| Why the Ride? |
|
|
 By Doug Somebody get a gun. I think I’m Ol’ Yeller.There is spittle at the corners of my mouth and I’m heaving for air. I’m less than 5 miles into a 30 mile ride and my legs started hurting before I reached the end of my driveway. It’s mid-July. I’ve been training since March and I wonder if it has done any good at all. There is (oh, I’m going to guess) a 17 mph headwind with gusts up to 23mph. I’m lurching along Dexter-Chelsea Road in slow motion and my knees sound like Rice Krispies. The hills, even the gradual inclines are killing me today. The Michigan humidity is like a heavy cape I can’t shrug off. In spite of my gasping, I hold my breath past each rotting roadkill. The emissions of the bacteria breaking down the mangled protein is unbearable. Bacteria with meat-farts. That’s the smell of death. To take the edge off the unpleasantness, I assign names to a few of the casualties. Shivers, the squirrel, has been flattened on the road now for a couple of weeks and is almost gone from the constant battery of car tires. There’s a new coon on the shoulder by the tracks doing a bloated spread-eagle on his back. His face frozen forever in surprise. He is … Lewis. Unlike Shivers, he should last a good couple of months off the road by the weeds. Depends on what the crows and possums do with him.  I pass the barn with the stallions. My aqualung rasping brings them once again in a randy gallop from around the corner of the barn in very obvious, but misguided expectation. I feel weird, and dirty. The strong odor of manure only stamps the memory indelibly into memory. I hurt. There is only more of the same ahead of me today. All I want to do is turn around and go home. Some days I do. This is training for the WAM 300. It’s a 300 mile bike ride from Traverse City to Chelsea – 3 days, 100 miles a day. It is a fundraiser for the Michigan chapter of Make-A-Wish (WAM = Wish-A-Mile). I raise money. Then I do the ride. To survive the ride. I gotta train. So why ride? Why don’t we just give the money to Make-A-Wish and call it a day? Why ride? To be cool? Probably. We raise money for the kids, but riding really has nothing to do with raising the money. It’s a forced association, but a clever one. At the shop, a lot of folks ask about the ride. I get to tell my story. I get to brag, or at least I get a chance to. But I’m embarrassed to draw any attention to myself over this event. What I tell instead is about the stories I’ve heard on the trip. I tell about the little guy who has a head full of tumors. Here’s his wish: he wants to go for a ride in a pontoon boat. That’s it. That’s what he wants. Make-A-Wish doesn’t just give him a boat ride. They buy him a pontoon boat, dock it, and now he can go for a ride whenever he wants. The little guy took his boat rides until he couldn’t anymore. The criteria for being eligible for a wish is that you need 1) to be a kid, and 2) there’s something wrong with your body that could kill you. One little girl wanted to be princess for a day. Make-A-Wish gets the whole town involved. It’s winter. They have a parade. The high school is converted into a castle. You wouldn’t know it was a high school. Mom and Dad are the King and Queen. Brother is the Prince. She’s the pretty Princess everybody fusses over. The whole town is invited and it looks like the whole town showed up. There’s a tremendous feast. There is every kind of a food, game, activity a kid could ever want. It’s an incredible event.
But then there’s this moment where she’s Princess for a day, he gets to go for another boat ride, meet Cinderella, meet someone famous, or whatever their wish is. And then you hear the parents telling how it was this moment that carried them through. Suddenly life was not all bad. If their child died, they tell how they remember them in this happy moment. The doctor visits, the tests, the tears are all eclipsed by the one moment in time. I can’t help it. It chokes me up. What I go through for the ride is nothing, absolutely nothing. But if in asking me about the ride I get to tell you about the kids, their families, and the people who do this for these kids and their families, then that is everything. |
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
I’ve got a couple of friends who have kids with a life-threatening condition. It’s an incredible existence. While the other kids are doing kid stuff, these kids are at the doctors, again. There’s always this dark cloud hanging over their head. The parents, oh my gosh these parents, you’ve got to be kidding. I don’t know how they do it. To see your kid go through this. If it breaks my heart, what has it done to theirs? I can’t imagine. 
