 1940s. I had hoped to score a cup of coffee at the Perk Up Java Shop, whose location was clearly marked on the Google Maps app, but I met with disappointment seeing that it was closed. A handwritten note on the door encapsulated the stress and precariousness of small business owners everywhere, none more so in rural, small-town USA: “Closed indefinitely as I have to care for my mother-in-law.”

Instead of coffee, I sat outside the shop on a metal chair, drinking water spiked with an electrolyte supplement, and eating two hard-boiled egg sandwiches in quick succession while surveying my surroundings. Across the street was a five-story, sandstone brick building; its windows boarded up.  A sign in front read, “Eagles,” suggesting perhaps the downstairs space once housed a restaurant or bar. A cheery, new “Welcome to Crawford” banner hung from a light pole right outside Eagle’s blocked-off entrance, as if meant to distract people from the signs of entropy. But the banner’s welcoming message was further diminished by the two closed shops next door, their goods on display in the windows covered in white sheets.

Chadron still did have life, however. Next door to the closed coffee shop was a store festooned with green plants by the window. A water bowl had been placed on the sidewalk with a sign that stated, “Water for your dog! Or short people with low standards… we don’t judge.”

Crawford was like a pallid ER patient that had lost a lot of blood. I passed through similar emptied-out places the next day in Sheridan County: Rushville (the county seat), the village of Clinton, a city called Gordon, and, at day’s end, the village of Cody. All of them were platted in the late nineteenth century when the railroad was extended to those points.

In contrast, the cropland surrounding these towns was as sanguine as the towns were drained of life – the region had bled people but not farm productivity. Outside of the town of Hay Spring (where I saw a sign that read, “Happy Harvest”), were miles of open fields dotted with circular pivot irrigation systems growing mostly alfalfa, but also dry beans and corn. And I knew from my reading that the Nebraska Sandhills area I would be entering housed a robust livestock industry.

Mechanization did not just reduce the requisite manpower to run a farm; the entire process of agricultural production had become more industrialized since the 1970s, resulting in the centralization of operations and absentee ownership of farms. This business school approach to putting food on the table began in the 1950s (when the term agribusiness got its first mention in a Harvard Business School bulletin) and accelerated in the 1970s when Nixon’s laissez-faire Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, helped push through a Farm Bill that promoted maximum yields and led to a cost-conscious, industrialized “seed to processing” network (and which coincided with greater corporate ownership of farmland).

I had heard evidence of this centralization of ownership and production in my conversation with the lifeguard in Harrison and learned more from a massage therapist named Will I had fortuitously found several days later in Ainsworth. He told me that in Nebraska, it wasn’t so much that corporations were buying farmland but instead that wealthier farm operators were purchasing barely solvent farms and incorporating them into their operations. He also explained that it was hard for someone to start a farming business due to the entry-cost barriers. A new combine costs over half a million dollars. What kind of young person has that kind of money or could afford to go into so much debt?

He knew a lot of these large-scale operators. They’re nice people, he said. But they don’t live in the communities where they own farms. Their kids don’t go to the local schools. In short, they are not invested in places where they operate. My well-travelled Nebraskan masseuse, who could have lived anywhere but decided he wanted to raise his kids in Ainsworth, summed it up by saying, “They’re neighborly, but not good neighbors.”

Demographically, Nebraska’s population has been growing in line with the United States, but most of that growth takes place near the urban centers in the eastern part of the state and along the Interstate 80 corridor. I was riding across the northern part of the state, in already sparsely populated counties which had seen a further decline in population, some more than ten percent, over the last ten years. I didn’t need a census report to understand this; the boarded-up shops in Crawford said it all. Like Lisa in Jeffrey City, I wondered what happens to the people who remain and suffer the loss of the shared sense of place these communities once had?

There is irony to the fact that the same desire for profit and gain that led to the decimation of the bison and the Indigenous way of life on the northern plains has also been responsible for the hollowing out of whatever sense of place had existed in these small Nebraskan towns, leading to social stagnation and sadness. At least this is what I sensed when I stopped for a second breakfast in a café in Gordon. Though the cool blast of the air conditioner was a relief, the ambiance of the café was one of quiet despair. Perhaps the summer heat was having its effect on the patrons’ mood, but nobody in that place looked happy. While I waited for my food, I grabbed a dated cattle trade magazine (from 2020), filled with articles with advice about ranch management techniques, advertisements for ranch equipment and cattle feed, and essays about the proper use of antibiotics. Towards the back of the magazine was a two-page advertisement for Donald Trump, paid for by a national cattlemen’s association. At the center of the spread, employing classic heartland iconography, was a young cowboy riding a horse holding a staff with an oversized American flag. Was messaging such as this, designed to pull on patriotic sentiments among the hard-working people in the livestock industry, intended as a salve to counter this sense of loss?

A few days later in Ainsworth I experienced another version of this somber dining scene. The eatery was larger and busier (and the food was worse than mediocre), but it too told a story of dejection and the corrosion of spirit. We sat on cracked and peeling vinyl upholstery booth seats and saw the kitchen staff, both men and women my age or older, grimly carrying out their tasks as if they were sad automatons. One man walked bent over wearing a cheap, disposable plastic apron covering his overalls, the kind I once wore as a college food service worker. When we started a friendly conversation with our waitress, it was as if she had been waiting for the opportunity to unburden herself. She recounted the latter part of her life’s story – how she lost her husband and the effort it took to stay financially afloat.

In her story and on the faces of the diners and other staff in Gordon and Ainsworth I saw the current of despair running through rural America. While they struggled, their not-such-good-neighbor industrialized farming operators – individuals and corporations -- were making a lot of money.

When I crossed into the heart of the Nebraska Sandhills on the afternoon of Day 31 a roadside sign greeted me: “Cherry County. 3,814,000 Acres Big. God’s Own Cow Country.” (To lend credence to their boasting, it’s worth noting that Cherry County is bigger than Connecticut.) Though I wouldn’t call it humid, the air was steamier than the dryness I felt just a few days earlier in eastern Wyoming. I was exposed to the elements, riding through a mixed prairie, the sandhills stretching to the horizon on both sides of the road. I so desired to take a break but kept on plodding ahead, looking for even the most parsimonious sliver of cover from the sun. Finally, I found a small copse of roadside trees, and I quickly slid off the bike, set it down (chain side up, of course) on the highway’s shoulder, and lay downhill from the road’s edge in a state of overheated exhaustion. I stared into the deep blue sky above and listened to the branches and leaves making that refreshing rustling sound. I had countless moments such as these, but now they became more frequent the deeper I got into the trek and felt my stamina waning. The novelty and thrill of the early days were a distant memory. With each passing day, it took more rope to reach the water level in the well of perseverance.

Then there were moments of tailwind-induced joy, such as on the final stretch of Day 31. Like the final stretch into Harrison two days earlier, even though I was completing my fifth hour on the open road in scorching heat, the wind made me feel stronger than Hercules. I became giddy and thrilled with my ability to go superhumanly freaking fast with minimal effort. Like the tricks a drug can play on the mind, I somehow believed this ability was my birthright, that it should be like this all the time, because zooming down the road at 25 mph, mysteriously, my muscles no longer ached. Surely, I thought, I would soon reach the Atlantic Ocean and ride directly to Europe without stopping.

Yes, with tailwinds, all things are possible.

And at the end of Day 31 I arrived in Cody, population 168, where the sign said, “Welcome to Cody. A town too tough to die.”

Absent a tailwind, the heat was like a weight, and as I pulled into Valentine on Day 32 where I would meet Joanie for lunch, poetically, I felt about past half dead. I still had forty-seven miles to reach Ainsworth, where I would take a well-deserved rest day and bask in the satisfaction that I had completed over half the trek’s mileage. Valentine was home to a bridge high over the Niobrara River (from whence US 20 got half of its “Buttes to Bridges” moniker).

I had specifically selected this route so I could ride on the Cowboy Trail. The trail paralleled US 20 and while it would likely be slightly slower going, it would provide a more scenic and traffic-free path. Initially, I was happy to be off the roads as the trail dropped down to the bridge that crossed the river. But as soon as I crossed and the trail began to climb the eastern slope the surface got sloppy, changing from hard-packed dirt to a loose, gravelly-sand mixture. I crested the ramp, hoping that the riding would be easier if I were not climbing, but the trail surface degraded even further. To make matters worse, there was no airflow because the trail cut into the sandhills, blocking the usually profuse winds. After struggling for seven miles on the Cowboy trail, I made the decision that the absence of road traffic was not worth it. I found a crossroad that led me back to US 20.

Though I had found relief from the heat, I still had to grind out the long miles up short, steep climbs all the way to Ainsworth. It was so discouraging to finish a climb, winded and weak, only to see the daunting sight of yet another climb cut through a hill in the distance. There’s no way to sugar coat or romanticize the experience; on days such as those, existence boiled down to one pedal stroke after another. There was no tailwind to rescue the day and make me feel omnipotent.

 Pickup truck drivers in cowboy hats coming the opposite way gave polite waves. Trucks loaded with hay moved over to the shoulder and gave me a wide berth. I would occasionally ride on the highway when the rumble-strip lined shoulders became too full of roadside detritus. I was careful to return to the shoulder when I saw a vehicle approaching from my rear but held my line when it was unsafe to navigate the rumble strip. On one occasion, this enraged a driver behind me who leaned on his horn. I had put out my left arm in the universal “slow” hand motion but that didn’t matter, because as he passed me, he yelled something unintelligible, his hands waving in anger that I had caused him to slow down. Remember, this was his road.

Close to mile 70 that day, imagine my surprise when a Cherry County Sherrif’s squad car passed close by, turned on its lights, and pulled off on to the shoulder ahead of me.

He was a Deputy Sherrif with a roly-poly belly, probably in his late-30s. He got out of his car with a smile (which I did appreciate) and said, “Hey! You’re nowhere near Sturgis. You must be lost.”

Using humor as his opening gambit communicated to me that I had not broken some unknown law, but the true purpose of his stopping me was yet to be revealed. We exchanged pleasantries and I told him what I was doing. And then the message:

“Look, there’s nothing illegal about riding on this road, but I received a complaint from a driver that there was a biker blocking traffic.” He went on to warn me about the dangers of motorists, and that it would be a lot safer for me to ride only on the shoulder. By then, I had already connected the dots and figured out that the irate driver I had obstructed (for my own safety) had made the call.

He wouldn’t be the first police officer to warn me about the dangers of riding on public roads. Likewise, many friends expressed their concern about the risk of getting hit by a vehicle or losing control and crashing with bone-breaking force. Not only did this not happen, but over the length of the ten-week, 3,500-mile trek I never once fell and hurt myself. To be precise (and more honest) I did lose balance and fall on two occasions, but both times I suffered barely a scratch. The first fall occurred outside of Jackson in Wyoming when I came to a full stop and simply did not unclip my shoe from the pedal quickly enough. The second fall was on the C&O Canal Towpath in Maryland: I was barely moving and lost balance on a muddied section. With about a dozen onlookers, I felt more embarrassment than pain.

Later, as I struggled up the incline towards a planned rest stop in the village of Johnstown, I sensed a change in the landscape. The land near the road was no longer the light brown, soft rounded hills of the Sandhills but flat with neat green plots of soybeans, empty fields dotted with rolls of recently harvested hay and – finally – my first sight of soil planted with the Cornhusker State’s namesake crop. I didn’t know then, but I had just crossed the 100th Meridian, that invisible boundary between the arid west and the moist east.

The primary objective of a rest day was to provide my body with an opportunity to recover ever so partially from the daily demands imposed on it by the Bike Trip of the Mind. Mind you, a single day off the bike is not nearly enough to ever fully recuperate from long days in the saddle under a blazing sun, but just enough, I hoped, to give my corporeal form sufficient respite to carry on.

But when I woke up in Ainsworth on Day 34, I felt as exhausted as if I had just completed a full day’s ride. I suspected that it had something to do with the massage I got the day prior with Will, the stocky, blond Nebraskan who had just returned from the Olympic games in Tokyo, his third as a Sports Massage Therapist. Learning that I would be setting off in the morning, Will told me that he didn’t want to overwhelm my body and work my muscles too deeply, which would cause toxins in my tissue to be released quickly. But after eating two large cookies for dessert that night I immediately felt exhausted. In the middle of the night, I woke up drenched in sweat, those toxins releasing, nonetheless. This did not bode well.

I felt uneasy when I left Ainsworth, but good fortune provided me with a steady tailwind, and I did not have to expend much energy. I rode within my limits, leisurely, and made good time out of the Sandhills and into farmland with now more densely placed fields of corn, soybean, and alfalfa. Many would remark that the Nebraskan landscape is ‘boring’ but such a comment on the unremarkable panorama is less an insult to nature and more of an indictment of modern, industrial agriculture with its economically efficient but soil-degrading monoculture practices. The land I was riding through was once part of that flowing, free river of grasslands that stretched from Canada to Mexico. Under the unblinking sun, all I saw now was petroleum-based farming and large tracts of pivot-irrigated fields of hay near functional-looking, small towns, and waterways soiled with poisonous runoff that had been sprayed (“applied,” to use the industrial term) to make the crops grow.

I passed through agricultural towns like Atkinson, which, like so many population centers in this part of Nebraska, was established in the late nineteenth century and became a transportation hub when the railroad line from Omaha was extended to the town. Unlike the smaller villages along the old rail line, Atkinson has remained an economic hub and has not suffered the precipitous population decline suffered by smaller towns. But Atkinson was not the tidy, idyllic place with a cozy, small-town feeling where, say, Nebraskan native Henry Fonda might have grown up. Instead, with a large biofuel operation anchoring the southeast entrance, its low-slung warehouses, and large auto and farm equipment sales lots, Atkinson had a rough-edged feeling to it.

That night we stayed in a park in the small city of O’Neill and shared the hookup area with four other RVs; the nearest to us was a long trailer pulled by a bright red, hefty-looking pickup truck. We exchanged waves with its lone resident and driver, who, after we had eaten dinner, walked over to chat. His name was Lonnie, and he was originally from O’Neill. His wife had passed away not too long before, and he had moved down to Texas to be closer to his children. Lonnie couldn’t have been that much older than us. He had come up from Texas for a funeral and told us that he had made his living as a truck driver, though he was now retired.

Lonnie really wanted to talk. What made him unusual was my sense that he truly wanted to connect socially and not just engage in the usual one-way, self-absorbed chatter characteristic of so many people that I met along the way. He possessed a matter-of-fact humble certitude. Clearly, he missed his wife, and having traveled home for a funeral probably put him in a wistful mood. After telling us stories of his former days hauling goods to and from Nebraska, I recounted to him how I noticed that the large 18-wheel rigs approaching me from the opposite direction would give me a wide berth. I told Lonnie, “Truck drivers in Nebraska are very courteous.”He gave me a faraway, incredulous look that told me the opposite was true. He then recounted how, on one occasion, another truck driver seemed oblivious to his presence and essentially forced him off the road and it was only by equal measures of skill and luck that he saved himself. When Joanie asked why someone would do something so dangerous and reckless, Lonnie responded dryly, “Brain damage, clearly.”

Later, we rode our bikes to the local Dairy Queen for dessert. For the second night in a row, I woke up in the middle of my slumber, drenched in sweat.

On Day 35, my goal was to reach Norfolk in eastern Nebraska, some 75 miles to the southeast. But alas, the winds were no longer guided by Glinda. No, on this day, the Wicked Witch of the West, cackling madly, threw the headwinds at me. For the entire day.

Oh what a world.

It only took a few minutes of struggling on the arrow-straight road directly into the wind to realize how deep the trough of shit that I would be eating from that day would be. After ten miles of toil against my invisible foe, I took a break in the shade of the trees of the Cowboy Trail, whose path paralleled the road. I felt dizzy. I tried riding on the trail again, but the wind still found its way through the trees, and the rough trail surface made the effort even more difficult. I returned to the road and, at mile sixteen, when Joanie drove by in Olympia. I waved at her to stop. I climbed in, restocked with more Clif bars, and then ate and drank, dripping with sweat and feeling sorry for myself.

 Somewhat reluctantly, I mounted Third Wind and returned to face the punishing headwind, but only four miles later, still feeling worn to nub, I chose to pull off the road into the village of Ewing to rest some more. I was so weak that I played with the idea of stopping for a full sit-down meal, but what I thought was a restaurant turned out to be a grocery store. Instead, I sat in the shade on a metal bench in front of the village’s Town Marshall building and, with significant effort, ate the sandwiches I had packed for lunch (though it was nowhere near midday). The dizzy feeling had transformed into a mild vertigo. For the first time I wondered if I had reached the end of my rope.  That’s it – trek over.

I lay down and dozed for a bit. When I woke up, not feeling much better, a gentleman of retirement age rolled up on a small ATV and chatted me up a bit. There was a voice inside my head urgently telling me to ask him for help, but I had no idea what kind of help I needed. The fatigue was taking my mind down strange pathways, paved with exhaustion.

I don’t know how, but I eventually got on the bike and kept on pedaling. Maybe it was the power of reflexive impulse, or perhaps I had internalized the lesson -- after years of studying and practicing taiji chuan -- that when the mind commands, the body obeys. Or maybe it was deep, unconscious instinct that told me Ewing, Nebraska did not seem like a good place to quit. The only alternative was to ride. And, counterintuitively, and ever so gradually, I began to recover. The wind was still unrelenting, but I was able to increase my riding speed. After five or six miles my resolve hardened, and I became fully confident that I would make it to Norfolk.

But how I suffered so. Even though I had recuperated to a small degree, the unyielding wind made me stiffen and quiver emotionally. An unconscious instinct – the opposite of the energy that made me climb back on the bike in Ewing -- yanked open a trap door and I fell into a pit of my own making. For despite having the mental breakthrough of acceptance of suffering back in the scablands in eastern Washington, and notwithstanding all my neat words about how fickle the wind can be, I involuntarily let my frustration with something over which I had absolutely no control make myself miserable. Literally faced with the ultimate metaphor of resistance, it was peculiar how useless and ineffective intellectual understanding of that metaphor was. It certainly didn’t help me handle the unrelenting effort of pedaling all those miles.

Late in the afternoon, I pulled off the road to take a break. As soon as I dismounted, my sphincter muscles began to tremble, a signal from my body to remind me that it was not happy with the day’s grind. Seventy-five miles of battling the unseen.

As the sun sank low, I struggled on, powered only by an ever-weakening will. When I eventually reached Norfolk, I was greeted unceremoniously by strip malls and long stretches of big box chain stores and franchises that dominate the United States: Menards, Walmart, Pizza Hut, Buffalo Wild Wings, Hampton Inn, McDonald’s, ad nauseum. Finally, I pulled into the parking lot of the hotel Joanie had booked at my insistence. I dismounted from Third Wind, stiff and spent.  Flushed with equal parts exhaustion and emotion, I began to sob.

Even a decent night’s sleep on a hotel bed could not replenish and restore my body after that epic slog. On my last day in Nebraska, the winds were not a bother, but the heat sapped my already feeble constitution. The day’s ride was a roller coaster of steep climbs and descents over undulating terrain. However, I did find a sense of inner peace over the last 36 miles, a stretch in Cuming County that took me through a lush and quiet landscape on a mostly empty State Road intersected by countless creeks and streams through what was the Omaha Nation’s historical home.

Decatur, the day’s destination, is a village on the west bank of the Missouri River on lands that were dubiously purchased from the Omaha tribe, and which provided a painful example how people are punished by the economic forces outside of their control. Before my arrival, Joanie had bought herself an ice cream cone from a local shop and sat outside to enjoy it, noting, among other things, that she was the youngest person around. She started talking to an older gentleman, a retired farmer, who worked at his wife’s ice-cream shop because she was quite ill with cancer. He leased his fields to provide some income but mainly supported his wife who didn’t want to give up the store. He told Joanie they had to drive over an hour each way to Omaha for his wife’s chemotherapy treatments.

When Joanie wondered, with the prodigious summer winds blowing, why she didn’t see any wind turbines in Nebraska, her question opened a beehive of resentment and let loose the all-too-common curse of the disenfranchised. “If you go across the river into Iowa, you’ll see plenty of wind turbines,” he said. “That’s because the Iowa state government promotes that kind of stuff. But those political and business folks down in Lincoln don’t care about us. They’re too busy enriching themselves.”

The next morning, I was primed to go. My body felt stronger and just the thought of crossing the Missouri River energized me: by the end of the day, I would have surpassed 2,000 miles of riding and traversed from what I thought of as a “plains state” to a “midwestern” state, leaving the brown pasturelands and green fields of northern Nebraska, cornhusker in name, for the true corn kingdom that is Iowa.

I crossed over the Missouri on the Burt County Missouri River Bridge, known locally as "That Scary Ass Bridge" because when you drive across the mid-twentieth century truss structure you can see the river flowing underneath the metal grillwork on the roadway floor while the weight of your vehicle (even a bicycle!) produces a loud, creaky sound. Eight miles into Iowa, I met Joanie for a second breakfast in the farming town of Onawa, which bills itself as a progressive rural community. There were loudspeakers set up on light posts up and down Main Street playing a succession of 1980s rock hits. For a brief moment I was caught up in the cognitive dissonance of AC/DC’s TNT competing with the throaty roar of powerful diesel engine cabs hauling their heavy loads through town.

We sat down in Fannie’s Café, and I ordered a stack of blueberry pancakes, doused with copious amounts of amber syrup from the table’s dispenser. It was a Monday morning, and the café was busy with a crowd of retirement-aged men and women enjoying their coffee and breakfast. The town had the same sense of place I felt about Pomeroy, Washington and Lander, Wyoming. Its proximity to Interstate 29 just a few miles to the west made it the largest city on the Iowa side of the river between Council Bluffs to the south and Sioux City to the north. But more than being a commercial and agricultural hub, what I sensed about Onawa was, in a word, community. Yes, its population is homogenous, but from what I witnessed, there was something egalitarian about the town’s physical layout, its commercial frontage, and the tenor of its human interactions.

I left Onawa and headed towards the Loess Hills, whose gently shaped and verdant slopes were created by windblown deposits of fine-grained clay that had accumulated over thousands of years following the last Ice-Age, rising above the Missouri River floodplain.

I was fighting a headwind, but that did not account for my sudden sense of depletion. Instead of an expected energy boost from the pancake breakfast, I was exhausted after riding only seven miles. I pulled off the road at the entrance to the village of Turin, found a gazebo in a public park with a metal picnic table with long benches, and collapsed. I lay there, dark thoughts of not being able to complete the cross-country trek swirling once again in the cauldron that was now my mind. What was happening? After nearly two thousand miles and weeks of accumulative effort, had I finally reached my limit? Then I thought about what I had recently eaten. I saw an image of the glass dispenser from which I had poured copious amounts of sticky, viscous, maple syrup. Why had I assumed that a slim-margined café in Onawa would provide each table with jars of the expensive, Grade A, good amber stuff? I grimaced realizing I had loaded up on corn syrup. My weakened body, though craving the raw calories, was responding to the effort of having to digest the combination of sucrose and artificial flavoring.

As I had done two days prior in Ewing, Nebraska, I lay there, disconsolate. No vehicles passed in either direction. No Turin residents came by and wondered what a sweat-drenched cyclist was doing in their gazebo. There was just the sound of wind, birds, and a distant cow lowing.

I eventually rose, wearily, and, out of habit, began to pack up and leave. As I did in Ewing, I unconsciously decided that the only way out was to keep riding. Despite the brilliance of the sun above, in my depleted state I anticipated a dark, dark ride.