I get up and load my bike, and before I leave town I go poking around the RV park again, to get a better look at the colony of cats. Some of them are dirty and clearly need homes. But it’s not like I can just pick one up and stuff it in my luggage. And they’re half-feral at least already – it may be too late to train them.
Around 3:00am I wake up hearing the sound of animals roving around outside – raccoons perhaps. I dismiss the noise, and turn on my back, and fall asleep again.
About an hour later I hear an angry snapping sound close at hand, and I open my eyes, still mostly asleep, and see light flashing indistinctly around me. Freaked out, disoriented from my weird dreams, I sit up and claw savagely at the air in front of my face, instinctively trying to pre-emptively attack whatever is about to kill me.
Then I sit all the way up, eyes straining, and all I see is the pinpoint of light on the side of the power adapter, plugged into my laptop. As I watch it, it turns from orange to green, indicating that it attempted to charge, but then found that the battery was full.
Puzzled by this, but also reassured by the mundanity of it, I remember where I am and who I am, breathe calmly for a while, and then fall back asleep. It’s not until morning, after I’m back on my bike and out on the road, that I realize I was probably awakened by the noise of a temporary power failure caused by crappy wiring. I woke up just in time for the power to return, and for my laptop to attempt another charge.
The territory is beautiful, but as I pedal through it, for eight hours, I am endlessly blasted by a headwind — a punishingly dry one. Every downhill slope feels flat; every hill feels like a hot brick wall. My gloves and kerchief and sweater dry out, and I slurp my way through my lemonade cup, then through one canteen, then through the other, then begin working on my water sack, which is already warm.
Five hours into the ride, I stop the bike and blunder down to the river, to soak my arms and hands. I have to stomp and hack my way through a gauntlet of weeds, and when I get to the river, the banks are narrow and the water is moving fast. I dunk my shoes and my hands, and splash my shirt liberally. When I stumble back up to the road, I discover that a woman has parked her car at the turnout fifty feet away. She walks up to me and asks how she can get to the river, since she’s thirsty too, but I warn her against it, then wish her well and pedal away.
If she has no water, I am not interested in conversation.
Two hours later I run out of water entirely. The water bag is totally flat. Half an hour later I am thirsty again, and my sleeves and bandanna have dried out. I stop and gaze longingly at the river, still flowing past me with its precarious banks. There’s just no way to get down to it without falling in, and I’d probably be carried a long way before I could drag myself out again. The hills on either side of me are even less hospitable. They’re covered with dry bushes, packed together and reaching up like the clawed hands of the undead, eager to tear at the living.
“Glad I don’t have to walk through that crap,” I mutter, and pedal on. I’m getting a bit worried. I packed as much water as my containers would allow, and it still wasn’t enough to get me past this canyon.
I do eventually find some water, but the ride down out of the mountains leaves me exhausted, and I still have to cross a valley to get to the next town. I can see on my GPS that I need to go down one long stretch of road, then turn northeast, then go down another long stretch of road, and then I’m done for the day. I set an audiobook playing, and concentrate on spinning the pedals, and I make pretty good time until I get to the bend in the road, and then that terrible headwind returns.
It batters me from the left side in irregular bursts, causing me to weave all over the narrow shoulder. The fields across the highway are fallow, and the wind gathers up long rolling tubes of grit and dust, then pushes them over the road at me. Sometimes I can see these waves approaching and brace for them, squinting my eyes and holding my breath, but usually the evening light is too dim for me to make them out. The sun has already set, and the sky is a white blanket of gloom, growing dimmer, but not dark enough to make my headlight useful, and every couple minutes the wind spits raindrops at me, as if to say “Don’t complain, I can easily make it worse.”
Just around the time my GPS indicates I am halfway down the road, the headwind changes course and starts blowing directly in my face. There’s less grit this way, but now it’s against my pedaling, and I’m forced to slow down from 10 miles per hour to 6. I become so frustrated with the wind that I began yelling at it. “Yooouuuuuu ssssuuuuuuuuuuucccckk!!!! Arrrrrrrrrrggghhh!!! Get oouuuuuuuutt of myyy fffaaaaaacceee!!!! ARRRRRGGGH!!” Each time a car passes me in the lane, I swerve out into the road so I can ride in the draft, for the few seconds it remains. It’s risky but I don’t care at this point.
A full hour later I arrive in the town of Vale, exhausted, starving, and coated in grit. Luckily a cheap hotel and a decent restaurant are still open.
I’ve made it to Juntura, and am eating breakfast at the Oasis diner. Terry the cook sits down at my table and writes me out a list of the hot springs I should look for as I ride east.
When he gets up, I start a conversation with the guy two tables down, first about the road, and then about his strange hobby. He owns some land outside of town, and for five or six years now he has been using some of his retirement fund to buy large amounts of seed and distribute it to the wild bird population.
I ask him, “What’s the motivation?”
“When I was young I did a lot of hunting. Killed a whole lot of them. Now I want to give something back. Sometimes it’s complicated – you have to move the feed sites around to keep the birds from getting sick, and grain prices can fluctuate a lot. But I enjoy it.”
“How do you finance it?”
“I’ve got an income, I’m comfortable. Got enough to spare so I can do this.”
While we’re talking, a woman walks by, towards the exit doors. The guy chats with her for a while, and I learn that she’s a farmer, and her grain harvest is coming up soon.
The man says, “Make sure you get the quail out of the way first, because the babies won’t run, even if they hear the noise.”
“Oh, I do, I do,” she says. “I chase them out myself.”
This guy is very dedicated to preserving birds. I consider making a donation to his cause, but I don’t have much money at the moment. In retrospect, I should have offered to help him put up a web page for accepting donations and offering tours. I should have at least gotten his name.
It’s about an hour before noon, and I’m on my way out of Juntura, after lingering in the diner for too long. The air is hot and dry, and blowing steadily in my face as I climb the first rise out of town. The clouds overhead look very intricate.
Down that first hill, the road begins to follow a canyon, cut by a river. The walls are towering strata of rock and steep hillsides crumbling down onto each other in massive colored bands.
It’s very pretty, and I spend many hours biking through it due to the headwind. The contrast between the dry hills and the wet river is a little weird. After a long, dusty afternoon, I pedal out of a valley and discover a nice display of sunset colors behind me.
As I’m descending, I can already tell that this valley is different from any of the valleys I’d pedaled through all week. The air is cool, and not dry. Crops can grow well here.
Also, corn. Tight regimental rows of genetically identical corn plants, for miles and miles. As it scrolls past my bike I think in amazement, “Each of these fields will feed a thousand people this year. Hell, maybe ten thousand. Mechanized farming is incredible.”
Between and within the fields, farmers have etched canals for water distribution. Some of the local plants have grown wild in these canals, claiming the unused space. Animals have also moved in. As I’m riding by I glance down one of the canals and see a handful of baby ducks paddling hastily after their mother.
Eventually I roll in to the town of Vale, just on the Idaho border. I locate a motel across from an RV park, and see a sign that says “Check In At RV Park Across Street”. As I walk my bike around the gravel lanes of the RV park to the office, I notice a lot of cats – some very young – slinking around in the shadows, spying on me. Then I see a big hand-painted sign: “Caution! Children And Kittens Crossing!”
I get a room for 30 bucks, and haul my bike into it. Then I wash up hastily, and pull most of my luggage off the bike so I can ride it around town more easily. It’s about 11pm but the diner at the other end of town is still open, so I ride over there and get an omelette, toast, hash browns, and a visit to the salad bar. Plus four cups of ice water. While I’m digesting, I listen to the conversation of the old farmers seated nearby.
They talk about training and purchasing horses, fetching stray cattle, the difficulty of managing dry weather and estimating the value of land. One of them tells a story of a horse he bought that didn’t train very well but was extremely sturdy, and how he used to ride that horse through the rough terrain on the west edge of his land, until one day he was out mending a fence with some ranch hands and something made the horse get skittish, and it put a foot wrong and fell down on a hillside. It never fully recovered from the injury and the farmer had to just let it out to pasture.
The regret in the farmer’s voice is obvious, and part of an interesting pattern. Farmers don’t talk about animals the way urban people do. Animals on a farm are generally kept to serve some purpose — in other words, to do work. And a working relationship inspires respect. Sometimes more than just respect, actually. For example, the work that dogs and horses do is done better when the animal has intelligence and personality. You spend all day on a well-mannered horse, and you’re going to start liking that horse. Spend all day managing sheep with a clever sheepdog, and you’re going to feel an attachment to that dog. Even feed animals inspire a relationship with a kind of depth to it – not on the individual level, but on the level of the species. They need to be managed. But if you keep an animal around just for amusement or attention, an accessory to your life that doesn’t make or save you money, the relationship is, of course, different. It can be a lot less respectful, a lot more dismissive.
It’s strange to listen to this casual respect in the words of farmers, and compare it with the attitudes I find in city-dwellers, on both extremes. There are people in the city who think of animals as differently-shaped people, with complex inner lives and human empathy and wisdom – and there are people who consider animals to be robots, ambulatory objects made for eating, destruction, or abuse. One type of person would keep a chihuahua as a pet, name it Snookums, and claim that it has psychic powers. The other type of person would buy the veal entree on a lunch break, eat half of it, and dump the rest casually in the trash. Some people even do both.
To farmers, it must seem like this sort of contact with animals is a joke.
But I digress. At about 1:00am, I pay my bill, and ride my bike back to the motel. I pass the neon sign out front and decide it needs to be photographed.
I’m pedaling into a headwind, going about half the speed I usually do, through a long twisty canyon. Since the terrain is moving very slowly, I put on an audiobook: The Affair Of The Bloodstained Egg Cosy. Turns out to be an engagingly written whodunit, painted from the Agatha Christie paintbox. The descriptions of austere English countryside and dark manor houses is a severe contrast to my environment, but that kind of adds to the appeal.
Today is a day of hills. After a long flat stretch, I climb a hill, then another larger hill, and then I go blasting down into a valley and lose all my altitude. At the end of the valley the road slowly tilts upward, more and more, until it plunges down again and I find myself at the base of a narrow valley, looking up at an absolutely enormous hill. By this time it’s late in the day and I’m low on water, and as I roll slowly up to the base I begin weighing my options for camping somewhere nearby, so I can tackle the hill in the morning. But the valley is bowl-shaped, so any flat space I could choose is in plain view of the highway. I’m not keen on being a roadside camper, visible to a thousand curious yahoos and policemen. So up I go, at two miles per hour.
Halfway up the extremely sloping road I stop to rest and gather my wits. I’m feeling a bit faint from the exertion. I had plenty of sleep the previous night, and I stuffed my face with food, but my body is falling behind my energy demands.
I sit down on a retaining wall, even though my butt is a bit sore, because I’m having trouble standing. I want to lay down directly on the road instead, but that would cause motorists to pull over and ask worried questions. I chomp mechanically on a bag of fritos, then some peanut butter crackers, then some juice and water. The food disappears into me, and my hunger is totally unchanged.
Oh well. Nowhere to go but up. I rest and meditate for a while longer, enjoying the sunset colors and waiting for the juice to kick in, then I climb back onto the bike and pedal on.
At my second rest break, I sip water slowly, waiting for my body to cook more energy out of the food in my gut. My mind wanders and I have an interesting realization: My body is managing itself, and I am managing my body, in a way that is totally unlike the way I’ve been doing things for 99 percent of my life.
Usually, I pass my time in a world brimming with calories, and my only sense of hunger is the sense of having a digestive system with nothing to do, and a calorie deficit of half a day at the most. Out here, I am not only experiencing a chronic calorie deficit, I am keeping myself in such constant motion that my body is having difficulty converting energy fast enough to keep me functioning on an hour by hour basis.
The physiology behind this is interesting. Without going into too much detail, I can describe it this way: My entire body runs on glucose. Glucose is digested out of the food I eat, swims around in my bloodstream, and is slurped up and used as needed. I can also store extra fuel in my body, mostly in my liver, in the form of glycogen. As long as I have enough glycogen around, it doesn’t matter how fast I get ahold of glucose, because I can convert the glycogen I have stored back into glucose to make up for the deficit and keep pedaling along. Typically, my body has around a 12-hour supply of glycogen, and it can refill the tank as I digest overnight.
But now I’m out here, and I’ve been pedaling for as much as 12 hours a day, one day after the other. My glycogen level is low, because all the glucose I make during the day is being sucked up and burned by my muscles before my liver can get ahold of it and make more glycogen. If I sit down and concentrate, I can feel that lowness, as a kind of low-grade hunger that’s curiously different from the hunger I usually experience. Usually I feel hunger as a sensation that comes up from my stomach and my gut – a message that the assembly line of digestion is empty, and wasting time. In the usual scenario, my liver may be depleted of glycogen, but that’s because it’s dumped it all out over the course of the day, making sure that the rest of my body gets as much as it wants.
But now my body – every part of it – is not getting as much as it wants. Everything is fighting for glucose, and the liver is being conservative with what little supply it has, because it has to keep a minimum safe level, to keep my heart beating and my lungs working, for an unknown length of time. It could be disastrous to dump all the reserves in.
So now, I feel hunger as a sensation from all over my body. Not the soreness of lactic acid – the ache of overused muscle – but a kind of emptiness, even a feeling of suction, as though my whole body were a giant drink straw, trying to suck food into itself and re-inflate.
For the first time in many years, I feel as though I could gulp down an entire bottle of soda, and feel no sugar-high whatsoever.
Here in Juntura, I’ve just checked into the second worst hotel room of the trip. It’s really bad. I think it used to be a shipping container, but the interior has been lined with sheetrock, vinyl, and lumpy carpet. It has three windows, but all three of them have been covered over with huge sheets of transparent plastic, staplegunned to the walls. I’m not sure if it’s for heat retention purposes or just to increase the weird factor, but the bugs have taken it as an opportunity to set up shop and transform each windowsill into a little sealed terrarium. With the spiders, the silverfish, the moths, the tiny centipedes, and the sunlight, there is a fairly complete biosphere at work here.
But like I said, this is the second worst room. The worst room was in Burns. (The one in Wagontire was free, so I’m not counting it.) The redeeming factors that this room has over the one in Burns are:
The beds do not block the door and are not nailed to the floorboards.
The fridge is full-size and there is a microwave and a television, and some additional outlets.
The shower isn’t repulsive, once you bang on it and scare out the spiders.
The air is actually fresher and warmer than in Burns.
Strange but true. I find myself liking the room, despite the abundance of critters with more than four legs. I feel like I am their guest for the night — as if I might find a folded card on the toilet tank that reads, “Welcoem to bug rume, wee hoep U liek or aminneteys, signd, The Bugs.”
I arrange my sleeping bag on one of the beds, and spread my sweater out to make a pillow. I plug the laptop in to charge, start a playlist of piano music, and quickly fall asleep.
