Gravel and Rain
The air was crisp and sharp. It was July and the Alabama sun was setting over a copse of trees to the north. I took both hands off the handlebars and held them high behind me and yelled at it all. The sound echoed within my helmet. My canvas bivvy, mattress, sleeping bag, stove, a 2-liter water jug, and a bag of rice were strapped to the back of the bike with a piece of old climbing rope. A guy named Travis had given the rope to me in North Carolina ten years ago, when he taught me how to rock climb. It had been old rope even then.
The Triumph was running clean, but all the luggage poorly strapped atop the passenger seat made it top-heavy. I came onto a straight stretch between two fields, one of tall grass and the other tobacco, and I shifted into fifth and gunned it to seventy. An abandoned barn, half caved-in, squatted next to a willow tree and a small pond. My hands were hot in my thick leather gloves. I opened my mouth and warm sunlight came into it beneath my bulky goggles and touched my tongue, as did two flies. I was going south to Little River Canyon to camp for a night.
I stopped to check my map in the parking lot of a roadside restaurant that I’d eaten at once, three years before. The restaurant was closed now. I wasn’t sad. The food there had tasted like sweat.
I rode on. Thunderheads danced on the horizon. I rode through downtown Fort Payne and up the mountain towards the canyon, the load on the back of the bike swaying from side to side on the turns. I turned off Highway 35 onto a shady forest service road, heading to where someone on the internet had said there was free dispersed camping.
A light rain was falling now, and the sun was setting and sending long, glistening rays over the grey clouds. I was only a few miles from the campsite, but I knew I’d have to set up fast to avoid the rain. How many miles along this road was it? I couldn’t remember. I saw a small paved off-road and pulled off onto it, hoping to check my map.
Bad idea. The road wasn’t asphalt, but loose gravel and mud. I lowsided the bike in the gravel, pinning my knee underneath the fuel tank and scraping up my side and arm. In several years of riding, this was my first time going down.
I cut the engine and heaved the bike up. A bike is always much heavier than you think, the first time you have to lift it from its side. I could tell the alignment was skewed slightly. But it seemed like I’d gotten off well. A few scratches, a chipped turn signal. Then I saw that the shifter peg had snapped off, with the end still threaded into the arm. The arm itself was bent inwards. Damn.
An easy fix, but there was no way I could ride this bike a hundred miles home. I could hitch, of course, but I was loath to leave my bike there, and I wasn’t likely to come across anyone with a truck and a ramp to load the Triumph. On top of that, it was the summer of COVID-19, so folks weren’t looking to pick up strangers.
As if on cue, the sky opened up above me. Rain pelted the gravel. Two kids on ATVs, blaring rap music, roared past on the road. After much ado, I jammed the bike down into neutral and rolled it further up the gravel turnoff. Then I cut the bags from the bike, covered it with a tarp, and rolled out my bivvy.
Peter Matthiessen, watching bharal on the slopes above Shey Gompa in the Dolpo in 1973, wrote of the rams crashing their heads together to show dominance before the rut. Speaking of the evolutionary developments in bharal to protect them from injury during such displays, the thick parietal bone between their horns, thick head hair, strong necks, and cushion of air space in the sinuses, he wrote:
Why nature should devote so many centuries, thousands probably, to the natural selection of these characters that favor head-on collisions over brains is a good question, although speaking for myself in these searching days, less brains and a good head on collision might be just the answer.
Of course, I had not read this passage then. I read it quite recently, smoking a cigar on my porch in western Puerto Rico while a similar afternoon thunderstorm slanted rain in under the overhang and the stray dog my girlfriend had been feeding whined outside our gate. But it made me think of that day.
Back on the gravel, I lay on my mattress inside my bivvy and read Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad as the rain came down harder. It soaked into the gravel and I watched it birth a thousand streams in a thousand directions, running over and between pebbles like little rapids.
There have been a few moments like this in my life. Moments in the lull after minor tragedy, when the only thing to do is sit and wait. When the mishap is both unmendable and absolute.
After I was robbed in Peru at 19. After a different motorcycle breakdown in Southern California. After falling into a river with my pack on, soaking all my gear, in Slovenia. After taking a 200-foot fall on an Ecuadorian volcano and ripping most of the skin off my hands and arms. Moments where what has happened is troublesome enough that it blots out thoughts of anything else, but also where there isn’t anything else that can be done. Laying in my hostel bed in Ecuador, watching anime and eating tortilla chips and oatmeal, waiting for my body to heal from my accident, was the most at peace I’d felt in years.
It’s a sort of simple nirvana. Sometimes it’s these moments that make it all worth it. The mountains you don’t summit, but spend three days on, stuck in your tent. The airport lounges where you wait for a flight delayed eight hours. The days you spend in a shelter staring at the ceiling, waiting for the snow to melt from the pass.
The tents that you’re stuck in, during a rainstorm, when you wreck your bike on gravel and trash the shifter arm.
Whether the outcome is good or bad, head-on collisions are a fast track to success or careful introspection, if you play the aftermath right (which is oftentimes even better than success). It’s the problems you can’t solve, the immutable mistakes, that give you the chance to take a step sideways and look at it all.
I boiled rice on the stove and punched the roof of the bivvy intermittently to stop the rain from pooling. Then I thought about a few things in my life, breathed in, lay down, and fell asleep.
