A Plea for Amnesty (or How Dan Became "Brother Dan")

I’ve sat for a month or two trying to think of the next significant story for my blog.

I’ve worried that maybe I’ve disassociated some of my readers after suffering long bouts of mogigraphia (a fancy word for writer’s cramp). Now that I’m in my house I think I’m cured, but this will be a more accurate test than my recent efforts. For the few of you who remain, I hope you enjoy my work.

The most encouraging praise came from my brother Dan recently. He wrote me a note after reading “How Far?” a post from back in June.

Don't know why I hadn't read it till now, but I just walked away from reading this with a renewed sense of respect for your principles as regarding independence and adventure. Makes me wonder what I was doing then, and remember that you didn't talk about it much, but I know you told me the story of the day and recalled much of it. I was only 12 then, so I didn't quite get it.—Dan

That made me want to write again. To make people think about adventure and independence.

This story is dedicated to my brother Dan.

You’ll know why at the end…


When I was seventeen, my brother Dan and I got permission from my parents to go camping out in the desert. Even in the first sentence here, I notice something of significance that anybody that has heard me talk about my brother Dan would recognize.

Brother Dan.

It is an extreme rarity for me to call my brother Dan anything other than “Brother Dan.”

There was no specific day that I can remember starting to call him that. I’ve called him that for years. It isn’t derogatory, quite the opposite. I want people to associate him with me. I want them to recognize our relationship, our tie, our connection. He isn’t just some kid, some friend, some anybody. He’s my brother. It isn’t meant to be a “tag-along” title, and more than likely it probably started in college when the people I was meeting hadn’t met him or didn’t know who I was talking to if I just referred to him as Dan.

It didn’t take long for my friends to get to know him though. Since he accompanied me on nearly every significant trip and witnessed practically every important event of my life, I’d reference him in stories left and right.

Well, one day, we got permission to camp out for a quick overnighter in the desert. We’d been asking my parents for a while. It wasn’t hard to pack. We tossed a couple of armloads worth of stuff, the majority of which had something to do with water, into the back of the station wagon that was our ticket around town.

We drove north on I-17 for half an hour and turned east into the desert. We followed the Carefree Highway—which was a perfect street name for the day—for 10 miles, then turned north for 18 miles of graded dirt road to a free campground hidden down in a little depression. This little impression in the high desert plateau is something of an oasis amidst the arid high scrub and gravelly buttes in the vicinity.

I got my driver’s license when I was sixteen. Driving came naturally after years of riding my bike trying not to get squished between city buses or pan-caked by distracted drivers. I had gotten my permit six months earlier, hours before a family vacation when my parents thought I might be helpful as a third string driver. I was hooked. I loved to drive.

“My” car was a 1983 Grand Marquis station wagon. I thought it was especially meaningful that it was born the same year as I. It was awesome. Maybe it wasn’t the coolest car on the road—especially without air conditioning, but it met my needs with the perfect combination of attributes. It was big. I once took 14 people to a high school football game (12 of them were girls—bonus points for Eddy). There were seat belts for 12. The hood was like a queen size bed.

Usually though when you get a car that can ferry an abundance of passengers you lose gas mileage. Granted it wasn’t exceptional, but if I was conservative with my accelerator I could get the “Beast” into the 18-20 mile per gallon range. The other thing that usually suffers with passenger capacity is acceleration. Again the wagon was nothing extraordinary, but it could hold its head high with rear wheel drive and a 5.8-liter, small block V-8. The speedometer only went to 80 miles per hour, so I have no idea how fast it could really go, but I had it pegged a few times. Pegged at 80, the pedal was only a third of the way to the floor.

But if you have a fast car, you usually get a harsher ride. Not so with the wagon. That baby floated—speed bumps, no problem. It was so wide and heavy, even with the soft suspension, I could corner as fast as I wanted to.

On top of all of that it was old, so it was cheap to insure.

Fast, big, comfortable, reasonably fuel efficient and very safe—built like a tank in fact.

On the dirt road run into the camp ground I drove aggressively. Too much gas in the corners, fishtailing on the dirt having fun. I was too cheap to wear out my tires on asphalt and afraid of getting tickets anyways so the dirt roads were where I let loose.

We got there in one piece. We set up our meager camp, built a fire, ate a few hot dogs and way too may marshmellows as the sun went down painting a firestorm of pinks, red, oranges, purples, and blues across the cloudless sky.

We sat in our lawn chairs late into the night with the fire hissing and popping. Coyotes howled in the distance. The desert cools drastically in the night, and the warmth of the fire illuminated our ruddy, boyish faces as we laughed, debated, and teased our way through the typical conundrums of youth.

We slept.

In the morning we woke up. After a simple breakfast we packed our gear back into the wagon. We made our lunch and then drove a few miles back towards Phoenix to the jumping off point for our hike.

The solitude of the desert is immense.

"...In sublimity - the superlative degree of beauty - what land can equal the desert with its wide plains, its grim mountains, and its expanding canopy of sky! You shall never see elsewhere as here the dome, the pinnacle, the minaret fretted with golden fire at sunrise and sunset; you shall never see elsewhere as here the sunset valleys swimming in a pink and lilac haze, the great mesas and plateaus fading into blue distance, the gorges and canyons banked full of purple shadow. Never again shall you see such light and air and color; never such opaline mirage, such rosy dawn, such fiery twilight. And wherever you go, by land or by sea, you shall not forget that which you saw not but rather felt - the desolation and the silence of the desert..." — John C. Van Dyke, 1898, The Desert

We hiked for an hour up a narrow canyon, ate our lunch, and hiked an hour back.

What happened next irreversibly tied me to my brother Dan—interminably made him brother Dan.

I decided to continue with my foolishly aggressive driving. No one was in danger other than the two of us. I took the twists and turns, rises and drops inspired by rally racing videos I’d seen. I’d brake hard into a corner putting the car sideways, drifting my way into position to accelerate hard on the exit.

I went up a short hill semi-blinded by the slope, turned right at the top, and dropped down continuing to the right. We were on the flank of a mountain. At the bottom of the quick descent was a left hand bend. To the right of us was the mountain, to the left a hundred foot expanse as the slope fell away from the unprotected side of the road.

The left hand bend was my undoing. I drifted too much. As the back of the wagon slid through behind me, it pointed the hood of the Beast towards the gulch. I was skidding out of control, heading for sure extermination.

Growing up in Minnesota long before I’d gotten my turn behind the wheel, over and over I heard coaching that to regain control you’ve got to turn your tires in the direction of the skid. The problem with that advice was that to steer my tires in that direction was to steer to certain destruction.

Somehow my muscles overcame my fear and for the briefest moment I whipped the wheel to the left, toward the edge, gained a fraction of traction, then wrenched the wheel back to the right.

My overcorrection, drove the car into the side of the mountain.

The impact was lessened by the pile of loose dirt that accumulates on the side of graded dirt roads. When we hit that berm, it lifted the right front corner of the car into the air and the car was promptly high-centered on an 18-inch pile of scree.

The engine was killed by the impact.

Dazed and scared, but completely unhurt we sat in the car. I broke the silence first, but unfortunately even with my memory for story telling I can’t remember what was said.

I tried to open my door but it wouldn’t. The car was at such an angle that the door was pressed into the ground. Dan pushed his door open and climbed out and I followed, climbing up and out across the front bench of seats.

After surveying the damage we set to work. The mound of dirt ran between the front two wheels and exited the side of the car between the front and back right tires. The back left corner of the bumper was resting on the ground supporting the car. Both of the right side tires were suspended in the air, most importantly the right rear which was the driving wheel.

Dan started scooping out the dirt and I pulled out the jack. Fortunately it wasn’t one of the new small jacks that stows away under the hood of the car—it was an old-school jack for an old-school car.

Around this point the first car drove by. The driver rolled down the window of his Subaru and asked us if we needed help. We certainly did, but refused. We’d only been there for 10 minutes at most and weren’t ready to throw in the towel yet. Plus I was scared that he’d call the cops, my parents, or a tow truck and I’d be stuck explaining my stupidity.

With increasing futility and mounting frustration we scraped at the roadside trying to get enough clearance to get our right rear tire back onto the ground.

Another car drove up, this time a truck. A young guy and his girlfriend were headed out into the desert to do some four wheeling. Again we turned down their help with a “We almost got it, but thanks.

After 45 minutes an old Ford Bronco pulled up. The loan passenger was a guy in his fifties, a week’s stubble on his chin and a filthy ball cap propped on his oily hair.

“You boys look to be in a heap o’ trouble.”

Dan, knowing the drill, nonchalantly said, “Nah, we almost got it…thanks though.”

The guy dropped his jacked up Bronco back into gear, and slowly pulled away. He made it 30 feet before he put it in reverse and came back to us.

"Ain’t no way ya almost got it. Lemme help ya.”

It wasn’t a question. He was telling us what he was going to do. Thankfully he knew just what needed to be done. He clambered down with a tow strap and looped through the tow hooks on the wagon. I climbed into the driver’s seat of the wagon and he gingerly applied the gas on his end of the line. Initially nothing happened, but slowly the Beast regained its proper place on the road.

Without getting out of his vehicle the guy took the strap from my uplifted hands, accepted my appreciation, and said, “I’ll bet you’ll never be that stupid again.” He dropped it into gear and this time didn’t come back.

Dan and I gave the car a perfunctory inspection. On the exterior everything seemed sound. Underneath the car a part was hanging down, sheered from its mounting bolts by the impact. It gently swayed, held in place by its wiring harness. We found a coat hanger in the back of the wagon and wired it back into place. Other than that nothing was conspicuously amiss. Dirt was packed into every imaginable crevice under the whole front of the car.

We climbed back in, refastened our seatbelts, and crept down the remaining five miles of dirt road. The vibration of the washboard road freed most of the dirt deposits and soon we were back onto the Carefree Highway—without such a carefree attitude this time.

We were supposed to be home by 4:00. We pulled into the driveway at 3:55 and unbelievably my parents weren’t home. I reexamined the car and miraculously our initial analysis held. Somehow the car sustained no significant damage.

At that point we made the choice not to tell my parents—another bad decision in a day full of them.

My brother Dan, that day, went from being my tag-a-long annoyance to full-fledged, acknowledged and accepted participant in the epic of my life. It wasn’t just him keeping his mouth shut, it was a bond that transcended tattletaling. We shared something.

We still share that something. He gets me, understands my passions, my pursuit of adventure, my strengths, weaknesses, victories, and failures. He understands why, though separated by age and distance, we can talk as though we have never been separated.

He is indeed my Brother Dan.

I tell this story now after all of these years with the hope for amnesty. This year my parents sold the Beast. The Beast with a mythical figure to us older kids in the family. We all learned to drive on it, enshrouded by the safety of its size. As time passed, the car approached 200,000 miles and became less and less reliable. Eventually my parents replaced it with a newer car for the young drivers of the family and the wagon was relegated to the last and lowliest position in the family driveway. It sat undriven for extended periods until finally it wasn’t driven at all. We worried that the car would die an anonymous death, crushed into a cube of steel, when my parents finally got rid of it. It wouldn’t be fair for a car with such a storied life to die such an obscure death.

Thankfully my parents wanted more for the car than the $150 per ton that the scrap yard was offering. They posted it on Craigslist. A man drove from a small town over an hour away and bought the car. When he finished putting it on his trailer with my youngest brother and sister in near tears observing from the porch, my mom asked him what he was going to do with it. Hesitantly, lest he offend, he told her that he would be entering it into his small county’s demolition derby later that summer.

My entire family attended (except me—work obligated).

The Beast didn’t win the derby, but she gave it everything she had. She lost due to immobilization, but after she was towed back to the pits, the man climbed back in and fired the engine back up, one last time, on the first try.

The wagon died that day—a legend in life and a legend in death. As a gladiator in the arena, she fought, she suffered, and she ultimately succumbed. Her greatest accomplishment, giving me a brother I can’t take for granted, lives.

Eddy Zakes
eazakes@juno.com

How far?

I used to ride my bicycle a lot.

Actually—I rode it so much that most people thought I was weird.

But anyways, I really liked it so I didn’t care what people thought. I wore those skin-tight little shorts. You know, the ones with the pad in them that makes you look like you’re wearing a spandex diaper. I shaved my legs religiously and was proud of my incredible tan lines.

Most serious cyclists have ridden 100 miles in a day. It’s typically called a ‘century,’ and is to the cyclist what a marathon is to the runner.

I’d knocked off my first century at 15 years old and routinely rode 75 miles on a Saturday, come ‘that one place’ or high water. During the winter I stuffed newspapers up my jersey to block the wind and during the summer I’d drink two or three gallons of water to combat the 100-plus degree heat of an Arizona morning.

I raced the regional junior races and did fairly well, winning in the smallest local races, hitting the top five in state level races, and finishing around tenth in the bigger regional races.

I didn’t have all of the best equipment but I loved to ride and loved the weirdness and recognition of participating in a sport that doesn’t usually attract teenagers.

Out of that love to ride hatched the insane idea of riding 200 miles in one day.

Two hundred miles is not outside the range of the possible, but it is definitely on the far side of the absolute fringe of the extreme. Normal riders, even most who’ve been riding for years, haven’t ridden 200 miles in day, nor even want to.

There really isn’t that great of a reason to do it. It isn’t really that great of training because that sort of distance is ultimately more debilitating the constructive. It produces a physiological strain on the body that takes months to recover from.

And nobody really cares.

That’s probably the real reason few pursue riding ultra-long distances. There is no recognition. Pretty much everybody thinks you should be committed to an asylum, but then after a week or two everybody forgets what you did and things get back to normal.

Kind of like a runner. A runner is cool if he runs a marathon. There isn’t any added ‘coolness ranking’ if the runner ran 30 miles instead of the 26.2. The same with the bicycling thing. If you want coolness, ride you’re bike 100 miles. Normal people think that riding your bicycle 25 miles is a lot, so 100 is amazing, but 200 is so unfathomable that people don’t place it higher than the ‘amazing’ of the 100 mile ride.

Regardless, that is what I wanted to do. I wanted to ride my bike 200 miles in one day.

I posed the idea to my parents and they actually went for it. They just wanted me to tell them when I was leaving, give them a detailed route description, and call them from one or two points along the way.

First, I worked on figuring out where I wanted to ride. I knew I had absolutely no desire to do an out-and-back course for two reasons. I thought it would be too boring and the opportunity to turn around was too great.

I settled on a loop riding from my house in Glendale up I-17 to Cordes Junction, over to Prescott, down to Wickenburg, and then home to Glendale.

I got busy with other things but held the ride in the back of my head for when the opportunity was right. I couldn’t go in the summer because it’d be to hot; since part of my ride was over 5,000 feet of elevation, I couldn’t go in the winter because it’d be to cold and snowy. The challenge with the spring and fall was getting the right blend of weather over the whole 200 miles. It might be perfect in one place and not in the next.

At dinner one night in April, things just felt right. So just like that I announced, without much fanfare, that tomorrow was the day.

I set my alarm for 4:30am and went to bed around 8:00pm. I slept fine, but woke up earlier than I wanted to around 4:00, probably because of my nervous excitement. When I get really nervously excited about something I shiver, so I quietly shivered my way around the kitchen packing up some food, filling my water bottles, and eating a quick bowl of oatmeal. I let myself out the garage door and left without an audience around 4:30.

I wound through the quiet, cool suburban streets of the fifth largest metropolis in the U.S. Past hundreds of sleeping households, a few barking dogs, and just stirring birds. The sun was pausing behind the horizon’s curtain, waiting for its cue to shine on the day’s stage.

All was well. I was the boy on the bike.

I rode slowly knowing what was ahead, making sure not to crash into anything in the dark. I had a handlebar bag full of food, warmer clothing for the mountains, and a map, and my three jersey pockets were full of even more food and water.

After thirty minutes I was on the wide shoulder of the interstate, with warm breezes washing over me whenever semi’s chugged by. I picked up my pace and was faced with the biggest climb of the ride.

About thirty miles from my front door is a climb of 10 miles. From the relatively low desert to the high desert plateau, the Black Canyon Freeway climbs roughly 1,500 feet. Nearing the top of this climb, I was starting to get hungry. I knew 35 minutes ahead was the first real chance of stopping that I’d had yet. I started craving—I know it’s strange, but after a few hours of hard exercise, you crave weird things—I started craving a McDonald’s number one value meal. You know, the Big Mac, super-sized fries, and replacing the pop with a strawberry milkshake.

Well that’s what I wanted.

So I pulled into the only restaurant in Cordes Junction, which conveniently is a McDonald’s, leaned my bike against the glass window in a spot where it would be clearly visible to me on the inside (it would be bad to have your bicycle stolen partway through a 200 mile ride), and walked up to the counter.

“Can I have a number one value meal please?” I asked the older lady behind the counter.

She looked over the counter at me, the gangly teenager, salt-crusted from sweat, wearing funny looking shoes, let alone funny looking shorts, and said, “Sorry honey, we don’t serve burgers ‘til 10:00.”

So I asked the next obvious question. “Could I have a large strawberry milkshake then?”

“Weeell, I’m real sorry son, but our ice cream machine is broken, so I’ll have to say nope to that too.”

I was crushed. For nearly an hour I’d been fantasizing about this meal. All they could give me was something from their breakfast menu. I settled—grumbling all the way—for a couple of Egg McMuffins and an orange juice.

I finished my breakfast, refilled my water bottles, having drank three of them, and set off for Prescott around 9:00am.

The road to Prescott is nothing spectacular, but…it was struggling through a resurfacing and widening project. For two hours I rode squeezed against a concrete barrier, cars blaring their horns trying to get by me on the single grooved concrete lane that the Department of Transportation had left open. For the first few minutes I pondered the road sign stating that fines were doubled in construction zones. Wondering first if it would apply to whoever ran me over, and second if my parents would get any of the fine. After that I just concentrated on my riding and trying to keep my front wheel from being captured in a groove.

I rode into Prescott with a new craving. I wanted Mountain Dew. Everybody says that sugar is bad, caffeine is bad, blah, blah, blah… Well, it can be, but that day that was what I needed. I figured most people argued against sugar because it caused a sugar high, which is generally followed by a sugar low, which can be difficult to recover from. I resolved that I just wouldn’t let myself come off of the high. If you keep pumping in more sugar then you’ll have a hard time achieving the low. Besides, I needed the sugar because at this point I’d ridden 91 miles and climbed a total of 8, 500 feet.

The only place that I could think of that served Mountain Dew was Taco Bell. That’s not a problem because I’ve always liked Taco Bell. Same routine—I leaned my bike up against the glass window, walked in clicking my carbon fiber bike cleats across the tile floor, and asked the employee for six bean burritos and three soft tacos and an extra large pop.

He kind of looked at me funny.

He got me what I wanted and I started in on it. I ate all of it except two bean burritos which went into my jersey pockets. Then I walked out to my bike and grabbed two of my water bottles and filled them up with Mountain Dew also. Then I pedaled away.

The next part of my ride was the hardest. The wind turned against me and I was lethargic from having sat down to eat. I rode up over a hill to get out of Prescott heading south. The sun was full blast and it was the pits. The absolute pits. And then the sun went behind some clouds and it got really cold, but I’d been sweating from the sun and the climb, but then I was freezing and couldn’t get warm, and…it was the pits.

I rode through Yarnell and was hungry again. I pulled off the road but there weren’t any establishments that sold real food. I stopped into something like a general store just to stretch my legs and bought a few candy bars (sugar again).

Then came the best part of the whole trip.

The Yarnell Hill.

This isn’t just any hill, it is one the biggest climbs in the state. It soars 2,500 feet up the side of Table Top Mountain in a scant four miles. I however, had the privilege of going down it.

At the crest of the mountain I looked down onto my desert home. The warmth of desert floor was calling me and I answered by one again stepping into the pedals and dropping my bicycle into its biggest gear. Four miles wasn’t enough to pay for my suffering, but it brought the balance closer to being back in line.

It was probably around 3:00 when I got to the bottom. I pedaled my way to Wickenburg and finally got to treat myself to that number one value meal from McDonald’s. And then a second one.

Just one last leg home. About 45 miles.

It was getting dark and I was about 10 miles from home when I endured my only mechanical mishap of the trip. A flat tire. I was pretty close to past caring, so I just reinflated the tire and kept riding without patching it.

Two miles later it was flat again. I just wanted to quit, but no, I had to deal with this joke of a tire. Exhausted, I pulled out a spare tube and inserted into the tire casing and inflated it once more.

I climbed back onto my bike with my body screaming no.

I said yes. Audibly.

I pedaled the last few miles to my house and looked down at the computer on my handlebars. It read 195.70. That wasn’t going to cut it so I rode straight past my house.

My knee was throbbing and visibly swollen. My feet were blistered, my hands were numb. But I rode on.

Phoenix at Night

The last two miles were giving me such excruciating pain in my left knee that I unclipped my left foot and just pedaled with my right.

Around 8:15pm I pulled into my driveway and unclipped my right foot from the pedal. My body was disagreeing with me and I nearly fell over. My legs didn’t want to walk they wanted to turn circles so I stumbled up to the garage door, just as I’d left it nearly 16 hours before, audienceless.

I opened the door, pushed my bike in, and leaned it against the wall in its customary place. Next I pulled my helmet off. Sweat trickled out of the foam pads that help it to sit comfortably on your head. Then I took off my shoes. Then my gloves. I took one last swig of warm Mountain Dew out of my bottle and walked into the house.

My body ached, but now it could rest. My family was in the living room watching TV and I didn’t immediately announce my presence. I just sat down in the kitchen and sat.

Sat still.

I had ridden myself into a hallowed land. The few who really knew were amazed. A 16-year old—200 miles in one day, and with 12,500 feet of climbing at that, and alone, without the psychological assistance of competition or friends.

Simply unbelievable.

And to most it was. And to most it will be.

And it needs to be that way or wouldn’t mean the same thing.

But me, and to you. We know.

-Eddy Zakes
eazakes@juno.com