Excerpts
The First Big Ride
Excerpts
| The
following passages are excerpted from The First Big Ride : A Woman's Journey by
Eloise Hanner. Copyright © 2000. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The road ahead was straight and endless. It was exactly the same behind us, an uninterrupted line in a landscape that was flat and empty as far as I could see. I guessed that the horizon was about twenty miles distant. The next pit stop was five miles beyond that. It was already noon, hot, and the wind was coming from the side, which was slowing our progress. I took a long draw off of my water tube and got a mouthful of warm, plastic-flavored water. My handlebar computer was registering 12.4 miles an hour, which put me at least an hour and a half away. It was strange to find myself out here in the middle of nowhere, bicycling across this vast, desolate nothingness. I thought back to the beginning of this odyssey and how it began. The fact is, left to my own devices, I never would have done it. I certainly wouldn't have noticed the ad in the sports section, or if I had, it would have only been to exclaim about the stupidity of anyone doing such a thing. The rain cleared up after dinner and I propped myself up outside the tent on a square of plastic, facing the meadow in one of our makeshift mattress chairs. The meadow had been created by loggers who had felled trees there years before, and it was now dotted with stumps. Just beyond the clearing the tall trees and dense underbrush formed a wall of dark green. I could see where some of the tallest trees had been struck by lightening and were now just jagged spires against the twilight. The meadow looked like a place for elk or deer and now had that lush, velvety look that grass gets at sunset. In the distance I could hear the bagpiper. This was a Scottish cyclist (or I presumed that he was Scottish) who had brought his bagpipes, and every evening around 8:00 he strolled a distance from the camp and played. I sat there, not reading or writing as I had planned, but just listened. The music was plaintive and haunting and seemed to belong to that green, dripping mountaintop. I felt like I was sinking into the timeless mists of Brigadoon while my former life faded away like an old history of someone else. I wondered where the ride would take me. Would a new career, a new path, become clear? I wrote in my journal for a while then disassembled the chair and crawled back into the tent with Chuck. I heard the bagpiper begin the hymn of "Amazing Grace." He always closed with it and it was generally the last thing I heard before falling asleep. |
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