The year the sky fell

If there is a silver lining in the whole house bound wheelchair experience, it's that the weather in Portland has continued to suck well after the normal shelf life of traditional sucky weather. Generally by late March the nice dry days of spring begin to clump together and by the end of April a few weeks of sunny days have run in succession. Not this year. The day I came home from the hospital it snowed. That was late March. The latest I have ever known it to snow in Stump Town was Valentines. This year the snow flew a full 5 weeks later. Unbelievable.

A long time ago I moved into a row house in a ghetto of Ghent in early March. Two-weeks later we had 10 people, 2 to a room and 2 in the living room, from 5 different countries and both hemispheres, cooking, eating, bathing and exposing each other to a global variety of viral strains.

For whatever reason, we rarely all trained together. Occasionally we rode to a kermesse together, but nearly every day everyone arrived from different directions at the car wash a few blocks away from our dive, each wanting to power wash his bike at the same time on someone else's franc. We each only had one bike, so we had to maintain our machine daily. One guy had a removable fender for his rear wheel to keep the spray off his butt, but other than a plastic rain coat, everyone toughed out three or four hours a day in the rain and sleet with neoprene thermal jackets and tights that soaked up rain and road spray like a sponge. It snowed the first week of May.

By late May, sick of being sick, a housemate and I moved from Ghent to Ichtegem. From a ghetto to a potato farm town with a brewery, southeast of Brugge. We lived on a knoll outside of the little town with a nudist lunatic who only spoke Flemish. I don't think he could read in any language. His name was Lionel. One of our neighbors had been West Flanders champion in 1968. Another went to school with Johan Museeuw and was building his house by hand, brick by brick in the rain, on the weekends.

The pig farmer down the hill often came over after dinner to tell us how to train properly. He too only spoke Flemish. He wrote in the margins of the newspaper, "52x14, 5x1 huer" then punched a giant fist into the leathery palm of his other hand over and over again and coughed, "Uumph! Uumph!" I assumed he was talking about intervals. Mostly though, Ian and I both looked over the old man's shoulder and watched Love Boat dubbed in French.

It didn't take long for Ian and I to loathe training together, riding to kermesses together, or cooking and eating together. We learned to politely tolerate each other. There was no where to go in Ichtegem. No one to hang out with. No magazine shop to waste time at in an effort to escape the monotony. Initially I was stoked to have free use of the washing machine and dryer in the garage. After a month of living in rural west Flanders I missed sitting at the laundromat in Ghent, writing letters home while the old ladies folded my clothes for me as if I was their own.

Then there was the weather. The wind was stronger in Ichtegem as we were closer to the North Sea coast. From the porch I could count the church steeples of each village between where I sat and the sea town of Oostende. It rained at some point every day. The most demoralizing days I would get up in the morning and rush out onto the road to train before really waking up. The idea was that if I just got on with the task at hand it wouldn't be so bad. To then return home 4 hours later as the darkness broke open to a sunny and warm afternoon was as if God himself was flipping me the bird.

Riding to a kermesse, I usually took a backpack filled with a change of clothes, a towel, and some food for the return trip home. Before the rain let up in July, the dike of good moral and positive thinking began to crumble. Ian and I both grew tired of changing out of wet, dirty clothes after a race and into wet, clean clothes that had gotten soaked while riding to the race. Even when using plastic bags to wrap the clothes in, the water still seeped in to dampen the 'clean' clothes.

Adding insult to injury, the Lithuanian National Team who were racing on worn out, handed-down equipment from 1970's non-compatible manufacturers, at least had a shitty old Mercedes-Benz to stuff themselves into to and from races like a bunch of circus clowns, only to completely annihilate everyone at every race we showed ourselves at. I swear there were 200 Lithuanians spread all over Belgium as we could never escape them. In truth there was only about 10.

The day in late June when the falling sky finally broke us was no different than any of the previous 100 or so days. Riding through a little town, Ian pulled off the front of our two-up rotation midway through another ordinary training ride. He pulled in behind me to recover from the gusty head wind. The rain hit us horizontally. The rider following couldn't tell the difference of road spray from the rear wheel of the rider in front, or rain blown sideways by the biting wind.

While we rode mid-day in near darkness, we could see patches of light well off in the distance. We habitually rode toward those oasis's of sunshine in simple search of a dry stretch of road. Suddenly, a wind gust and surge of downpour came at us in unison. Ian stopped his bike in the middle of the road and screamed.

"That's the fucking end."

I heard his outrage but it faded as I kept riding, not realizing he stopped. I looked back, then pulled over at a covered bus stop a few meters up the road. He put his feet back in his pedals and soldiered on to where I sat under the plexi-glass covering. He dropped his bike on the ground and sat down next to me.

"You can keep riding, I'm done. I'm staying right here until it stops raining."

"It's never gonna stop raining." I said.

"Oh, it will stop. Believe me, it will stop. And when it does, I'll ride home. But not until it stops raining. This is bullshit."

I left Ian at the bus stop and rode straight home. I too was tired of the weather but buried it inside me with plenty of other angst. I arrived home, bathed, changed, broke into my small, hard earned kermesse fortune, then walked next door to to the West Flanders Champion's house and begged his wife drive me to the bike shop in Gistel, across the main road from the Museeuw auto dealership. I bought a stationary trainer.

Mrs. Uetenove made me buy her a tea and pastry at a cafe. She explained to me in Flemish, broken French, pigeon English and hand gestures that her husband became a much happier man after he switched from being a fietsen renner to a salesman of disposable cameras and drove around the countryside instead of riding on a bicycle.

When I returned home, Ian was in the kitchen. He sat out the dark cloud, waiting for the sun to evaporate the puddles. He waited at the bus stop until he saw the moisture rise in the glaring sunlight, steaming back into the atmosphere before he would continue riding. Just as he said he would. He made it most of the way home and was mostly dry before another thunder cell broke open on him within sight of our cabin on the hill.

Two weeks later, just before the start of the Tour de France, it stopped raining for about 6-weeks.