In the end, John managed to find a decent spot to pitch our tent about twenty feet off the freeway behind a little hillock. Given our circumstances as hostages of the interstate, we considered ourselves lucky that we were, at least, hidden from the highway and had a flat spot for the tent. And that we managed to get camp set up before Mother Nature unleashed her fury.
A few minutes after climbing in for the evening, we heard the first pitter-patters of rain on the tent. We listened as nature’s orchestra ramped up the intensity to include deafening thunder claps and watched the tent light up as bright bolts of lightning flashed in the sky. Rain pummeled our nylon shelter and wind distorted our tent like the contortionist we saw as we waited in line for a magic show in Vegas. We fell asleep hoping and praying our tent was up to the challenge it was faced with.
“We’re stuck, Nancy,” John proclaimed the following morning when he climbed out of the tent. “This doesn’t look good. The sky is still filled with dark gray rain clouds, and it’ll be raining here in a few minutes. We can’t go on – if we do everything will be soaked.”
“We don’t have a choice,” I responded as I emerged from the tent. “We don’t have much food, and very little water. I mean – we’re right next to the interstate for God’s sake! We can’t hang out here all day!”
“Well, I’ll tell you one thing. I’m not packing up right now. That rain storm over there will be here within thirty minutes and there is no way we can get everything packed before that. Besides, even if we were to try to pack up now, all we would manage to do is get all our dry stuff wet. The tent fly is soaked, but the tent itself is okay. If we pack it all together, we’ll end up with the whole thing being drenched. It’s stupid to pack up like this!”
We climbed back in the tent to wait for the coming rain storm to pass.
We ended up spending the entire day and that night right there behind our little hillock twenty feet from the interstate. Shower after shower passed, so we holed up in our tent reading, playing cards, and doing beadwork while listening to the hum of rubber on pavement all day. We joked about how lucky we were to be serenaded by the melody of passing cars while waiting for the rain to pass.
Between thunder showers, the four of us emerged from our cocoon and hung around outside for a few minutes, eating the last few morsels of food I had stashed in my panniers and watching our water dwindle away. I regretted not having a means of capturing the rain water to refill our bottles.
In order to avoid riding in the rain we camped just yards from the interstate. We were stuck there for a whole day and could only leave the tent for short stretches between showers.
By the following morning the rain had passed and we happily packed all our belongings onto our iron maidens and took off to brave the jungle of interstate traffic once again. As miserable as riding on the freeway was, we all agreed that it brought us to a magical place – Zion National Park.
Temperatures plummeted while we were in Zion, yet the spectacular views made it all worthwhile. We curled up in our down cocoons at night, and piled on every layer of clothing we could find to brave the chilly mornings. During the day, however, the fall temps were perfect for hiking and exploring the park. We spent a few days wandering the many trails crisscrossing the park and thoroughly enjoyed the break from cycling.
* * *
Dear Grandma,
When we woke up this morning it was ice cold. We put on lots of layers of clothes. We had to go through a tunnel but bikes weren’t allowed in so we hitched a ride in a pick-up. We saw lots of swirls and twirls in the rocks. It was cool. We also saw a checkerboard mesa. It was really neat too. We saw buffalo and two snakes. We are going to have a fire tonight. It is going to be very cold.
Love, Davy
* * *
Oh my! I thought as I cycled out of Zion. I’m speechless. Yes, me – the one dubbed Chatty McChatter McChattington by my boys – I’m speechless. I tried all day to come up with words to describe the whirly, twirly, swirly sandstone formations we rode through that day, but consistently came up empty-handed. I wanted to write home to Mom and describe our surroundings, but somehow couldn’t find the right words.
I thought of “breathtakingly beautiful” but that was too trite; “stunningly gorgeous” was too blah; “exquisitely carved by the Creator” was too gushy; “uncommonly delicious” – that might have worked, but it wasn’t cookies I was talking about; “absotively, posilutely, spectacularly stupendous” was too tongue-twisty. So there it was. I was officially speechless for perhaps the first time in my life.
We had prepared for a cold ride, but the gods were with us and warmed things up considerably. Just a few weeks earlier we had cycled in the early mornings and late afternoons to avoid the sweltering heat of Death Valley. Now the only comfortable time to ride was the middle of the day.
We realized we needed to come up with some kind of plan to deal with the cold, but we weren’t at all sure what that plan would be. In some ways it was frustrating – we had finally settled into a nice comfortable rhythm and knew what we were doing. And then the rules all changed and we were back to square one. And yet that was what made the trip so fun and exciting – the fact that every day was different and we never knew what kind of challenges our days would bring.
A warm fire was wonderful on bone-chilling mornings.
Cold continued to be the word of the day as we slowly made our way across the Colorado Plateau in Southern Utah. We sought out places to pitch our tent based on availability of wood for campfires. All evening we huddled around the fire before making a mad dash to our sleeping bags. John braved early morning frosts to get a fire lit for me and the boys, so all we had to do was make another mad dash back to the fire upon waking.
Breaking camp and packing the bikes was excruciatingly slow as John and I could only work a few minutes before needing to thaw out our frozen fingers over the flames. Once we were ready to go, we wrapped the boys in every scrap of clothing we could find and dragged them away from the fire and onto the bike.
Our cycling hours were limited to just a few in the middle of the day. We took advantage of that time and pedaled hard, trying to get to the Grand Canyon and then off the plateau before the full blast of winter hit us. The cold was sapping our energy and making life difficult, but we slowly made progress through the Navajo Reservation.
One day things were just blah. The sky was dark and dreary and overcast. We were climbing a twenty-mile hill. We were cold and uncomfortable. As we took breaks by the side of the road, the four of us sat quietly rather than chatting as usual. Blah.
By late afternoon a rainstorm was imminent. We were near the top of a pass at 6500 feet, it was cold, and we wanted to get to a lower elevation to camp. Then it started to sprinkle.
“John!” I called to him ahead of me. “It’s raining! Let’s stop to bag everything.”
“It’s not raining hard yet,” he shouted back. “Let’s just go! We’re close to the top of the pass – hopefully we can make it down before the storm really hits. If we stop now we’ll never make it! Let’s just ride as fast as we can.”
We crested the pass and headed down – with rain drops accumulating on our jackets. We didn’t have rain pants, only jackets. John and I could deal with cold, but if the kids got wet and cold, they would be miserable. They were both wearing thick cotton sweatpants which would never dry and we knew we couldn’t get them wet. We raced down the pass and the whole time I was thinking, Gotta protect the kids... can’t let them get wet... we need shelter... We were in the middle of the Navajo Reservation and there was no shelter. Fortunately, by the time we dropped down to a normal elevation the rain had stopped, although we knew a major rainstorm wasn’t far away.
We rode a few more miles through Navajo land looking for a place to camp. There were houses scattered here and there everywhere, but John finally managed to find a deserted house separated from the rest. We darted behind the abandoned house and quickly set up camp – right next to a dry river bed.
We knew that, with the threat of rain it might not be a dry river bed in the morning. We climbed into our tent knowing that if we heard the roar of a flash flood we needed to scramble.
At some point in the wee hours of the morning I sat up and yelled, “John! Get me a flashlight!”
“Huh?” he mumbled.
“I’m gonna throw up!” I shouted as I frantically unzipped the tent. “Get me a flashlight!”
I slipped on my shoes, unzipped the fly, grabbed the flashlight and headed out. I made it a grand total of eight feet before emptying my gut.
“Aw, Nancy,” John complained, “you could have gone farther away.” I should have barfed on him.
I crawled back in my sleeping bag shivering uncontrollably. An hour later I had managed to stop shaking, just in time for diarrhea to hit. I scrambled back outside into the cold and rain.
By morning I was exhausted. I had been up the entire night making mad dashes out of the tent into the bitter cold and felt like crap. Fortunately, the rain had passed. As much as I wanted to curl up and go to sleep, I knew as well as John did that we couldn’t stay. We were camped behind an abandoned house on Navajo land and we had no food or water. We needed to continue on.
There isn’t much worse than being sick and needing to ride. But having to ride uphill and against the wind while sick certainly was worse and I fought for each pedal stroke. After what I thought was ten or twelve miles, I glanced at the odometer. It said four miles. I could have sworn it was lying.
About sixty miles later (eleven miles according to the lying odometer) I started feeling a bit better and the wind shifted into a crosswind. We made fairly good time into a small village where we bought lunch. As the four of us stood outside the small store munching on burritos and potato chips, John looked back and noticed a nasty storm off in the distance.
“Good thing the wind is a cross-wind,” he commented. “If it was a tail wind that storm would be heading right for us.”
Less than a minute later the wind shifted into a direct tail wind and the temperature dropped considerably. We jumped on our bikes and rode like the wind! We had never gone so fast – ever! Before long sand was blowing along the road in huge gusts. Shortly thereafter it wasn’t even gusts – just a solid steady stream of dust. Visibility was next to nothing as we cruised effortlessly at thirty miles per hour praying to God above there were no pot holes in the road.
We tried to stop and wait out the storm, but the howling wind was too strong. We couldn't even stand still without being blown over. We climbed back on our bikes and allowed the wind to push us onwards.
After the fastest thirty miles on record, we pulled into the trading post in Cameron. When John smiled I could see his grit-covered teeth, and I was sure mine were just as bad. Everything else was coated with a thick layer of dust. But we had survived the sandstorm, and had gotten ourselves to a safe place. We had a lot to be thankful for.
We wandered around the trading post shellshocked but safe.
* * *
Dear Grandma,
We went through a very bad sandstorm. We went over thirty-five miles per hour and got dust all over us. We were very scared. We stopped at a store and didn’t leave until the storm was over. We camped behind a Chevron and superstore. We took showers. Daryl got lost again when he tried to find the bathroom, but we found him after not too much time.
Love, Davy
* * *
The next day we were climbing to the Grand Canyon at last. It had been nearly a thousand miles since we left the coast, and our destination was finally within reach. The four of us were giddy with excitement, knowing we would soon be at one of the most spectacular places on Earth.
“Hey, Mom!” Davy called to me as we ground our way up the hill. “I’m hungry.”
I pulled out some carrots for him to munch on as we climbed.
A short while later we took a break on the side of the road and Davy crawled into my lap. “I’m hungry, Mom,” he said. “Very hungry.”
I handed him some more carrots.
A few miles from the entrance to the National Park, we pulled into the forest to camp for the night.
“I’m really, really hungry,” Davy complained as we set up the tent. I pulled out the carrots again.
A while later, after we had camp set up and organized for the night, I made peanut butter and jelly tortillas. Davy took one bite and set it down. “I’m really hungry, but I just can’t eat.” He curled up in my lap again.
A few seconds later, he jumped off my lap and barfed up a whole lot of carrot soup. I realized Davy had never thrown up before – ever. The poor kid had been feeling badly for hours, but had no idea what was going on. All he knew was that his stomach hurt, and that had always meant hunger in the past. Now he knew.
All evening we sat around the fire with Davy curled up on my lap. Every once in a while he would leap up and make a mad dash to the bushes for another round of throwing up. John and I grew more and more concerned – the last thing we wanted was a bunch of carrot puke in the tent.
“Listen, sweetie,” I told Davy before we went to bed. “If you need to throw up in the night, I need you to shout out really loudly, ‘I need to throw up!’ okay?”
“Yeah,” he replied. “I can do that.”
“John,” I continued. “If he needs to throw up, you open the tent door while I’m turning on the flashlight. Davy – all you need to do is scramble outside as fast as you can. Don’t even take the time to put on your shoes – just go! I’ll follow right after you with your shoes, okay?”
Davy rose to the challenge. When the moment came, he knew exactly what to do and did it admirably. He scrambled out of the tent into sub-freezing temperatures time and time again.
The amazing thing was that Daryl, too, knew exactly what to do. So when he needed to barf a few hours later, he sounded the alarm and we all reacted just as planned – while Davy slept peacefully.
The following morning I crawled out of our frost-covered tent into the bitter cold Arizona desert and surveyed my surroundings. As my eyes landed on the many frozen piles of puke dotting the ground, I wondered, for perhaps the millionth time in the past four months, just why I was there. What could possibly have possessed me to haul my sons around North America on bicycles? What kind of madness caused me to subject my darling boys to numerous mad dashes out of the tent in sub-freezing temperatures to barf in the woods? What kind of mother was I anyway?
My questions were answered a few hours later when we arrived at the Grand Canyon and marveled at Mother Nature’s amazingly exquisite handiwork. Yes, it was all worth it. All our frozen fingers and tired legs, puke runs in the middle of the night and being sandblasted in the desert – they were all just a small part of our adventure. The magic of our family being together and exploring our world was more than worth it all. Each and every one of us knew there was no going back.
Daryl enjoyed making smoke figures as he played with Ninja sticks.
Dear Grandma,
We took a class about the formation of the Grand Canyon. We learned it took almost two billion years to form. All you have to do to remember the process is to remember DUDE.
The D in DUDE stands for the deposition of rock. Once there was a swamp and there was a lot of mud at the bottom of the swamp. Eventually the mud turned into shale. Then there was a desert. After a long time the sand turned to a lot of sandstone. Where there was a shallow ocean covering the Grand Canyon we got limestone. But do you know what they all have in common? They were all formed at sea level.
The U in DUDE stands for the uplifting of rock. The uplifting of rock had to do with plate tectonics. The oceanic plate was thin but heavy, and the continental plate was thick but light. The oceanic plate went under the continental plate, pushing it up, forming the Colorado Plateau. But do you know what is weird about the Colorado Plateau? It is flat!
The second D in DUDE stands for downcutting of rock. It took the Colorado River six million years to cut the rock. The Colorado River
goes very fast. It drags rocks and sediment out to the ocean. It makes the depth of the canyon.
E in DUDE stands for erosion of rock. Rain, floods, and slides happen, which push other rock which makes the canyon wider.
DUDE is still happening today. In the next five million years the canyon will keep getting wider and wider until you will not be able to see the other side.
Stay tuned: Big Cliff National Park coming in five million years!
Love, Davy & Daryl
* * *
It was Halloween. We were camped fifty miles north of Williams, Arizona and wanted to get to town so the boys could go trick or treating. The way we figured it, fifty miles wouldn’t be too bad. But we didn’t count on the head wind – a stiff headwind. We battled and battled until John didn’t think he could battle any more.
The kids and I urged him on, determined to get to town before evening. The kids pedaled like never before, but the bulk of the burden still rested on John’s shoulders. I could see the fatigue in his eyes, his shoulders, and his demeanor. He occasionally slumped off the bike and collapsed to the ground for a break, but always managed to climb back on to continue his heroic efforts.
Three miles from town I suggested camping in the forest and the kids and I walk into town. John all too readily agreed and we headed off the road into the trees. The boys and I grabbed what we needed and headed out, while John set the tent up to relax for the evening.
The three of us hitched a ride to civilization and began our forays into Halloween in a strange town. We stumbled into a celebration at a church and an hour later walked out with a plateful of cupcakes and two whole pies, in addition to a bunch of candies and toys.
Twenty Miles per Cookie: 9000 Miles of Kid-Powered Adventures Page 7
