Crater Lake To Stanley, Day 15 : Curiosity

It’s mid-morning, and I’ve been slogging along the final, massive uphill climb towards Stanley for a couple of hours already. I pull off by the side of the road at a turnout to catch my breath and gulp from the dwindling water supply in my luggage, and as I’m recovering, I notice an information kiosk. It’s a little column of rocks and mortar with a flat space on top like a podium, and a thick sheet of scratchy plastic screwed down to it. Beneath the semi-transparent plastic is a diagram of the valley I’m climbing out of, and a few paragraphs talking about what the early prospectors and expeditions saw when they came stumbling through almost 200 years ago.

According to the diagram, the jagged mountains in the distance are the Sawtooth Range. I feel a mixture of excitement and disappointment that I am in physical sight of my destination – the planned end of my bicycle ride. Now that I am so used to moving, what will it be like to stop?

The road keeps going up, and gets even steeper. Since the morning I have had the bike set to the lowest possible gear, and now that gear isn’t low enough. I have to push harder than I want to with every pedal stroke, and most of the time I use the foot-clips to pull up on the opposite pedal at the same time, trying to spread the fatigue over both sets of leg muscles. It helps, but not a lot, so I rest frequently.

But with each rest stop I take, I look around and see another interesting variation of the terrain. The mountains are hissing with a thousand tiny snowmelt streams, and snapping with a billion lively insects. In places the terrain is so compressed and segmented that it appears to have been laid out by a team of landscape artists, twisting each tree and placing each rock just so, like the decorations in a mini-golf course or a theme park, for maximum impact. Each chunk of meadow seems tailored to fill the irregular space it occupies, between faces of sheer grey rock or mounds of skree. Each river is an intricate succession of pools and waterfalls, wound expertly around the boulders, fallen trees, sandbars, pockets of eroded rock, and the embankment of the road.

Evidence of real design – human design – is visible in the road itself. Wherever the tiny streams threaten to flood the road, the builders have very cleverly buttressed it with layers of gravel and large stones, so the water drains harmlessly into the ground and pops up in some more convenient place downhill. The road here really is a kind of technical marvel.

I pass by a sliver of valley that has choked up with water and grass, and hear a riot of frogs. I pass by a grassy clearing dotted with multicolored flowers that resembles an enchanted meadow in some fantasy novel, except that it’s on a forty-five-degree slope. I pass through a V-shaped valley crowded with low green bushes, punctuated with the blackened spires of trees burned by some decades-past forest fire, making the whole area resemble a gigantic pincushion.

Eventually the sights overwhelm me and I decide to stop and spend an hour or so photographing one of the snowmelt streams in detail.

Once I have finally pedaled to the top of the mountain pass, the terrain opens into a long plateau, divided into wide sections by thick bands of forest. The road plows a corridor straight across the bands, and the clouds are long and narrow, so the entire landscape is laid out along horizontal and vertical lines. It’s an effect I last saw while driving through the Yukon.

Up here there is space for the flowers and trees to spread out a bit.

… And the ground is flat and solid enough for the rivers to do a bit of actual meandering.

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.

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.

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.

Crater Lake To Stanley, Day 9 : Curiosity

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.

After one final push, I make it to the top of the hill. From there I make a long and very fast descent into a valley.

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.

And grow they do. In fact, the air is thick with the pungent smell of onions. Miles and miles and miles of them.

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.

Then I disappear into my room, for a tepid shower and some much needed sleep.