Hallie Pritts
I left my house in Pittsburgh and rode to and through the Colorado Rockies, a hobo bicycle trip, with my boyfriend, 1,600 miles, give or take. It was no spandex-clad, carbon fiber endeavor. It was a stealth-camping, dumpster-diving, zero-budget journey across the continent. Along the way, we encountered dead animals, 1,600, give or take.
Our territory was beyond the white line, the edge of road. If we were lucky, a foot or two of blacktop to skim along. The painted line gave some impression of safety, though a car wouldn’t even feel a jolt crossing it. It was an agreement, a handshake. A narrow zone belonging to bicycles.
But that fraught narrow space wasn’t ours alone. We shared it with roadkill, countless lumps. Deer, raccoons, possums, foxes, groundhogs, coyotes, squirrels, turtles, rabbits, toads, armadillos, dogs, cats, porcupines, and skunks in various stages of decay. Some bloated or exploded, others dried up and flattened to a carpet of fur waving in the wind like doleful flags.
Sometimes, I had to swerve into the road to avoid a full deer carcass. Sometimes, there were too many cars, it was too perilous to dart over, too likely I’d be turned into roadkill myself, and my wheels passed over sad, crushed rabbits.
When compared to a motor vehicle, a bicycle is two dimensional. A line on a graph. To the left, hulking three-dimensional threats—cars and semis and moving vans and trucks—whipped by at high speeds. To the right, once living, breathing, biting, eating, and reproducing animals lay snuffed out by traffic.
We shared the berm with these creatures who’d been killed by cars. As vehicles whooshed by, we stayed the course, dodging reminders of what could happen to us.
To every dead animal, I whispered: There but for the grace of God….
II.
One afternoon, we came across a bunny recently hit. Soft brown fur, gentle eyes closed. No visible injuries, no blood and guts. It lay peacefully. It was still alive, barely. My boyfriend, N, placed his hand on its chest and felt the slow thump of its heart growing fainter every moment. He covered it with a large leaf like a blanket and squatted next to it till its heart stopped. He looked at me. “I think we should eat it.”
I had eaten rabbit. In France. Cooked in wine sauce. My backwoods relatives shot rabbits for supper. Rabbits can carry tularemia, a nasty disease that causes skin ulcers, raging fevers, and organ damage. My relatives avoided that bane by not fussing with wild rabbit in any month without an R in it—hunting only in cold months. This was July. But as long as it’s fully cooked, you don’t get tularemia from eating. You get it in the butchering. The microbes get in through your hangnails. But N had a pair of rubber gloves, a hunting knife, and a rudimentary idea of how to skin and gut. I built a little fire and gathered wild sage for seasoning.
We boiled the heck out of it, and the sage turned the broth bitter, but we ate it to its end, in dire need of calories and unwilling to waste any of the little animal who’d so recently been alive, sharing our road.
III.
After weeks in the Rockies, we weren’t strangers to striking and extraordinary landscapes, but this place was different, Black Canyon of the Gunnison. It was harsh, stark, too alive. As we biked along the long black canyon, I felt it wanted to drag us in and digest us.
A few weeks earlier, while camping with some career hippies near Steamboat Springs, I’d contracted giardia, a waterborne illness that prompted days of projectile vomiting. I was already lean from biking a thousand miles, but being sick in the wilderness whittled my body down to the sinews. My ribs jutted front and back. I was sliding into starvation in range of civilization.
Behind schedule, we pushed to do more miles. N needed to be in Arizona by August. Rather than cross the desert on a bike in the summer, I thought about bailing out in Durango and going home. To make N’s deadline, we set our sights on sixty miles that day. When we reached the desolate swathe of Bureau of Land Management acreage where we planned to camp, it was dusk moving to dark.
I didn’t like the way the light looked—too yellow, too still. We climbed an embankment. I remember dry bare earth, a sickly beige color. We pulled our sleeping pads from our bikes, ready to throw them down and crash into sleep, when I spotted it. An animal track. Wide. Large. Mountain lion.
“I’m not staying here,” I said.
“But it’s almost dark,” N said.
Panic bubbled. “There’s a mountain lion nearby. We can’t sleep here.”
I won that standoff. We climbed back on our bikes. But soon it was full dark. There was no berm here, no painted lines at all on this mountain road, the type that closed from November to April. Our pinprick bike lights didn’t make a dent in the darkness. I expected the road to be deserted, but cars flew past us. Vehicles tore around curves, lighting us up. They swerved at the last possible moment. No one expected a pair of bicycles on this road, at this time of night in such darkness.
I started to cry, but when you’re on a bike, crying chokes you. There’s not enough lung capacity to do both. The cries come out strangled, a failed emission of pain.
Call it beyond dark. We couldn’t even see each other. After biking for two months, we’d been pedaling through the mountains for hours. I burned through my last calorie. “We’re going to die here,” I said.
Along the road was a deep ditch. We couldn’t make out much of it, but it was off the road. We pulled our bikes into its depths. I fell into a black sleep and didn’t wake till morning.
It was hot. The sun was high. We lay in tall weeds in what was clearly a manmade runoff channel. Enormous, its own canyon. Maybe it was carved out for snowmelt, I don’t know. I felt small inside it.
Surrounding us were deer carcasses. A dozen or more. Deflated structures with no guts left. Sun-baked, flattened by time. No smell. Just hides stretched over bones. They dotted the trough like cemetery stones.
We dragged ourselves out. We kept moving.
Hallie Pritts lives in Pittsburgh, PA. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Atlas Obscura, McSweeney’s, The Missouri Review, Off Assignment, and elsewhere.