A Mighty Headwind

Yeaaaahh. So Saskatchewan didn't exactly go well. Considering we thought that it would take us about four days to get to Manitoba and it actually took us ten. What happened? I'll tell you what happened. WIND happened.

We just couldn't catch a break. Whether we were biking north, south, southeast or east, we were biking straight into a powerful headwind.

In fact, our headwind woes started much earlier than Saskatchewan and, without exaggeration, I can say that save for about two days of riding, we've either been in a headwind or a nasty crosswind since Fernie. In other words, for about 1000 clicks.

So, it's not that the headwinds were isolated to Saskatchewan, it's just that the headwinds culminated into a distinct source of misery and despair in Saskatchewan.

The trouble with a headwind, obviously, is that it slows you down. A lot. Those panniers sticking out from the sides of your bike? You might as well be trailing a parachute behind you. You know, like those race cars that release a parachute to act as a brake. So, yes, it's like riding with your brakes on. And it's hard to really get anywhere when you've got the brakes on. It's, like, slow.

Take, for example the one day in Saskatchewan when we weren't contending with headwinds: We went 160 km from Kindersley to Outlook in about seven hours. A long day, yes, but it was also a very productive day. On the other hand, when we were fighting vicious headwinds between Glenavon to Wawota we were able to do 103 km also in about seven hours.

It's painful. Not just painfully slow. Literally painful. Those 103 km were damn exhausting. Worse than the mountains, because while the passes were a hard few hours, there was also the hour or two where you got to come down the other side. Riding into a headwind for seven hours is just seven hours of unrelenting grunt work. (And it's curiously hard on the knees too, although I don't know why. You just suddenly start to feel rather arthritic and you get all freaked out that you're developing a knee problem, but then it goes away as soon as the wind dies down.)

So, needless to say, the headwind situation was already wearing thin by the time we hit the Saskatchewan border (especially since it robbed us of the Tyrrell Museum!). And, at the same time, the food crisis was developing from a situation into a full blown crisis. Combined with the fact that, after the mountains, one not only expects but needs the prairies to be a bit of a break and lo, we had a morale problem brewing. A morale problem and a corresponding fatigue problem that, given equal portions of poor nutrition and grunt work, boiled over into a just being physically ill problem.

While there were certainly lovely days and lovely moments, the synergy between the Food Crisis and the Headwinds Crisis amounted to what seemed like a drawn out Groundhog Day where we'd get up, grimly soldier through a plateful of processed foods, grunt out a day of riding with both our knees and the wind howling (all the while sliding into a malnourished fugue state), give up after seven hours and realize with alarm and despair that you are nowhere near where you should be if you're going to get out of the province anytime within a reasonable schedule. Repeat.

And, just like all things do when they're spiralling out of control*, one bad situation feeds the other and the longer we were stranded in rural Saskatchewan in the wind, the more we desperately needed quality food and the longer we went without eating properly, the harder it was to ride far enough to get out quicker. And, inevitably, we got kinda ill and we were forced to take an extra day and a half off.

Anyway, it got to the point where at least once a day, Kieran would say with grim determination, "We can't let Saskatchewan win." And I would imagine that, after we left whichever teeny village we'd stopped in, the townspeople would gather around a cauldron in the town square and start chanting some spell that turned the winds from west to east, until eventually we'd be forced to relent and buy real estate and round out the workforce.**

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* Did anyone else have to do those Daisyworld computer simulations in university? Where if you didn't find the perfect balance of daisies and soil, Daisyworld's positive feedback loops would cause its climate to overheat?

**Seriously, some of these places had that kind of creepy feel to them. Made me think of that short story, The Lottery, where the people would stone to death someone every year in order to ensure good crops. Not to mention how the people would descend upon us to tell us how they're trying to attract young families and would bleat things like "The water here is excellent!"