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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.”

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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.

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

Crater Lake To Stanley, Day 8 : Curiosity

I get up and out of the hotel room with no trouble. Before leaving I drink a prodigious amount of water, shower, and fill my water sack, but forget to fill my canteen.

Then I zig-zag out the east side of Burns towards the long 20-mile flat stretch of Highway 20. Before I get to the highway I have to pass down some long, barren streets that have probably sectioned out active farms in the past, but now just run through empty fields gone to seed. In a dirt lot between two corners of an unmarked intersection, I notice a beat-up truck with a guy sitting in the cab and another disheveled guy sitting in the back. They seem a little menacing, until one of them waves hello at me, and I raise my hand in return. The other man raises his hand in response to mine. And with the greeting ritual complete, I relax and ride on.

It sets me to wondering, though – does my own presence make people nervous? For a few days in the desert, I had to wear a scarf across my face to keep my sunburn from getting worse, and I must have looked exactly like a terrorist. … Well, a terrorist pedaling a recumbent bike.

And yet, I still got plenty of waves and smiles from passing cars. Go figure.

Soon I turn right, onto Highway 20, aka the Central Oregon Highway. I am treated to a gentle downhill grade, and zoom along at 16 miles per hour for a while. I play through Slim Westerns again, then I put the iPod in shuffle mode and come up with the ancient radio version of Har-De-Har-Har, The Ballad Of The Typical Asshole, performed by DJ Zog in another era.

That segues into one of Zog’s noise shows, and that propels me all the way across the flatlands. Just before the hills begin I pause to drink water and eat a red bell pepper, and some curious horses come moseying up to the fence for a look.

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Sorry, horses, I don’t have any snacks for you.

About an hour later I’ve ridden up to Oard’s Gallery and Museum, the only real building in the “town” of Buchanan. It’s at the foot of an extremely steep hill, so I decide to take a break. I guzzle some water and buy some snacks and a soda, and spend a few minutes petting the big old snaggletoothed orange cat that walks around on the display counters, then go on a little tour of the museum.

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There’s a lot of stuff crammed into a very small space here.

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Some of it is for sale … but I have zero interest in purchasing. Anything I buy would have to be hauled hundreds of miles on a bicycle.

Bike touring gives you a very different perspective about souvenirs.

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Outside the rest stop I chat with a guy refueling his motorcycle. He’s wearing a black leather jacket with broad shoulders, over a T-shirt with a noir-style Popeye drawn on it, striking a thoughtful pose.

“Stanley Idaho, eh?” he says. “My old hunting grounds. Beautiful place. You’ll like it there.”

He zooms off on the motorbike, which is far too quiet and agile to be an American vehicle, taking only a few seconds to ascend the hill that’s going to take me half an hour to climb.

Crater Lake To Stanley, Day 7 : Curiosity

I’m on my way out of Wagontire. I’ve had a solid breakfast and a nice chat with the young girl who is granddaughter to Wagontire’s only permanent resident. (She brings the total population of Wagontire up to 2.) She’s in an unfortunate situation – her body is maturing much faster than her mind, and she’s rebelled against the trappings of womanhood and become a tomboy, and started hanging out mostly with boys, which unfortunately exposes her to a greater portion of the physical pressure and deceit that young boys can exhibit. I wanted to warn her about this, but couldn’t find a way to steer the conversation there without coming across to her grandmother as a creep.

Anyway, I’m back on the road, pedaling towards Burns on Highway 395. “Slim Westerns” is my theme music for this terrain, and I’m most of the way through the album. The water in my bandanna and gloves is almost entirely gone.

I stop at the top of a large hill and pee on the highway. It’s taken me a while I get used to peeing right out in the open; in high desert there’s no shelter to hide behind, and no trees to pee against, except perhaps the telephone poles. So you just stand any old where and let ‘er rip, and hope there aren’t any electric cars on the road, since you can’t hear those thing coming.

I get back on board and coast down the hill, and begin slowly climbing the next one, a long shallow incline several miles long. Near the top, I glance in my rear-view mirror and see a dark shape coming up slowly behind me along the side of the road. Immediately the Stephen King story “The Long Walk” elbows into my mind, and I laugh out loud at myself, then shove the vision back out of my mind. Just what I need – Death himself striding up the shoulder after me.

After a few minutes the shape slowly resolves into two shapes, weaving in and out of each other. I pull my headphones out and turn my head to listen, and hear no engine noise, and no farting of Harleys. It must be bicyclists. If they’re cycling out in this wasteland, they must be on an extended tour. Hot damn, my second encounter with fellow tourers!

Eventually they draw up alongside me. It’s two young men, in t-shirts and bicycle pants. They’re on upright bikes with what I would consider a light amount of gear strapped to them. One is bearing a gallon jug of water with a screw-top lid, bungee corded to a rack. With each stroke of his pedals the bike swings, causing the water to slosh around. They’re ascending the hill much faster than I am, because they’re standing up on their pedals. Ah the impatience of youth. Quietly I worry for their survival in this heat, with no helmets and a half-gallon of water to share.

I wave, and shout “Where ya headed?”

“Yellowstone!”

“Cool!”

“And you?”

“Stanley, Idaho!”

They quickly outdistance me, on their lighter bikes and younger legs.

Hours later, I descend into the town of Riley. The entire town consists of one large general store, thrown together at a T-junction in a patch of cropland. I coast over to the entrance and discover that the two kids I’d seen earlier in the day are here, splayed out on a wooden bench, slowly eating ice cream cups. Each has purchased a bottle of spring water and drained it. Their bikes are laid on the ground near some bushes, and I dismount and kickstand my bike near theirs, behind a motorcycle. The owner of the motorcycle is sitting on another bench, chatting with the two boys.

“Fancy meeting you guys here!” I say. They laugh. “Of course, there’s only one road out of here, to the east, so it was kind of bound to happen.”

I pull my empty canteen off my seat and walk into the store. I purchase a root beer, some chips, and a couple of bananas, then hold up the canteen and ask, “Is there a place I can fill this with water?” The woman at the register directs me to a sink, and I fill the canteen and then soak my bandanna, gloves, and the arms of my shirt up to the shoulders.

Outside I place the canteen back behind my seat. One of the boys examines it with an expression like, “Why didn’t I think of that?!” I chat with them for a while, and take their picture.

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Feeling less taciturn now, one of them asks if I can help him with the rack on his bike. A strut is broken and he’s had to apply copious duct-tape to it; and the bag still slides off. I hand him the large zipties I’d brought in my repair bag, wishing that I’d remembered to pack some actual rack hardware like I’d intended to. He thanks me sincerely and sets to work on the rack. Looks like I’ve made some friends.

It’s funny; the desire to help fellow bike tourers is curiously intense, and it even extends to other people on the road who aren’t touring. I find myself interested in helping strangers that I would usually ignore, and taking action for them that would usually seem like too much of an inconvenience. For example, what if my own rack breaks now? I have no zipties to field-repair it. But here’s a broken rack right in front of me. The zipties should be used; it doesn’t matter that it’s not my rack.

Crater Lake To Stanley, Day 7 : Discomfort

Over breakfast I tell the woman who runs Wagontire about the cow noises, and she says, “Yep, as a matter of fact, they were runnin’ a bunch of cows by here last night.” Mystery solved.

It’s mid-afternoon, and I’m riding away from the “town” of Riley. I’ve got water and snacks, and am prepared for another long, rolling run over scrubland hills and hay fields. But I’m not prepared for what I find at the top of the next rise: A construction zone, compressing the road in half, with a guide car, and a woman at the head wearing a hard-hat and holding a sign – the reversible kind for directing traffic.

The woman just waves at me, and then gestures for me to go ahead up the road, regardless of the timing of the traffic. I’m skeptical, but I decide to follow orders. As I proceed up along the left-hand shoulder, very slowly, a procession of huge trucks bellows past me, only a few feet from my wind-tossed bicycle, and in one case only a few inches. The woman with the sign makes no effort to stop them or even slow them down, even though I am still only partway up the hill.

Then, just as I reach the top of the hill, I see a long chain of cars coming towards me on the single lane. The worker at the other end of the zone has signaled for their traffic to proceed, completely ignorant of my presence. The woman who waved me in was clearly not doing her job, and jeopardizing my safety.

The oncoming cars notice me and slow way down, attempting to compensate for the uncomfortable position. I wave sheepishly at them and curse the woman with the sign, under my breath.

Thankfully, the people running the next construction zone were much smarter. The woman running that one let me go first, then slowed down the guide car so I led the group, until I was safely in the two-lane region.

On the way down a big hill leading to the next major town, I find a piece of property that looks like an outdoor warehouse for old car parts.

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I’m sure it’s nice to have a spare part handy for whatever breaks down on this winding, scorched road, but the resource is a bit of an eyesore. I also can’t help wondering what awful things are leaking out of the engine blocks and crankcases and permeating the soil of the valley. The scene compels me to think about the difficulty of managing industrial pollution, how modern cities have to bootstrap themselves from one configuration to the next, to serve the whims of the economy and the affluence of their population, and how every stage leaves a different kind of detritus that must be managed. Mine tailings, animal crap, railroad ties, lead piping, copper wire, et cetera through the ages … and in this case, poisoned soil.

The town I’ve arrived at is called Burns. On the way in, I rode past a huge refinery smokestack, standing alone in a field of bulldozed ruins. Rebar and cement lay in heaps. I imagine the only reason the smokestack remains is because the contractors are not sure how to safely knock it down. For now, it’s just another half-finished project, a sloppy mess on the edge of a town that is sloppy in general.

To visualize the street layout of Burns, and the level of urban planning that was probably involved, picture a giant hand sweeping across the sparse patchwork of roads that meander through most of the Oregon wilderness. Imagine the hand gathering up these roads into a compressed wad. Now the wad is tossed into a waffle iron, pressed flat, and cooked at a thousand degrees so everything gets torn up, cracked, and melted. Welcome to the town of Burns. Inside the city grid, you’ll be lucky to find a piece of uncracked pavement wider than a beach umbrella. What isn’t bulldozed is crumbling. What isn’t crumbling, is festering under several layers of paint and tar.

I’m sure there are people who live here and love it; and to them, I apologize. You’re nice people; I met some of you. But your whole town is beat up like a roadsign by a rifle range.

I’ve just checked into what is probably the worst hotel in Burns. I didn’t mean to; I was just looking for something close to the center of town. The layout of the room is as bad as the layout of Burns. The second bed (and I’m taking liberties with the definition of “bed” here) is so close to the front door that I have to lift my bike over it sideways to get it into the room.

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The lights that work are crap fluorescents, but I want it dark anyway, so that’s alright. I’m standing in front of the mirror of the tiny bathroom, inspecting my brutal sunburn from the last week of riding.

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How appropriate. I show up in Burns, and I’ve got burns. I really need to make some kind of face-covering to complement the scarf on my head.