| Mileage Chart | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 |
Excerpt from my journal, July 24:
Yesterday, touring euphoria took me about ninety minutes into the ride, as it does most days. I had just crossed the Continental Divide - not a big deal in itself; I've crossed it about seven times on this trip - and was riding the rolling gradients before the next crossing, eight thousand feet above sea level in the Rocky Mountains of northwest Wyoming. What could be better? At those moments I try to fathom riding across the United States. I don't know if I succeed in comprehending it, but I succeed in loving it.
It rained a little today, but not enough to bum anyone out, and not enough to make the locals happy. Although generally downhill, the gradient was light. The route passed Hebgen Lake, site of a 1959 earthquake, Richter scale 7.5. Eighty million tons of debris fell from an 8000-foot mountain slope onto an overflow camping area. It filled in the Madison River, creating a new lake, Earthquake Lake. Twenty-eight people died. In contrast, the Armenian quake of the late '80's killed 50,000; the Mexico City quake 10,000. The deadliest American earthquake, San Francisco 1906, killed about 600.
For dinner I pan-fried salmon on my Whisperlite stove, with fresh string beans and a jalapeno sourdough bread flute. I washed it down with a big Fosters Bitter Ale. I got all this at the extraordinary, for a town of one thousand, IGA Econo Market in Ennis. Had I wanted shallots, they had them. I stayed at the Camper Corner RV Park in Ennis, a bargain at seven dollars, but it used the sardine-can packaging model. I set up at the other end of the place from Adventure Cycling so one of the girls could come visit me. Instead I got my Swiss friends Martin and Thomas, whom I'd been seeing for days. They invited me for hot chocolate after dinner.
By 10:30 this fine morning I'd already climbed 1900 feet and come back down 600 to arrive in Virginia City, Montana. On the way I listened to AM radio, the second time in my life I'd listened to headphones on the bike. It was Mick Jagger's 55th birthday. It was a country station out of Dillon, but they did not play "Wild Horses" or "Faraway Eyes" for Mick. I did, however, hear
Except for the initial climb, I didn't like the day's ride much. A poor road surface jiggled me most of the time, and I felt listless. I stopped at a small bookstore in Sheridan for an iced latte and e-mail, run by the local art teacher. He thought this town could use some culture. "I don't think there's any danger of Barnes and Noble coming in and putting me out of business." I had several e-mails.
After cereal in camp I rode over Badger Pass, 6760 feet - from Dillon's 5100 - in eighteen miles. I dipped to 6000 again before climbing to 7360 at Big Hole Pass, then descended into tiny Jackson, home of Jackson Hot Springs Lodge, Rosa's cantina, Jackson Mercantile, and a garage. A faded IOOF hall claimed free Internet access but did not claim to be open. There was no water or food available from Dillon to Jackson, so I carried a bottle of Powerade in addition to the usual half-gallon of water. I could as easily have ridden on to Wisdom like the group, but why should I? Ron, a young Dutchman just out of school, stayed, his first night away from the group in 67 days. We each had the lemon chicken breast at the lodge restaurant, good but not exceptional. An immense piece of apple walnut cheesecake saved the meal from obscurity.
Ron and I walked around town - one street. He liked the '65 Cadillac, where I preferred the 1950's model, but I didn't actually like either of them. I explained the Church of the Latter Day Saints to him. I couldn't explain the International Order of Oddfellows, because I don't understand it myself. A hundred yards out in a field sat the hot spring itself, walled and enclosed in a fence, boiling hot. I wouldn't put my hand in it. Sleep came easily despite all the mooing.
I stopped at the Big Hole National Battlefield, where, in 1877, a force under Colonel John Gibbon attacked a band of Nez Perce who had been fleeing the Army for months. The Nez Perce won, technically, but their losses were heavy. The Army fired indiscriminately into the encampment, killing women, children, old men. It was then that the Nez Perce realized, even having won this battle, they were not going to beat the US Army. Lewis and Clark had also encamped here in 1805 or 1806. I couldn't see it all as I had a pass to climb, 7241-foot Chief Joseph Pass.
It wasn't too hard - I didn't even need first gear. Then the road
plunged 2000 feet in perhaps eight miles into the hot valley below.
I ate in Sula at about 4200
feet and pedaled into a headwind for the final 18 miles. Counting the round
trip to the grocery store, I rode 79 miles. Adventure
Cycling was hogging all the picnic tables, so I had to cook in
the midst of their riders' meeting.
Beginning with a tailwind and flat terrain, the morning was looking like the easiest day of the whole tour, but in the end it was just the flattest. The wind turned around after lunch; traffic was heavy and the afternoon dragged, relieved only by the teenage waitress at my pie stop in Lolo. For the first time, I began to think I might be getting tired of this.
I stayed at the Birchwood hostel in Missoula; so did the group. The route maps call anywhere you can sleep indoors, other than a motel, a hostel. But the Birchwood was a real hostel, with a kitchen and a living room, where you sleep in bunkbeds and have to do a chore in the morning.
Missoula is great college town, and headquarters of Adventure Cycling. The group and I took a day off. It was time to stock up on civilized experiences. Last night, I had found a good eastern Indian restaurant, someone's Tiger, with a great chutney; today I had a Thai lunch. I paid a visit to Adventure Cycling hq., where they treat you like a celebrity. Marketing director Kevin gave me a tour; I bought some stuff; and saw a map that had been soaking in water for over fifteen years. An eastbound cyclist had a message for me from Mickey, but he couldn't remember what it was. Lael shared his dinner with me. Then I had three desserts, a hot fudge sundae, a piece of pie, and a Yoplait yogurt.
I rode 38 miles on two bananas before I got any lunch. Up Lolo pass, only the last two or three miles presented any challenge, and second gear sufficed. Coming down the pass at 5235 feet, a cold rain fell for ten minutes, leaving clouds in the valley hanging on the mountainsides. I found a wonderful, isolated campsite at Powell Campground, near the Lochsa River, out of sight of the Eleven. The Eleven were short one stove, though, so Alice threw an arm around me and invited me to dinner, me and my stove. Gerritt was cooking pasta with Christy as sous-chef. They all made me feel welcome.
It was the eighth night in a row that I had been with the group (though it was only Ron one night). Though I rode alone, I was ending up with them every night. I was even trying to avoid them a little, but there are only so many campgrounds in Montana. By this time I was getting to know most of them, and there was no one I didn't like, but being around them changed the experience. I wanted my solo tour back.
Today was, I think, the most scenic of all 77 up to now. One of the funnest as well. I sat out in the woods in a hot spring with Christy and sat out a rainstorm under a bridge. It was easy too. Riding beside the lovely Lochsa River, there was only one climb all day, of fifty feet, once you got out of the campground (and that was only a hundred feet). All you had to do was keep the pedals going and try not to crash from staring at the beautiful canyon. There were no stores or gas stations all day, nor any houses that I can remember.
Breakfast was good this morning. Ten miles down the road, I stopped at the Jerry Johnson parking area, and hiked in a mile to the hot springs. Christy, in her riding clothes, was dangling her legs in the pool. I climbed in - it was perfect. Christy had just graduated from Michigan State and had never done anything like this ride before. She wasn't having a great time time on the trip. She needed a friend - someone her own age, another woman perhaps, since she and Alice hadn't really clicked. I felt a little sorry for her at the time, but she needed to get over it and have a good time. Her religion was helping her, she said.
We walked farther, to another pool. Two couples were soaking naked, one in their sixties, the other around forty. The old guy got out and stood there talking to Christy, who was seated. Whatever she was looking at, it wasn't his left arm, which was missing. Still he managed to show the full number of appendages. She was shocked, she told me on the walk back.
We went wading an hour later in the
Lochsa River. I stepped hard on a thorny branch in the water. I
pulled it out, but it still hurt.
By now it was early afternoon and we'd only done 25 miles. Christy was a slow rider so I went ahead, stopping at the historic ranger station a while, then sat out a cold rain under a bridge for half an hour. (Later my friend Dave would ask me if I was bummed out to be sitting under a bridge in the rain. Not at all - I was happy that bridge was there!) Finally I pulled into this tiny Apgar Campground and fixed the freeze-dried rice with curry chicken I had carried five hundred miles from Grant Village.
Before breakfast I was sitting outside a restaurant with my shoe off inspecting my heel. A Harley rider came up. "Getting blisters?" he asked. No, I explained to him, I stepped on a branch. "Want me to take a look at it?" he said, pulling out a big fish-scaling knife. "Just kidding," he said. He did look at it, but couldn't see anything in there.
After breakfast I was caught by Ron, Cecil, and Raymond, and joined them. They rode in a paceline, taking five to six-mile pulls at twenty miles per hour. In my turn I managed nineteen mostly, which wasn't bad. It was fun, and 20 miles melted away to a second breakfast in Kooskia. Fully one-third of the teams in the Tour de France had dropped, but Pantani still maintained a comfortable lead over Ulrich, with Bobby Julich holding third. Raymond had called home to Holland this morning and got the news. There were three Dutchmen in the ACA group. None of them had known the others were coming on this trip.
The route led over White Bird
Hill, climbing steeply away from the Clearwater River, deep into
quiet prairie hills on the Nez Perce reservation. I liked the
climb. Past Grangeville the road flattened then climbed a final 500
feet to 4320 above sea level. For those who cared to walk a
hundred feet, a stunning valley lie below. And for those who
leaned low over the bars, 2400 feet fell away in seven or eight
miles, the speedometer constantly over 35, mile after mile. This was
quite possibly the best downhill of the three months.
At 76 miles and one major climb, it had been a long day, but I felt strong all day. Could it have been the redundant breakfasts? I climbed 3520 feet, the ninth most of the tour. After dinner I sat at my picnic table and listed the top 20 climbing days. Of the eight that beat this day, three were in Virginia, two in Kentucky, and one each in Missouri, Colorado, and Wyoming. Three of the top six days were in Virginia - days two and three alone climbed 8200 feet. In Missouri I rode four consecutive days over 3000; 13,850 feet from Pilot Knob to Golden City.
Even more climbing than yesterday: 3800 feet, the sixth-highest so far. They were not easy - a long, hot stretch along the Salmon River fueled by pancakes - good ones - coffee (weak) and danish. The pancakes arrived with eight or ten - more than I could count anyway - tabs of butter melting on top. I shoved them off onto the table. There was nothing else to do with them. I had a very good lunch in Riggins, good salsa then a huge mesquite grilled chicken sandwich on a homemade roll with guacamole. Beside the Little Salmon River the road narrowed; traffic did not decrease. I don't know what they put in that guac - I could hardly stay awake. So I sat by the river, where the water was louder than the traffic, and read a while. I passed Zim's Hot Springs, where the group was staying, then rode over the 45th parallel. Finally, I ate at a bar just past the sawmill of Tamarack; called Dad; and rode four more miles to the twelve-site brushy USFS campground known as Evergreen. Cost: five dollars. I paid it, but a payment envelope showed up on my table anyway. For the first time I made a campfire, albeit briefly. For the third night in a row, I was camping alone. And my heel was feeling better at last.
I believe this is the day I rode my bike from a campground to another campground, ate in a couple of restaurants, climbed a big hill, and slept in my tent.The big hill had no name, but it rose 1300 feet above Cambridge to 4131 feet, then dropped to about 2100 again. The climb was warm, but nothing like the descent. I felt hotter going down than up. At 5:00 PM it read 110 degrees in the shade on the big dial thermometer at the restaurant. I had eaten a cheeseburger there, which is not surprising considering most of the items on the menu were patties of ground beef in a bun: hamburger, cheeseburger, double cheeseburger, bacon cheeseburger, Hell's Canyon burger, and some other named burger. For variety they offered grilled cheese, grilled ham and cheese, chicken fried steak, and grilled, breaded chicken sandwich. Mickey had been there a week ago and chatted with the woman.
I rode three miles to a barren but sparkling campground operated by Idaho Power. All the facilities are maintained to the standards of a high-class Atlanta office building. Best of all, it had drinking fountains with refrigerated water. And nice clean showers. And bright sodium vapor lamps. I ate a lot of cookies and had trouble sleeping.
I rode from 7:10 to 10:30 AM - that was it. I never made it out of Halfway. The first restaurant, at Pine something, wasn't open, so I was breakfast-deprived when I reached Halfway at 34 miles. I ate one, scrambled eggs with ham, homemade hashbrowns, weak coffee, a crunchy sweet cinnamon roll. I did laundry, getting pissed at the place when my clothes rinsed in hot water although I had selected Delicates and Woolens. It wasn't warm water, it was hot. The hoses were probably reversed. There was no one there to complain to.
Mike and Alice arrived. I had intended to ride on to Richland, but it didn't take much to convince me to stay. Had a couple beers with Lael, Kurt, and Bob, the Denver guys. That's about all there was to do in Halfway (unless you're in road construction, in which case you've got a lot of work to do). I ordered broasted chicken at the Stockman's Restaurant but was served fried without explanation. I asked about it. "Our broaster is broken," the waitress said. Apparently there is such a thing.
I finished Small Vices by Robert B. Parker, a detective novel. I never heard of Parker, but I'm trying to write like him now. He never uses dashes or semicolons, and rarely a hyphen. I don't remember ever seeing - I'm not sure of the name of this construction - an introductory appositive. It's a simple, unaffected style, clean and forceful like the protagonist Spenser, first name unstated. This book was easily ten times as good as the other crime novel I read, whose name and author escape me. (Parker would not have added that clause. He would have written another sentence: "I forger who wrote it and what it was called. I wish I remembered so I could not read any more of this author's books.")
The route climbed a thousand feet out of Halfway, and fell a similar amount to Richland. I encountered Mike and Alice, who ride together, and Gerrit on the way. As we entered Richland an old black man accosted us. "Lemme get my bike and I'll go with ya!" he shouted in a Louis Armstrong voice. He used to pick cotton in Texas. He is the only black man I could recall seeing since Yellowstone, and those were tourists.
I'm going to drink more lattes. I rode strongly and felt great today. It was 100 degrees and I didn't care. The hotter it got the harder I rode. For once it was hot enough that it felt like a summer afternoon in Georgia, less humid, but warmer to make up for it. I rode with Gerritt a little, and Mike and Alice some. The stark barren landscape slid by as I worked out what other bikes I might want to buy, not that I need any more. Most of the group stopped for sodas at a rancher’s house by the road, who sells sodas to passers-by.
I climbed three hundred feet above the desert floor to the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center. It told the tale of the pioneers and their ordeal in coming west, in exhibits and a poorly-acted one-woman performance. In Baker City we all stayed at the Mountain View Holiday Trav-l-park. Alice, Mike and I, and a newly animated Christy, went out for Mexican food. Christy was the first one in this afternoon. It must have given her confidence. Something did. She was chatting and cheerful, speaking Spanish with the waiter. I had two Dos Equis; she had two milks, explaining, "I love milk."
"I can say, 'I'm too sexy for my love' in Spanish," she told us. I asked her to say it and she did; and she said it right, she claimed. I have no idea what it means, in English or Spanish.
I've climbed 150 thousand feet now, on the nose. The first 75,000 took 1500 miles; the second 75,000 took 2360 miles.
Today's ride had three summits, Sumpter Summit, 5082 feet; Tipton Summit, 5124 feet; and Dixie Summit, 5277 feet. It looked like maybe three thousand feet of climbing on the map, but turned into 4080 feet gained, third-highest of the tour. Only the climb onto Skyline Drive and Hoosier Pass had more. The first place to obtain food was only two miles from the end. I ate a late lunch and wrote for a long time. The young waiter dispensed all the wisdom of his twenty years and referred a couple times to his art. I don't trust anyone who uses the words "my art."
It was about 5:30 when I hit the
Dixie Summit campground. I was the only one there. A retired
couple cruised in later but I was able to get a naked shower. I
like a naked shower. It's a little easier to clean certain
pieces. I built a superb fire but left it to join the old couple
for a while. They were pretty interesting - they traveled a lot -
but the man had to ask where I'd ridden from three times over the
course of an hour before it sank in that I had ridden all the way
from Virginia to Oregon.
I descended nine miles and joined Gerritt at breakfast. Ron and
Raymond arrived. Yesterday I learned that Raymond has run a
2:26 marathon. That makes him the fastest runner I've ever met,
by a long ways. He's 37, a programmer for KLM airlines.
We hit some nice towns today. I liked the looks of Prairie City and John Day as well. I bought another Robert B. Parker book there at the used bookstore. Only eight miles west came Mount Vernon, and one of the best lunches of the entire trip, with a large tasty bowl of clam chowder and a big piece of boysenberry pie. I've never had boysenberry, and if I ever have it again I hope it's exactly like that one. Dayville, where we all stayed, was the worst town of the day, offering little but a convenience store. I stayed at the church with the group, camping on the lawn.
Blueberry pancakes were good at the cafe. Most of us went a few miles off route to see the exhibits of the John Day fossil beds. Mike and I took a little hike to some fossil sites. The fossils have to be removed or they deteriorate rapidly, but synthetic fossils had been installed in the same places - a big tortoise shell; leaves; saber-tooth cat bones; but half of the mammal fossils found were oredonts, a horse-like, pig-like mammal with no modern descendants. After that Mike and I slogged up the seemingly endless Keyes Creek Summit to 4357 feet above sea level; I passed the 4000-mile mark. It was one of the few days I rode with someone most of the way.
We dropped into Mitchell about 4:00. I had run out of water before the summit, and immediately drank about three pints of Powerade, Frappucino, and water. And was happy to be staying in Mitchell. Mike went on and eventually Christy did, too. Long day for them.
There's a couple from New Jersey staying in the park, and a wild-haired guy named Jerry. I had seen him briefly in Dayville earlier. Mike greeted him by name. He had hung out with the group way back in Virginia. We went to dinner at the little Sidewalk Cafe in town, where we ordered Garden Burgers and soft ice cream. Although he looked as if he might be a homeless street person, with his scrawny shoulders and his odd belly and his slight limp, he proved to be both well-balanced and self-effacing. He was a DBMS programmer, fifty years old - his inspiration for this trip - most recently of Tempe, Arizona. I enjoyed his company more than most. But he was watching me write that next morning as I described him as "wild-haired."
Jerry Garcia died three years ago today. I had heard the Dead play "Unbroken Chain" a few months before, to my utter amazement.
Today's climb: Ochoco Pass, 4720 feet above sea level, a 2350-foot climb. Mike, Christy and the others rode over it yesterday, so they did over 4800 feet. At lunch I did not tip the waitress for the first time in twelve weeks. She didn't offer me water, more Pepsi. dessert, or ask me anything; what she did bring, she brought without enthusiasm. Two young guys in a gas station/convenience store were amazed that I had ridden from Virginia, which I had. "You can be proud of yourself," one of those guys told me.
I got to Redmond and decided to take tomorrow off. I stayed at the Desert Something RV Park, the only tent in the place. It sat three miles north of Redmond on US Route 97, a veritable superhighway, noisiest place I've yet slept. I cooked the Spicy Thai Pilaf I had purchased in Dayville and carried over two passes, with fresh brocolli. There was nothing Thai about it - it tasted exactly like Rice-a-Roni. With it I drank an entire $7.99 bottle of Columbia Crest chardonnay. There are advantages to taking a day off, like you can get drunk the night before.
Even before I got drunk I must have looked odd laughing uproariously at my picnic table. I was listening to Car Talk on my Walkman!
I took the day off in Redmond. The tour acquired an ending. In ten days I would fly to Phoenix out of Portland. Dad made the reservation.
At the Chamber of Commerce, a small soft-spoken man told me some of his friends who never had children now wish they had. Sometimes I feel like a rolling psychologist. I saw the only movie of the tour, Saving Private Ryan, a harrowing experience, one I can't even evaluate as a movie. Finally I had a bad dinner at Shari's Restaurant, a Shoney's/Coco's clone. It was celebrating its 20th anniversary, a testimonial to mediocrity.
Today I was crossing the last mountain range of the trip, the Cascades. McKenzie Pass looked like a big one, but it was in fact only forty-seven feet higher than Dixie Summit. West of Sisters I took route 242, a beautiful, quiet road. For the first eight miles it was nearly level, with almost no traffic, leading me through a lovely fir forest. I felt it the prettiest climb of the entire western U.S. At a viewpoint called Windy Point you could see across the lava rubble to Mt. Jefferson, 27 miles away, and even Mt. Hood, 75 miles to the north. I did spend some time in the 22/26 but in that gear it wasn't a strenuous climb.
I spent some time at the summit, taking the path through the volcanic rubble. Jerry got there; I hadn't seen him in a couple of days. For us it was a moment and a place to savor, our last high point. A young guy came up the from western side of McKenzie; for him it was the opposite. He had done nothing but climb since Portland. He asked us if there's any special braking technique he should use going down. I told him to sit up if he gets going too fast.
I was out of water and food so I got mildly pissed when I didn't plummet like a falling sheep right off the top. But down in the woods, moister and more fernful on the western side (I made that word up, "fernful") I plummeted pretty well. Generally, though, it was a 25 to 30 mph descent, and you had to brake a lot. The road was alternately sunny and shaded; it was narrow; and occasionally there was sand or gravel on a turn.
I stopped at Proxy Falls, hiking a mile or two. At the lower falls you could stand right in the creek and look up the falls nearly two thousand feel. A couple hours later I got to McKenzie Bridge campground; Jerry was already there. We had lost 4000 feet in elevation from the pass. Jerry thought the descent was "magic. If someone had taken me back up to the top, I would have come down that again."
We shared a nine-dollar site. I concocted a meal of pasta noodles and tomato-based sauce with sautéed onions and a fresh tomato and a little cabernet. He deemed it very good, and indeed it wasn't bad. But I've made three or four better dishes on this trip.
At 6:15 this morning I already had my bike upside-down and was pulling the rear wheel to replace a broken spoke. It was perhaps the earliest I had ever worked on anything in my life. I used Jerry's pump - he has that nice Topeak Master Blaster (I wonder if Stevie Wonder gets a royalty from them) that's almost like a floor pump. It's so easy to inflate a tire with that thing, but it weighs about three times as much as mine.
The ride was downhill mostly. It warmed up in the afternoon to Georgia-like conditions, but I felt good. I wonder if hot weather brings out my best - I felt good a week ago, that hot day over Flagstaff Summit too. Or else it was my afternoon pick-me-up, a big iced mocha and a quart of Gatorade, sort of a cyclist's speedball. Those came a couple hours after lunch at the Vida Café. I had some good navy bean soup, curly fries, and a slice of blueberry pie.
Mike and Alice
Every time I ride with Jerry I drop him in a hundred yards. I must ride four miles an hour faster than he does. In Eugene I decided to go to the Wal-Mart and get my four rolls developed. Some of the shots were pretty good. A couple of the sunsets came out really nice; and Christy took a good picture of me standing in the Lochsa River. I got a nice shot of her, uh, from behind.
I camped in Coburg, a few miles north of Eugene. Jerry was there. We talked until after dark about our tours. He hadn't had as good a time as I did. He'd had more like the kind of time I had expected to have. My tour had been more fun than I expected. He had worse weather and by his own admittance it took him weeks to learn how to eat right. I don't know why; he's toured for years. He was a little disappointed that he found no single women along the way, but in retrospect not surprised. I agreed with that disappointment.
It must have been about 11:00 that Alice and Mike strolled in. I hadn't seen them in a few days. Mike and I shook hands and Alice threw her arms around me. It was good to see them. They were glad too. Christy showed up later, but the rest of the group had ridden on.
I took a long time leaving camp this morning. Alice had genuinely good bread, a cibatta and two boules, which someone had given her. We all looked at the pictures I got developed last night. I shook hands with Mike than went to hug Christy. She put both arms around me and hugged me warmly, to my surprise. Alice hugged me too. I rode out to the Original Pancake House in Eugene, just like the one on Cheshire Bridge Road in Atlanta.
I wanted to ride 85 miles to the coast today, but the forecast called for 100 degrees. The record for August 13 was 98 degrees. And I didn't leave breakfast until 11:00. Wish I had gotten to see more of Eugene. What I did see, I liked - a college town with amazing bicycle facilities. I seemed to always be on a street with bike lanes, and I wasn't even trying. A guy gave me directions when I looked lost; a professor on a bike asked me simply, "How far?"
Out of Eugene the route took county roads through Crow and Noti, past two sawmills. The postmaster in Noti was retired from twenty some years with the Postal Service in Eugene. He became postmaster of his own domain, making forty thousand a year in an easy position. He showed me a snapshot of his vineyards near Crow, where he grew pinot noir, pinot gris, and a little chardonnay. I ate two grilled cheese sandwiches on average bread in Walton; it was the best food they had. I didn't want a damn burger. A fresh-faced blonde girl pulled in on a bike, wearing a day pack, shorts, and a sleeveless shirt. She looked to be eighteen or twenty. She won the bike at the gym where she works out, took a fifty-mile training ride, and set out on a four-day tour. We talked for an hour; she was easy to talk to, genuine and unaffected. As I got ready to leave I introduced myself. Her name was Alison. "Maybe we'll see each other out on the road somewhere," she said as she left. That surprised me.
There were a couple of tunnels along the road, with pushbuttons for cyclists to push before entering. The buttons would flash warning lights at both entrances. I rode to this Archie Knowles USFS Campground, where all the water smelled like sulfur. There was a couple on a tandem, Rhonda and Alan, on their first camping tour, a one-week loop involving the coast. She invited me to dinner, which I happily accepted. They were riding a Co-Motion tandem built in Eugene, carrying panniers. Co-Motions are nice, and expensive. Alan said they usually ride about thirteen miles per hour on level ground with no wind. That was unladen. I had not realized it was possible to go that slow on a tandem.
Five or ten miles north of Florence, the Pacific came into view! I shot a victory picture. Later, I walked a short path from the hiker/biker campsite at the state park near Waldport to the beach, and waded in it. It was freezing. My feet were numb in a minute. It's the custom, of course, to dip your bike wheels in the Atlantic and Pacific, but I hadn't started at the Atlantic. I'm not much for symbolic gestures anyway. I knew perfectly well how I'd gotten there.
Riding north on the Oregon coast was a perplexing mixture of good road surface, heavy traffic, spectacular scenery, disappearing paved shoulders, and horrendous headwinds. I couldn't figure out if I liked it or not. A lot of times it was so hard that I told myself, I've made it to the Pacific Ocean; I don't have to go any further. Then I'd sit down to a late lunch with a couple guys I met, Nathan and Matt, and they had me laughing out loud about people they'd met. They were hating the wind as much as I did, but they ride through it about five miles per hour faster.
I slept well under the Pacific Ocean fog, and was up early and out of camp at 7:03 AM. It was foggy, damp and chilly, but no problem to see a hundred yards or more. I did a load of laundry that included my sleeping bag, eating breakfast during the dry cycle. The pancakes tasted of baking soda. I told the waitress and she told the cook.
People asked where I was going and where I was coming from. Now that I was off the Trans-Am route, people were surprised that I had come over four thousand miles. Most cyclists - and there are a lot here - are just riding the coast for a week or two. A small man with a foreign accent asked, "Have you taken many pictures or do you keep them in your heart?" I try to do both, I answered. He was a mechanical engineering professor, formerly at Purdue, now at Oregon State in Corvallis, who left India in 1955. He never understood what it was he couldn't stand about India until he was introduced to Joseph Campbell, just three months ago. Campbell was an expert on the myths of Indian culture, who finally went there, and discovered mainly disillusion. He found a contradictory culture of spirituality and greed which both repelled and attracted him.
The professor had some interesting opinions to share. Eugene was a little flaky, "a bit too hippie-ish for an engineer." We got into a long discussion on morality and what he termed the work ethic. By that he meant the way companies treat their employees as well as the employee's dedication to his work. It's wrong for Honda and Toyota to work their engineers like slaves, as it wrong for a tenured professor to sit in his office watching TV. At his university, the administration tries to tell him that he is a service provider and students are customers. Meanwhile over at H-P, they call the grounds a campus.
On the road, wind was one-fourth of
yesterday and traffic was double. I stopped at Yaquina Head and
Otter Rock, where whales were surfacing 150 yards away. With all
the sightseeing I didn't get to camp in Lincoln City until 7:00.
Oh yeah, I had the best lunch of the tour at Canyon Way
Restaurant in Newport, clam chowder and a cajun halibut sandwich.
In camp I cooked Ramen noodles for the first time on the tour,
with a Beck's dark 22-ounce.
The guy I camped near last night, on the Rivendell bike, was in camp. Two guys pulled in from Fairbanks, eighty days into their tour. Nathan and Matt arrived. They had found a contact sheet by the road, shots of squirrels mostly. Most of the shots had been x'ed out.
Happily, my route rejoined the Trans-Am at an intersection called Otis, where we both vanished into a quiet lovely forest for ten miles. The road curved and tilted deliciously on the downhills; hardly a motor vehicle came by. I ate another breakfast, a cinnamon roll and a big latte, at a nice little pub in Neskowin. At Sandlake there were dune buggies, trail bikes, and those little ATV's all over the dunes. I had to climb several hundred feet before dropping back to Camp Lookout State Park. I didn't cook but rode three miles to a little joint called Wee Willy's for a decent fish sandwich, clam chowder, and a slice of carrot cake.
That night it hit me that the tour was ending. The next morning, I would get up to a full day of touring for the last time. Because the day after, I would arrive in Astoria. It made me sad and philosophical. A month ago I had ridden out of Lander, Wyoming, up the Wind River valley eventually to Dubois - 79 miles; two months ago from Chanute, Kansas to Eureka with Jeff; and three months had passed since day one, when Park and I had seen a wild turkey in Bull Run Regional Park, had breakfast at McDonalds, and ridden to the Sperryville Volunteer Fire Department. What did it all mean? Any answer I'd give would be too simple - or maybe too complicated. I sure know how to do this, though.
I rode mostly on the Three
Capes Scenic Route. It was more peaceful than spectacular.
Traffic came back with a vengeance from Tillamook to Bay City, as
if Piedmont Road had been transplanted from Atlanta to the Oregon
coast. There was a peaceful stretch away from the shore between
Bay City and Nehalem. I sampled some wines at the Nehalem Bay
Winery but I didn't like any of them enough to order one,
especially after she insulted me. I told some kids there I was an
expert in six-dollar wines. "We don't have any cheap
wines," she said. Her 1993 Pinot tasted thin; the Chard was
in the French style; I liked the Riesling the best. But the white
wines were at room temperature so it was hard to judge them, and
I simply can't gauge a red without a meal. I'm not good enough to
extrapolate the sensations.
I cooked a Knorr-based potato soup, same as I made in Darby MT a few weeks back, and ate it across from a Brit named Tim, who concocted a Knorr-based vegetable soup. My meal was better because I had beer. Tim had been working for Microsoft in England, on the Microsoft Network. He had left to get away from it and figure out his next move by riding down to San Francisco from Seattle.
Manzanita was the coolest town I saw on the Oregon coast, a few blocks of frame houses down by the sea out of range of 101. There were a few restaurants and bars, apparently all charming. Like, Duck, North Carolina - at least the Duck of ten years ago - Manzanita struck a perfect balance between tourism and the backwoods.
It was the last day. I did my best to dawdle along the way. In Cannon Beach I stopped in at Mike's Bike Shop and admired the F. Mosers and an Olmo. At Seaside I found the first actual cyber cafe in the United States, that I've seen at least. The route then mercifully left 101 onto a Lewis and Clark Road, leading eventually to a reproduction of Fort Clatsop, believed to be the site they wintered on the Pacific. On the road there were hills, forests, and forested hills, so it was sort of a last taste of what so much of this tour was like. I loved those parts, climbing hills on little-traveled roads far from anywhere. You don't have to be an athlete to ride across the continent, but you have to put in an heroic effort. Almost every night I went to bed thinking, it's been a long day. It was work every day, a lot of work usually. At Fort Clatsop a volunteer demonstrated writing with a quill pen. Things like that remind me how easy we have it today. Never mind word processors; writing is easy today because of our pens. People were writing with fountain pens until World War II, and they were a huge improvement over quills.
I followed business route 101 into Astoria, then some residential streets with a few final steep hills to the Maritime Museum on the Columbia River, western terminus of the Trans-Am. An Indian motel manager tells me, "If you find a room in this town for less than forty dollars, take it," after I had offered him twenty. I went to the next place, offered him thirty, and got it for thirty-five. The odometer read 4579 from Bull Run -- 4,605 miles in all from Dulles Airport. It took 96 days from there.
[Thursday, August 20, Southwest Airlines flight 1589, Portland, OR to Phoenix, AZ]
I betook me back downtown on this final riding day hoping to enjoy a celebratory repast. I chose Ira's, a restaurant claiming unique food. Sourdough bread was served first, which unfortunately had sat too long in a warmer so the edges were dried out, not just the surface, but a quarter-inch deep. In addition to fresh butter, Ira served a compote of artichoke hearts, garlic, and olive oil. As Eliot Mackle would write, I gobbled it up. I ordered one of the specials, fettuccini with smoked trout, onions, snow peas, and yellow squash (although the waitress said it would be smoked trout, onions, and green bell peppers). Although it sounded interesting, and the ingredients were of high quality and properly cooked, they did not seem to work together. The smoky trout had the only flavor, the squash, onions, and snow peas all being rather bland. A white wine sauce and some herbs, of which the dish was devoid, might have brought it to life. I may have been fortunate, as the portion was too big even for a bicycle tourist on a blowout; I ate too much and still left some. Curiously, in Bernard Malamud's The Natural, which I'm reading, the protagonist Roy Hobbs was eating so much in this part of the story that he nearly killed himself. I'm not sure I understand it. His appetites nearly destroyed him, I guess. Mine didn't - I outrode them. I outrode any objective I ever imagined for myself. And after it all, I still wanted to ride.
So ends the longest bike tour I shall ever take, most likely. I was sorry not to be camping under the trees in the cool Oregon air or staying in a town you can ride across in five minutes or plotting where I would ride the next day. The next morning, after separating the stuff I would take to Arizona (it fit easily into one front pannier) from the stuff I would ship back to Atlanta, I loaded the Cannondale once more and hit the street. It felt good. Tires felt low, but I let it go. I rode one mile to Bikes and Beyond, 1089 Marine Street, where the proprietor congratulated me. I packed the panniers and camping gear into a big box and lugged it four blocks to a shipping place. As a last souvenir I bought two water bottles with the Bikes and Beyond logo in green. They looked good on the Cannondale against the cherry smoke paint. I gripped her bars one more time, wanting to do something with her, but I took a last fond look at my summer home bereft of panniers. Chris (I believe his name was) said, "One last look, eh?" I shook his hand and thanked him; he congratulated me again; and I walked back into the world where riding a bike is just something to do.
