Ask any person who has any association with Patagonia; be it local, visitor or tumble-dryer salesman and one word will inevitably come to the fore…. WIND.
Patagonia is synonymous with wind. Wind is the bête-noir of cyclists, because, irrespective of which direction it is prevailing, it will inevitably be ahead of you. The Irish prayer that extorts: ‘may the wind ever be on your back’, is at variance to that contradictorally bi-directional headwind. As for the white goods sales personnel, they can’t shift tumble-dryers, all you need is treble pegging on a clothes line.
This morning is a breeze of beauty; teasing the poplars, softly sifting through the cedars, tinkling a coke can down the street; this afternoon it will hurtle me halfway across a carriageway and stop me dead in my tracks. It will always be a constant background tinnitus, that will vary in volume, intensity and perversity.
We’re sitting in a converted water tank…(another tale for another day), at a crossroads, contemplating our options. To do the obvious visitor expectancy by rejoining an old acquaintance from our previous visits and ride south on Ruta Cuarenta . To cycle with a constant jacket-rattling sidewind, meeting up again with the pelotons of cycle tourers, the rigs of camper trucks and the cardio-arresting suction of passing lorries. Or to live for the moment and leaving the devil to take the hindmost, to use the monstrous tailwind that even the Patagonians are talking about and head across a continent to the Atlantic coast.
It’s been fourteen years since we last “did the ton”, clocked a century, and in truth I had assumed those days of Full-kit 100 mile rides lay in the past.
Not so.
Slowly I creep into the ‘sweet spot’; the silent bubble when wind roar and forward speed cancel out. The macadam is clean, the road stretches into a vanishing point lost in a floating mirage. It could run all the way to infinity. The computer reads 35kph, when a gust picks me up and pushes hard, now the numbers are effortlessly climbing through 40 heading for 45 and with that the inevitable cerebral debate begins The red-eyed cloven-footed voice urges ‘go for the 50’… whilst the feather-winged halo reminds me that a simple mistake is going to hurt.
…”Go…go…go…its flat, you can see for miles”
….”it’s at least three hours to the nearest hospital”.
…”go..go…go…out to the middle and blast”.
…”do you still want to get to Ushuaia?”
“ Brake”…
“Wimp”.
The road heads determinedly east-south-east, kinking occasionally, a correction that places that monstrous tailwind back squarely on my back. Whole decades of kilometres disappear behind me, even going uphill, a blast of propellant will conveniently trigger a spurt of speed, enough to carry me effortlessly over the top.
.”You know you’ll have to pay for this…. nothing in life is free”….
“bloody wee Puritan, away back to your presbytery”….
“there’ll be reckoning tomorrow”….
“we’ll worry about tomorrow when tomorrow comes”.
Tomorrow does come and we could have repeated that score, only we get waylaid by some classic Argentine hospitality; (yet another tale).
So the account sits heavily in the Red. There’s a distinct reek of sanctimonious guilt to counter the deodorant of ego, for we’ll be able to dine-out on that score come that Argentine hospitality. The debt-guilt comes from the cheating.
The plethora of quality weather apps keeps increasing, as does their subset: the ‘wind-app’, and with each passing cyclist we’re introduced to yet another one. All are works of beauty, strands of flowing arrows like weed in a river, appreciative art if you’re not intending to swim against the current. So they are also prognosticators for when to call a rest day, a day that might have been squandered on alleviating those accrued deficits. Tomorrow’s forecast shows a magenta southerly, we and the road go that way: for there are no other options left. Thereafter, the wind turns northerly.
No brainier.
Rest-day declared.
We’re time-rich, we an afford the stigmatic opprobrium from the fluttering halo as she silently mutters: “a debtor never be…”