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That Sunday, which was our third day of pedaling and fourth day of touring, was the only day during our entire trip that required us to pull to the side of the road and don our rain gear. It was fitting — poetic even — and I certainly couldn’t have written it better myself. Here I was: miserably heart-broken and #6-sick; pedaling the hardest I had ever been required to pedal; suffering with an ankle as weak as a my resolve; having not taken a proper shower going on four straight evenings; and it began raining just outside of our destination. I stopped to put on my jacket; Ben kept pedaling. He knew it was futile. I watched him disappear in the distance and was overcome with a sense of envy because that was exactly what I wished I was able to do.

When we finally came into town — whatever the town was I do not care to recall — we found neither food nor lodging. We had held the faintest hope of being greeted, at least, with a roadside diner but we found absolutely nothing of value except a collection of road signage. My spirit was broken; my body was shattered; and here went my last vestige of sanity: my mind fell away into the Washington wilderness and Ben’s shortly followed.

“Dear friend:” I began, looking quizzically at the cardinal directions outlined before us, “that road sign can’t be right.”

“How so?”

“It says east. Surely that is incorrect. How can we be traveling south, as we are, and take a left turn (as this sign would imply) that would take us to the east? A left turn should take us west. It’s uncanny, I know, but that sign just isn’t right.”

Consider first that I was arguing with state highway signage. Consider second that I was tired, even confused. And then consider third that Ben replied:

“You’re right. That is really weird.”

And we both nodded and agreed and shared an understanding that somehow traveling south and taking a left should bring us west and that somehow the state of Washington, and the makers of our map, had made a grave error. So after some dawdling about, we climbed on our bicycles and went right.

After this mapping error (which we only accepted to be our mapping error days later) there came the straw upon which the camel sat and by which his hairy ass was sodomized. Not five minutes later Ben and I came down a hill. At the bottom of the hill the road split at a fork and when I rolled up to it Ben was no where to be found. I was coasting, at the time, and peeved that I might have to stop doing so in order to figure out where it was he had gone — so I didn’t. I looked hard left, saw nothing, and then I went to the right (east, I swear! I was headed east!).

Down, down, down, down the hill I traveled and yet: I didn’t see Ben. And with each passing second a dreadful feeling grew from within my stomach and I felt a pull of some fine thread attempting to lead me in the opposite direction — back up the hill, back from where I came. A little voice, quiet at first but growing louder with every rotation of the tire, whispered:

“Damon? Oh, Damon? Didn’t we agree not to go this way? Didn’t Ben say it was the other town we were headed to? Didn’t you see him wave at you out of the corner of your eye? Didn’t he point to the opposite side of the map? Didn’t you hear his call?”

Suddenly, this worrisome whisper was countered by another voice, which said, quite plainly:

“Honestly: I could care less which way Ben went. We are going downhill. Pedaling back up is not an option. Forget it. Forget him. Let’s go.”

So I continued down. And down. And still: I didn’t see Ben. Near a flat spot in the road with a bit of a turn out for disabled cars I pulled over, torn between the two warring factions of my psyche, and waited. Ben was in front of me, I reasoned, but if he wasn’t, hypothetically speaking, it was ridiculous to keep going if he had taken the left turn at the fork and was now traveling in the opposite direction. He would have had to have looked back at some point and, seeing that I was not behind him, he would have turned around. He was certainly wondering where I was and it was always better to stay put — let someone else do the searching. If we were both looking for each other we would never find either one of us and, to top it all off, I was tired of running the various scenarios through my head.

So, I stepped off my bike. I undid my helmet. After hours of pedaling up hills and through fog and I simply stopped. I opened my bag and I took out the last hardboiled egg. And I ate it while sitting on the side of the road. I had given up. I had given in. I was ready to let the Lord come and take me away.

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