I was in Italy one August day, riding down the toe of the boot near Palmi headed for Sicily.  It was very hot, 100 degrees or so, and I was following S-18, which I'd picked up at Paola and would follow to Villa S. Giovanni where I'd catch the ferry to Messina.  I can't call it Highway S-18 because there the word highway equates with our 4-lane divided Interstate Highways.  Here, it's a two-lane rattlesnake in the mountains, coiled and lethal to the unwary cyclist.

To add to my frustration I'd made a navigation error that sent me down the road pictured above to a dead end at the very nice beach at Palmi.  So I had to reverse my course and climb the hill I'd just merrily coasted down and try to find my way back onto the "highway."  This picture was taken during the "merrily" phase.  Later I was in no mood for photography.

Keep in mind now that I'm riding a touring bicycle that's weighed down with 60 lbs. of gear.  Add the water and bike and you're looking at 90 lbs.  Lance Armstrong's bike and equipment weighs about 15 lbs.  And he has "domestics" on his team that carry water for him.

Well anyway I had to turn around, climb back up the hill and find the right highway.  As I was attempting this I came to the steepest hill I'd ever seen, not pictured here but surely a 15%, maybe an 18% grade.  I swear these Italians must have descended from cliff-dwellers.  They can build a road and village on nearly vertical terrain and apparently prefer to do so.

For reasons unknown to me highway engineers, here in America as well as overseas, define the slope of a hill in percent rather than angle.  A 15% slope rises 15 feet every 100 feet it travels.  There's probably a simple formula to convert that to an angle but what would be the purpose?

If you push a bicycle on level ground you'll find your feet are slightly closer to the front wheel than the rear.  As the slope increases your hands and arms will move forward and your feet will do their work further and further backward toward the rear wheels.  On this unhappy occasion my hands and arms were stretched fully out in front of me and my feet were pushing pavement aft of the rear wheel.  I pictured myself as looking something like a Roman slave pushing a mill stone around some endless circle.  How the hell did I get here?

I was counting, and trying to push, a hundred steps before ducking into the shade on the roadside to recover for the next hundred steps.  I was also looking down at the pavement trying to forget how steep the road ahead was.

All of a sudden the weight of the bicycle seemed to disappear and I was able to push with no more effort than what I’d use on flat ground.  I looked ahead to see if I’d reached the top without knowing it but at the same time I knew that was impossible.  Sure enough the road continued straight up.  I looked back to see if my packs had fallen off, knowing that was impossible too, or was there some other explanation.  What I saw was a little old man, surely seventy years old, directly behind my bicycle with his head down and both hands on the rear panniers doing his part to get me up this hill.  He hadn’t said a word, just saw something he wanted to do and did it.  I about teared up, then got back to work, pushing.

At the top of the hill I thanked him, we exchanged smiles and he was on his way.

Darn people.  Just when you think you’re perfectly justified in being in the foulest mood possible some guy like him comes along and spoils it.