I’m going to die this afternoon; I’ve just come to accept that. The pools of sweat collecting at my feet are nothing more than an indication of how much time I have left on Earth; to me the droplets running down the bridge of my nose and splashing off my handlebars represents grains of sand through the hourglass of life. And why can’t I keep any food down?

It hurts, and it hurts so bad. I’m slowly but by all accounts surely starting to succumb to the unrelenting elements surrounding me. I pedal, but very little happens. The wind that stood behind me like a friend and blew me along for so many miles has now turned and switched sides; and today is playing for blood.

I think I’m getting dizzy. Thinking about how many more miles of this desolate Montana highway I have to cover before I reach the sight of people again renders me even dizzier. And I’m starting to cry.

I wish I didn’t always have to try and tame the impossible. I just wanted this mistake I made of embarking on a suicidal bicycle journey across the continent to simply go away, vanish. I wanted to wake up in a place where I didn’t have to think about death anymore, namely New Jersey, my home, just twenty-three-hundred more miles away.

It’s done, over, I can’t pedal another foot. The eighty pound trailer I’m towing is getting bowled over and trampled by the wind. The limited task of riding one mile at a time and stopping at each mile marker has proved to be all but insurmountable. My legs are starting to spasm. So I stop.

Draped over my handlebars and seventy miles from help in either direction, I start heaving, again. My head hanging like a dead weight as spit and drool fall out of my mouth with aching moans. My eyes hurt from the strain of vomiting as I plead with myself to drink more water. God Damn it! I haven’t even seen a car in over an hour! What if this is really it? What if after all my dances with death over the years, this is where I finally drop dead? Then it all went black. Up to that point in my life I had never lost consciousness before.

My eyelids flicker. Where am I? I can’t move and I know I desperately need to. I’m trying to open my eyes and nothing is happening; all I can hear is the wind.