Two Wheels on my Wagon (37 page)

We celebrated with cheap champagne bought the day before and that Mike, the chauffeur for our return journey, had brought with him; cousin Steve's offer of our own lorry had been great in theory but too complicated in practice. The champagne had a screw top. It was hardly the podium moment of imagination, but I shook the bottle and sprayed it anyway. It had only been out of the fridge a couple of hours yet it was disgustingly warm. No matter, it was not for drinking.

We celebrated again when the border guards were shocked into revealing their latent humanity and let us ring home. We celebrated more still when I spoke to Catherine and she said Per had phoned in to say he'd been discharged from hospital with nothing worse than concussion and a headache.

We celebrated silently all the way back to Silver City as Mike's jeep whisked us at incredible speeds along roads down which we had just laboured. Even his rant against the injustices meted out by the industrial-military complex seemed celebratory, at least for a while.

Back in Silver City, Per celebrated with us at Jamie's house. His face spoke of headaches and the fatigue to which Trevor and I would not succumb until tomorrow. Yet he bore his fate with enviable and typical stoicism.

‘It seems like it was quite a bad crash so I'm just glad I didn't do myself any more damage,' he said happily.

Viewed in such a light, it was another cause for celebration. We treated ourselves to a slap-up dinner at Jalisto's restaurant. We didn't quite go the whole hog, but I did manage half a chicken. At the brew pub next door to the bike shop we were offered free beer. I was almost too worn out to accept it. Almost.

The next day passed quickly in a blur of preparations for our journey home. We took leave of Jamie's fabulous cycling cornucopia. Bikes had to be boxed, travel to Phoenix had to be arranged. In a country in which the concept of public transport was perceived as an affront to individual freedom, this was no mean feat. In the end we hired a car. The close-knit cycling community of Silver City provided a driver to return it after we'd been delivered to the airport. It was none other than Barin Beard, Mimbres Man himself; Mimbres Man, it turned out, related to a previous life as an originator of a brand of cool cycling clothing.

‘I'm on holiday so I can drive for a day and talk about cycling, it'll be fun.'

It was, though the complexity of finding somewhere to sleep at Phoenix airport was mind-boggling.

‘It must be the only airport in the whole world not to be surrounded by hotels,' I fumed as we drove around it for the third time.

We eventually found one. After dinner, and bidding farewell to Mimbres Man, we checked the Tour Divide website and discovered that Trevor and I had, in fact, failed in our bid to finish last, though only by one place. Clearly poisoning Stephen and causing Per to crash had not been enough. The man set to save us from such indignity – and take home the coveted prize of
Lanterne Rouge
– was Michael Komp. He had, it turned out, been handicapped from the start by the fact his bike had been delayed in Canadian customs. As a result, he had not even managed to depart with all the other riders, eventually leaving Banff nearly seven hours after the race had officially begun. He finally reached Antelope Wells in thirty-one days, twenty-two hours and thirty-five minutes, four days after Trevor and I had passed through. Our official finishing time was twenty-seven days, five hours and forty-two minutes.

More than a week and a half earlier, Matthew Lee had won the race in just under eighteen days. Kurt Refsnider took second in eighteen days and eleven hours, only two hours ahead of the Petervarys on their ‘Love Shack'. Steve, Alan and John from the UK all safely finished within a couple of hours of each other, in less than twenty-two days. Jill Homer, although only the second woman to finish after Tracy Petervary, set a new female course record of twenty-four days, seven hours and twenty-four minutes.

Of the other riders I encountered on the way, Cadet abandoned the race in Eureka, unable to ride any further on his sprained knee. He gallantly let Rick and Deanna depart in high spirits in the belief that he was going to set off shortly after them before pulling the plug. Arizona Jeff called it a day in Butte to go home to his pregnant wife. Martin from Austria turned his race into a touring ride before eventually flying home from Colorado. Rick continued in spite of his sore knee and rode the best part of 1,000 miles into Wyoming before deciding to call it a day. Ray's self-inflicted cut turned out to be even worse than it had seemed. He had severed an artery in his hand which required surgery to fix. The surgery was a success. Bruce persisted for 36 days and made it all the way to the finish in spite of missing a small section of the route and disqualifying himself from the race. Deanna also made it to the finish but was relegated from the final leaderboard for similarly going off-route for some 50 miles north of Helena.

Some of those who didn't make it expressed an immediate desire to return to the race, including Stephen Huddle and Cadet. Steve McGuire said he would complete the route one way or another, maybe taking a bit more time to appreciate the scenery and surroundings in the process. Even Trevor and Per – both successful in my book – said they would consider returning to ride it. Quicker.

Racing faster – or maybe just racing – was certainly a seductive notion. I told myself I could probably go faster. Matthew Lee took 30 days to ride from border to border in 2004 before returning the following year to win in 19 days. Greater speed would, in itself, certainly increase the level of adventurousness, if that was the motive. To ride as fast as Matthew Lee or the other front-runners did exposed them so much more to the risks inherent in the ride: bad weather; untimely mechanicals; running out of food and water; running out of energy. It was the cycling equivalent of scaling a higher mountain. I was in the Rockies. They were in the Himalayas.

Yet one of the most appealing aspects of the whole event was the element of the unknown. I now knew the route, which removed much of the novelty factor. I could also no longer claim to be a mountain bike novice, even though I had still only ridden one race.

The result was to conclude that once was probably enough. I toyed with the idea of passing this off as the result of the Tour Divide being a form of immersion therapy; or possibly aversion therapy. Making it to Antelope Wells, I conjectured, meant that I was now so at ease with my phobia of actually completing tasks (just ask my wife) that I could henceforth avoid undertaking anything more challenging than getting up in the morning. Or perhaps I could explain my future abstinence as the consequence of day after day of endless pedalling having cured me of the desire to ride long distances off-road for a month.

Neither really carried much weight. Laziness and the desire to protect my 100 per cent success rate were probably more significant factors. As was the view of the four children and wife I had left behind for over a month for the sake of a bike race, for whom once was also enough. Unless they could come too, though the bike hasn't yet been built that could allow us to do it together (if any enterprising designer wants to organise a road test – make that an off-road test – drop me a line).

Nevertheless, even one day of ‘normality' was sufficient to have me yearning once again for the existential simplicity of life on the Tour Divide. Eat. Sleep. Ride. Great Divide. That was the motto devised by the route's creators at the Adventure Cycling Association. It would make a fine philosophy.

But for now, at least, that was it. The adventure was over. Trevor flew home to Montreal on Saturday morning. Per caught his flight that evening. I had to wait until Sunday, but I was home in time for school sports day. I entered the fathers' race. I couldn't find a way of coming last in that either.