41 miles

Today was a challenge on many levels. Danielle’s bike is having problems again. The rear derailleur is now hitting her spokes in her lowest gears, meaning she can’t climb hills. She was trying to fix it yesterday when we climbed Logan by adjusting the limit screws, with no success. 

The plastic spoke guard cracked and came loose before the night ride yesterday, and she removed it. Her bike had fallen over while it was unloaded that night, and without the panniers to protect it, the derailleur itself likely hit the ground and bent out of alignment. I could tell she wanted to solve the problem on her own, which I respected – but I could also tell she didn’t quite know what to do. I made what little suggestions I could, and then stepped away to give her space to sort it out.

The hours of good sunlight in the morning slipped past. I started getting agitated, with rain forecasted for the afternoon. Eventually, she called Shayne, who confirmed on her description that the derailleur was probably bent, and she could either try to bend it back by hand (risky), or just try to get by without her lowest gears until we could get to another bike shop that might have the tools we needed. I took myself to the camp store to get some coffee, and called home to wish Papa a happy Father’s day. We had a nice chat. I carefully neglected to mention where I was and what I was doing.

We decided to move along and hope to find a bike shop. When we finally got on the road, we were back on Route 2, which had a VERY narrow, sandy, barely existent shoulder, with broken pavement, and this two-lane section of road was very busy with park traffic. Not exactly an ideal start. One additional point of misery for me was that my shoes and socks were still soaked through from riding yesterday in the downpour. 

As we were making our way along this horrible, sketchy, narrow road, an oncoming pickup truck suddenly decided to triple pass a string of cars, and (I suspect) didn’t see me at all. Somehow, I didn’t see it either until it was in the near lane and coming straight toward me, passing within what felt like inches of me, at 70+ mph. All I could see was a momentary flash of the grille, and I screamed for my fucking life. I haven’t felt existential terror like that, maybe ever. I don’t know what my face was doing, but there was still too much traffic and no room on the shoulder to move over or stop even for a minute to recover, so I just continued riding while some real near-death tears came over me and I tried to take deep breaths and settle my adrenaline. One driver a moment later gave me a “rock on” hand signal out their window, which really brought the tears, because whether or not they could tell what was going on with me in that moment, I appreciated the gesture so much. 

We finally stopped before Essex, at a place that seemed to match the description of that one woman who mysteriously asked us to say hi to someone named Larry. We didn’t find him there, and I wasn’t in the mood to try very hard, so we continued on, making our way very slowly up Marias Pass. I stopped for a while to gawk at some mountain goats down in the river gorge. Danielle was struggling on the long climb without her low gears. Once she caught up, she suggested that she might walk or hitchhike if it got much steeper. 

I reflected for a while on my reaction to this situation with her bike, and how it connects to my own relationship with help. I thought about how she had offered to walk with Chase yesterday when he got tired, and how it struck me as such a compassionate thing to do, and how it was something I had not considered, simply because he didn’t ask. It’s not that I don’t feel compassion for people who are struggling—I do, of course. I think I just operate with the implicit expectation that if someone is struggling beyond their capacity, they will say so, and if they want my help, they will identify what they need and ask for it directly. This is probably my stance towards other people’s struggles because it’s how I want them to treat mine, too. I have always found it incredibly frustrating (and often patronizing) when people try to anticipate my needs, and rush to help me before I have a chance to ask, because I feel it robs me of opportunities to work things out for myself, which is something I value deeply. I want to be able to ask for what I need on my own terms, and further, I see it as my responsibility to do so. Not everyone comes to the table with this particular set of expectations. The differences can create misunderstandings.

In Danielle’s case, she didn’t ask me to walk with her. There was no part of me that wanted to walk my own fully functional, fully loaded touring bike up this mountain, but I wondered, should I have offered? If I did offer to walk with her, would she just feel like she was slowing me down? She might, especially if I couldn’t effectively hide how I really did feel burdened by the situation. I don’t get to choose how I feel, but if that IS how I feel, how do I hide that? Is it even right to try? If I can’t hide it, and I can’t change it, then choosing to walk maybe isn’t a gift of compassion after all, it’s a gift of guilt. It says “I didn’t really want to help you, but I’m going to do it anyway because it’s the ‘right’ thing to do. Hope you appreciate my sacrifice!” and that just doesn’t seem like a great approach either. 

It’s a double bind that’s familiar to me. When someone insists on helping you, and you can feel that it is frustrating for them to do so, it can make you feel like a burden, and because they didn’t want to help you, but they denied their own reality and did it anyway, it leaves you feeling even more obligated to express your gratitude. But it’s very difficult to access gratitude when you feel locked in the guilt and frustration of being a burden, especially if it feels like you didn’t have a choice in becoming one.

We ended up stopping 24 miles short of our goal today, at Devil Creek Campground just before the pass. The camp host is a man named Dan. He kindly brought our firewood bundle to our site and chatted with us for a moment. We talked over the campfire and Danielle read some of her book out loud.