Alumnus completes cross-country bike ride
By John Zambenini ’07
It’s 10:30 in the morning and I’m cursing the wind, rain and sinister black clouds gathering around Lizard Head Mountain a few miles to my left as I’m huffing along an otherwise scenic Colorado mountainside. I spot a National Forest Service turn-off with a bank of sheltered latrines and note the mileage. 12.4. I’ll need to remember this spot in case the weather really starts to get dicey. Fortunately for me, I am bicycling across America and today is the day I’m bicycling up 10,200-foot Lizard Head Pass, a continuous 16-mile uphill-battle from idyllic Telluride. If I need to turn tail and run for safety, I shouldn’t have a problem making good time back downhill to safety.
Cycling Colorado’s beautiful San Juan Skyway has left me breathless for reasons other than the headache-inducing, judgment-clouding altitude. Stunning views of the San Juan Mountains, arguably Colorado’s most jagged, dramatic peaks, surround me. Blanketed by fir and aspen until the tree line, bald talus fields vault skyward, toward the 13 and 14,000-foot prominences of the serrated San Juans.
Despite the privilege of riding my bicycle in such a picturesque Shangri-la, I’m slightly perturbed at the ominous storm clouds. I’ve done everything right today. “I don’t deserve this,” I say to myself. I was up at dawn, packing up camp so as to summit the pass before afternoon. By my calculations, I was to have reached the top no later than 11:30, in order to avoid Colorado’s main summer attraction: “Afternoon Monsoons,” as the locals call them, gather innocuous, white, puffy clouds around taller peaks and passes, followed by tempestuous storms and deadly thunder and lightning.
I hitched a ride only yesterday, off the 9,000-foot Dallas Divide when an afternoon monsoon left me whimpering under a shrub, soaked and begging God that I wouldn’t die right then and there as bolts of lightning struck the ground a hundred yards away.
Today should have been different. I paid my dues and got an early start. It’s barely eleven. I’m now taking shelter on the porch of someone’s cabin a mile from the top, where I can see lightning striking regularly. I sigh and dig out every layer of warm clothing I have in my panniers and knock on the front door to alert the inhabitants to my presence. After an hour or so, the weather hasn’t changed; there’s really nothing to do but press on.
* * *
This was not the first time I had sought emergency shelter on my 3,700-mile journey across America and would certainly not be the last. And though my agitation at nasty weather would never cease and my troubled dreams of being stranded and struck by lightning wouldn’t relent until I reached the walnut--shaded Sacramento valley, I learned to worry only about the things I could change – what time I woke up, how fast I could get on the road in the morning, my awareness of nearby shelter.
There were few things I could change throughout my ride across America. I couldn’t shed the corrosive humidity or flatten the punishing 14-percent-grades of the Appalachian Mountains. I couldn’t sway the attitudes of angry drivers in Missouri or make roads any wider. I couldn’t redirect the buffeting crosswinds in Kansas. I couldn’t lower the 100-degree-plus temperatures I experienced from Dolores, Colorado all the way to Davis, California. I couldn’t reduce the weight of the 20 or 30 pounds of water I needed to carry daily through the desert. I couldn’t circumvent the dozen mountain passes I had to climb in Nevada alone.
But I found it much easier to change myself and to, accordingly, persevere. On days when I didn’t think my legs had another hill in them, when the tread fell off my tires on a lonesome Nevada highway, when I became violently ill and still had to ride 40 more miles, when I didn’t think I could stomach one more Power Bar, when my hands would go numb from leaning on the handlebars and not ultimately regain feeling until weeks after I reached the Pacific Ocean, I told myself “There are a million other people who would trade places with you right now.”
On one of those days when I needed to repeat that mantra over and over, I began doubting its veracity. Everything that could have went wrong did: I managed to lose my map, get lost, bend the bike’s handlebars, develop blisters on my feet, and lose my sandals; when I arrived at the next town, the general store was closed for the Fourth of July holiday, as was the place I was to camp, leaving me hungry and shelter-less just as it was starting to rain. It was only my fourth day on the road. “Nothing about this is remotely fun,” I told myself. I looked up at the sky and said, “God, could this day get any worse?”
Moments later, a van pulled up; the driver and his wife asked if I needed a place to stay. I wasn’t about to refuse their hospitality. Shortly, I found myself relaxing in the home of a rural Virginia pastor, showered and smiling. Next thing I knew, they were taking me to get new shoes, narrating the route to the next town, feeding me and taking me to the nearby Virginia Military Institute to watch the Fourth of July fireworks display. Every wrong was righted and the fellowship I enjoyed with that pastor and his family was an incredible joy.
And when I finally reached Vallejo, California on my 53rd day of cycling and boarded the ferry across the bay to the Embarcadero, I wouldn’t have traded the joy of that fellowship with the pastor in Virginia, or the horse-trainer in Missouri, the three Frenchmen I met in Kansas, or the retired couple, Irv and Barb, whom I rode with intermittently from Virginia to Colorado, or any of the hardships along the way, for anything in the world. Nor would I have traded the joy of attaining the prize I had my eyes fixed on for nearly two months: San Francisco.
The four cool, breezy, sunny, gently rolling miles along the San Francisco Bay from Fisherman’s Wharf, past the Golden Gate Bridge and down to Baker Beach on the Pacific Ocean ahead would mean nothing without the mountains, the weather, the close-calls and the thousands of countless, sweaty, non-descript miles of slogging it out the old fashioned way that came before them. Standing at the ferry terminal in San Francisco, looking at those four remaining miles, there was nothing left to do but do what I had done all summer long: press on.
John Zambenini is an Ohio-based writer and adventurer. He has climbed mountains, fallen in quicksand and is in love with the desert. He is a 2007 graduate of Asbury College.
