o vent my malevolent feelings, and relieve saddle fell off my bike on soreness, I’ve taken refuge from the tempest in this a high pass in the dilapidated post office. Dust and sand hiss beneath Drakensberg, T the skewed door and through a broken window. Out- knocked to the side are guttural shouts, the incessant bellowing of buses, ground from chickens cackling, thick leather whips snapping, hoarse fatigue and foul honks from car-pulling mules. The typical cacophony weather. swirling up amidst pyramids of oranges and tables of I try to ratio- bloody goats’ heads — North Africa at its most elemental. nalize. Objective- But I’ve not taken this respite to detail another world. No, ly, wind is nothing that which ails me is as ubiquitous as the stars. more than a pres- Every cyclist, especially every long-distance tourer, sure differential knows it like they know their own heart, perhaps better. It’s caused by a tem- inscrutable and amorphous, damnably frustrating and can perature gradient. Idiot drive an otherwise normal person mad. It’s the only thing A mountain wind that could make you want to strangle a perfectly innocent draining down a passing motorist for waving. It is that which can turn any valley in the wind, ordinary tour into an ordeal. evening. A sea I can hear the red Post Office flag flapping violently as if breeze, or its it were a chained bird struggling to escape. A song is blow- counterpart, a land blowing ing through my head. It’s been there for two days, ever breeze, blowing since we hit this mean headwind; ever since we began ped- up in the morning. aling for Casablanca. It’s an old, great song: I’m simply pedal- like a ing a little harder Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull, and going a little from the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol. slower. Simple circle Idiot wind… physics. I don’t know if Bob Dylan ever travelled by bicycle, but Never works in the midst of a maelstrom, when the sky flies horizontal though. Never around and I’m in my lowest gear and going nowhere, I sing this feels objective. It’s song. I shout it, scream it. I hurl it out even when the words as if the wind that my are sucked away and torn to pieces. has pummeled me In cycling, any wind is a headwind. Not a universal for the past two maxim you say? Maybe. But a true tailwind is as infrequent days and forced skull as a blue moon, and twice as beautiful. Wind is the cyclist’s me to hole up in implacable adversary. An enemy you cannot circumvent; a this cave-like post foe you must battle if you ride any great distance. On every office has a per- tour I’ve taken, this idiot wind has been there somewhere sonal vendetta. Anthropomorphizing? Childish? Well damn — lurking, waiting and laughing. it, so be it. I’ve got sand in my teeth and the wind’s howling Once we raced entirely across Nebraska without so so loudly I can’t hear myself think. much as a whimper. Then, the moment we turned north, Yesterday, when we stopped for lunch on a perfect ver- there it was: a gale so strong on the down side of an over- dant plain, the wind stopped. We had unleavened bread and pass, going downhill into the wind, we were stopped dead Moroccan sardines and oranges finer than any others found in our tracks. The wind defied gravity. In the narrow streets along the Mediterranean; and the second we mounted back of Chengdu, where you’d think the buildings would block up, so did the wind. it, wind like an invisible boxer threatened to bash me into I got ridiculously angry. I raged. Shook my tiny fists at the tree-lined curb. the inviolable force, sang at the top of my lungs till I was For four consecutive days, without stopping, a rabid dog breathless. Of course all to no avail. Eventually I settled into of a wind howled down the Loire Valley while three of us the saddle, put my head down and pumped. The world slowly, painfully slowly, pedaled upstream. I once simply around me roared, shouted back at me, sang shrilly — I just pumped. This went on for hours, then came the rain. Deep

Adventure Cyclist • April 2000 LUTAINB OYHART JOEY ILLUSTRATION BY

gray pellets slicing sideways. The highway wind had circled my skull, found an open- n’t. Pedaling when the demon within, and metamorphosed into a black river flowing ing and sucked inside like a Stygian the idiot wind without thought I’d give in. from the heart of Africa. It was as if I were whirlpool. Blind pedaling. So simple and difficult. desperately paddling upstream. The harder I All I could do to fight back, was pedal. A mean gust just punched through these pulled, the harder it pushed. The only The battle was within and my only weapons rotten post office walls and splattered black sounds were those of the dark water high- were wet, worn-out legs. End-of-the-day grains of sand onto this page. Sun’s going way rushing underneath and the wind shov- legs. Lead legs. But there was nothing for it, down and the saddle waits. I gotta go ing through. so I pedaled, pumped, pushed — like every again… Time melted, inky and fluid as the sky. cyclist on every continent in every miser- Idiot wind, it’s a wonder that we still Suddenly, I rode off the road into my own able, head-on downpour. I forced muscle know how to breathe. ● head. The demon I thought was without, against metal, minute after minute. No was within. Beckoning me. Breathing hot. agreeing or denying, acquiescing or con- Whispering sweetly and seductively as a quering. Just pedaling when the headwind Adventure Cycling member Mark Jenkins is a serpent. Stop. Give up. Go home. That idiot and the wind in my head thought I would- columnist for Outside magazine.

Adventure Cyclist • April 2000