Day 65: Ontario, Oregon: "Family"

This blog has to start with my thoughts on Paige Hicks. For those of you who haven't been on Bike & Build's website in a while, the organization has been hit with a terrible tragedy. Paige, a rider on the Providence to Seattle team this year, and an alumna from last year's Providence to San Francisco team, was victim of a tragic cycling accident and passed away three days ago, on July 20th.

It's something you simply never expect to happen to yourself or someone you know at this age. It's confusing, it's sad, and the entire Bike & Build community is in mourning over the loss of such a fantastic person of tremendous promise. I personally never knew Paige, but I get the sense that I do *know* her. Her and I have shared in a distinguished life-changing experience. We've shared a passion for adventure, for service, and for life and have pursued these passions while biking across the country, taking every mountain, fighting every headwind, enjoying the connection we make with each person, enjoying the love and laughter made every minute.

The most positive perspective I've been able to find amidst this tragedy is that it has given my team and the rest of the community, all seven other routes and seven other years' worth of other routes, a chance to demonstrate the love and support we have for each other. Because of the shared experiences, its easy to feel like this organization is one giant family. Without knowing anything else about me, alumni have welcomed me into their home and given of themselves tirelessly to support me and my cause. Now that we have lost one of our own we're steeped in sadness, but I have also been completely blown away by the support and love that has risen out of the woodwork in the last few days. No matter what happens, no matter how much time or how many miles separate us, we have each other, and we have each other for life, because we have all changed our lives together.

I want to extend my deepest condolences to Paige's family and her team. I want them to know that I ride for Paige and that her memory lives on in the very soul of our team. I know that she would want us to keep ridong, no matter what, and to keep celebrating the gifts of this journey. As such, I will move on, for now, to describe my adventure between Idaho Falls and hearing the news of her passing...

The last time I updated this blog Idaho was a brand new state for me and I didn't know what to expect. As it turns out there's been a little bit of everything, with a majority of it being surprisingly awesome.

For our build day in Idaho Falls we hopped on the bikes and rode across town to the swank new location for the local Habitat affiliate's ReStore. It's a serious upgrade. They're going from some dilapidated old house in the church district to a refurbished consignment store in the heart of town. The affiliate's new director, a woman named Karen, has a lot of ambitious goals for the chapter and their new ReStore is the crux. When we rolled up 31 volunteers strong, she was thrilled but also nervous, telling us she'd never worked with such a large group before in her life. The whole job was a new adventure for Karen, since she'd only started a few months ago, but she was positive and jumped into the day with both feet.

Karen provided enough work for each of us to feel useful the entire day. I wound up freelancing since there were so many different jobs. I started by painting the outside of the store with a paint-sprayer, which is a crazy-fun power tool. It basically shoots out high-pressured clouds of paint, and you can cover a wall in about a 6th of the time it would normally take with rollers. not to mention it's just fun to wield. It looks like some kind of crazy sci-fi weapon! So I played with that for a while, then hung out on the roof helping Andy and Sharif remove the old consignment store sign, which wound up being a sketchy venture to say the least, with Andy 20 feet up in the air unsrewing 100-pound pieces of wood out of a billboard and trying as best he could to drop them gently. Eventually I wound up being a fifth wheel there, so I did some trim-work in what is going to be the main showroom for the new ReStore. The day ended with us painting the showroom, and by 3 you could really appreciate the amount of work the team had put into the building that day. It really did transform before our eyes, and Karen was elated. I'm proud to say she was also pleased with the exciting paint-pattern I placed on the center shelf. I get an eye for design from my mom I s'pose. Ya know.

After a full day of putting in the hours for Habitat we were cordially invited by the pastor of our hosting church to a cook-out at his home outside of town. Man. Little did we know.

For one thing, Pastor Dennis has a lot of toys. Not one, but *two* grills, a beautiful backyard with a volleyball court, and these crazy heater-things that shot up open flames. Dennis said during the winter, when you turned them on, you could grill outside in your shorts and not notice a thing. But wait! There's more! The whole team got to admire his ginormous-screen TV, and watch two local news stations cover our build day from just a few hours before. He also had two beautiful toys in his garage. One was an early-60s Harley Davidson motorcycle that looked like something you'd ride on the way to Woodstock. The other, a 1965 Ford Mustang. I don't know a lot about cars, but I know that car was awesome. It looked like the bat mobile, and Pastor Dennis had kept it in such incredible condition that it made me wonder what year it was.

So the team chilled in the back yard, mingling with the congregation and enjoying a quiet cook-out in suburbia. I should also mention that Dennis made the best sausages I've ever had, and burgers which came close to making me reevaluate my own recipe. It was fun talking about grilling with him. That's something I miss. That's gonna be good to get home to. But, then again, I'm not in any hurry.

Passing into a very respectable food coma, the team was ferried back to the church for bed time. Sadly I didn't get to ride in the Mustang, but I did get to talk to Karen some more about the exciting plans she has for Idaho Falls Habitat. I wish absolutely all of the best for her. She has a great vision.

So we slept. Then we woke. From Idaho Falls the plan was to hit up Arco, the first city in the world to be lit with nuclear power! Bet you didn't know that, huh? Sarah Crawford and I had the privilege of sweeping that day and it was perfect. The ride was smooth and surprisingly windless all day, and certainly the prettiest part of Idaho we'd seen at that point, with the Rockies, an ever-present force in our lives these days, sneaking back up over the horizon to show their mighty snow-capped peaks and pose their challenges. Swept up in the fever of excitement for nuclear power, a good half of the team stopped by EBR-1 (Experimental Breeding Reactor 1), the first nuclear power plant in the WORLD. Bet you didn't know that, huh? Sarah and I took a tour of the factory and learned more about nuclear fission than I certainly ever expected to on this trip. The old plant was so cool. There were computers the size of refrigerators and huge metal drums which stored coolants and carbon rods and the like. It was like a scene from the original Star Trek series. But the highlight was definitely the manipulator station. So you know in movies when you see scientists controlling robotic arms to work with dangerous materials? yeah, we got to play with those arms. And I was really good at them thanks to my 15 or so years of videogame-playing. I stayed at that station way longer than any 20-year-old should, but I did make a pretty impressive pyramid of blocks.

When we were finished running through the factory Sarah and I continued on our journey to Arco, admiring the mountains and talking about everything important, which is our way. She has a tendency to pull my deeper side out of me, and we had a great dialogue about life, religion, love, politics, fate, adventure, and everything in between. I love being able to have those kinds of one-on-ones with folks on this trip.

And as for Arco it definitely had this air of 1950s-nuclear-boom-town. There were atomic symbols everywhere, and the town was holding a festival called "Nuclear Days", but most of us were to tired to actually attend (though I could hear the live music from the window next to my sleeping-quarters that night). Something else I found really interesting: There's a butte overlooking the town covered in painted numbers. A member of the church we stayed with that night explained that the local high-schoolers, sometime in their senior year, have a tradition of sneaking up to the mountain and lowering someone over the ridge in a tire tied to a rope with a paint brush. The rambunction teens paint their graduating year on the side of the mountain, and then disappear into the night. They've been doing it for at least 50 years. It's a fascinating, quaint little piece of history. I never caught the man's name, but his whole family was great. The wife cooked us spaghetti with an elk-based meat sauce, and his two sons, one five and the other 9 months, delighted the team with their adorableness. The 5 year old, Jonathan, developed a keen fascination for my macbook and we hung out playing with the different visual effects on photoshop until it rolled around to his bedtime. Ours wasn't too far behind his.

Next was our ride to Challis, in which we would cut into the Rockies, once again, to enter the mountainous heart of Idaho, the Sawtooths. For whatever reason I flew that morning along the flat leading up to the mountain, and was actually out in first for the first 25 miles or so, finally backing down to break for streching and a sorely-needed Clif bar. When I jumped back in the road it wasn't long before the Fast People (Noah, Zach, et al.) to catch me, and they were kind enough to invite me into their paceline, which I enjoyed for all of 5 minutes before deciding it put to much stress on me. I breaked along the road right in between and beautiful mountain range to my right and a lake to my left, and when I hopped back on joined a paceline that was a little better suited. Still a good challenge, though. It's very satisfying to be able to comfortably ride in the middle-front of the pack, and we, by which I mean myself, Emma, Derrick, Emily, Caroline, Dave, and Will Green, had great laughs rolling into lunch.

After lunch the laughs died down for a good portion and things got real. Really, riding through the Sawtooths is like a fun house, nothing is quite what it seems. Our first solid evidence would have to be from when Zach and I placed a bet on how far down the road ne particular mountain was. It turned out to be 7 or so miles, but it was an exhausting 7, with heinous headwinds mocking our efforts and a road that was going uphill just enough to look flat but to inexplicably take all of our energy out of us. We kept our minds of the road by geeking out, which is something I thoroughly enjoy doing with Zach. We talked about Joss Whedon's "Firefly", talked about who on the team would be which characters from "Firefly", etc. (I'm Wash, and I'm happy with that).

I had to break to knock back a packet of "gel" because the wind was really killing me. Incidentally, mocha-flavored "gel" is nasty. It's like eating really thick chocolate icing. It'd also been in my back pocket in the desert for 3 hours so it was warm, which you may think would make mocha taste better but no. But I'll be darned if it didn't do its job! There was a mountain. I climbed it. Then I enjoyed 20 miles of steady downhill, the highlight being a pass through Grandview Canyon. In another moment of geeking out, Will Green said it was like pod-racing from the new Star Wars trilogy. For those on which that reference is lost, the more romantic description would be like biking through the ruins of some ancient civilization. There were towers of sanstone which had wrinkled, buckled, and toppled over time to create this wild, rugged city of bright orange rock. Truly beautiful.

With the tough portion of the day behind us, the ride into Challis was a cinch, and our host was amazing. We stayed at a retreat center in the foothills outside of town and I spent the afternoon exploring the hiking trails, reading by the koi pond, and napping next to a babbling brook. We ha a team meeting that night and, after 8 long weeks, finally held elections for King of the Beard-Off. I'd shaved my beard into lightning-bolt sideburns for the occasion and we all catwalked to give our last impressions. I placed a solid 4th. Andy got length, and Jesse got both volume and style, having shaved his beard into an exact replica of the beard from the villain from the movie Wild Wild West. I sugggest you look it up. Words don't do it justice. there are just so many angles!

Afterwards Jesse, Laura, Raleigh and I played doodling games until we laughed ourselves to tears. I slept outside and, for the umpteenth time, admired the mountain stars until my eyes got too heavy.

The next day was a stunning ride through the Sawtooths to Stanley, Idaho. I rode with Jesse that day and we spent about 5 hours of our ride cracking each other up. He's a good bro. The scenery really stole the show, though. Pinetrees all around, the Salmon River roaring on our left side, the mountains looming overhead, and, rolling into Stanley, we had a perfect frame of William's peak and the surrounding range.

We camped out that night and celebrated two birthdays, since it was both Alyson's 25th and Kristen's 21st. zthose of age went into town to raise a ruckus and I stayed back and played guitar by the moonlight. When they returned I got a kick out of the stories from the night and then went to bed.

Sleeping outside that night, however, was a huge mistake. It. Got. Cold. It was like Mother nature was nagging and screaming in my ear the entire night. My sleeping bag retained just enough warmth to keep me alive but not asleep, and I tossed and turned for a good two hours cursing myself for not claiming a spot in one of the tents. Eventually my body dealt, but there was a *lot* of character building that night, and, subsequently, a lot on today's ride.

Today was worked across 93 miles of legit Rockies. We woke up at 5 to take on the day and it was farciacally cold. Those of us who weren't working on morning chores took shifts running laps around the field and, when it was finally time to leave, the first thing half the team did was roll into town and invade the local coffee shop. I had a mountainous scramble and two cups of very strong coffee, and, sufficiently warmed and wired, sopped out with Jesse again. We freestyled an hour. Long. Power ballad about Idaho and also had good talks. Our first climb was a total breeze and was followed by 9 miles of descent to our first lunch stop. We thought we had the day in the bag.

But in the Sawtooths (or is it "Sawteeth"?) nothing is as it seems. The segment in between our two lunches was brutal. A 10-mile climb that took its sweet time getting over the mountains. there were at least 5 or 6 instances in which I thought I'd made it to the top only to see, around the corner, that I was no where close. By the time I got to second lunch I was livid. My blood was boiling and I was ready to descend. Sadly, though, we had much more mountain to cross. Every time it seemed like we finally founf the descent, we'd go for maybe a quarter mile only to find we had to climb back up another half mile. We rolled through valley after valley. It was beautiful but maddening. But also a gift. It's exactly what I needed these days. I've proven myself physically, and now I'm working into the psychology of biking, and enduring all those climbs and frustrations that come with it. But I succeeded! it was a long, long day but I never let it break me. There were points where I came close, but I would always envision myself 20 feet ahead, and convince myself that I can *always* go another 20 feet. It worked great and I battled my way across the mountains with a smile.

And in comparison to the other rides as of late, the ride into Boise with an effing cakewalk, at a mere 40 miles, with nearly 3/4s of it downhill. I rode with Kristen and we had great talks about service and saving the world. That girl's going to do amazing things and change lives. I can just tell. She cares too much to *not* make a difference, and she inspires the rest of this team with her compassion. Anyways, we rode to Boise. The last section i enjoyed in particular, a beautiful, sun-baked orange canyon with lichen crawling up either side. We made it into Boise before 11am, hich gave us ample time and reason to have second breakfast, and it was the best of the entire trip. Maybe even in my top 3 breakfasts ever. After biking across a super-tough state, few things could have satisfied me as much as the omelet, chorizo, potatoes and fresh coffee I had that morning with good friends like Jen and Jesse and Zach. I don't know if you're aware of this but Boise also has the highest Basque population outside of Spain, and it reflects in the city's restaurants, shops, architecture, and handsome waiters which left the womenfolk of our team swooning and tipping inappropriately large amounts.

We received word about Paige's passing that first night in Boise, and the mood immediately changed. It was utterly shocking. We were left frightened, sad and stunned, but it was a very emotionally powerful night for the team. We all stayed in, had a group hug/prayer in the church courtyard, and then spent the rest of the evening just being there for each other.

I expected to be as shaken the next day as I was the first, but I had a realization over the night: a Bike & Builder, like Paige, would want us to keep riding, literally and figuratively. The fact that I'm alive at all is a blessing, and there's no denying that. Moreover, I'm surronded by amazing friends, and on the adventure of a lifetime. With these realizations in consideration, I have a sense of recommitment to everything important about this trip and about life, and I have Paige to thank for it.

That evening we all sat in a circle with a ball of tie-dyed yarn, which we passed around to make bracelets, since Paige often wore tie-dye. As the yarn was passed, we each had a chance to speak our mind to the rest of the team, and I said three major things. First, there was a chance, even in these sad times, to see the love and support BNB has. Second, every time I look at my new bracelet, I will think of Paige, think of this trip, and think of how lucky I am to be alive, and to experince all that life has to offer. I will aim to be more aware of the blessings I've been given, and not squander my relationships with other people. Third, I told my team that I respected them all for who they were, loved them deeply, and was a better person for having them in my life. It's something I wish to say to all the family and friends in my life at some point, and it's something I'll say to the audience of this blog. It's sad that it sometimes takes something this sad to awaken us to these truths, to make us aware and grateful to be alive, but if I and others are left inspired to live a fuller life, than perhaps this is a fine way for Paige's legacy to live on.

Today we crossed the border into Oregon. It's our final state. Our final leg of the journey. Our final chance to get the most we can out of this trip, this journey that has already transformed me in more ways than I can fathom, let alone describe to you. I'm thankful to be here. I'm thankful to be *here*. And, as all the riders will say, I now ride for Paige Hicks.