After college, moving to Omaha felt like the beginning of real life.
By day, I had landed the perfect degree-driven job as an Art Director at a graphic design studio. By night, I was doing what every recent graduate does best—collecting new friends, closing bars, solving the world’s problems badly, and pretending sleep was optional.
That’s how Eric O’Brien became one of my people.
We met through mutual friends, usually with music playing too loud, too many cocktails involved, and long arguments about cards, life, and whatever alternative band we were obsessed with that week. Eric loved camping and mountain biking, which to me sounded less like hobbies and more like religion.
So when he suggested a weekend at Indian Cave State Park, I was in.
We loaded both bikes onto the back of my Honda Prelude—a car nobody believed I could fit inside unless they saw the driver’s seat tilted back like a lounge chair—and headed south on a perfect Friday morning.
The trip started exactly right.
Tents up. Supplies unpacked. Bikes off the rack. A few hours riding the flatter bluff trails.
Then we got back to camp and discovered we had apparently adopted several hundred ticks from the prairie grass.
Nothing says “great weekend” like sitting cross-legged by a tent picking parasites off your legs and laughing until your stomach hurts.
That night, the sky changed.
Storm clouds rolled in from the southwest and built into towering monsters. Thunder cracked in the distance.
Being newly graduated college men, we were technically educated but apparently not smart enough to check the weather.
So naturally our decision was: we’re already here.
The storm hit like God was dumping mop buckets from heaven.
Forty-mile-an-hour winds, sheets of rain, lightning so constant the tents glowed like movie props.
Somehow I slept through most of it.
The next morning I woke up to sunlight, campfire smoke, and the smell of coffee Eric had already made.
That alone is friendship.
But after what Eric told me next, that was true friendship.
Apparently sometime before sunrise, he woke up to discover a tick attached in about the worst place a man can imagine. According to Eric, he nearly passed out right there in the tent before deciding the only reasonable response was to get up, start coffee, and pretend the morning was still salvageable.
That’s the kind of detail no trail map prepares you for.
We drank coffee, chewed beef jerky, and headed for the trails again—both of us now a little more respectful of Nebraska prairie grass.
Only then did we realize how hard it had rained.
The river had spilled far beyond its banks, swallowing the lower road and forcing the rangers to close access near the cave entrance. Our original route was gone, so we hiked the bikes to another trailhead and started down a steep wooded descent instead.
I went first.
At the top it was exhilarating—fast turns, wet earth, trees blurring past, that perfect post-storm smoothness under the tires.
Then the hill got steeper.
Then faster.
Then came the turn.
A root had been exposed by the runoff, except “exposed” isn’t really the right word because this thing looked like it had grown into a medieval trap overnight.
My front tire hit it above the axle.
The bike stopped.
I did not.
I went screaming over the handlebars and flew through the air like I’d been personally launched by the park itself, landing face-first in fresh mud twenty feet later and plowing a trench with my lips.
By the time Eric got there, I was peeling mud out of my eyes, spitting dirt, and trying to decide whether my teeth were all still accounted for.
He looked at the destroyed front wheel, laughed like a man witnessing high art, and said:
“You know, it’s a good thing we brought extra rims, because yours is absolutely screwed.”
That pretty much ended the biking portion of the adventure.
But on the hike back to camp, still muddy and carrying wounded equipment, I spotted a patch of morels just off the trail.
Eric had never had them before.
That night, after showers, a fire, and fresh morels sizzling over camp food, he took one bite and declared it the best thing he’d ever eaten.
Funny how the weekends that go wrong become the ones you remember best.
The storms.
The ticks.
The wipeouts.
The ruined rims.
The stories retold by firelight.
Sometimes the disaster is the adventure.
If this story resonated with you, you’re not alone.
