EnRouteTransport

Let’s begin the day with a downhill.
20 miles to the next town, but less work, eh?
Check out the scenery! How about the road and traffic? Is this the kind of downhill I can just ride, the kind that lets me take off, launch into flight, minor shifts of my body to steer and then just smooth, unadulterated joy…?
I guess we’ll see.

I start down the hill.
Oooh, there’s a cyclist! I zip by, “You’re almost there!” and he smiles, cranking the pedals.
A sponsor car. Trek. Hey! Whatever. I’m so glad to be out doing this fully self-supported. People keep saying I’m going really light. I keep thinking of things I don’t need in my bag…and I keep collecting things I don’t need because I don’t need them, but I need them. Look for Moose. Oh, hey, that was cool. I’m going too fast to stop. Check it out, that New Mexico plate passed you on the climb, but now he’s out fishing. He probably stops every now and again, gets out to try his skill, then moves on. I can see how that would be fun. What are you going to do at the bottom of this, take the short ride to the larger town in the other direction or take the little longer ride to the smaller town on your route? Depends on what time it is. What’s this? Looks like a big hill. You said it was all downhill from the top. Well, it is, but that doesn’t mean you’re not going to have to do some more climbing along the way. That’s how downhills come, it’s like moderation and keeps you balanced. You’re breathing hard. Yeah, so? Downshift. There’s no race, nowhere I have to be. I’ll take my time. Oooh, look at that! Hah, that’s funny. Take a picture. Cool, let’s keep going. It’s one of those hills that seems flat. Yep, that’s why you’re in such a low gear. Well, it seems flat. One revolution at a time, that’s how we get there. Pretty yellow flowers. The air smells so good.

“Where am I?” I check the map.
“Here. Neat. That cliff looks like it has a face in it. Oh, and a train! Perfect, a scenic byway along a functional rail line. That’s what I’m talking about.”

Many of the roads I ride have some kind of scenic status, many of them scenic byways. Through the country on the western side of the Colorado Rocky Mountains Front Range, I follow the Colorado River Headwaters Scenic Byway. The country is distinct from other areas…they all are in their way. The road winds through canyons, around cliffs, through desert mountains, over green mountains, through beetle kill forests (not nearly as bad as far northern Colorado), along aspen meadows, and into and out of small towns.
“Location is everything. Check out the scenic context of this scenic byway sign.”
I’m sure there’s some Department of Transportation rule about where you can place signs, and then you get a kind of roadway clutter in places because that’s the designated place for everything. I suppose having signage along an entire roadway detracts from it too. Let’s face it, you have to warn people of roadway hazards, like wildlife, you have to run your power, you have to pick up the trash and recognize who’s doing it, you have to look at the pretty scenery, you have to know how fast to go, you have to know about the turns, you have to know when the road is steep, you have to know if there’s construction…ok, so we have a lot of need to know and need to share on the road, not every sign placement considers aesthetics. Maybe I’m weird because I notice these things.

We’re in Grand County. Does that speak to the look of the place, the gold rush back in the day, someone named Grand…does it matter? If the point of this drive is that it follows the headwaters of the Colorado, that’s something, but are the headwaters reason enough to designate a roadway? How scenic is this drive—or pedal in my case? I’ve been working on a scenic byway back in Oregon, and I suppose the question of how scenic the drive is arises. Besides the headwaters, how else was this byway pitched. Did it focus on the historical or heritage aspects of the area? Another nearby byway does just that by following the gold rush. I don’t think the Colorado River headwaters were functionally navigable for transportation, so the point of celebrating the river wouldn’t be about historic transportation corridors—much as I enjoy that idea. Why not just leave it as a thing of beauty as it is, like a flower or butterfly, without having to attribute significance or meaning to it? Find the beauty in what you see…people consider different things beautiful. This is a living landscape, meaning it continues in popular use…it’s a functional transportation route along a significant natural feature. It’s not frozen in time, it’s alive in time. When I think of the Colorado River, the mighty waters that formed the Grand Canyon come to mind, as does the trickle this river makes at its terminus. For me, headwaters signal something like, “Here begins wildness. The mightiest forces in nature have modest beginnings.”

Why do people come here?
Sign says, “Sportsman’s Paradise.”
“That explains it.”

In Kremmling I called the Riverside Lodge in Silverthorne. My map indicated “hostel” and to call ahead for a reservation. I managed to make a reservation for a spot in the dorm room with Steve even though the semis lumbering by rattling their chains made it pretty much impossible for me to hear him…I assumed the effect was the same on the other side.
“When do you think you’ll be here?”
“Well, I’m in Kremmling now. It’s 12:30,” I made a hasty miscalculation, “probably about 4.”
“Ok, when you get here come on in and ask for Steve.”
We hung up and I did the math again. “Three and a half hours, what was I thinking? It’ll probably be more like 5. Plus, I’ve been dragging today.”
I didn’t move any faster right away. Heading out of Kremmling, I had to stop again for pictures of some naturally unnatural green ponds next to the rail tracks. What can I say, I respond to color. And then I had to stop again just to test the viciousness and voraciousness of the local mosquito population. Up the hill I went. Then down the hill I went.
Afar off in the distance, I saw another cyclist climbing.
“Will he want to stop. Will I?”
The cyclist crossed the road ahead of me and stopped on the far side of the guardrail.
“He definitely wants to talk. That would be funny if I said ‘Hi’ and rode past. No it wouldn’t.”
I slowed and stopped to talk to him.

“Are you by yourself?”
“Are you by yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
We were going to get along just fine starting that conversation off talking on top of one another. Despite saying that I’d had a slow start to the morning, I felt great, a bit bike blissed.
“Where’d you leave from?”
“Eugene, OR. I left from my front door. Where do you hail from?”
“St. Louis, MO. I left from my front door.”
“High five, man. That’s the best, isn’t it? Where are you headed?”
“I’m going to Missoula and then picking up the Lewis & Clark Trail. I’ll follow the Columbia into Portland where I have people to see. Then I’m heading down the coast into California. I have more people to see there. I have family in Eugene too, I should probably see them. It’s a lot to see everyone.”
“Yeah, I spent some time last night making arrangements to see people in Pueblo.”

“When are you going to be there?”
“In two days.”
“Two days?! I was there a week and a half ago. How many miles you traveling? You must be in your 20s.”
“I’m 35. Yesterday I did over 100 miles, but that’s not usual.”
“I’m old. I don’t travel that fast. I go about 40 miles a day.”
“You’re not old. You’re doing this.”
“You’re gonna hate Kansas.”
“Don’t tell me that. I believe there’s something fun to be found everywhere, everyday.” I keep telling people how I made it up Chief Joseph Pass, on the hunt for yellow things. I shared that story again.
“Well, you’re going to have fun. Are you going to Guffey?”
“Yeah, I was thinking about that for tomorrow.”
“The hostel there is great. You stay in these little cabins for $10.”
“I’ll check it out, that’s awesome.”
“I should let you go if you’re going all the way to Silverthorne.”
“Aw, it’s all downhill from here, right?”
“Are you taking 30 around the lake. It’s really pretty.”
“I’m Mike.”
“Well Mike from St. Louis, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you. I’m Heidi. Have a great trip!”

I rode into Summit County.
“Oh yeah, all the 14eers.”
I stopped to take a picture of the wildlife crossing sign at a turn for Green Reservoir. Kept thinking back to the wildlife caution in Yellowstone and wondered why they didn’t have cyclists on the sign along with the deer and elk. I continued down the road in the shadow of some brewing rain clouds. The road went down and up, down and up around the lake. At one point I realized I should be on the other side, and I looked across at the road that had no traffic on it.
“Bugger, I missed the turn.” I think I simply spaced out in my bike bliss and should have turned down the road when I stopped to take the picture, but it never entered my awareness.
I came to the top of a rise and remarked at the darkness of the rock and soil the road sliced through. The sky came down close, I could almost reach out and touch it. Instead, it touched me. Fat raindrops started coming down, marking the pavement with big, slobbery splats.
“Hmmm. Maybe I can get ahead of it.” I pedaled hard in big gears up and down the hills around the lake. I couldn’t outrun it. We traveled perpendicularly to each other, the storm and I. I saw a fisherman running up the slope to his truck. “It’s raining!” He gave me a quizzical look midstride. The traffic slowed in the rain, but I kept up a good pace, accelerated well beyond my norm and singing. I came to the tail of the storm right as I intersected with the road that went around the other side of the lake. Four cyclists had stopped there – probably to put on rain gear – and just started moving when I flew by, “Right on cyclists! Yeah! It’s raining.” And then I was out of the rain, and I didn’t feel wet. I had some climbing to do to get to Silverthorne, and that’s when I started to notice the altitude and the effects of having raced around the lake.

I saw the green sign for Silverthorne, and a bike path mysteriously appeared on the side of the road. At first I thought it was a sidewalk and didn’t get on it, then I realized it was a present for me. I accepted. Felt like I rode that path a long time to get into town. I checked my map. “Where am I going? Rainbow Drive, Riverside Lodge.” Over and over again, I paced myself that way… “Rainbow Drive, Riverside Lodge. Rainbow Drive, Riverside Lodge.” I had a guess about where Riverside Lodge would be. Rainbow Drive could be anywhere. As one friend mentioned to me at the beginning of my trip, “Rainbows are everywhere. All you need is a little sun and a little rain.” I guess when you modify “Rainbow” with “Drive” that makes it a little more location specific.

I remember Silverthorne from past trips to Colorado in a vague sort of way. Coming into town, the Blue River area to my left had a rather familiar resemblance to the terrain of one of my Outward Bound courses. I wondered if that was the place where the instructor’s vegan boyfriend had hiked in a load of chocolate cookies made with amaranth flour on sandals he fashioned from old tires. The cookies were great, first time I’d eaten amaranth flour. Don’t be fooled, I was all about the chocolate, but as a budding vegan kitchen chemist, the whole experience made an impression. My first course had been out there somewhere too, but I thought Dillon was the town the trailhead departed from. It all had a lot of familiarity to it. Then came the buildings. Target. Big box store adopts design guidelines and building articulation patterns so that it doesn’t look like one big box…looks more like mountain town building cluster. “Well, now there’s a Target that doesn’t have the same placeless look as every other Target I’ve studied recently.” Target was the target of some criticism on placelessness and lack of identity in west Eugene for a project I worked on. I wound around mountain town mall looking for Rainbow Dr. Found Rainbow Drive but got so lost in the parking lots and shopping mania, I got scared so pulled into visitor information for a map. I didn’t want to get lost in that maze of consumerism and car culture.

“Riverside Lodge is just down the street.”
“Cool. I can get there. It’s a little hard to tell what’s a street and what’s a parking lot. Thanks.”

I made it to the lodge, got a quick tour and got myself settled. 4:11 p.m. No way!

I had to go find some food. My head felt severely sugar deprived. I walked along the river bike path (for me!) and crossed a ped bridge to the other side. I hadn’t seen much in the way of food down Rainbow, but I had seen some options coming into town. The first store I saw had a Patagonia sign visible from outside, and I went in thinking I might be able to find some GU, which I was also low on. It was a fishing store. Oops. A nice guy behind the counter said I could learn to fish there, and then I could eat the fish. Normally, I would agree that is the better way to procure food…teach me a skill and forage from the source. However, I didn’t have time. I could feel the sleep about to swallow me, but my head was somewhere else. I wandered out.
“Don’t people eat when they go shopping? Criminy…looks like they eat t-shirts made in sweatshops!”
I made a b-line for the first place that looked like I could get something edible and happily discovered I didn’t have to have wheat with it. Yeah. I ate too much and walked very slowly back to the lodge wondering how altitude would mix with overeating. I got to my room and passed out.
Becky called. “Are you sleeping?”
“Yeah, but let’s talk about Pueblo. Who knows when we’ll have a chance to talk next.”
We made some rough plans. I must have done something for a little while after that, but primarily I went back to sleep. Oh, I texted David. He and I do the New York Times crossword puzzle every weekend at home. I hadn’t even seen a NYT puzzle since I’d been out. Found out he was having a nasty infection to deal with. Ew. Not like I could do anything from Silverthorne. Bummer.

In the morning, I was up not particularly early to get some writing done. Shortly after I made tea in the dark kitchen one of the longer-term tenants of Riverside showed up. When Steve showed me around, he did mention that there were people who’d been tenants in the space for a while could answer questions I had. I also noticed a “for rent” sign on the fence when I went out walking for dinner and figured he must rent rooms on the third floor. So, I stayed at an SRO and finally had a chance to meet the kind of person who lives in one. SROs for those of you not familiar with planner acronym speak is Single Room Occupancy. Essentially, SROs are residential models that add very low income density, particularly in downtown areas. Generally, SROs attract older single men, people who don’t necessarily need a kitchen and just need a place to sleep. Usually, SROs are old hotels. Sometimes they have a reputation for being seedy and run down. I’ve been curious what new SRO models might look like as they seem to serve a vital function in economically depressed neighborhoods that also want to attract people.
I never asked his name, this man at the Riverside, but we had a nice conversation. He’s not homeless because he lives there, but I figured he wasn’t more than one night away from being homeless. When one of the other guys left, he called out to him.
“Hey, if you get the Times, I’d love it.” And to me he said, “He works at Starbucks. Sometimes he brings home the Times. It’s such a treat.” And yelling back to the guy who just left, “You can just leave it in the driveway.”
I turned around, and there was the Times, on the kitchen table. “Oooh! They are yummy. Do you do the crossword puzzles?”
He looked at me blankly.
“Do you mind if I dismember the paper for the puzzle? Do you read the Arts section?”
“Go ahead.”
“What day is it, Tuesday…should be easy. That’s ok, it’s been a while. I do the puzzle with my friend. I was talking to him last night. Funny that the Times showed up this morning.”

I found the puzzle and set to work with my black sharpie…not my usual way of working a puzzle, but I figured it was Tuesday that’d be ok. I gave it a good run and got most of it. I always bomb on the actress names and music questions. Couldn’t fill in two little blocks.
“Well, that’s as much as I could do. Thanks!”
I bounced off to find some writing privacy.

I walked into the Bear Trap at 7:07 a.m., fully attired, packed, and ready to leave with the exception of a big fuel up to get me down the road.
Three men at a table near the door all turned and looked at me.
“A girl walks into a bar dressed in cycling clothes, everyone turns to look…” I felt good, even if my attempt at a joke went over poorly. I had a great breakfast and enjoyed observing the people coming and going, the interactions of the two women managing the early morning Sunday breakfasters.
“So much for it being slow,” the waitress said through the kitchen window. The woman cooking wore a tie-dyed tank top with a maroon bandana tied around her brow. She looked 7’ tall in the kitchen, never seemed to say a word.
“How was everything?”
“It was great. That’ll get me 100 miles down the road.”
“That’s what we like to hear.”
I hoped she felt as up as I did. Even though I didn’t do the math, I knew I had a big day planned for myself.

The 24 miles to the Colorado border came over that cracked roadway that seems as though it will give me a flat every time I go over one. I rode out in the road mostly because there were hardly any people out driving, and the cracks jarred me and my bike less there. Mountain foothills flanked both sides of the roadway, but the place still had that treeless character. In the mountains to the west, I could see the evergreens giving the mountains a purplish cast.
“Those trees look dead. The whole mountain, dead trees. Probably from the beetles.”
Road maintenance in the form of fresh chip seal from Walcott through Saratoga to the state line meant that the “bike lane” had fresh oil on it and the road had a pale layer of sharp gravel. I chuckled over the auto-centric cautions, “I’d be lucky to get up to 30 m.p.h. Seems like they ought to say something also about what happens when a flying rock hits something other than a glass windshield. I guess if I have a windshield, it’s my glasses, and I don’t like the thought of a rock breaking my glasses. Better that than my eye. ‘You’ll shoot your eye out kid.’ My bike does a good job shooting those loose rocks out too, but I have to hit them just right.”

At the state line, the Colorful Colorado sign thrilled me. While the sign portrays the opposite of what it’s about, I remember noticing the difference between states almost immediately. I looked back to see how Wyoming chose to greet travelers.
“Forever West. Huh. Well, that sounds like a lot of resistance to change, but the place does seem to have a changeless feel to it…like the geology is some of the oldest around and change happens on geologic time.”
That was it. I looked back on ‘Forever West’ for a moment, and then I entered Colorado. Suddenly, the mountains appeared and the landscape rustled lushly: trees, flowers, grasses…and the road changed. I had a smoother ride in Colorado, but I didn’t necessarily have much room on the roadway.

I heard that the ride into Walden had little in the way of services. I kept thinking of Adam and Manuel making the ride late the previous afternoon. They probably had good views, but I thought the morning light and cloud formations enhanced the scenic qualities. A couple of little building clusters stood out on the landscape.

One tiny town, Cowdrey, sits next to a wildlife area. In the wetland area, I saw pelicans having a party and cows placidly enjoying the green slopes. A little further on, I came to Walden. It did surprise me how “big” the town seemed. The courthouse made an impressive statement.
“Check out the ghosts in the upper windows! Funny. I wonder if it’s a functional space.”

I stopped at a gas station for water. The main street had a number of vacant storefronts and what looked like two really thriving businesses, sportsmen’s hangouts. When I came out, a woman smoking a cigarette started a conversation with me.
“Are you staying here tonight?”
“I was thinking of pushing on. It’s only 1 o’clock.”
“It’s 60 miles to the next town.”
“60. Really?! Well, it’s a little early to stop. I think I can make it to the next town. It’ll be a big day.”
“There’s a hill.”
“Yeah, a pass. But it looks like the grade is pretty low. I think I’ll try it. How long have you lived here?” She obviously wasn’t a visitor.
“Since ’81.”
“What do you like about living here?”
“Nothing.” She surprised me, and I looked at her with incredulity. “I’ve wanted to leave for a long time, just haven’t been able to. There’s no work here. It’s a struggle to make a living.”
“Where would you move to?”
“Fort Collins.”
“What’s the big industry?”
“Ranching and hay. There was a big to do about getting a pellet factory in here. They came.”
“Pellet factory? Like to make wood pellets for pellet stoves?”
“Yeah, there’s tons of dead timber from all the beetle kill. The factory came in about a year ago. I was working there, and then they closed, and we all got laid off.”
“I noticed the dead trees.”
“We’re having an epidemic. We told people a while ago that there was a problem, and no one did anything. When the trees get infested, the wood turns a pretty blue color, but it surprises me no one sells the wood for furniture or anything.”
“The beetles don’t have any natural predators?”
“No, they get under the bark.”
“And woodpeckers can’t get them?”
“No. They say a really cold freeze would kill them, but it hasn’t gotten to 50 below yet, and the things seem pretty resistant to cold. The only thing that would really kill them is a big fire. If there were a fire, Walden’s down in the valley. They say the smoke would settle here, and we’d all have to evacuate.”

“Then you could move to Ft. Collins!”
She smiled, and we had a conspiratorial moment. “When you go down the road…” she gestured lighting a match and throwing it.
Later, I wondered why a person would need to burn the mountains to leave town. In the past, I needed some external force in my life to “justify” moving, but after I did once, I realized I could relocate any time. A big space of uncertainty opens up when you do that, but it doesn’t mean you get swallowed into nothingness. Even out on this ride, I often feel swallowed in nothingness, but somewhere is always there, surprising as that may be. Symbolically, it may be easier to burn the mountains though, particularly if you have a need to leave town with no reminders.
“What’s your name?”
“Caroline. And yours?”
“Heidi.”
“Have a safe trip.”

I came across another wildlife area just out of town and stopped at the interpretive boards to eat something and evaluate my commitment to a long day. The boards talked about the different animals that lived in different parts of the wetland areas and what they eat. Above, some swallows figured out how to live among the anti-nesting and perching devices. Rebels. I watched the raptors along the roadway. I admit that after my experience in Wisdom, I keep an eye on the circling birds of prey, but I’m not afraid they will attack. A woman in Virginia City explained that my experience out there was probably because the red-tails were fledging and a mama was probably protecting a baby on the ground. Yeah, whatever. Actually, it seemed pretty plausible. I think these raptors were Peregrine Falcons, and that was pretty exciting. I found one in the pit on the side of the road. I took some pictures of it, but it wasn’t a fresh kill and not in pristine condition like some of the other birds I’ve seen. I do like a closer look at the birds though. You never know what little secrets about identifying them you can glean from up close. I wanted to see moose, but with each mile, I had less and less opportunity. Seeing a Peregrine in the wild made up for the moose, in my mind.

While Caroline had cautioned me that there wasn’t anything in Rand except a post office, I found Rand Store open. I bought lots of drinks…juice, water…all that and sat out on the porch taking in the scenery. Beautiful spot. I had 10 miles to the top of the pass, “And then it’s all downhill from there.” I say that a lot. It’s true, but there always seems to be another uphill after the downhill.
As I climbed the pass, I wondered about Routt National Forest. If the forest had no trees alive, could it be considered a forest? If there were only stumps, could you consider it a forest? And what about fire? How do you manage mountainsides that have no living trees? What about erosion? Is it better to keep the trees standing so their roots hold things together? Where is Tom Collier? He could help me understand forest management. I kept remembering the areas of Yellowstone where they had posted signs, “naturally reseeded by fire in 1988.” How long would you have to wait after a fire for the beetles to be GONE? A human life offers no functional comparison for the life of a forest. “What have we done, as humans, that may have precipitated this forest illness?”

I enjoyed the ride to the pass, another big crossing of the Continental Divide. I didn’t encounter much traffic along the road, but I noticed that cars never come as ones, they always go by at least in twos.

After crossing the Divide, I had a delicious ride down. Flying! The road followed the river, and I observed the many people out fishing, going from one hole to the next. At one bend in the road, a father and his young son walked toward the river, holding hands, fishing poles in their other hands, waders on. Seeing the two of them made my heart sing.

In Saratoga, I decided to take a good rest and feed my technology.

“How long have you been here?”
“Since February.”
“What brought you here?”
“I lived in Denver for a really long time. I was making $100k as a warehouse manager, and I got laid off. When you’re just about 60, it’s tough to make a new start on a career, especially when you were making as much as I was. No one wants to hire someone for a lower wage who was making $100k. Up here in Saratoga is my favorite place to go fishing, so I came up here and bought this place.”

“Do you get many cyclists coming through?”
“Yeah, we had a group of about 14 a few days ago. I’ve been biking a lot since I got up here. Lost 60 pounds! I still have a lot more to lose.”
“Cycling keeps you young!”
“I have family in Denver, and I like to go back down there to see them. The fishing’s still great here though. The fishing is excellent in Buffalo, Wyoming. I might retire there.”

The next morning, I went in hunt of breakfast and a good place to write. This was a rest day, so I wasn’t in my cycling clothes. I found Lollypops, right next to the Wolf Hotel, and settled in with a cup of tea in the sunlit windows. A couple from Wichita, KS, with a 10-year old daughter was having breakfast also.
“I’m going to get my computer.” He’d seen me with my laptop and assumed I had an internet connection in the place. “Are you connected?”
“I’m connected, but I’m not connected.”
Someone else in the café came by, “About the only place you can get a signal is there, where she’s sitting.”
The young family went back to waiting for their Belgian waffles, and I resumed writing.
Six cyclists came in. I watched them sort out where they would all sit. A rather peculiar collection of folks, not what I would normally expect of a single team. One older man among the many young riders, one woman. Two of them looked like mountain bikers, one of whom had a badly sunburned and peeling nose, the other distinctly Mexican. The older man seemed to have the maps and information. I enjoyed puzzling out how they all came together. Sometimes when you meet people on the road, it works out like that. I couldn’t believe that six people could work it out so well. After all, Lollipop’s service wasn’t the kind that facilitated a quick refuel for cyclists on a schedule.
They started talking about Jeffrey City, so I went over. “Sounds like you’re headed from where I just came from. Would you like to know anything about it?”
“Yeah!”
“Are you three separate teams?”
“I guess you could say that.” Three of them – the group with the woman – came from Boston, headed to the Oregon coast. The mountain bikers rode up from Boulder and were going as far as Rawlins and then turning back. And one came from Kentucky, headed to the Oregon coast.
I chatted mostly with the older man, Kurt. They all told me their names, but it was like eating breakfast scramble…names in no particular order. The mountain biker with the burned nose interjected, “Thanks, have a good trip.” He’d wanted to know if you could see the Tetons from Rawlins.
“No. Even out in the middle of Wyoming, you might be able to see the Winds. You can’t see the Tetons until you cross Togwotee Pass, and then you’re pretty much in Grand Teton National Park.”
His comment made me feel like I was intruding on their breakfast and he wanted me to go away, back to my world, so I did. I didn’t look like a cyclist in my skirt, striped socks, and going-nowhere-today schedule.
When I went to settle up, Kurt wanted to chat a little more. We traded contact information, and I shared about my research on bicycle tourism and rural communities. He writes for the paper in Kentucky. Nice note to leave on. The loaded bicycles outside Lollipop’s made quite a statement. I couldn’t capture them all in one picture. Their transport looked as diverse as they did, and my suspicion that two of them were on mountain bikes was confirmed.

My main objective for the day involved catching up on some of my posts. I wrote in my room until I could no longer, then I relocated to the Saratoga library. I have no idea how long I was there, but I do know I was there for opening at 11 and when they closed at 3 or 4. Simple math is the most complex. At one point I noticed several boxes of old magazines in the entry hall.
“Are those magazines give-aways?”
“They sure are. Take as many as you want. Take all of them!”

Right before they ushered the stragglers out, I quickly looked through the National Geographics. 1978-1979 at least the ones on top. I could have gone for an older vintage, but I had to be quick. I looked at the spines and took 6 because there was no time to really decide what would be best.

I went to the hotel where I would wait for Cara to arrive.

Cara and I became friends when we were 4, when both of our families had recently moved to Cheyenne. We’re practically the same age, less than a month apart. Her dad got a job working for the U.S. Embassy, and she moved. We agreed to write letters and did. She first went to Morrocco, then Japan, later Zaire, and finally Korea, always with stops and transitions in DC. Her parents split while they were in Morocco, but the way things worked out with the different families, she was always somewhere out there. Occasionally she would visit family in Wyoming and we would see each other again. Our correspondence would go through fits and starts, but we always managed to stay in touch. When I moved to Oregon, I went on several road trips, one that took me back to Colorado and New Mexico. Cara had just begun law school at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, and we arranged to see one another. That was the last we saw each other. Late last year, we started writing letters again, and after seven years, it seemed time to make another face-to-face connection. After all her travels around the world, I almost couldn’t believe that she decided to settle back in Cheyenne.
Cheyenne is 150 miles off my route, and while I grew up there, I didn’t really have a need to go so far out of my way to stop there.
“We could meet in Rawlins or somewhere else if you want. I’m going through Saratoga and Walden.”
“Let’s meet in Saratoga, it’s nicer there.”
She called while I was still at the library, “I should be there in an hour and a half. I’m so excited to see you!”
“I can’t wait to see you. I’ll meet you at the hotel.”

Seven years is a long time. We caught up on siblings, family, partners, work, Easter Island, home.
Her dad had recently traveled to Easter Island, and we couldn’t quite remember where it was.
“I think it’s Polynesian, isn’t it?”
“He was on a tour of South America. I think it’s there. There’s the name of the heads. What are they called? I want to say Maori.”
“That’s New Zealand. That would be Polynesian. Here…I found it. It’s 2300 miles west of Chile.”
“See, I knew it was South America.”
“2300 miles is pretty far away. It’s just a little speck out there in the ocean. Oh, and the heads are called ‘maoi.’ How do you say that?”
“Maui?”
“The pronunciation says, Mow-EYE but as one syllable.”
“Mowee. I think that’s how you say it.”
“Muhwhy?”
“Mowee. I think that’s it.”

During dinner, I had tea to fend off the sleepiness. This meant I was up well into the night, long after she went to sleep. I took that time to go through my National Geographic magazines, culling images, trying to decide which one magazine I would allow myself to take. It seemed like each issue had something worth carrying in it, and all of them journeys that resonated with my current undertaking: one Japanese man solo on a dog sled to the North Pole, one woman solo with camels across the Australian outback, a couple walking across the country…. I ripped up three magazines and kept three others. I’d have to narrow again before packing to leave.

In the morning, Cara and I wandered aimlessly in Saratoga. I wanted to visit the post office and unload some of the papers I collected. It was closed.
“My Mom just called while you were in there. She wanted to know if you were really doing this and by yourself. I told her, yes, you really are that crazy and doing it but that I’d call her later to talk.”
We went back to the hotel room, and I took my magazines out onto the steps and started ripping them. I decided to take the entire magazine with the story about Robyn Davidson. I read her book Tracks years ago for book group, remembered liking it. I tore out the story on the cross-country walkers. I wanted that too. Who knows if I’ll read it, if I’ll get to any of the stories, if I’ll send any of the images with words written all over them or taped together in some collage inspiration. Sometimes it seems right to carry things for the sake of carrying them.
“How are you feeling?”
“Eh. Ok.”
“Should we try the Hobo Pool?”

The Hobo Pool is the free hot springs in Saratoga. Most people who’ve been there have some story about someone who was in there for a really long time. I don’t have any attire for bathing or swimming…we decided to put our legs in. The pool was pretty hot anyway, probably not what most people would willingly put their entire body into, hence the stories of these crazy people who get all the way in and stay for hours.
While we sat there, I told a story of being at the pool.
“We came here one summer with my uncle. The water was really hot like this, and there was an Asian man up there where the hot comes in, just in the water for a long time. No one would get in the pool it was so hot. Then my uncle said he would get Dairy Queen for anyone who got all the way in and stayed for one minute. Well, I wanted a vanilla cone with a cherry coat, so I did it. I got in slowly and squatted down on this bench right here. And I focused, not moving. I think I stayed in longer than a minute, but I know I got my ice cream. I don’t recall that anyone else got in, but that wasn’t important to me. I have to say, if I were dressed differently I would totally get in there. This feels good.”
“I’m ready to get out. Do you want to try the river and find some cooler water?”
“Sounds good.”
“Look, now I’m wearing red tall socks.” The water line had left both of us with bright red lower legs.
We walked to the river, tender feet over sharp rocks. Cara stepped in. “Ow, it’s hot! I thought it would be cold.”
I stepped in too and walked a little further along, “It’s no cooler over here.” The water looked cold and clear, but it burned. I stepped over a little gravel bar to where the water moved more quickly. “Oh, it’s ok here. The cold is its own kind of intensity.”
Cara came and stood at the confluence of the hot and cold, “Oh, this is just right, this is what I’m talking about.” We stood there for a little while. “I wonder how hot that is,” she pointed. “That looks like the place to sit.”
I walked over and tested it with my hand, “That’s pretty toasty.”

We ended up hanging out at a restaurant by the river for a long lunch and chat before heading our separate ways. I planned only a short ride. It was 20 miles or 70, and I wasn’t quite up for a 70-mile ride that started at 1 p.m. She was headed back home to husband and daughter.
“Can I drop you off somewhere.”
“Nah, I think I’ll just ride from here. It’s not a big deal to get to Riverside.”
“Let’s not wait another seven years.”
“Deal. See you again soon.”

Out on the road, I became aware of another cyclist ahead of me when one had just stopped to talk to him. Soon I caught up to him.
“Have you seen my roommate out there?”
“No, I didn’t see anyone else except you and that other guy you were talking to.”
“Odd. I wonder how he got ahead of me. He always does that, he rides so fast. I stopped to get some sunscreen for my nose, maybe he passed me when I was in the store.”
We chatted for a little while.
“I’m Adam.”
“Heidi. I met you yesterday morning. I looked different.”
“Oh yeah. You’re studying bicycling in rural areas. That was my Dad you were talking to.”
“No way. I didn’t get that when we were chatting at Lollypop’s.”
We pulled up to the bar in Riverside where Adam was meeting his roommate.
“Hi, I’m Manuel.”
“Heidi, I met you at breakfast yesterday. I looked different.”
“Oh yeah. Come, have a drink with us.”
“Ok.”

The bar had stools upholstered with old blue jeans, and a woman in her 50s smoked cigarettes while tending. The three of us in the bar with her seemed sort of awkward, and she seemed like she wanted to talk. I remembered Adam’s comment at Lollypop’s but decided to try my usual question, “How long have you lived here?” I can’t remember what she said in answer to that, but what followed did catch my attention.
“I came up here to write a novel. I’m working on my second one, but I’m moving next week.”
She published a murder mystery novel, and the main characters are tough women who ride Harleys.
Adam and Manuel downed two pints each and were headed to Walden. I could tell Manuel had some drive to him, based on what Adam had said.
“I like to think of myself as Extreme. I come from Oaxaca, Mexico. I used to race down there. Now I want to race up here and realize my dreams. If you don’t need to get somewhere, there is no need to ride really far. We have to get back to Boulder.”
We went outside, and I watched them prep for another 50 miles. The clock read 3:30 p.m. I was glad I didn’t have to push it. They left, and I went across the street to Lazy Acres.

“Do you have space for the likes of me here?”
“We sure do. This is Lisa. She’s sharing the tenting spot there with you, but she’s going to leave soon. Are you ready for the damage?”
“How much it is?”
“$8.50.”
“You’re killing me. $8.50? Ok.”
I set up my shelter quickly, crawled under the amplified heat in it, and passed out for 45 minutes to an hour. It wasn’t that the 20 miles had exhausted me. I was up late and early and had a beer after riding. Sleep is a good remedy. I crawled out and set up to write. Lisa came by to pack up the last of her things and go. We started chatting, but I couldn’t take my attention off of how she looked.
“You look amazing! That scarf is so perfectly coordinated with the rest of you.”
“Thanks. A woman over there gave me the scarf.”
“It’s just right.”
“We’re a bunch of women up here camping in vintage trailers. We stay somewhere, and it’s all women. We go fishing.”
“It’s so refreshing to be around female energy. Cycling I encounter so many men.”
We sparkled back and forth to one another, then she got in her jeep back to Denver. I stayed up into the dark writing.

People in rural communities make their own amusements. Back in John Day, a woman told me that people often ask her what she does for fun, “Not what kind of entertainment I would recommend for them, but what I do for fun. Well, we go four-wheelin’, shoot squirrels, hang out in the woods.” Most people tell me that you hang out with your friends and neighbors, have people over to dinner, spend time with one another.

Yesterday, in a town called Rand, the woman behind the counter said, “We all know each other here. Most of the time we all get along, but we kinda have to. Everyone knows everyone, and we rely on everyone else in town for different things. It works out.” By the way, in Rand, they have the cleanest, tidiest “Necessary Room” I have ever encountered. It was a great counterpoint to my stop “across the street” in Muddy Gap.
“Is it a composting system?”
“Yeah. It’s a lime compost. We have a CLF in there, but that’s the only thing.”
I assume he meant that the outhouse is wired for a bulb but is essentially completely off the house system. Among the books and decorative items in the shop, they had an entire array of titles on outhouses and a little wall hanging that got me thinking, “Not every house is a home.”

Bill prepped me for Rawlins and Sinclair “Rawlins…I had a business there in 1980..built part of the penitentiary…..lots of uranium still in the ground there…..used to be a tough town…was the site of my last barroom brawl…thank god….although it won’t bother you, the highest price gasoline in Wyoming was AT the refinery in Sinclair. There used to be a funky old hotel…Puerco (sp)…right on the main drag…30 yrs ago….I’m sure not much has changed…I lived there for almost a year…..one of the most spectacular anticlines in Wyoming is right between Rawlins and Sinclair….after Sinclair, you enter the fringes of the Powder River Basin…”

I stopped in Rawlins long enough to get something to eat, refill on water, and decide if I would ride the next 40 miles to Sinclair. I needed to catch up on my stories coming through Wyoming, but it’s better to do that when I don’t have to go another 40 miles. Since I was taking a rest in Saratoga, I decided to ride on. I did find a cute little coffee shop/bistro in downtown Rawlins just a couple of doors down from the City Hall. That part of town has more character than I remember, perhaps because most of what I think of has to do with the part of town that serves the interstate. When I rode past there, I couldn’t help but notice what happens. In places where no fast food restaurants exist, they abound. In places absent of franchise motels, they abound. The downtown areas keep their distance, so if you drive the interstates and stop at the service areas, you wouldn’t necessarily see the town. You would see the same kind of place in a different location over and over again though.

I have crossed the interstate system three times thus far. The first time, I forgot that Baker City, OR, benefits from I-84 traffic. Everything I saw of the place focused in downtown, and I had to ride about 3 miles before starting to see the tell-tale signs of interstate service development. I went under I-15 before reaching Dillon, MT. I remember that place as a serviceless interchange. From Rawlins (well, Sinclair), I had to ride I-80 east for 13 miles, but Rawlins is a big stop for interstate travelers. I would guess that all the towns in Wyoming along I-80 exist because the first transcontinental railroad (the Union Pacific) went through Wyoming. I-80 follows the tracks. Riding from Rawlins to Sinclair, I took the old highway, what remains of it.

Where Rawlins has an Old West feel to it, Sinclair appears to have grown from a southern influence. The buildings have clay tile roofs and orient around a central park plaza, just like you see so often in southwestern towns or in Mexico. As close as it is to Rawlins and the interstate, something else characterizes the place. It has a vacant feel to it, but that could be from lack of enclosure. I rode through the square and into Sinclair’s main industry area, the oil refinery.

Sinclair

The green brontosaurus marking the corner of Lincolnway and Logan originates here.
Its onceness sucked from earth through the nose’s straw.
Fringing the Red Desert,
Less than six inches annual precipitation,

pipes, towers, tubes, retching smoke and flames like an epileptic dragon with withered wings,
a cantankerous hulk.
Shadowing a village like Pompeii nestled on Vesuvius.
These vacancies and bungalows given their only life from the mild shelter of a few trees.

She came into her yard,
Daddy gone in his big blue truck.
He always came home smelling
cold when he loved her picking her

high up to become a flower in the sky.
My lungs escape: PTERADON, because I am.
My brother has a book.
I look at it when he’s at school.

She sits,
singing and drawing.
The two dandelions grow.
I can sit inside them, feel warm,

me, my own sun in flight.
This is what it’s like before I hatch.
For hours she sits;
Her amusement broken between

song
silence
chattering noises
silence
discussions
song.

Paper skids with heavy breeze.
Careful cartography, the green
line making a curve and swirl
meeting with repeated yellow circles,

A blue, leading, suggestive line; her map’s north.
Laying on top, two dandelions wilt in the sun.

I like Edward Gorey’s story, The Epiplectic Bicycle. It’s a fine amplifier for my Sinclair experience. Embley and Yewbert take me to my own childhood. Maybe it’s the croquet mallets, but dark whimsy and a bicycle? Choice.

This place is as out under the glare of full sun as could be possible. With the flame and the black oil cars waiting on the rail tracks and the relentless intensity of the sun, I wonder how the place hasn’t exploded. I guess that’s what all those safety regulations are about. Who knows…it captures my interest in the way junk yards and vintage trucks capture my interest or the curious things one can find in overstuffed refrigerators. It’s the part of me that liked playing with trucks when I was little that can’t help but be attracted to how the refinery at Sinclair looks. I could tell stories all day in a place like that.

I didn’t particularly want to ride on the interstate, but I knew the shoulder would be wide and probably in much better repair than the road surface I suffered through coming into Rawlins. Side by side, the U.S. freight system…rail and road. Looked like more freight moving in semi-trucks than on the railroad. Mostly whatever moves on the road is hidden in a box or beneath tarps. But apparently it’s time to ship onions, and they all peeked out the back of the onion haulers. Lots of onions. Now there’s a hardy vegetable.

I exited at Walcott. Fresh chip seal. Yummy. 20 miles to Saratoga on the straights with some hills. Unwavering. Unbroken. Crosswind. I passed one trail marker. The Overland Trail came through here. I squinted out over the sagebrush, looking for old trail tracks, thinking about the stagecoach coming through…the “express” way to travel before the railroad. I can’t imagine all that bumping and bouncing was good for the people riding in the coach, but you make do with what you have, eh? I was back to kthunking down the road…as it turned out, this mode I could look forward to the rest of Wyoming. All that jostling is probably less good for my bike than for me, and we both looked forward to a needed rest day.

“Whee!”

From Jeffrey City I pushed on another 20 miles to Muddy Gap. I saw no evidence of wagon tracks along the highway, but I kept looking. Muddy Gap sits at the intersection of two highways. A house sits along one highway, and a gas station perches on the high side of the other, on the flat part of the T. I rolled up to the interpretive sign and read how three major points of the Oregon Trail all converge within 20 miles (in different directions) of this place.

Notably, Independence Rock, 16 miles to the north(east), marks time and location. Pioneers met there on Independence Day and set off fireworks. If they didn’t make it to this point, they could likely get caught in winter weather further down the trail, almost certain death.

I went into the convenience store and looked at everything. At the end of my survey, I stood in front of the drinks coolers. A pleasant east Indian woman asked me questions between fixing dinner for her family and changing her young son’s diaper on the table.
“What are you looking for?”
“All kinds of things. Is there somewhere to camp around here?”
“The bathroom is there, we do a tip jar. It’s $12 to camp. Anywhere out there. Where are you headed?”
“I’m going to DC.”
“How many days does it take to get there?”
“I allowed 80 days.” I pulled the juices out of the cooler one at a time, reading the labels. I wanted something that had fruit as one of the first two ingredients.
“How do you get the time to do that?”
“I’m in school right now, and I made it my summer project.” Striking out on the juice. Orange juice said 100% juice, and I examined the label looking for the fine print. What kind of terms would I agree to for some vitamins?
“So you’re on vacation?”
“It’s more research than vacation.” I grabbed two quarts of bottled water then returned to the aisles for something that would suffice for dinner. She pulled some pizza slices from the little oven on the counter.
Her husband ran the register, a little less friendly than she, meanwhile their boy nagged at him to go upstairs or outside or somewhere. I waved at the little dude, and he started at me blankly then went back to bugging his dad.

“Where do I camp?” The woman came back.
“Anywhere out there on the grass. We have eight acres.”
“And the bathroom?”
“It’s open until 9 p.m. and then again at 7 a.m. If you need the bathroom in the middle of the night, there’s one across the street.”

I wouldn’t exactly call the stuff growing around the convenience store grass. In one place it’d been mowed, so I guess that qualified. I found a flat area with some speargrass and clover here and there, but mostly it was just floury dirt pebbled with rocks and a round sit-upon of some kind of ground cover sage. I sat on the sage, drank water and juice. The man came out with his son. The little toddler wobbled around in the wind. There was nowhere in particular to go, but outside was apparently a nice change from inside.

“What must it be like growing up in a place like this…or even living in a place like this? They probably do decent business, and I suppose you make your life what you want it. They must do ok, but she wants to go on vacation somewhere instead of selling drinks and junk food to a bunch of people on vacation.” The walls inside the convenience store had a base of white paint, but every bit of every wall had layers and layers of things people had written, a little bit like a contemporary Register Cliff. People pass through there and scrawl their names with the date, maybe where they’re from, who their lover is. Maybe later they come back through and cross off their old lover and write in a new name, frame it in a heart.
The wind came up in a gust, and I watched a massive dust cloud come straight for me. I ducked and let it hit me on the head instead of square in the face.
“I’m camping in a boundless wind tunnel. No wonder there’s so much trash scattered about right here.”
I set up my shelter against the wind and crawled inside.
“The calm cooker.” Intense sun quickly heated up the yellow nylon of my shelter and the air inside.
Convinced my world wouldn’t blow away, I fell into an easy sleep sprawled over my sleeping pad with my sleeping bag half draped over me and half wadded under my head for a pillow.

I woke early the next morning and decided to push on. I left right at 7 a.m. and decided not to get water in the convenience store at Muddy Gap. I figured I could get some at Grandma’s Café in Lamont, or just push on.

The highway I rode from Muddy Gap had more traffic than the one I rode the previous day. Two lanes only, no middle lane. Immediately I came across a large dead bird in the bike lane. I stopped and examined it. Looked like a hawk until I saw the foot, fully feathered to the talons. “Another owl!” I don’t know why owls have a different status in my mind than other birds. Perhaps the symbolism of wisdom and feminine strength speak to me…or maybe the mystery of nocturnal predators. I picked it up the way I would hold live raptors, my hands over its back, with the wings folded aside its body like potholders. This owl had considerable size on the little saw-whet I picked up outside of Nevada City, huge eyes, and a big beak. Not an owl I recognized, but it probably was a Great Horned Owl – not known for their brains – but I had no idea…considering it couldn’t lift its horns. It still felt warm, but feathers can deceive. I moved it off the roadway, placed it so its wings wouldn’t catch the wind and flap around, and continued on.

My route crossed the Continental Divide again, twice. The first crossing came soon and didn’t seem much more than one among many hills on the road. Right around this first pass, I came across a deer that looked more as if it’d been blown up with dynamite than hit by something. Lots of dead deer. In Wyoming, the Mule Deer have large ears. And there are the Pronghorn Antelope, known for their land-speed records. I evaluated the roadway based on the loss of life I witnessed all around, “At least the Pronghorn have sense enough to stay off the roadway.”

Grandma’s Café came into view. I noticed the Lamont town sign no longer bears the population number, the one aspect of this particular place that captured my imagination in college.

47 Miles from Rawlins

Went to town seventeen days ago,
Forgot sugar.
Borrowing sugar from neighbors?
No one in the movies lives like this.
Towns have a town drunk and forgotten church.
We get along when there’s enough sugar;
Dolores likes two spoonfuls in Sanka
I like the evenings, setting on the mountains’ lame foot
People stop, eager, desperate
They know this circle on the map,
They don’t think
Three people makes a town.
No sugar means bland baked-beans.
Sunrise reaches into the bedroom.
This porch waits for evening:
Before sunset, decaf.
Cars pass at 85.
She needs two spoonfuls of sugar.

Now, Lamont lies 39 miles from Rawlins. I lied in the poem, and I knew it, but 47 miles had a better ring to it than 39, sounded more remote somehow. On a bike, those 39 miles feel every bit of 47 because absolutely nothing except the rolling high plains prairie dotted with cattle extends between the two places. I stopped to take some pictures of the café (that didn’t turn out in the morning light) and remembered when my Dad and I came through on a small town roadtrip after I graduated from college. Lamont was the one place…all I remembered of the place was “Population 3”…I had to stop. Dad and I went in for breakfast.

A sign outside the doorway said, “Customer service starts here.” We walked in and Grandma welcomed us, asked us what we wanted and said, “Here’s the coffee, there are the cups, help yourself.” I don’t remember that we ate anything…I was a vegan then and wouldn’t eat most things a person could find at convenience stores and roadside cafes. So different now.

I stood on the roadway and thought again about water, thought about Grandma in the cafe and my trip with Dad and the poem, and thought about the miles ahead. I continued on.

The second cross of the Divide came right before Rawlins, a sign on the downhill of something. In the miles before, I pedaled over long stretches of road that made me swear, a lane, half eaten by rumble strip, adjoined by broken-rough-cracked-pocked-strip-of-junky-yuck, and 8 inches of first layer roadway with tarred cracks, slope on the last four inches, and weeds growing in the way. How many more miles of this? The trucks lumbering by often had oversized loads. Mostly they headed north with their bank vaults, combines, nuclear reactors or whatever these excessively large objects were….attached to trailer parts, unidentifiable without context, big.

I passed a tiny bird on the road and came back around to inspect it. Thought it was a hummingbird. I picked it up. Not a hummingbird, a small brown bird, little, intact, precious. Counterpoint on the roadway. I set it off the side, like the owl earlier. I passed a sun-bleached jawbone. Quaint. Laying on the gravel on the roadside. Then I started seeing antelope in various states of decay. Even here, among the deer and birds. I remembered a year we drove I-80, and antelope carcasses littered the prairie. The winter had been hard, they starved, succumbed to the bitter cold. And then, I saw something in the lane I never expected I would see in Wyoming, particularly out in the desert scrub, a turtle. It looked like a still frame, about to take another step, except for the broken carapace.

One of the truckers passed me and pulled over ahead. I caught up to him, just as he climbed back into his cab, “Do you have any drinking water?”
“No, sorry, I don’t.”
“That’s ok,” and I pedaled on.
I figured I would make Rawlins without a problem. The morning, although bright, had not warmed to hot. While I could have had more water, I knew if I took small swallows of what I had, I would easily make it, and I did. I wouldn’t be like the turtle.

On leaving Lander, I entered another world, physically, psychologically, cosmologically. 40 miles to Sweetwater Junction, a rest area, a place to get water. I want to say you find nothing in this place, but for those who delight in open spaces, uncontained existence, and a relative absence of human presence, the land offers immeasurable bounty. From Sweetwater Junction, 20 miles to Jeffrey City, a place people tell stories about. It lends itself to story telling; we need it. How else can a person make sense of Jeffrey City?

Years ago, the town gripped me, and I wrote about it. I also painted this landscape to the right on an 8′ by 8′ canvas. I never got the sky right in that painting. It looked striped. I couldn’t figure out how to blend sixty four square feet of blue before the paint dried. Away from Wyoming at school in upstate New York, the spare boundlessness of place crooned to me from the gray, closed-in winters of Hamilton. I sat at my desk, and all that poured out came in the form of searing emptiness with the eerie harmonics of the fierce wind sliced by high tension wires.

Jeffrey City — Namesake

For eight to forty dollars
a pound they
mine Uranium.
And if he should die,
one among all the other
men of this boom town,
they will pay his wife
eight hundred dollars
and his children fifty.

Tornadoes swirl through
in summer picking up brown earth,
Melissa’s blue ball.
Playground swings clang and wrap.
In the haze of this afternoon,
diffuse sunlight reflects
off the four-square court,
cracked, with grass
pushing through.
The basketball hoop:
without a backboard,
without a net.

On the Platte River Road
where we began from
Independence, Missouri
my diary now, I keep, outloud
as I sweat to sleep.
Their hooves worn away,
we unburdened books,
my diary, and our furniture
on the open plains with
two marked graves.
Melissa rubbed her name
into the soft stone
next to
Pierre-Jean de Smet 1840

At night it will rain,
endlessness, grasslessness;
I walk through the rooms of the house

In Oregon.
The stained glass window will face east.

The houses are practically cardboard;
making men as cut outs,
set up among
all the wildflowers from the mountain
planted in a desert.

This pace fell and emptied into isolation.
Now hollows like
The back of a caterpillar’s throat gape.
Melissa pulls on a threadbare sock and looks in windows of the empty school.

I cannot escape this place. I doubt anyone who has ever been through it and let it touch them can. But maybe this place has touched me in a way it hasn’t touched others…because I am somehow from here, and I return to it, and I feel the layers of lives I have lived.

At Beaver Ridge, I looked back at the Wind River Range. This segment of the Continental Divide has the highest mountains in Wyoming. Gannett Peak reaches 13,804,’ and I have never climbed it. I climbed the Grand Teton. And I climbed in the Winds at a place called Cirque of the Towers, summiting Wolf’s Head and Pingora. The first unplanned bivy I ever had came on Wolf’s Head after a long day of climbing, made longer by the electrical storm and rain that trapped our team of three on the razor ridge. At least twice, I thought death by lightning strike would take me. The second time, my friend Tim sat with a pool of water collecting in his lap, “I don’t want to die.”
“I don’t either, but we don’t have much choice about it if it happens. There are 2,000’ that direction, and 2,000 the other.”
Just then some spectral clouds came swirling up from the sheer walls below and hung breathing in the space before us, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, and lifted and dissipated into the storm above.
We both blinked in silence.
The second unplanned bivy came less than a week later, on the Grand.
Pretty sight from Beaver Ridge.

I turned my attention to what lay ahead. The road went on unerringly. No erasures, straight and unwavering. I passed the only cluster of trees I saw in that whole expanse, some contorted creatures glued together. Strength in numbers. Strength in kind. Past Sweetwater, I stopped to read about the Ice Slough, and a solo woman in a Prius stopped.
“Are you headed cross country?”
“Yeah. Are you?” She had Virginia plates.
“Yeah. Do you need any water?”
“I’m good, but thanks for asking.”
“My road bike is in the car. Do you want any blueberries?”
“Ok. Thanks.”
“Take a big handful.”
I couldn’t quite get a big handful. I was a bit not on the planet anyway and must have had a far out air about me. The blueberries tasted good, sweet.
At the Ice Slough, the unique depression where water collected and cold nighttime temperatures meant that people could find ice by digging about two feet below the ground surface, even in the middle of the summer. It doesn’t work that way anymore, but for the pioneers headed to Oregon, the ice in this desolate area would have been as much a refresher as cold water and blueberries to me.

The Oregon Trail comes through here as do several other overland routes. In the distance, Split Rock stood as a famous landmark for Indians, trappers, pioneers, messengers, and travelers. I don’t know what it was like for people to pick up and move west in a covered wagon, but riding through here on a bike gets me considerably closer to understanding what it was like than I ever did with my toy covered wagon in 4th grade Wyoming History class. And it’s not the first time I felt like I’ve done this before.

An impressive tail wind blew me through the desolate landscape. Sagebrush, snow fences. Miles and miles and miles and miles of it.

I stopped in Jeffrey City half thinking I would stay the night, half thinking I would have a meal. I wandered through my recollection of the place, the genesis of the poem. And then I looked, too, at Jeffrey City. I found the library in unit 6 of derelict and decaying apartment complexes. The sign said open, but I wasn’t sure, couldn’t tell. I figured people would be squatting all over the place, but everything was boarded up and falling apart, the apartment complexes particularly. I passed by a trailer. Two dogs came out and barked with voices that sounded like they too had lived in an earlier time, and now the sound didn’t quite come through.

I went back to the main street, looking for the bar where I knew there was food. The wailing coming through the open door sent me back to the road. I passed a woman on the street on my way to a last pic of town. I’d heard of a motel in this place that didn’t look open but was. She came up behind me, and we started chatting.
“They opened it up for us. We’re an Adventure Cycling group. I’m sure you could stay here if you wanted. It’s not so bad.”
“I’m not sure, I think I might push on. The people I stayed with in Lander thought Muddy Gap might be a bit better than Jeffrey City.”
“Use the tailwind! It’s a hell of a lot better than fighting the bloody wind at 3 or 4 mph the whole way.”
I hadn’t passed many cyclists that day. Two different solo men headed west along the route before I reached Sweetwater. None of us even made a motion to stop. Here, Adventure Cycling’s VansAm team of about 14 stopped for the night. I passed a few more of them on their way in.

I continued down…kthunk…the highway scanning…kthunk…the landscape on …kthunk…both sides of the road…kthunk…way for any evidence of wagon …kthunk… train tracks. The tail wind made it seem…kthunk… easy to pedal…kthunk… in my biggest gears, even going up the…kthunk… hills. The bike lane had wide cracks in it…kthunk… every ten feet or so, making for …kthunk… a very annoying …kthunk… ride…almost as if I …kthunk… were riding over…kthunk… a widely spaced cattle guard all …kthunk… day. Thankfully, there…kthunk… wasn’t much traffic in that …kthunk… desolate place, and I …kthunk… would swerve around the rumble strips…eeeeeehhhhhaahhhhhhh… (sometimes) and ride the road where the cracks were mostly…bloop…filled in.

In Lander, I had to stop for the signage juxtaposition, “OBGYN – Plumbing, funny. Come get yer plumbing worked on.”

I rode town looking for a coffee shop or NOLS or something. At 9,000 people, Lander has about the same population as Baker City, Oregon, and I would consider it a large town compared to the size of most towns I visit. Home of the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), I wanted to see what effect the school had on the community. Brunton, an outdoor gear company, headquarters in Riverton, about 15 miles northeast from Lander. I thought I might be able to send some mail to someone through NOLS. I rode slowly through town, passed a cycling shop, a climbing shop, a bustling downtown area in a fairly good state of repair and occupancy.
“Bookstore with pastries. There.” I pulled over and leaned my bike against the wall. “Well I’ll be,” there stood NOLS just across the street in a large building on the corner. I walked into NOLS first. From the Main Street door, the first room is a museum exhibit area. On the right, “Instructor Library.” In the center of the building, it opened into the classic open space of a hotel lobby, complete with tiled floor, balcony on the second floor, and a stained glass ceiling above. Not exactly what I would think of as offices. I asked someone buried behind a large Mac at the desk, “I’m trying to send mail to someone who’ll be leading a course in Jackson soon. Is it possible to do that?”
“Well, I’ll try.”
“I have a first name, which I know may not be much help. I also have a birthdate. Can you look people up by birthday?”
We didn’t have any success.
“Is there lodging here, or is it just offices?”
“This is all lodging for students and instructors.”
Awesome use of an old hotel. I don’t think I found the NOLS organizational offices, but it didn’t matter. Everything works out in its way. I went through the side entrance and across the street to the coffee shop.

I had some writing to catch up on in Lander. I checked Warm Showers. In Lander, home of NOLS and as a town on the TransAm, I thought there might be someone there. I found one couple, sent an email and wrote while I waited for a response. Right about the time I thought I should go look for dinner or a place to camp or something, Jim called me.
“Are you still looking for a place this evening?”
“I am. If you’re available, that would be wonderful.”
“We’re happy to have you. Where are you?”
“I’m at a coffee shop downtown.”
“Oh, I can be there pretty soon.”
“Is there only one in town?” I noticed from the customer traffic, that I was definitely in a bookstore, but hadn’t felt that I was fully in coffee shop clientele territory.
“There are a couple. Where are you?”
“I’m across from NOLS.”
“Oh, at the bookstore. I can be there in five minutes, and we can ride up to the house together.”
“Sounds great. See you soon.”
I hurriedly finished my message and packed up my laptop right when Jim rode up on his Surly Long-Hauler. I saw another one of those gorgeous rides in Virginia City, ridden by a woman who had a terrible cough. She was sick, and the couple was headed off route to Bozeman to go home.

“Wow, you’re going light.”
“Yeah. My bike isn’t designed to carry weight. I have this cargo rack that fits in the hub on front, so I worked it out to carry everything that way. It’s the strongest part of my bike. I spent so much time planning the other parts of my trip that when it came to my gear, I made do with what I could collect on short notice. I knew I wouldn’t carry much. How long have you lived in Lander?”
“25 years. I came here after I finished school because I got a job that fit all my criteria. I’m a CPA. Now, I’m the Deputy Treasurer for the County.”
“How’s the County doing?”
“Well. Wyoming is a mineral-rich state, particularly in gas and oil, so when things are going poorly for the rest of the country, we tend to do ok. Conversely, when the rest of the country is doing well, we often don’t.”
“I noticed a couple of signs on my way in: ‘Certified Development Community’ and ‘Tourist Community.’ What are those about?”
“For tourism, we have a lot of outdoor recreation with the Wind River range right there and NOLS here in town. There are a lot of trust fund people who are attracted to the area because of NOLS. People go climbing, backpacking, skiing, fishing, hunting, snowmobiling. We’re just working on a new cross-country ski area nearby town. A lot of government offices are located in town, so that brings a professional class of people to the area. Ranching is the main industry, always has been.”
“Your Warm Showers post says you haven’t been touring in a while.”
“I want to go. That’s why I got this bike. I think I’m ready to tape the handlebars now. I’ve been riding it around to make sure I have the right stem and all that. Got it a few weeks ago. I’d like to go on a short tour, like up to Jackson with my daughter.”
I thought of JC’s comment, “Nothing says I love you to your bike like taking it on a tour.” Part of me wants to qualify that because not all bikes love touring; however, I felt certain that a Long-Hauler would be in raptures touring.

We arrived at the house on Hillcrest following a short but steep climb on the bike path. I leaned my bike against the picnic table. I had the shakes – a combination of the caffeine in my chai at the bookstore and a lack of other substantial food in my system after the day’s ride. It’d been several hours since I had anything to eat, and all that I had eaten was buried in the 60 miles or so of riding it took to get there.

I took a shower and emerged to the delicious aromas of Jim’s skill at the skillet. We dined in Jim & Julia’s backyard, a gorgeous garden oasis.
“All the greens came from the garden.”
“Fantastic! I haven’t seen greens like this since I left Oregon.” The last time I had such a delicious medley of greens came from Linda & Tom in Halfway…they also grow their own. “And little kale leaves even. Ah!”
“Really, there’s kale in here?”
“Yeah. Is it a winter mix or something?”
“Yeah. Must be. We have a cold frame on the other side of the shed.”
“When Jim & I first got married – we’ve been married three years, both of us this is our second marriage – he said that he was on this list and cyclists stayed with him sometimes. He said he wanted to stay on the list and would I be interested. We have the most interesting people come visit!”

Jim left to till someone’s yard, and Julia and I chatted over the dishes. She recently retired from teaching Math and Science, partly because of a head injury she sustained from ice skating two years ago. The story of her injury and recovery filled me with awe and admiration. She grew up in Lander and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Wyoming in Engineering.
“My dad was a dentist, and when I was growing up, he used to wrangle me into being his assistant during emergencies.”
“Mine too! I remember one time when my Dad brought home a video on wisdom teeth removal for continuing ed. We both watched it. And then it was a little weird when he took mine out. I knew exactly what was happening.”
“I wonder if they knew each other.”
“Let’s find out.” I emailed my Mom. Not long after, the affirmative response came back: “No kiddin! Last time Dad saw Bill it was in Dillard’s at the Cheyenne mall. Bill directed the marginal dental program for years and Dad of course provided a great deal of care for marginal patients.
When we first moved to Cheyenne, Bill gave dad some very astute business advice: ‘Charge what you need to, to meet your costs.’ We think of him still and with continued high regard. Bill always expedited care for children in need.
Ahhhh Wyoming. Small town with very long streets.”

Right as we were all about to turn in for the evening (Jim had returned from his good neighbor task), Jim mentioned that the woman he’d helped had been selected for jury duty.
“Oh, she’ll be really good. We need good jurors.”
“What kind of case?” I was thinking some sort of small court kind of thing.
“Murder.”
“Murder?! I didn’t think you had those kinds of problems in small towns. At least everyone I’ve talked to so far has mentioned the absence of crime being one of the reasons they choose to live in rurally.”
“With the reservation so close, we get a fair bit of that. The Shoshone and the Arapaho were warring tribes, and now they’re on the same reservation. Also, the reservation has an incredible amount of mineral resource, and groups come up and try to exploit and take advantage of the riches, and that causes some of that too.”
“Generally, we find it safe here. Lander is a mix of independently wealthy to welfare. Having NOLS in town changes the demographics of the place. And if you go to Riverton – it’s part of the Reservation and it’s not – things are different.”
“As a teacher, I would hear all kinds of things, the kind of stuff you wouldn’t just hear around town. I would ask new kids why they came to the area, and sometimes they would say, ‘To live on welfare.’ They didn’t know exactly what that meant, but their parents certainly wouldn’t tell you that.”

In the morning, I took my leave of Jim & Julia, stopped at the post office in town, and looped back to the climbing shop. I needed sunscreen for my lips. The arid climate and intense sun sucked the moisture right out of me, and my lips felt like prostheses rather than part of me.

With a full quantity of water, sun protection, and energy food, I pedaled out. Jim had given me some terrain description: “It will be up and down for a little while and then a climb up Beaver Ridge. It’s one of those climbs with no downhill on the other side. When you get to the top, be sure to look back. It’s beautiful.”