Status: Chapter 25 to come!

Reach for the Sky

Day Two.

“So what we’re doing right now,” Travis addressed the camera in Godfrey’s hand, “is bandaging Scottie’s wound so that she doesn’t get it all infected. Because that’s easy to do in the middle of the woods. Right, Sweet Cheeks?” I groaned in reply.

“God Scottie, and you guys made it all the way to the end of the day yesterday?” Greggg asked as Travis helped me re-wrap my cut, standing in my underwear and motocross knee-highs in the hotel room the four of us had shared. The wound had required forty stitches, and the people had strongly recommended dropping out of the race, but Travis and I would continue on. “Why are you still racing today?”

“I don’t want to quit because of a little cut. God, you guys would never let me live it down.” I joked, a hand on Travis's shoulder for balance.

“She’s tenacious,” He shrugged, and finished taping over the bandage.

“So how is it that I get so beat up and you come away with nothing, Travis?” I asked, as I eased into my riding pants.

“Easy. I ride motorcycles all the time, and you’re a four-wheeler girl who knows naught of balance and all things dirt bike-y.” I sighed, knowing just how right he was.

“I actually need my wrist taped, want to do it? It’ll make you feel better about yourself,” Travis teased, handing me the pre-wrap and white tape. I lined his wrist deftly with green pre-wrap and then began to strengthen the wrap with the white tape until he felt it suitable before I wrapped it all off to make it look “pretty.”

“How long do we have?” Bell asked, fresh out of the shower.

“Twenty minutes,” I replied, as I pulled on my first boot and began to buckle it up, painfully bending over my leg. Travis seemed to notice this, and took my backpack off the bed beside me.

“I’m going to go fill the bags, I’ll meet you at the start.”

“Yessir.”

Twenty minutes later, Travis, Bell, Godfrey and I were hot off the starting line - We managed to stay together until the first pit stop, where our trails split. Then it was just Travis and I riding through the most rugged terrain in the world. At one point early on, Travis nearly lost his big 450 into a deep rut - I had to drop my bike and gimp over to grab the handlebars to keep him from doing his last backflip down the side of a mountain. The bright sun coupled with the stifling, stagnant air of the forest prompted the loss of our motocross shirts - we matched in all green that day, and looked like goobers - but otherwise, the day held no huge instances except a lot of pain and a few more falls on my part. We finished third in the rankings, slowly working our way up.

The third day was nothing to write home about either, we finished second that day, which was a surprise to us both because I had suffered horrible cramps from consuming too many Red Bulls and not enough water in the middle of a dicey hill climb section and went down, almost taking out Travis below me; we had been forced to wait until the cramps subsided before I could crawl back on the bike and continue. Apparently, the other teams had encountered worse, and fallen harder than Travis and I had.

The fourth day was much more challenging. Apparently, there had been rain the night before (I would never have noticed, I slept like a little baby every night I could), and the course was much more difficult for it. There was no stopping to remove shirts or check bandages, it was just eight hours of hard riding. I saw many downed riders - Travis and I had to help out on more than one occasion as we ran into single “experts” stuck in the muck, helpless.

One terrifying hill almost killed the both of us, though.

I had started down first, as usual, since I wrecked more than Travis did, he insisted on following me. He would normally follow down a hill climb such as this one as soon as he thought I was almost safely at the bottom, a time-saving method as we could afford to wait for one another or we would never finish the day’s race. As I neared the bottom, I heard Travis make a leap of faith at a line I had passed up as too challenging, and heard him begin to shout and swear as the bike crashed down the slope behind me. I ditched the 250 and jumped into the treeline, just as Travis's enormous 450 smashed into it, carrying both bikes down the slope in a twisted heap. But the bikes weren’t my first concern; I could see Travis laying on his stomach a short distance up the slope, and he was definitely not moving.

“Travis! TP, get up!” My shouts proceeded me in the mad scramble up the hill, trying to get to him before another rider could crest the rise and accidentally run us over. When I finally got to him, the tall man was gasping for breath.

“Travis? Gimpy boy, are you alright?” Quickly and as gently as I could, I took his shoulders and rolled him over onto his back. “Oh man, you’re a mess.” He was, too, blood running down his face from a cut between his eyes, and a fresh shiner which would surely be even worse the next day; I dug in his backpack as he gasped for his first-aid kit and began to dab at his face when he finally regained the ability to speak.

“That was probably the dumbest line ever,” He gasped, gripping my forearms as I carefully dabbed rubbing alcohol on his face. “I should have followed yours, you were making your way down quite nicely.”

“Actually, I hit a dead spot in the trail and couldn’t pick up my line again, good thing your bike took care of that.” Travis immediately sat up, as if he were going to launch down the hill and see if the Suzuki mess was ride-able, but I pushed him back down firmly with one hand on his chest. “Stop it, let me patch this up or you’ll hate yourself.”

“That sounds familiar,” He laughed as I attacked his face again, disinfecting and covering the cut with a band-aid before I began to clean off the rest of the blood.

“So are you ok? Just the wind knocked out of you and a cut? Do a systems check.” I stepped back and allowed him to flex and finally stand up before I replaced the first-aid kit in his backpack. Together, we made our way down the slope, leaning on one another for support as we were both gimpy - I from forty stitches and he from years of knee injuries.

“That sucks. I hate going down,” Travis actually pouted, I couldn’t help but poke him in the ribs knowing he couldn’t retaliate with his helmet in hand.

“Ah, well, the bruise really brings out the green in your eyes,” I laughed as he thumped me square in the top of the helmet with his. “You’re just sore because your fall was probably more epic than mine.”

“Come on Sweet Cheeks, let’s clear out this wreck,”

Once we extracted one bike from another and decided that despite being bent and beaten to hell, they were still in working order, Travis and I continued laboring down the trial; the last stop of the day was only twenty miles ahead.

Twenty miles and a suspension bridge ahead. When I could jump over gaps, I was fine - flying wasn’t a problem, bridges specifically were. Not dinky ones, though, but the big ones that could cause major problems if one didn’t make it or if it collapsed beneath me while I was driving over. Quite a stupid fear, if one was to ask me, judging on how many risks I took on a daily basis just doing what I did for a living, but it was what it was.

I stopped and stared, paralyzed as I watched the thing sway back and forth in midair. Travis stopped beside me when he noticed I wasn’t proceeding as usual, and tried to give me an impromptu pep-talk.

“Come on, Scottie, you can do this! It’s just a bridge - think of it like that tall obstacle wall we had to drive over on the first day, that was definitely way worse!” He placed a gloved hand atop my helmet and patted it a few times. “Just, let’s not think about it. You have to go. So go.” A pleading look silenced him, and he sat with his arms crossed over his chest. “Well I’m not going until you go.” He said, stubbornly.

“What!”

“Yeah. And we’re wasting time. You need to go. Now!” He pressed the start button on my bike and the thing roared to life, and he began to guide me toward the bridge with his much larger dirt bike, effectively keeping me from thinking about the obstacle ahead as I fought to remain upright.

“Go!” The strangled shout prompted me to look down - and I shot across the wooden, swinging bridge in third gear, clinging to the 250 as if my life depended on it. Travis didn’t even stop on the other side but blew past me, again not leaving me enough time to think as I fought him for my position in front of him once more.

Before I knew it, we had reached the last checkpoint after a brief struggle for power over a straightaway - which I obviously lost with the smaller bike and all. The third day of riding, we finished first out of the Expert’s Teams, arriving before nightfall.

It was a hell of a story to tell once we finally did get back to the hotel that night.