Crater Lake To Stanley, Day 13 : Curiosity

Today I’m biking into mountains again, so it’s slow steady climbing all day. By mid-afternoon I have wrestled my way to a gas station next to a small produce market, outside the “town” of Horseshoe Bend. I buy a bell pepper and a banana, then I eat the bell pepper while standing around in the parking lot, and toss the seed pieces under a bush. I take a look around, and notice that since I’m surrounded by hills, I can no longer tell where the horizon is.

A few hours later I turn onto a highway that follows the bank of a churning river. My speed keeps dropping from the usual 10mph to 8mph or even 5mph, and I can’t tell if it’s because of the incline or because of fatigue. I keep seeing an optical illusion – the road, the river, and the train track on the opposite bank are all laid out on different slopes, and with no view of the horizon, I have no idea what sort of incline I’m really on. I know I’m at least going up hill because if I wasn’t, the river would be flowing with me instead of against me.

Such are the things a rider will obsess about, when he knows he will be riding for many hours.

I stop at a turnout for a bathroom break, and then sit on my bike for a while crunching a bag of corn chips. I notice my reflection in the rear-view mirror, and decide to take a picture of it. Since the camera is tilted up at the mirror, it looks like the roadway is sloping down.

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Crater Lake To Stanley, Day 12 : Curiosity

I’m passing through Fruitland, heading southeast away from Ontario, towards the town of Emmett, my next designated sleeping place. The land is divided into big squares, and it seems that each one is growing a different vegetable.

• Dense short, golden wheat
• Tall, light yellow wheat
• Thin, bendy medium-sized wheat
• Deep green wrinkly leaves of kale
• Big purple-leafed cabbage plants
• Short tangly green herbs
• Tall spindly light-green herbs

I find it amusing that I could probably recognize these vegetables if they were cut, washed, ripened, and sitting in a supermarket, but out here in a field, clustered together and halfway mature, I have only a vague idea of what they are. Every day of this trip I see another thing that reminds me how little I actually know — even about important things, like, what food actually looks like when it’s still in the ground.

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Crater Lake To Stanley, Day 11 : Curiosity

I’ve made it to the city of Ontario, on the Idaho side of the border. I’m taking a day off to recover my wits, take notes, process photos, do laundry, and drink massive amounts of water. (The motel has a free ice machine! Hooray!)

To relax I decide to bike downtown. I pass by a hole-in-the-wall Mexico-themed market, where all the staff and patrons speak Spanish, perhaps exclusively. Funny how this phenomenon can be seen in America even this far north. Perhaps wherever there are fields to be worked — and Idaho has plenty of those.

Anyway, I buy three Jarritos sodas, each a different flavor, and the man behind the counter opens one of them up for me. I go riding back through town with a soda in one hand, on my lap, thinking that it probably looks like a beer to everyone who sees me at the intersections.