June 23 - In Which We Run For Our Lives

{Brock}

Let's start with the experience of lving outside and being vulnerable. Many people I have met live without a guaranteed place to sleep day in and day out, but I've only been in the position to understand what it feels like a few times myself. Last night Adele and I spent the night sleeping behind a church just outside of Walla Walla, Washington.

We tried, anyway. A refuge from the deluge was a welcome prospect, and so we cooked our potatoes and chili over the camp stove while the rain came down in buckets outside. We had been anticipating a small sprinkle, but the sustained thunder and lightning persisted, and so we simply rolled out our mats next to the double doors under the covered walkway and laid to rest.

Your brain begins to concoct the craziest tales while you're sitting theree trying to be invisible with your eyes shut. Every passing vehicle (just infrequent enough for each to reboot the cycle of terror) sounded as though it was stopping to evict us. Coyotes howled out by the river and sounded like they were hungry for human flesh. The constant drizzle of the downspout forcing the rain past our heads masked the outside world and made it more difficult to understand what was happening around us. Settling and rattling noises brought on by water and wind sounded legitimately like gunshots at times. We lay in our corner waiting for dusk to end and for our hearts to beat normally.

Some would say we were overly paranoid, and that includes me. I KNEW that we were safe and had nothing to hide, and yet was still viscerally terrified of the prospect of being discovered. We fitfully tossed and turned on our mats until dawn broke and with it my alarm for 5:30am, early enough to avoid any programming the church might have for a weekend.

I could tell you about all of the nice things we did that morning to recover, and about the coffee shop and the Starbucks blend that I swear had sugar added already, and the bookstore and the farmers market and the bicycle shop and the racing peleton we saw outside of town, but that's all rather dull compared to the event that set us running for our lives.

Well into the day's ride and having already passed two cute prairie towns in Eastern Washington's rolling agricultural land, we were climbing out into the next set of farms and hills when I turned to assess Adele's progress behind me and whether I should wait for her or not. As we had been under warm and pleasant blue skies all morning, I felt no urgency as yet. Mid turn I recognized that all was not as it should be.

Above Adele's head, and above the horizon we were climbing away from, was a monster of a cloud system. Cumulonimbus and angry as all hell. This was what I had always seen on the silver screen and never thought could be my reality, seemingly a living being rising from the west to stretch its arms of destruction over us and sweep us away. It was like the tidal wave in a disaster movie, or the onslaught af a barbarian horde in a Roman empire period piece.

Our uphill progress was slow, and the map I was following indicated that we hadn't yet reached the crest of the hill. I called out to Adele to see if she was able to push on to try and outrun what would certainly be an unpleasant downpour, and she said she preferred that to the alternative.

I had been climbing with a lazy cadence, but decided to put myself into the task. Every minute I glanced over my shoulder to see if the thunderhead was holding its position or moving away from us. Like a determined predator, it kept advancing. The first tendrils of white reached across the sky above me to block the blueness of summer and the sun's happy rays. It was as if the season had never existed. The black and blue body of the monster was still somewhat far behind me, but as I watched the shadow extend over my trajectory, I knew that we would have to come to terms with the great storm that was hovering behind us.

I crested the hill and jammed my derailleur into my highest gear. While turning a corner around the wheat-covered hills, I stared into the maw of the cloud and marveled at its sheer size, at the nuance of color, the definition of its front compared to the haziness of its greyish train dragging across the unfortunate land we had already passed. This was a beautiful monster we were running from.

Reaching the last summit and preparing to descend into a valley where we hoped to find shade, I realized that the air around me was perfectly still and warm, and the headwind I had been battling before was no longer present. I could feel the warm air around me in perfect stasis with my speed and my pores began to flood my exposed skin with moisture, hoping to cool my body's temperature. It was strange, riding in the horse latitudes while the storm galed with a polar fury. I cranked the pedals hard and leaned into the descent.

The cold air hit me like a brick wall as the air patterns abruptly changed. I pushed against the icy gusts attempting to dislodge my wheels from the pavement and realized that there was a palpable force pushing me around on the road. I tightened my white knuckles onto the hoods and fought the drift with what seemed to be overly dramatic corrections, and yet my path still wavered back and forth between the shoulder and the white painted line. The first moisture dropped onto my arms and shirt with big droplets of fury.

Pushing downward at an unreasonable speed for the conditions, I knew that if the pavement became wet our speeds would become dangerous, and I looked for a place to pull over. Miraculously, there was a turnout ahead where a tractor trailer anticipating the poor weather was already pulled out, waiting for the storm to pass. I applied my brakes and drafted a priority schedule in my head: cover leather saddle, tuck iPhone into waterproof bag, make sure Adele sees me, don raingear. Adele pulled in behind me and hastily put on her jacket. Before we had a chance to grasp what was happening, the hail came with a vengeance.

Big, hard, stinging projectiles came flying out of the sky and onto us. The hailstones were between the size of a shooter marble and a golf ball and they were FALLING FROM THE SKY. I yelled to Adele to take cover under the stand of trees and we crouched beneath not enough foliage with our arms over our necks and our bikes lying in the undergrowth.

Even if you don't like to wear a helmet for safety on a bicycle, it's a damn handy thing to have on our head in the event of a freak hailstorm.

An eternity passed. We remained hunched in the bushes while the projectiles pelted us mercilessly. The white orbs piled up onto the ground and created a twisted snow globe diorama of pain. Traffic was not moving on the road and the roar of precipitation drowned out any other noise. I feared the sting of paintballs on my back in a regressive memory from a time when I thought I'd like the game.

The weather lightened up slowly. Adele and I clamored out of the bushes and watched the landscape shift surprisingly fast from a winter wonder to overflowing gutter streams. Steam rose from the ground as the sun emerged from behind the grey like a lazy husband asking if he can do the dishes as the last pot is being dried.

The county sheriff stopped by to see if we were alright. We assured him we were as our wet clothing clung to us on the side of the highway.

We dried slowly as we rode. 30 miles later, we turned the keys in the lock of a house lent to us by relatives of friends and sank, exhausted, into the couches. Sometimes it's nice to have a safe place to land after so much uncertainty.

Then again, any port in a storm.