Moving Uphill

Yesterday morning, climbing to Loup Loup Pass, I was dying. I was on the kind of uphill even your car hesitates before climbing. My thighs were on fire. My lungs were screaming. I was struggling to move far enough forward that my bike wouldn’t roll backwards beneath me.

Every meter of pavement was a hard win, a conquest of earth and space and rocks and sweat. I cranked on the pedals, this strange and simple mechanization of circles on air, of a dream to move forward, repeated and repeated. I began to round a curve and, there, just off the pavement and nestled in rocks I saw the small tombstone. It was no larger than a bottle and read one word: Peace. A small motorcycle headlight lay beside it, intently refracting light onto this small patch of space. I wavered there, in between pedal strokes. My lungs burned, firing away a million tiny fireworks, quivering like the quaking Aspen. For longer than gravity seems to allow I hung there, in this space, on this earth, before pressing down and moving uphill.

I have begun to have a very acute perception of space. The space beside be, the space below me. The space between this car and me, the space between me and the guardrail. The mountains have a different space. Their space adds definition to the sky, it slices through and rounds out the different shades of blue, the different textures of clouds. As we have moved through the river valleys and into the mountains, we’ve clung to this new space, ruffling its sheets to release the fresh scents of pine, overturning its rocks to see if its hollow inside.

At first, the mountains were a white tear in the sky. The snow-shrouded peaks were all that existed against the blue skies of our first days. They were like a glacier, only revealing the very top, hiding the large mass beneath. As we began to approach them, cycling through the low hills of western Washington, the blue below began to take shape, began to differ from the blue above. The blue below began to fill up like a balloon. It was as though the snow-packed peaks were taking deep, full breaths, revealing lungs of depth and shape and shadows. Soon, their space swelled into our world, adding nooks and folds, glacial memories and spikes of Douglas Fir. Soon, their space became all we could know, all we could learn.

—

Sometimes, it can be difficult to tell if you’re going uphill.

Everything inside you sees a downhill. Or, at the very least, a flat slab of pavement up ahead. But, despite what you see, you keep slowing down. It is as though your bike was braking.

“It is as though my bike is braking,” you think. And so, you check. You check your brakes, you check your tires, you check that you’re not dragging a conifer-branch, having become an untrained and underpaid sidewalk sweeper recruited into service by some mountain troll wreaking high jinks on weary travelers.

But, nothing is stuck, nothing is dragging, not one of your tires is flat. You are just going uphill.

Your perspective is wrong and gravity doesn’t care. It just keeps pulling you back, pulling you down.

Those uphills are the worst.

—

Two days ago, I saw two dead songbirds. They lay in the grass, slightly covered, wearing a yellow the color of newborn spring. They looked like porcelain ornaments, placed lightly in their grassy nests, undisturbed beside a world moving too fast to hear their song.

—

Our first major descent tasted like cheap whiskey.

Having reached the top, we pedaled forward, a sign reducing the mountain to a triangle. STEEP GRADE, it welcomed us. We rolled forward and the space in front of us opened up. The mountain had folded in on itself, like a cat curled up beneath the hot sun. Our descent was immediate. A guard rail was opposite us. The road curved to the right and at the bottom, there was another guardrail where the curve began. But directly in front of us, there was no guardrail at all. There was just emptiness. The space that we clung to disappeared at this curve and there was no hidden glacier beneath the snow-packed peak. There was no shadows of blue below the tear in the sky. There was just air, sharp and hot. We rolled down towards this curve, our entire world reduced to the space between our brakes and our handlebars, the millimeter of difference a little more pressure would make.

Stepping away from the saddle, it must have looked comical. Such tiny wheels, such tiny people, on such a large road, on such a large mountain, rolling down white-knuckled and in uncloaked fear. But the taste of that absence had a sharp bite. It had saturated our lungs, had extinguished the million tiny fireworks bursting inside, had shown us a space so large, we could slip into its absence and vanish completely. There were no songbirds on this exposed rock. There was no mountain troll, playing harmless high jinks. There was only a small motorcycle headlight, refracting a single beam of possibility into our eyes, filling our lungs with intended purpose, shining a show of shadows against a blank wall.