Wheels of Life

In trying to climb the beautiful, demanding mountain roads of Dominica, he found an unlikely path to paradise

WE CAME ALONG THE SEA COAST IN A TAXI, away from the airport, the windows open to the warm evening rain as a woman's voice sounded soft and sing-songy on the crackly radio. "And they will be bicycling all over the island," she was saying, "and, oh, yes, they will be climbing the very big hills."

The taxi rounded a turn, its engine groaning a bit as it ground up an incline. We came into a forest, and suddenly the world was green and lush, the narrow macadam road empty of cars and squiggling skyward like a lane in a storybook. The verdant beauty around us was beyond words.

But perhaps you have seen Dominica, a tiny island nation of 70,000 people that sits just north of Barbados and several hundred miles from the Dominican Republic. Dominica played backdrop to this summer's blockbuster, "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest." The movie is a mawkish lark, and its basic story line -- Watch out, Jack Sparrow! Those Carib Indian cannibals are going to roast your pirate bones on a spit! -- was offensive to many Dominicans. But as it lingers on the island's mist-shrouded hills, with drums pulsing ominously in the background, the film gets at the spirit of the place: Two-thirds of Dominica is still blanketed in coniferous old growth. There are 365 twisting mountain rivers here and a host of waterfalls cascading down into clear emerald pools. And the land is so cragged and steep that it's almost unfathomable.

Though it is only 29 miles long and 16 miles at its widest, Dominica is home to two peaks over 4,500 feet. The rest of the island is essentially a range of smaller mountains and valleys, and the roads are murderous. There is one paved hill that rises for a steady mile at a 28 percent grade. The Tour de France, in contrast, rarely offers up grades steeper than 10 percent, and almost never goes steeper than 15 percent. Virtually no one travels to Dominica to ride a bicycle.

"And there are three cyclists, you know," the woman was saying now in melodious tones on the radio. "There is John Moorhouse, a very talented bicycle racer who lives in Florida. There is a photographer -- his name is Peter -- and there is a very famous writer."

John Moorhouse, who is 36, was sitting beside me. A Dominican by blood, he spent his teenage years on the island before moving, in 1993, to Orlando, where he's become a standout in 24-hour mountain bike races, which see competitors looping dirt paths for a full day and night without ceasing. He rides his bike 250 miles a week, and in races he has no qualms about chomping down a whole stick of butter, straight from the wrapper, as he whirs starved and bleary-eyed through the 3 a.m. darkness. Moorhouse works as the U.S. distributor for Scottoiler, a British company that makes bicycle lubrication systems, but he dreams of returning to Dominica one day to guide bike tours. He was now on a reconnaissance mission, and he'd alerted the media by sending out a press release saying that his expedition here was to "conquer" the hills. In an agrarian country aiming to promote ecotourism, his quest was national news.

Behind Moorhouse, photographer Peter McBride, 35, was oblivious to his new celebrity and chatting away on his cellphone. McBride is stocky and ripped, with the rugged bonhomie and tousled good looks of a Patagonia clothing model. Once a member of the U.S. developmental ski team, he now specializes in adventure assignments -- in sea kayaking Croatia and backcountry skiing the Republic of Georgia, that sort of thing.

And the "very famous writer"? Well, I had plenty of time to ponder that phrase, since the ride away from the airport, in Melville Hall, to Dominica's capital city, Roseau, is long and winding and slow -- marred by potholes so nasty that, at one point, I saw a small tree growing in a two-foot-deep chasm bitten out of the edge of the road.

The "very famous writer" was me.

I AM 42 YEARS OLD, and I ride my bike 100 or so miles a week. I ride almost everywhere -- to the grocery store, to the dentist, the nine miles to my daughter's school, even when it's cold and raining outside. But this devotion to biking is a new thing for me, begun only a few months before my Dominica trip, and for two decades now, I've approached exercise with an anxiety that has at times neared an engulfing obsession.

Let me explain. I was an athlete once, too -- a distance runner. In college, I could run five miles in just over 26 minutes; I once ran a half-marathon in 1:13. I was strictly mediocre by NCAA standards, but good enough to glimpse in running a delight, a feeling of mastery, that had eluded me as a bony and skittish kid relegated to the "challenged" section of gym class. I could enter an all-comers, all-ages 10K and place 10th or 12th in a field of 500 people, and I lived, as all devout geeks do, with numbers streaming through my skull. I could recite my splits and my finish times from memory, and I knew, to the second, the records set by running's great luminaries. I made sense of the world -- and of where I stood in it -- through numbers.

But when I was 21, I pulled some back muscles. A minor overuse injury, nothing much, but somehow I was filled with the fear that I would never recover, that I would be no one again. And, indeed, I did not recover. Regularly, throughout my twenties and thirties, I fell into these horrible, claustrophobic episodes, months long, that would begin with a simple muscle pull -- a knot in my hamstring, say. I would worry about the pain and brace so stiffly against it that I became like a dry stick waiting to crack. Officially, I had myofascial pain syndrome. My muscles kept pulling, going deep into spasm. I became ensconced in a rictus of pain, and soon that rictus became who I was.