It’s easy to think that hard knocks march in columns while a good turn is a lone rider.
That’s why we have many sayings like ‘It never rains but it pours’ but there are few that I can think of about the opposite.
Maybe it’s like how the bread always falls off your plate and lands butter-side down on the floor.
Or how blowing on the dice before a roll never works.
It’s like how we remember the fights we lost and the criticisms we took on the chin while the victories fade quickly out of memory.
But a good tiding isn’t always a lone rider, sometimes it comes at the head of a herd of cattle.
And that’s how it went after reaching the Arctic Ocean in the first year of this extraordinary GoRUFFLY gamble.
The challenges seemed to arrive as a stampede after those heady, hopeful days of spring when we struck out for the north.
A series of mechanical issues, unplanned expenses, and lower than expected sales seemed like mile markers along a road to nowhere, which seemed to lengthen and harden like the odds.
Camping along the Arctic shore felt like preparing hard tack rations and coffee at the eve of another battle, not the celebration of a great victory.
A puncture and damaged sidewall, stranded by torrential rain and mud, and then my radiator gave out in the blazing Utah desert.
Then we crossed into Mexico, which was like plunging across the Rubicon. We stopped to feed and water the horses, counted our remaining pennies, and considered what last ditch offensive could be made.
And there, in a casita at the edge of a corn field outside a parched village is where the winds shifted.
A video of Moxie leaping into her Cockpit – an act we had recorded her perform a thousand times before across a thousand different landscapes – suddenly went viral.
Then another on the heels of that, which in turn brought a series of press appearances.
Throughout that winter, which had been warmer than the summer – literally true since we had been in Mexico and the Arctic, respectively – views were growing along with sales and donations to the Girl Up fundraiser.
As we set off that spring with renewed hopes and strong tailwinds, the bad-luck pattern seemed to be in permanent retreat.
But no streak – good or bad – remains permanently unbroken, just not broken yet.
And that’s why season 2 of GoRUFFLY is called ‘Into Tragedy’…
