siam to attica

day 38 -- clinton to dayton

2010-10-03T23:46:00.009-05:00

450 miles to dayton, fantasy football draft starting in 12 hours (and first class of the quarter at 8.30 sharp the next morning), labor day traffic across illinois and indiana, that same apocalyptic storm always in the background. cutting it this close wasn't the smartest idea, but with two new tires what could go wrong? sure, a garden variety breakdown would leave me in some small town with no way to secure transportation home short of leaning too hard on some hapless friend. but since groundless optimism was the theme for the trip, it was a fitting end.

crossed the river not as early as I'd hoped on a narrow concrete bridge on the lincoln highway. taking US30 as far as it would take me was tempting (grew up just a few miles from its eastern end, went to college right on it), but I was still harboring a neurotic urge to avoid chicago. crossing the mississippi is a disappointment in most places...apart from levees there isn't any topographical relief, just a sprawling river with scruffy islands and indistinct banks. so what span it are low, nondescript bridges that don't lend any grandeur to this greatest of rivers. crossings are infrequent, but the width of the river is the only engineering challenge -- the number of pylons determines the cost, not innovative solutions for spanning the distance. and so it is for the US30 bridge(s -- one on the north end of town, one just south of the city center). on the illinois side was flat nothing, straight roads, summer haze. none of the rolling bluffs that crowd the iowa side. followed the lincoln highway as far as rock falls (missed a section where now-US30 departs from the historical highway (confusing)) and was flipped onto I-88 for a short stretch, and then due south on SR40. at the junction the road crossed over the feeder trough for the hennepin canal, which linked the illinois and rock rivers to cut 419 river miles off of the freight journey from chicago to rock island. and further south I crossed the canal itself, which the state has rehabbed into a multiuse recreational trail on land and water. the route was long and dead straight and didn't do much to keep me ahead of the rainy tail end of the haunting storm of the previous night, but I missed rain once again even with a breakfast stop at peoria, which is where I turned east for good. somewhere along the way I hooked up with the ronald reagan heritage trail through this utterly nondescript landscape. and I thought he was a golden state cowboy. the trail did lead past tiny eureka college, the name of which I guess presaged his california destination. dodged a closed-off town square in bradford, but no time to wait around for labor day festivities, though the bbq drums were already a-smokin.

from peoria I turned east on US24, chosen for its run well south of chicago (see above) and its long straight line into the heart of indiana. this was familiar corn country. now dry-cold stalks, gleaming silos of familiar shape (not the open-framed silos of california and oregon), the sweet sickly smell of silage and manure that I caught for the first time in weeks when I reached minnesota and iowa. towns with optimistic names like eureka and fairbury and goodland. overall miles and miles of an identical human landscape. barn-silo-house-town-house-silo-barn, and on this day frantic harvesting perhaps ahead of the storm rolling in from the west? and in this everyone-harvesting-at-once a reminder of the trap of modern farming -- a small fleet of combines mowing down stalks in just about every field. no opportunity for pooling resources and sharing that $280k piece of equipment that you use for two weeks a year. the amish win again. I crossed into (back home again in) indiana with little fanfare and not much traffic. until I crossed I-65, that is. immediately the westbound lane was stacked up with trucks towing weekend boats from the exotic indiana lake district back into the big shoulders. I was headed the right direction at the right time to miss all this, but I was slightly concerned that I'd have to dodge a road-raging and sunburnt drunk trying to move up a couple of spots, but all was quiet. no vacation traffic coming in from central illinois, but lake schafer and lake freeman make north central indiana the hot spot for an exotic interstate getaway. or something. better than the borrow-pit pond slash campgrounds that hug I-75 in northern ohio.

traffic thinned as I neared logansport, which was the downriver pull-out of a wabash canoe trip I took last summer. I managed to lose a pair of oakleys stashing the canoe by the river while I biked back to huntington to pick up the car. so I figured if I was ever back in town I'd dig through the river mud for them (yeah...they're not cheap shades). and there I was a quick turn off US24 to the river road, but the chances of finding the spot were slim -- I picked it as a good place to hide for the bike and then the canoe, after all. anyway, a half hour treasure hunt didn't fit the schedule, and it was on to kokomo and a slog through indiana strip mall territory -- the summer heat was back. on the way I stopped for a sandwich in galveston, IN, where a blustery young infantryman was regaling old classmates with a jumble of basic training tales and 'remember that time when...' exaggerations. he exuded new recruit confidence, backed by a sergeant who promised to 'bend the rules' so he could speed up his deployment to afghanistan...though in this there was a shrill note that didn't cover his nerves. despite his charisma there was something about him that made his friends nervous and anxious to see him go...in his mildly souped up ride.

I was back on US35 now, which happens to lead all the way to a quarter mile from my apartment. through the indiana gasfields and around muncie, where I got impatient of suburban arteries and veered off on SR32. I should have stayed the course through the familiar towns of economy and williamsburg into richmond, but instead I was on the just-as-familiar but slightly longer route past quirkily scenic farmland, IN and the winchester speedway (a favorite of dad's old mechanic, randomly). so the equally familiar but more boring US27 south to richmond, some quick jogs through the west side of town and then a straight shot down the main drag. time to spare, so I skipped even the last 30 miles on I-70 and stuck to US35 through eaton and west alexandria and new lebanon, towns and pizza shops and christian-themed coffee shops familiar from lazy afternoon commutes back from adjuncting at wright state when I lived in richmond. and then the scruffy west edge of dayton, the abandoned delphi parts plant, and home. home. 38 days, 9986 miles (on the second bike), 21 states. from dayton, OH to dayton, NV; florence, KY to florence, AZ; clinton, OK to clinton, IA; el paso, TX to el paso IL; jonesboro, AR to jonesboro, IN.

and with that, as a wise (very) young friend remarked, 'his trip is done.'

day 37 -- new ulm to clinton, IA

2010-09-24T23:29:00.003-05:00

two days to go and still nowhere near the mississippi, so New Ulm (and its monument to Arminius, apparently -- this town is seriously German) was in the rearview early as I headed southeast toward Dubuque in an effort to give chicago a wide berth on labor day. the route I took kept to the eastern edge of the prairie...tributary valleys for the big muddy dropped off to the left until I crossed over in Decorah, IA, home of Luther College and the upper iowa river. the college is tucked away down the valley, but it's left its mark on a vibrant main street...couldn't find a seat in the crunchy grocery store slash deli and ended up in a (you betcha) German-themed golden arches, listening to college boys trying to impress women by talking casually about internet porn. from there I outraced a stormfront across a patchwork of farmed highlands and creek hollows, each one deeper than the last as I approached the river. climbed over a last set of bluffs and dropped down to the mississippi at Guttenberg, and I was back in the dead zone of river towns. chatted with a couple that had leapfrogged me a couple of times along the way -- they'd roar by, get lost as US52 wound through a town, then catch up to me again. when I said I was headed for 'ohio, eventually,' they heard 'waterloo [, iowa].' and then through the rest of europe-in-iowa back above the river: luxemburg, then durango. and finally into Dubuque. a touch bigger than I thought, a town of brick warehouses and the river and crumbling industry. that rivertown time warp again...even the cars sun was setting, but I wanted to roll on closer to the river crossing on the lincoln highway. so now past the 'mines of spain' state park (once spanish property, mines visible on google earth), a fantastic sunset over the bluffs, then back down to the buggy river. hilly country, not bottomland at all here, more low hills and roads winding back into woods, turnoffs for old ferries. by late dusk had pulled into the surprisingly lively town of bellevue with several bars, lots of bikers, but no motels except for a bed and breakfast in a barn on the outskirts, so I pressed on to Clinton, IA.

I found a budget inn right downtown and grabbed a room, parked next to a pair of his/hers old model yamaha cruisers. lazed around savoring my last motel parallel universe night...crappy TV, anonymity on an empty floor. by the time I roused myself to forage for food, it was too late to find anything on a sunday night without heading out to the outskirts. china garden was around the corner, but a hand-markered sign announced that the proprietors were off on vacation for a couple of weeks. the bar across the street featured a disconcerting interaction between a woman in a wheelchair and another patron, so I steered clear and wandered around a starkly empty town. dimly lit storefronts, a handful of abandoned cars, a trio of youngsters hurrying away from a downtown apartment building. they were bundled against a surprising wind, which was what drew me outside more than the prospect of food. I was vaguely hoping for an iowa tornado -- no luck there, but the wind certainly was fierce. leaves raining sideways, dust clogging my eyes. all of this added to a vague surreality. could be that this was the last night out on a long trip, but something about the silent downtown and the apocalyptic wind without a storm gave me the sense that I was in a haunted landscape. alas, no ghosts, not even in the motel.

day 36 -- morehead to new ulm, MN

2010-09-23T22:31:00.008-05:00

due south from morehead through now-endless cornfields. I must have missed the descent into the red river bottom on the dakota side while zipping along on the 'superslab.' not quite as soul-crushing as the arkansas-missouri bottom, likely because it was cooler than 105 degrees, absent the blazing sun. it was sunday morning quiet and still. small towns and grain elevators and the red river and western rail line...and the iowa, chicago, and eastern...and one stray canada pacific train decorated with 'come to canada' slogans fading on the boxcars. and here hunting licenses for sale, bait and tackle in convenience stores. no wilderness in sight, but the route skirted the forest margin. and everywhere a parkway in this featureless cornland -- highway 75 the king of trails (from the gulf to canada), the prairie passage, the laura ingalls wilder parkway. there was more history on these routes, or more like manufactured historical places with shiny new asphalts looping off the scarred concrete of the secondary highway. minnesota was surprisingly immediately in the lead for roughest roads, though the rural sample was probably not representative. seamed concrete, endless rough tar squiggles.

roads in disrepair notwithstanding, I'd actually reminded myself to slow it down a bit once I got to the more well-ordered and lawful side of the red river. no more desert and high plain highways here. and sure enough, the very first dotted-yellow pass I attempted in the state of Hubert Humphrey and Jesse Ventura? undertaken just as a squarish car with not-a-bike rack-on-its-roof appeared over the crest of the next hill. seriously. he U-turned behind me and the truck I'd passed, I pulled over, yadayada. somehow I divined that this was minnesota and the tough guy out-intimidate-the-cop act wasn't necessary, so I was polite and positively gregarious with a trooper who was in fact fred rogers' grandson. he had me at 76mph in a 55, but focused on a 'new law' that limited passing speed to 10mph over the speed limit. I'm not clear why it's okay to speed while passing, and he correctly pointed out that I passed another vehicle that was doing 61mph at the time. but I produced the trifecta of license, registration, and insurance info (even after he told me it was okay if I didn't want to dig them out of my luggage), and because I don't yet have any bench warrants, officer very friendly helped me 'get through this state without a ticket.' and I thanked him for his concern for my safety. 'magine that.

stopped to blog in a sleepy coffee shop somewhere and zig-zagged across the minnesota river valley on a sweep southwest of the twin cities. I missed one scenic route when it slipped off onto a county road...minnesota roads were obsessively numbered, and there was no road too small to get the scenic designation. ended up a town short of a mankato destination, but happily, as it turned out, in new ulm, MN. the road to mankato turned north across the river one more time, but I took a quick detour into downtown new ulm down a treelined boulevard, along a notably lively main street and then down a steep hill to the river and the annual RiverBlast. clouds of bbq smoke, music, crowds, and I'd managed not to miss labor day weekend completely.

surveyed the scene, then headed back out to a cheap motel on the edge of town where some good ol' boys had set up their own par-tay on a picnic table in a corner of the parking lot. bud lite and cards and kid rock (!) on a genuine boom box. tempting, but RiverBlast smelled a touch better, so after donning the party shirt I rolled back down to the river. at first glance this looked like any smalltown festival -- food trucks selling pork bbq, a tent for beer armbands and a separate tent for beer tapped from the side of a truck (from the local august schell brewery). I had already missed a lot -- the saturday started with a road race and later a paddling rally and canoe obstacle course on the river. various boomers were discussing aches and pains from same. and the music! the plan b band, which the website advertised as 'minnesota's fastest rising blues band,' though perhaps 'the palest blues band on the planet' would be more accurate; Donnie Klossner on the accordion -- 'musik mit Herz;' and the band I saw, finishing off the festival -- Paul Cebar and the Milwaukeeans. but even at 10pm riverblast was still very much alive, nearly raucous. admittedly it was competing with stereotypes about you betcha lake woebegone scandinavians, but new ulm is self-identified teutonic territory. perhaps this explains the remarkably bacchanalian atmosphere, as far as public festivals go in recent midwestern experience. the crowd leaned heavily toward boomers, though there was a smattering of younger folks...but everyone was into the band. so none of this sounds all that wild, really, and it wasn't...but there was an openness that stood out. everyone knew everyone else (and eyes followed me as an interloper)...people slid in and out of conversations over beer and brats and canoe stories, and in and out of the stiff-legged but uninhibited jiving in front of the funk 80s soul from the milwaukeeans. that reunion-of-some-sort vibe was awesome, esp since there was a complete lack of posturing and self-consciousness. and precious little awkward flirting though the crowd looked more and more unattached as the evening wound down. maybe all of this was boomers passing into the who-cares-anymore phase. two tall frizzy blondes in matching semi-uniforms who were in charge of drawing names for the gun cabinet giveaway shimmied away with whoever happened by. the resident punk danced with someone's grandma. a squat couple with matching flattops fired off some seriously dirty dancing. the drunk girls from the office wore glow-in-the-dark bracelets seductively. cowboy hats were about as ironic as it got. and so on. can't adequately describe it, but there was something easy and joyous about it that made an impression, even sounds from a distance when I wandered down to the dock on a misty moonsilver river.

running and philosophizing

2010-09-19T23:21:00.004-05:00

on the other side of the red river from fargo is morehead, MN, home to Concordia College and philosopher matt. for those keeping score, philosopher matt is not to be confused with gandhi matt in portland, though they have philosophy in common. philosopher matt is a philosopher by trade, not just avocation, and is nearing the end of a three-year stint at Concordia that may well continue on. he's from (very) small town indiana, grew up in an evangelical family and has developed a uniquely positioned perspective on faith and reason that's way more than just academic posturing. he's also a runner with remarkable range -- 1:55 (correct me if I'm wrong) for 800m in college to 2:42 for a hilly marathon -- and a touch more athletic than most runners: rail thin but capable of benching 250lbs* back in the day (*edited for accuracy and so as not to slight anyone's athleticism). most importantly he can sketch complex thoughts while running up steep hills...college roommate booboo may be a better storyteller-on-the-run, but philsopher matt wins on quality per mile at pace. so this is a long introduction, but philosophy and running are what we do (okay, I'm faking both right now), training together intermittently (mostly because of my frequent retirements from running and general absenteeism) and bouncing deep thought beachballs around on runs. the gaps between runs grow increasingly longer (with repeated conversations and tales the result, though this is also a symptom of the aging academic), but the idea synthesis still works. I know that I could finish the dissertation if it were possible to dictate it to philsopher matt over the course of a few months of consistent runs. distilling thoughts we do well.

so I pulled into philosopher matt's driveway in morehead in the early evening after winding through downtown fargo and after an initial lap past his house...which sits a bit precariously close to the flood-prone river, though apparently just high enough that it didn't require the sandbags his neighbors' places did in the last couple of floods. he's renting this well-lit little house, sparsely furnished as you'd expect since he's still technically based in cincinnati -- his guitar and a table were the most substantial possessions I saw. and after dusting accumulated arthropoda off my gear, we set out for a quick jog along the summertime sedate river. the discussion this time was on 'shopcraft and soulcraft' and competence and labor. and then to JL Beers for burgers and local brew in a surprisingly cosmopolitan fargo. a handful of colleges make for a downtown strip that is way more impressive than dayton's...so perhaps I don't have to escape to the coast. we squeezed in another run in the morning and a family diner breakfast, and it was back on the road...next discussion run TBA.

day 35 -- williston to morehead, MN

2010-09-19T17:49:00.006-05:00

what I noticed as I pulled out of williston was the dust. dust on cars in the motel parking lot, dust on the sidewalks, dust on street signs. as much as dust is iconic for the dakotas, it still surprised me -- when I first glanced at the dust-streaked cars I wondered how it was that every car in the parking lot had arrived there on dirt roads. and there are a lot of the latter, admittedly, but I think that had nothing to do with this urban dust. and wind, also iconic but surprising just the same. figured that heading consistently east would spare me from the worst of it, but plains gusts are stronger than that, ricocheting off the relentless sand hills. there was something incessant about those hills that I can't quite figure out...you'd think that of these landscapes the endless open spaces of the Montana plains would qualify as oppressive, not gently rolling scrubby hills above a slow-moving river. perhaps it was fatigue, perhaps it was that I couldn't process anything more complicated than plains-to-a-mountainous-horizon at this point. whatever the case, the maze of scarred hills was daunting. I tried to imagine it covered with tallgrass prairie, but that was hard to do while dodging and passing lumbering tankers and passing relief-valve flames roaring behind brand new oil and gas rigs that are surely residual from the halcyon days of $95 barrels of oil. presumably these ancient coastal swamps are richer than illinois cornfields, but still it's hard to imagine profiting from these trickle wells when the oil gushes unabated from saudi sands. halliburton was here in any case, and in a sprawling convenience store in new town on the Fort Berthold reservation there was a rack full of flame retardant coveralls. (but none of the giant wrenches I saw in texas.)

the three affiliated tribes -- mandan, hidatsa, arikara -- were in the midst of election season as well. and just as the incumbent sherriff in any county election wears his/her badge and pointed hat on election signs to demonstrate crime-fighting bona fides, so incumbents here wore feathers and braids. I was following SR1804 as it right-angle snaked around the chain of lakes, taking a scenic route suggestion from the atlas as far as Underwood before turning east on SR200 instead of continuing south to Bismarck and I-94. the significance of '1804' it didn't occur to me until I was on the road -- I figured the four digits signified a county road taken over for yet another auto trail, but of course this was lewis and clark country and so the 1804 wasn't a random number. I couldn't get into the 'in the footsteps' angle, possibly because I was headed the wrong way, but also because everything about the modern traverse is so different than the original journey. I know that's obvious, but it's hard to imagine what they saw and how they traveled while flying along on asphalt behind 50 horses, give or take. the mud, the baggage, the endless scanning ahead for a better track.

when I turned east I rather suddenly found myself in more comfortable flatness. endless wheat, a few towns, but most of the latter offset from the main road. this was real farmland isolation -- not the nothing-for-100-miles of nevada, but skeletal towns enclosed in small stands of trees, tucked away a half mile from passing traffic, a post office and two bank branches and a gas station and a rarely-open cafe...all just enough to keep residents close. no tourists except for the occasional wayward biker who mistakenly took a dirt road into town instead of the haphazardly paved one asphalt artery. an absolute isolation despite the presence of towns 10 miles down the road in either direction, though I'm sure consolidated high schools and commuting to urban jobs and the like make living here less shut in than it appears from the outside. I passed on the 'confederate bar and cafe' in McClusky not really wanting to know how the owner landed on the decision to paint a charming stars-and-bars across the roof of his establishment, or how it fit at all with the north dakota experience. and would stonewall have darkened the doorway of a cafe? perhaps the proprietor came north to plant peanuts unmolested by people of any color other than pink. also iconic and obvious, but the unsullied caucasian-ness of eastern dakota and the rural minnesota to come was remarkable.

anyway...the rest of the ride was a zig-zag toward Fargo and an inevitable stretch of I-94 -- I passed on riding by the KVLY television mast, which at 2063 feet was for two periods the tallest human-built structure in the world. (a Polish mast outstripped it in 1970 before collapsing in 1991; burq khalifa has rather more impressively passed it now.) I did pass by Sykeston, the home town of one Travis Hafner, whom a baseball historian tells me has a slim lead in home runs hit by a north dakotan over Darin Erstad. and Williston claimed Phil Jackson as a high school grad. and on the edge of arrowood national wildlife refuge -- tragedy. I was following SR9 and its right-angles, watching various waterfowl in some of the 10,000 lakes (more like ponds here). and then one hopped onto the road ahead...I slowed a bit, but the duck saw me and lifted off with plenty of room to spare. but at the last second it dipped low and straight at me...toward my face, specifically. quick calculations determined that this wasn't a good thing, so I half-swerved and half-ducked -- not enough to miss it completely, and it glanced hard off my left shoulder. a thud at 65mph, for sure, but presumably worse for the duck than for me. couldn't find it in the rearview, and when I wheeled around it was nowhere to be found. ugh. sickened me to think of likely injuries, but nothing to do.

the positive highlight, however, was a stop for a buffalo chicken pizza at the 'pizza ranch' in carrington, ND...a chain that I'd never stumbled across despite its dozens of locations in the heartland, especially iowa. sorta like the 'texas roadhouse' chain, based in Clarskville, IN.

day 34 -- havre to williston, ND

2010-09-06T10:13:00.004-05:00

headed out from havre on a bike now with two great gripping tires, just in time for endless straight roads and no turns. more of the same montana countryside, with the space between towns shrinking steadily. from glacier to havre and beyond the hi-line ran to the north of US2, but at some point it crossed over to the south side. the template for towns changed at the same time, from (in north-south order) tracks/grain elevator/main street/perpendicular residential streets to something more complicated but just as formulaic. US 2 was isolated on the north edge of town and lined with gas stations and fast food without entering the town proper. in each town one or two streets cut underneath the tracks to enter the town, which consisted of a 2x1 block commercial district with two bars, one casino, and one cafe fronting the tracks; and western wear and hunting outfitters and municipal offices around the other three sides. too too many places to explore, so I resolved (the third such resoluation) to spend at least part of next summer hopping from town to town in montana and spending at least 2-3 nights in each place. diners in the early morning in time to catch ranchers, countryside during the day to capture the trains and the grass and the sky properly, bars at night.

an attempt on that score didn't work out to well in the whistlestop of saco. I stopped at the diner for a late lunch. two waitresses, a third off duty. the menu has a smattering of prices filled in, greek style, so I figure that marks what's available. club sandwich? not available since they can't afford to keep lunchmeat on hand. and actually nothing from the grill either since it's stuck on way-too-hot. pretty much only the daily special is on offer -- chicken patty sandwich with tots. and I get two patties as compensation for the limited choices, though I'm not really all that excited for that much breaded chicken. straight from the school cafeteria. but...later an elderly couple comes in. the occasion? just dropped off the steer! too perfect to make up.

no time for enough of that on this trip, though. back onto the endless US2. I covered all 664 montana miles from the edge of hells canyon above troy to the first sand hills of the dakotas. all along the route there were signs urging voters to pressure lawmakers into considering '4 for US2,' presumably referring to lanes. outside of havre there were occasional packs of five cars together, but nothing that could reasonably be called 'traffic.' several hundred miles of widened highway for the 100,000 or souls who live along the corridor? perhaps in alaska. more train traffic than cars and almost no semis since all the freight is on the rails, making for a parade of the 21st century railway picturesque. in place of boxcars and tankers and hoppers there are stacked containers. behind the iconic orange of BNSF locomotives a rainbow of the shipping companies: italia azure, hyundai rust-red, yang ming red on white, evergreen...well.

but for residents, not aesthetics-tourists, meth is a bigger concern. the public service campaign here is 'meth -- not even once.' this shows up on official billboards and hand-painted murals alike, often accompanied by images of the family you stand to lose. it's hard to imagine the real devastation meth inflicts, but do forty years of politicized hysterics over marijuana and cocaine blur the no-turning-back reality of meth? cocaine is a you-could-die-each-time gamble, but not the once-and-you're-hooked guarantee. there's no game to it. it is too much to imagine that meth takes hold in only the most hopeless communities, small towns that are in some ways worse than the inner city because there isn't even a distant uptown to dream about?

somewhere between brockton and culbertson the landscape shifted to dakota, the jumble of sand hills into which the plains deteriorate. the border came a bit later, and soon after I spun through williston, ND. I was hoping to stay downtown, but the old west main street hotel-casino was too far in the rearview. so the next best thing -- the 'vegas hotel' on the strip mall outskirts. complete with a random public fantasy football draft at 7pm!

day 33 -- coram, MT to havre, MT

2010-09-05T16:18:00.002-05:00

the gear didn't exactly dry off in the heater-less room, but I still wanted to avoid the rain and tried to wait it out. by 7am it hadn't let up much, and I had to get to havre. so a rainy and cold run along the flathead river until I passed into the glacier rain shadow. just on the edge of have-to-stop bonechilled...completely inadvertently (as with everything on this trip) I packed just enough warm clothes to get by...helly hansen long underwear and a sporthill 3sp top underneath the leather works down to about 50 degrees, it turns out. barely. and it was critical that I bought thinsulate gloves in the middle of summer and thought to bring them along. almost enough to reconsider the 'I'm too cool for a windshield' attitude. damn you teehay. from that first stifling night in the tent to this last cover-my-face-with-the-sleeping bag night.

the montana plains come up abruptly, likely because the mountains of glacier are an overthrust of older rocks on top of younger strata. indian reservations are stacked up against the park with spectacular views but dry country. standard markers on the edge of the res...fields of abandoned ford pickups, still lots of 80s american cars on the streets, scattered trailers like the one val kilmer visits in that movie. communities that are heavily native with a smattering of visiting ranchers. a macdonald's full of blackfeet families, a blackfoot on the corner all in denim and dark sungalsses.

when the clouds cleared the ground turned brilliant gold under that biggest sky. sweeping swells and broad swales, staggering and immense but easy to scan, somehow welcoming despite the scale. windmills casting spinning shadows on the grass. no resistance to wind power here, apparently...people who have unlimited sky aren't as defensive of their beachfront views as those usually surrounded by cityscape? there's no way to oversell this landscape, even if I can't explain why exactly this sky is so big. on this post-rainy day the contrast of sky with brown grass was exquisite, and cinder cones on the horizon in whitlash. and the towns along the way almost reveled in this beauty, welcoming visitors with chirpy wrought-iron signs with snappy slogans (in rudyard, '596 nice people, one old sore head,' referring to a 1960s resident with dubious social skills). that or these towns are relatively thriving, still tethered to the hi-line, the northernmost american rail line that's crowded with BNSF freight trains coming one after another, those headed west backed by helper locomotives for the long push over the divide. US2 follows the line all the way through montana, and each town has a co-op grain elevator complex smack in the middle of downtown on the trackside of main street. in chester, superior feeds was proud of five -- count 'em, 5 -- accident free days.

passed by kremlin, which had to advertise its 'USA style' with a stars-and-stripes painted sign, and then into havre (thankfully not pronounced 'harve'). checked into the sierra motel and unloaded gear, then out to the yamaha dealer. then lots of exploring on foot. out toward montana state-havre, downtown for a haircut in a barber shop full of farmers discussing who'd cut his wheat and who hadn't, pizza in an empty pizza-pro and ice cream in an empty ice cream parlor until a youth group on a scavenger hunt started to burst through the doors in groups. I was hoping to while the evening away in a bar, but all were attached to casinos, so I turned in early and slept on and off while neighbors lurched in and out, made loud threats to 'smoke' someone, puked occasionally, and burned holes in the room's carpet.

day 32 -- rainy glacier

2010-09-04T15:45:00.003-05:00

seriously? a crew had hiked in early that morning and started repairing the hitching post, so no late sleep. they hadn't arrived the night before, since there weren't any bags hanging from the pole at 9pm, but there they were. and better prepared than me, with rain slickers and hiking poles. so plan C: leave the tent and hope it dried out a bit before I packed it up, hike out to the continental divide and hopefully spectacular views, return to the campsite, pack up, and get back to the packer's roost by 8pm at the latest so I could get back on the park road and through a road closure at logan pass by a 9pm nighttime construction cutoff. around 21 miles in all (8 miles out and back, then 5 back to the bike), but more than half with a light pack with food and water only. misty damp to start and more than a bit chilly, but I had enough layers as long as I kept moving. I kept hoping for the sun, but no luck there. over the course of the hike I went from hoping for sun...to hoping against rain...to very glad for bouncing hail rather than soaking rain...to hoping the gusty winds would die down...to hoping the trail at the bottom wasn't two inches deep in water.

for all of that, though, the landscape was even more inspiring than I could have imagined. I won't try to describe it...it's way bigger than words. check out the photos, some of which worked especially well with the swirling clouds on these rainy days. it's the sort of landscape that invites cliche -- I'll go with a scale that would force even lance armstrong to recognize his insignificance. the trail headed just over the next ridge turns out to be two miles away. the view just around the next corner isn't actually reachable. a campground called 'fifty peaks' for the endless series of craggy edges visible from that spot. inspiring hiking, most of it across the well-named flattop mountain and easy, still mostly through burned forest that afforded views all around when the mountains weren't obscured by clouds. the bb sized hail and wind weren't all that bad, though they cut a quiet picnic short when I started shivering, and past the divide a heathy moor that recalled scotland, even down to the invisible and inaudible creek ('burn' to stick with the scottish imagery) the gurgle from which rushes up only as you step within a few yards of its rocky course. so I re-resolved to make glacier the focus of a trip for summer '11, to hike across the park from west-to-east and to loop into the canadian section along the way. peaks, glaciers, forests, glacial ponds. otherworldly.

all went well until a ginger limp down the trail back to the bike -- the achilles quit after about 15 miles. I thought I was making good time, esp when more rain sped me along, but I reached packer's roost at about 8.10pm. since everything was soaked, I decided to repack under the stable overhang, and by the time I'd stuffed and remounted luggage and changed back into rain-soaked and heavy, smelly leather, it was 8.40pm. only twenty minutes to reach the road closure point and make it to the east side of the park and a good 50 miles closer to havre for the next day's ride. a rainy ride in the dark through hairpin turns wasn't all that much fun, but better now than a few weeks ago. minutes clicking by, construction lights appear on the slope too far away, more turns and turns and turns...and the construction zone at 9.02. road closed. ugh. back down the same winding roads, in the rain, and farther. faceshield rain spotted and fogged up, car headlights blinding me. and frigid. the first unpleasant ride of the trip, but no choice this time. back down past lake macdonald, past the park lodge (surely full), past the west side visitor center, past the town of west glacier (no vacancy), resigned to a ride all the way back to columbia falls. but vacancy at a summer resort motel, and desperate enough to overpay for it, if only to dry out my gear so as not to ruin the tent with mildewy saddlebags. naturally this summers-only spot didn't have heaters, so I cranked the air conditioning and hid out in the lounge with a roadtripping couple from the smokies and shared a couple bottles of moose drool. in sum, I would have been better off spending another night in the campground with the chainsaw crew and heading off in the morning. anyway. glacier dampened me...but not enough to scare me off.

day 31 -- troy to glacier NP

2010-09-04T15:13:00.002-05:00

libby turned out not nearly as dire as expected...run down for sure but no more than your average mining town, and livelier / more crowded than I'd have thought. after sleeping in at the ranch motel to make sure the rain had passed, I stopped at the 'world famous' libby diner for a late breakfast with a very gregarious hostess who commanded the room. at the next table there was what appeared to be a CSA general complete with absurdly bushy mustache-connected-to-pork chops, unsurprisingly from andersonville, GA (see above for georgians trying too hard at authentic southern street cred). all sorts of deep south connections claimed by the happy hostess and grand reminisces had by all. fox news was shouting in the corner. I won't wade into the irony there in a town where a callous corporation has fatally sickened someone in every family and then declared bankruptcy so as not to pay for the damage. but the foxies were all about holding BP responsible, right?

onward and upward from libby toward kalispell and glacier NP. caught up to the rain again outside of kalispell and bounced through a muddy construction zone in a steady downpour. sheltered in a gas station and attempted to calculate where the rain was headed (rather than oh, checking weather.com or something), securing reassurance from a local outfitter that the rain was headed toward missoula. though there was a big purple cloud parked low over the mountains. I got halfway out of columbia falls on the last stretch to the gateway of west glacier when it started to rain hard. this time I turned around and pulled under another gas station just as it started to hail. not good for chrome, presumably, so a surprisingly good call. another snickers and coke to pay for my stay, then to the grocery store to stock up for a hike this time and wait out for the rain. all this worked well enough, as it was dry and sort of sunny when I started back up the hill. got lost in the crush of end-of-the-season park visitors trying to ask about backcountry permits and decided just to head out into the woods in secret. followed the park road past lake macdonald and turned off as the 'going to the sun' road started its climb toward logan pass. a quick glance at the map suggested that most short-term hikers do 'the loop' from a point a bit further up the road or drive around to the eastern end of the park and hike from many glaciers. the latter looked most attractive, but it was getting late, and I really wanted to get into the woods without following a train of backpacks. and I was set on completing a loop that I had eyeballed at about 40 miles (without looking at the scale, of course) instead of an out-and-back. a gravel road led down to the macdonald creek trail at packer's roost, and I set out from there after covering my bag with its rain slicker...and wisely draped my leathers over it and my clothing bag under the bike, instead of stowing all of it on the porch of a nearby and apparently disused stable. impressive (for me) foresight but half-assed execution.

the trail was predictably spectacular, and because of the rain I had it all to myself. started out through swampy lowlands but soon emerged in a huge tract of burnt-out forest not yet recovered. a sign on the road noted a 1987 lightning fire, but if that was this fire it was surprising to see so little regrowth. not exactly the aesthetic ideal of the conifer forest, but striking just the same, all grey verticals and rain-shiny burnt stumps. the trail crossed the creek and headed up toward two possible passes, and with each switchback I recalibrated my guess on which one the trail was aiming for. at this point I still planned to sprint 12 miles to the second campsite and then march off another 30+ miles the next day to complete a loop that looked to cover a good section of the scenic core of the park. I've never hiked more than about 25 miles in a day, but the aforementioned explorers did routinely on their PCT adventure, so I figured I could, creaky achilles and all. only problem was that though I had food this time, I hadn't filled the camelback, so I only had a liter of water. to compenstate I sipped water off leaves every 50m or so, as if that would make up for poor planning. fortunately for me the ascent was slower than I planned and I only made it to the first campsite before it got dark, after about five miles. so no 40-mile hike the next day...I'd have taken an extra day, but I had another tire change appointment scheduled in havre, MT and of course some 1600 miles between me and dayton. so I set up camp in the near dark and discovered another slight problem...there was a food-hanging pole but no bear box. I had lazily assumed that all national parks had moved to boxes rather than relying on hikers' food-hanging skills, and hadn't brought any rope on the trip. this didn't trouble me too much until I realized that the bears here weren't just friendly and scare-able black bears but grizzlies too. so I stashed the bag under the rain fly of my tent and hoped that if I heard rustling I'd make the right call on scaring the bear away or playing dead.

in the event it started raining early in the morning and there weren't any visitors. I gave up even on the shorter loop and decided to sleep late in the wonderfully quiet woods. until I heard chainsaws at 7.30.

day 30 -- mazama, WA to troy, MT

2010-09-03T11:13:00.002-05:00

after breakfast in the resort town of winthrop at the base of the mountains (which had managed to pull off a fake old west vibe without looking ridiculous or too chintzy) the other washington was next, ranches and farms and sleepy towns in the rain shadow. a different world from west of the cascades, for sure, but not the sharply us/them red/blue divide many would like to imagine. I didn't see placards demanding that regular americans 'take back' their country from... anyway. drive-thru espresso huts still showed up in towns, farms advertised organic produce, land was assigned to conservancy. the ferry county weekly news was full of candidates for local office thanking their supporters and reminding them to vote again in november. one race in particular was turning gossipy, in that one dennis boone, running for sherriff, found it necessary to take out a quarter page ad to print a letter battling false rumors. apparently some are claiming that if elected he'll fire all the deputies and cancel a drugs initiative, assertions that a smiling mr boone assured us were categorically false. he was pictured leaning forward over the railing of his front porch, wearing a plaid rancher shirt and jeans. elsewhere in the paper was a long letter criticizing the business column editor for her impassioned plea that people patronize a struggling bookstore in ***. the letter writer felt that the column unfairly criticized any who bought books online as traitors to the local economy, but then also attached a long list of perceived failings of said bookstore -- no roadside signage, wrong end of town, no attached coffee shop. a pretty classic dispute that seems never to have taken off in most places after the shortlived 'buy american' surge of the 1970s. the economy sucks, local businesses struggle, blame government regulation/immigrants/walmart while at the same time doggedly boosting the free market which strangles local business. crocodile tears for mom-and-pop, but rarely a concerted effort to spend a little more or endure the parking nightmare of having to walk a couple of blocks to the store...

the further east I went the more the country dried up. and in the driest parts, naturally, were indian reservations. announcing omak on the edge of one such parcel was a sign spelling out the town name in red figures twisted into the shapes of letters -- cowboy boots, a tepee, and a red-skinned indian. I'd love to find out how indian and settler identities have merged there. crossed into idaho and through the soft upper end of hell's canyon (deeper than the grand canyon at its southern end, but not as dramatic) and then into montana. out of the national forest the landscape changed to a patchwork of regrown forest and more recent clearcut, which was all the more chaotically spectacular in the mismatched patchwork of sun and shadow on the hillsides. I'd considered libby as a destination for the evening (dodged rain all day and so canceled camping plans) because I knew the name and figured it must be a resort-y town for that reason. after a while I remembered why libby, montana rang a bell...the eponymous documentary about the residents' decades long struggle with the predictable results of an economy founded on the largest asbestos mine in the world. the film painted a pretty grim picture, so I settled on the closer town of troy, 'lowest in elevation, highest in recreation.'

but if everyone in libby is dying of mesothelioma, troy is just plain dead. the town was quaint in a ghost town sort of way, but I found the 'ranch motel' at the far end of town, the parking space of which were for some reason full of troy police vehicles. temporary offices? (perhaps...more on that in a bit.) the office door was momentarily locked but opened just as I pulled my hand back by a guy in his mid-20s who was surprised to see that I was not his buddy riding up from bozeman. not exactly the proprietor, he was dressed only in some crazily printed pajama bottoms and lots of tatoos. I didn't get a good look at any of this because he was too jumpy and vibrating to bring into focus. on his left knuckles I did catch 'DOOM' printed in thin, hasty, lines. he told me he was 'just the son,' but that the could probably figure out how to check me in, though he couldn't work the credit card machine. he's recently returned from living all over the seattle area but didn't explain what brought him back to troy...and conversation was as disjointed as his movements, so I gave up. I wandered back into town to find a bar on a sunday night (timing, again, not so good). on the other side of the street from the police station / municipal building was a mobile marquee pointing at the government center and indicating that 'dictator don' was within. I sensed this was not a joke, and a little research came up with a nasty spat pitting the mayor (don banning) against the city council. the former has taken to making executive decisions without involving council, suggesting that it concentrate more on legislating and less on management. the latter has responded by refusing to approve anything and closed the last meeting before addressing anything on the agenda in protest. dictator don is trying to pay city employees anyway, and no one is picking up the tab on $60,000 in obligations the city owes. all this proves that if only we delegated all our important decisions to small town politicos, this country would run so much more smoothly.

I ended up at the 'home bar,' which was empty except for the barkeep and two guys playing video games and/or slots, two guys with hair that matched the journey-class music on the jukebox. though it was dead quiet tonight, in a couple of weeks the home bar holds a huge biker rally and was elaborately decorated with biker paraphernalia, like an old air conditioner to which dual chrome exhausts had been lashed in keeping with the 'cool your pipes at the home bar' theme. behind the bar was a lengthy list of people on probation for misbehavior and a shorter list of those 86'd for a year or permanently. the barkeep had recently moved to troy from aberdeen, WA with her retired-from-the-state husband, who was building a cabin 12 miles up winding roads in the woods above the yaak river. progress was slow, and they were just starting to think that they should find a place in town to spend the winter (sounds wise). troy is low elevation-wise, but the cabin is just high enough (but not too high and dry) to get a good amount of snow in the winter. and soon, I'd think.

so she wasn't a great source for local lore, but to the rescue rode 'junior.' junior was clearly happy to see a stranger at the bar and sidled up straightaway and started to fumble for change for his $2 budweiser, and I crawled under the pool table to retrieve a dropped quarter. junior is the sort to offer his life story without prompting. and it was a solid one. he's clearly of native extraction, though he didn't mention this, and looked about 65 despite his birth certificate age of 81 (except for some key missing teeth up front). he was wearing a yellow and white mesh baseball cap that advertised troy, montana, but has lived there for 'only' 44 years. moved from minnesota to work in construction. the rest is murky...despite his hearing aid, junior spoke in a barely audible not quite whisper, and a lot of enunciation was lost in the space where his front teeth were supposed to be. but he related everything in such a matter-of-fact tone that I didn't doubt much of what I pieced together. worked hard and followed the money, always cognizant that one has to work long hours when the money's available...perhaps an inevitable conclusion for any who work in the boom-bust economy of construction and logging and mining, but junior pointed out that he turned down longterm company jobs several times because he knew that the 'guarantee' of lifetime benefits was never really a serious one. so he moved from digging ditches to operating a crane to buying a logging truck, then more logging trucks, then log loaders and cranes until he'd amassed a small fleet of construction equipment and thence a small fortune. through it all there was a current of perceived disrespect, as in a long story of his expertise in fixing a crane on the libby dam project. company higher-ups ignored his suggestions, but when the manufacturer reps were called in they concluded that junior knew more about the machine than they did. and so junior saved the day, and promptly quit after fixing the problem but sneakily not calling attention to another one. I have no idea whether junior is the know-it-all pain in the ass sort of line worker or a non-company-man indian who suffered undeserved condescension. the next story was even harder to gauge, the more recent murder of his wife. junior was off in north dakota somewhere working when it happened (he too adamantly insists), the police pinned it on 'bikers,' and junior spent a while trying to point the sherriff in the right direction to the man he knew did it. the rest was completely opaque...where/why it happened and so on, but in the end junior found peace in knowing that whoever did it had to live with the guilt, and one of the two conspirators (the number of the guilty grew with the story) had already died from shame. again I leaned hard toward respect and compassion here -- his demeanor demanded it -- but then again the canned and unprompted nature of the narration was suspicious. I barely got a word in after 'did you grow up here?' other than the murder story, the rest was typical enough...grandkids have moved off in search of work, either down to missoula or up north to work on a gas pipeline. nothing to be done...but of course better than things in libby.

day 29 -- seattle to mazama, WA

2010-09-03T00:40:00.002-05:00

midday start for the official turn eastward...keeping up with the brazilians and company meant closing down the pub, after a recurring encounter with a dude who spent the night spouting nonsense and punctuating it with odd tongue wagging. one of the seattle natives suggested that this behavior was indicative of too much time on the boat. and this made sense since the tongue-wagger was clearly a seattle native himself, correctly identifying neighborhood origins for the locals in our crew.

anyway, just before I took off I committed to the far northern across washington and then into glacier. SR20 winds through the north cascades and stays north of spokane, picking up US2 only in sand point, ID. US2 was attractive as well, but remote was more appealing. I headed out of seattle on SR9 as an alternative to more I-5. suburbs stretched on for miles past the standard quick fade-out of the west, a reminder that this climate is rather more forgiving. suburbs to out-of-the-way eateries to outfitters...finally yielding to gritty farming and logging towns. there was a street fair (=big yard sale) in clear lake featuring a chihuahua rescue outfit and kids riding miniature ponies around a ring that was no more than 20 feet across. and suddenly the wild west in sedro-woolley, an old school town with a very 90s hyphenated name. I was still in seattle ethnic/crunchy food mode, but the best I could find was a bacon bleu burger at 'just moe's' at the end of the L-shaped main drag. this was real small-town crowd. little league world series on the TV, some spouse-abandoned late middle-agers alternating beers at a high table and smokes outside, and finally a slightly rougher crowd getting an early start on the saturday. a bald and tattooed but slickly prettyboy-as-convict look with his moon-eyed girlfriend, who remarked to me (or no one in particular) as he strode out for a cigarette that 'there's nothing quite like watching someone you love walk away.' she said that adoringly, not wistfully. interesting take. and another biker couple, this one dressed as if they were on the way to hawaii...she earned two scoldings from the barkeep for language violations. I zipped out before she got the boot. left coast sensibility re-emerged at an organic farm and land conservancy along the skagit river -- and more importantly fresh raspberry ice cream.

all along the skagit I leapfrogged a filipino-american family (mom, dad, teenage son) inexplicably driving an unmarked minibus, like the airport rental car shuttle or a nursing home campus shuttle. and then SR20 turned out of the skagit valley, and I fell in love with the north cascades. the topography isn't all that different from the cascades closer to portland, but there's something about the unbroken forest here that separates it. forested mountain views around every corner, as if this is where artists come to learn how to paint forested mountain views. green spiked hills in the foreground against faded blue slopes in the background, misty clouds, the works. and trails! trailheads left and right in the national park, in the national forest...I resolved on the spot to spend weeks hiking this landscape. conifer forests can get monotonous in the uniformity, but it's hard to imagine tiring of the piny scent, the dripping silence. (which raises a question. do we associate that scent with clean because it's somehow intrinsically clean-smelling? or have lysol and dish detergent reverse-engineered that association?) the road climbed gradually in this glaciated landscape over rainy pass (where it rained, natch) and then to washington pass and dramatic vistas over the glacier-scoured uplands above the wonderfully named early winters creek. rolled down from the pass and turned in at the lone fir campground. the rushing creek sound that I associate with ideal campsites from time spent in the smokies (where it's impossible to find a spot where water isn't gurgling) clashed a bit with the rushing traffic sound from the road in this narrow valley. quiet crunchy campers in hats and fleece...and after dark someone with a flute playing generic 'native american' music. the sort of music that sounds like it's continuing even after the flute has stopped it blends into natural sounds so well. (this was better than hearing a flute at big bend, assuming indian music but realizing it was just a high school kid practicing band music...)

days 27-28 -- on the water with cap'n casey jones

2010-09-02T17:09:00.004-05:00

the next morning it was off into the water on the captain's zodiac. rainy, blustery day...not typical seattle august, apparently, but it fit the imaginary seattle well enough. first stop...crab pots off richmond beach and a hoped-for dungeness feast later on. but no recognizable buoys despite a few passes. this was seriously bad, not just for prospective crab wontons but because these were serious traps. possibly confiscated by fish and game officers because they were out during a sunday-tuesday moratorium, but that level of enforcement looked unlikely. more probably some punk had grabbed them. we hoisted someone else's to look at the catch (and now I know how to sex crabs and what constitutes a legal catch), and I suggested that we could bait someone else's trap, head across to a planned lunch on bainbridge island and slip back for 'our' catch before the real owner returned, but there were karmic problems with that, so no go. disappointment aside, we motored over for that lunch at a great waterside joint with local beer and local food (smoked halibut and jalapeno salad sandwich for me...excellent). casey's caught between selling the boat in an effort to pare down his stuff...and listing all the improvements he was considering. a rear platform to accommodate a dual engine complex to make it more sea-worthy (redundancy), for example. I took a turn at the helm and learned the rudiments of engine plane and throttle and riding through wake. we explored a possible diving spot (casey is a PADI instructor) and mugged for photos with the skyline, then toured the yacht marina and a billion dollars of boats. some post-outing boat care and then some more great city fare, some pho accompanied by blaring muzak.

casey's other current interest is a 1989 volvo station wagon in remarkably good condition. after a series of brand new SUVs rapidly turned over, the idea now is to put energy into tuning and tinkering a machine with 200,000 miles into another 100,000 miles...not really out of necessity but out of the challenge and ownership of the project. so yuriy the russian volvo guru was consulted on repairing a broken parking brake cable, checking the moving brakes, and investigating various squeaks and rattles that kept cropping up. for all his roughshod bravado and derring-do (from skateboards to wingers to late night quarry diving), casey always had a meticulous side. running wasn't a lark fueled by raw athleticism...casey followed the sport and training closely and was borderline obsessive about thinking ahead to the next race. so for all his formidable competitive drive there was a strong intellectual slant to his running. all this makes sense for the volvo and the boat, but also for the scuba thing...adventure and risk but very carefully managed -- you can't just strap on the tanks and head for the bottom. so after it's all rehabbed, this will turn out to be one remarkable 1989 volvo -- re-upholstered roof liner, replacement leather seats, dark tinted windows.

but there's still the freewheeling casey -- we spent part of the next day attempting to find some downtown tourists to take out on the boat. casey latched onto a couple of kansans in town for a wedding, but with me-deadweight as a silent sidekick we didn't get very far. (all I had to contribute were my goofy shoes.) which was all good in the end since there were backup plans to end the evening with various brazilian friends and s.o.'s -- casey has taken to brazil and brazilians recently, speaks portugese fluently.

in and around these various events we managed to sample burritos/enchiladas from a literal hole-in-the-wall around the corner from pike street, visited pals at the hydroponic garden shop, scrabbattled latenight, and counseled a friend through a breakup-with-kid-complications situation. casey still is a pastor's son at heart...true to form his high school ambition was to start his own religion.

day 26 -- portland to seattle

2010-09-02T16:37:00.004-05:00

after a day spent mostly borrowing wireless on office park medians and a 7-11 sidewalk waiting for the tire to arrive, for the service dept to mount it, and then slow slow pre-rush hour traffic across portland (even after I figured out that 'motorcycles OK' was appended to the HOV lane signage), I gave up on the secondary road thing and headed north on I-5. scenic enough, but I missed mt st helens again -- the first time I visited washington the summit road was closed due to snow. anyway, zipped into watery seattle and checked into the george and dragon, which advertised itself as a 'british pub' in the nonsensical chain-pub way, but this was a very local joint. the seattle sounders were a few blocks down at qwest field playing some mexican club in the CONCACAF champions league (who knew that existed?), but plenty of the faithful were outfitted in green and watching at the pub. and then the indisputably one-of-a-kind cap'n casey jones showed up. the kid who cajoled a handful of weirdly matched semi-athletes into competing like contenders, the kid who submarined authority at every turn but got teammates to follow his lead without question, the kid who messed around when it didn't count and toed the line hard when it did, the kid who alternated casually nasty barbs with fierce (if gruff) support for friends, the kid who put 'casey jones' on an endless loop at cross-country camp and had the bus driver blare 'freebird' incessantly, instilling a vaguely rebellious (but not hippie) streak in at least one straight arrow band geek. crude, moody, doggedly independent...but dripping charisma. we spent the year after he graduated trying to out-casey each other.

casey headed for the coast fifteen years ago and I'm not sure I've seen him since (though I swear he ambled out of the shadows at a the hershey texaco some time back). but it's no surprise that he's the same guy, despite some rough breaks. and I know that's what everyone says about long lost friends, but sometimes it's true. he looks the seattle part now, a little grunge, a little shaggy. we compared notes on lost hershey denizens...he had a lot more juice on that score, including the unlikeliest multimillionaire porn star ever. (and I just looked him up under his stage name to confirm. still speechless.) we traded my bike for a buddy's SUV to tow the captain's boat the next day and turned in.

day 25 -- tire education in portland

2010-08-30T13:44:00.001-05:00

turns out I completed that 575 mile ride through oregon on a nearly shredded rear tire. I had managed to convince myself that the absence of a central tread on said tire was normal since there was plenty of side tread left...and that these original tires were fine for the 14,000 total miles they'd have covered. suspension of disbelief. I'd attach a photo, but in the interest of not horrifying family members, imagine better than I'm describing. that there was fabric showing should suffice. limped over to downtown vancouver instead of a planned portland coffee shop expedition and searched for someone who could find a not entirely common tire for this rig. I lucked out when the local motorcycle hub had one in a nearby yamaha warehouse and could have it the next day. crisis averted. later that afternoon I gingerly rolled across town to meet the explorers (my vancouver hosts) for a run on trails with their team. one of the guys had an impressive collection of cycles, and after one look at the tire he suggested strongly that he'd happily strap the bike onto his pickup and take it down to the shop rather than let me risk any more miles on that tire. very generous, and yes, brought home just how derelict I was in letting it go so far. what I've learned: riding 2000 miles a week demands a touch more attention to tire wear than normal usage.

the rest of the break in vancouver/portland was less dire. anyone reading this blog has heard plenty about the explorers, a recently married couple I know from the running spot. he's done turns as gandhi/student council president, a disgruntled midshipman, an optimistic appalachian trail dropout, a bearcat, and returned to annapolis to complete the rare double of academy attendance and great books at st johns. she's the levelheaded one...cinti eastside refugee, redhawk, bemused running shoe expert and person-observer, ethiopian adventurer, and master electrician. they've speed-hiked the pacific crest and talked of sailing around the world, but for now they're biding time and making money as financial analysts...convincing new jersey dentists not to give up on the stock market just yet. or at least not just now. the pattern is work/make money then head out on an adventure, but the wanderlust has stilled for a moment, and they're focusing on running and coaching and more local adventures. their quirky and remarkably well-matched outlooks haven't changed, and they've come to realize just how strong that bond is. curious, open, logical, non-ideological. intentional and unintentional philosophy. and appreciative of good food...we headed south into portland warehouses for a sublime cajun meal of oysters and etouffe and mac-and-cheeses.

day 24 -- redding to vancouver, WA

2010-08-30T13:04:00.001-05:00

I left a bit of a ride to reach portland, but optimism springs, so I stuck to the long way 'round, with an emphasis on volcanoes. I-5 wound closest to mt shasta, so I followed it north to start, exiting at the amusingly named weed, california. I'm sure the annual 'weed festival' is popular, though the town motto doesn't take advantage -- 'weed like to welcome you.' understated town with a breakfast spot popular with bikers. back down the other side of the mountains and into farmland with an oregon look. US97 led northeast toward bend, oregon and beyond, but the lava beds national monument wasn't far away, so I slipped due east just south of the border past a marshy wildlife preserve and then south past the artificial tule lake. on google maps you can find this district by looking for the bright green splotch in the midst of the browns and dark greens of the rain shadow desert. the water now in tule lake likely used to flow into the marsh but now irrigates surrounding farmland; however, the farmers of the tule lake district have posted a large sign helpfully informing us that they divert some of 'their' groundwater to support the wildlife preserve. lava beds turned out not quite as interesting as I imagined -- this isn't exactly kilauea. some broken jagged rocks covered in the same brown grass that grows everywhere else. farther south there are lava caves, but more than a driveby exploration wasn't possible, so I skirted the north end of the park and read about the history of a late army vs modoc war featuring whimsically named indians like 'captain jack.'

SR39 in california and oregon stuck to another irrigation corridor, around the picturesque town of klamath falls, and back to US97. I was on the 'volcanic legacy' trail, and crater lake was the next stop. a long quiet climb through fir passages...and suddenly to the right the annie creek gorge opened up. roadside signs explained 'fossil fumeroles.' crater lake was as spectacular as advertised -- blue blue water, stacked geometrics in ancient lava, craggy edges. but the windswept slopes were just as dramatic -- red and yellow close-cropped grass in meadows stretching down to more forested tracts and then to the rounded humps of surrounding volcanoes, all of which I couldn't quite capture with the camera.

and finally into the cascades. I peeled off US97 and started climbing through resort towns less and less polished with elevation. antiques and 'grilles' at the bottom...general stores and outfitters further up. trees arching over the road, brief glances of snowcaps that wheeled into view and then disappeared behind the next closer slope. on the whole much more orderly than the chaos of the shastas, with long switchbacks and obvious passes. when I reached detroit in the heart of the range, I turned northward on SR224, which circled north toward portland down several tributaries of the clackamas. this was a highlight of an already spectacular ride, with the water and trees and cliffs so much closer on this much smaller road. scattered campers and fishermen but quieter than the primary road through this patchwork of national forests. the cool noble quiet of the cascades is hard to beat. the sloppy familiar tumble of the deciduous forest will always strike home for me, but the neat clean verticals of this landscape (matchstick trees, cliffs) are stunning. dusk dropped over the forest as I reached estacada (which meant that changing to the non-tinted faceshield didn't help much since it was covered in bugs in short order), and I followed I205 over the columbia to reach the next stop...vancouver, WA.

day 23 -- manchester beach to redding

2010-08-28T18:09:00.002-05:00

up early since I still harbored notions of making portland that day, but not surprisingly the coast road didn't straighten out much and I gave up on that fairly quickly. SR1 finally petered out and merged with US101. this was an opportunity to make up some time, but fortunately I'd chucked the schedule at that point and detoured on the redwood-scenic 'avenue of the giants,' which twined around US101 and twisted through the forest more intimately on ground level. 101 was where the tacky 50s roadside attractions restarted after the sedate and reserved new england-style SR1...the difference akin to atlantic city and acadia. trees you can drive through and immortal trees and chainsaw sculptures and 'confusion hill' and more trees you can drive through and 1800-year-old trees. the avenue was a lot quieter, with run-down hippie towns like Phillipsville, where I stopped for a snack before heading into the trees. a general store and post office, behind which at riverside were trailers and shanties. a couple kids somehow peeled into a gravel parking spot across from the picnic table I was occupying in a rusty civic that one admitted 'isn't really legit.' while one bought cigarettes, the other discussed living there...'a few tweakers' but generally a quiet place, unlike towns more convenient to 101 (according to him). the avenue winds among the trees carefully, with towering specimens guiding where the road can go and marked with reflectors, clearly more for drivers' safety than for the trees, which are surely indestructible. I won't try too hard to describe the forest or the trees, and photos can't capture it. it's all about disorienting scale and cool darkness and ferny groundcover. towering and majestic and whatever conventional adjective certainly apply, but they're inadequate in the end. the big mossy silence was entrancing, though, and I wished I had time to stop right there and find an out of the way campsite for the night.

but back onto a windy 101 and finally a cut west toward the mountains on a road through slowly climbing farmland that turned into national forest and again those tortuous not-quite-switchback roads. these mountains were a lot less straightforward than the sierras farther south...I climbed and descended and climbed and descended without ever apparently reaching the top. exhausting. I stopped for a roadside nap in a turnout and continued on, finally after some imperceptible crest arriving on a much gentler and straighter ride down into the head of the central valley at ghost-town shasta and then redding. I was looking forward all day to a cool (not cold) mountain campsite in the ponderosas in the shadow of mt shasta, but with the sun on the way down and mind and body tired from a full day of rolling the bike left and right, discretion (and an empty stomach) suggested a motel night in redding. initially I regretted this when the sun looked not so far down as I thought -- and later when I saw the campground was perched under some notable spires -- but the windy interstate miles plus fatigue probably didn't add up very well. I wandered around a sunday-evening-dead town for a while looking for a greasy pizza joint (rebelling against the exquisite food by the bay?) and failed miserably. after making it back to the center city budget inn I headed out again on the bike and ended up at another burrito place that was the only establishment open past 9pm. this was a lucky stroke, actually, even though I had passed it up on the first pedestrian pass-by. first of all it sits on the edge of a sprawling complex of 1950s vintage motels, at least four of which take up a square of four blocks...with a few stragglers (like mine) just down the main drag. I-5 sweeps past redding now, but this was the old US99, some of which was signposted straight through shasta college on sidewalks where the drag ended on its south end. the motels were mostly empty, but each one featured at least one stand of posturing sentinels in wife-beaters calling down to others working on muscle cars in the parking area. the restaurant was quiet as well, but the mostly out-of-town patrons were interesting, esp a young couple with baby and mother(-in-law). unspoken friction, irritation flashing in eyes. mostly I read the local paper while downing a 'diablo' shrimp quesadilla (super-good). the nps had closed the trail to the peak of the lassen volcano for trail improvements -- namely dropping helicopter loads of stone steps -- closing for a month the possibility of moonlight hikes. the transportation editor responded at length to a letter complaining that CHiPs only issue speeding tickets on sunny spring days and that they don't do enough to penalize people who drive slow in the fast lane. and debate on Modoc county's money-draining hospital. once upon a time this only-hospital-in-the-county was a 'source of pride,' but that was before people got hoppin' mad about paying for healthcare that should apparently be provided for free, without government interference. in the last decade the hospital has on its own dragged the county to the brink of bankruptcy, primarily because the commissioners have played shell games with money earmarked for other services in order to keep the hospital afloat. reactions ranged from an ex-cop who cited the lives the hospital has saved (when roads to more distant hospotals are closed by snow, for example) and was mounting a campaign to raise taxes to pay for it to a rancher who flatly declared that he didn't want to pay for something he'd rather not use. gotta love the foresight there...wonder if cowboy joe will demand an ambulance to sacramento next time he suffers a heart attack.

day 22 -- san francisco to manchester beach

2010-08-28T18:06:00.001-05:00

but it was onto the great northwest. the california coast was required reading, and I spent all day winding winding winding along the low cliffs of marin and sonoma. since I'd waited around for the street food festival to get underway I was riding in a swamp of saturday daytrippers on the approach and across the golden gate bridge, but past marin and the shuttle parking for muir woods the traffic thinned progressively. slightly harrowing descent on an absurdly twisty road from the marin headland to the beaches, but then just moderately tedious winding stretches. striking there is the essentially-desert abutting the ocean, though this desert is covered in dry brown grass and cattle and the occasional vineyard that has escaped the valleys. scenic scenic, especially the stretch between elk and mendocino, but it seemed that I was always twisting around to get a better vantage on the coastline I'd just passed. and that's how it always is, right? what's in the rearview always looks better than what's ahead. seriously, not just in conditions that sun angles and clouds explain...but all the time. rearviews must have some fancy polarizing feature. that or what's ahead inevitably looks boring in comparison to the glimpses behind. anyway. winding winding roads sometimes disappearing over the first line of hills but in every case back to the coast and always one shelf up from bottom-of-the-cliff beaches. oysters on high tables outside a marinaside joint, then some unexpected 'texas-style' barbeque in the artsy town of gualala. I'd only made it some 150 miles on this afternoon, but curvy roads demand some focus and work on the motorcycle, so I was borderline bleary-eyed and wobbly-kneed. I had set a beach beyond ft bragg as a destination, but settled on a nicely undeveloped beach near manchester with some open campsites. breezy and chilly (I was already cold from the bike despite layers), it was perfect for the norcal coast. I wandered out to the dunes with herds of mulies, listened to crashing surf and all that, and turned in early after I'd more seriously staked down the tent. no stars that night, just cold damp breezes and a layer of dew on everything that I hadn't stored in the tent.

day 21 -- idling by the bay

2010-08-28T17:27:00.002-05:00

I didn't need the reminder, but san francisco made it clear just what I miss out on in dayton-cincinnati. vibrant neighborhoods where people walk for reasons other than exercise. street food. comforting urban chaos. clutches of migrant workers...and a gaggle of homeless migrant workers who have given up on the dream. placards and postings for every sort of activism, from the inane (no wind farms here) to the irrelevant (californians protesting the 'show me your papers' state to the east) to the poignant (sexism spreads AIDS). baseball and a produce market and ethnic enclaves. a city with urban problems like any other but enough civic spirit to attempt solutions other than putting more people in prison. some of this is a function of population size, but much more than that it's an attitude...what shocked me this time was the extent to which any of this was surprising, that I've slipped into accepting midwestern malaise and dullness as the norm.

but jt is living a real san francisco life, not an affected contrivance or an asetheticized simulacrum -- no forced identities here -- just the life this sort of place can afford. I like to remind people that jt and I were close before birth since our parents shared our mostly overlapping in utero time. professional parents with rural mid-atlantic roots (the renowned lititz, no less), the iconic pennsylvania postsecondary experience in happy valley, but then a move north to toronto and eventually to the left coast. all this to say that jt is not a hipster radical or bohemian but a small town kid who can embrace a real city. so after I straggled in and cleaned up we set out for soul food near dogpatch. superb cajun blackened catfish and sublime mac-and-cheese and the like in a legit soul kitchen...run by koreans (or vietnamese). only in san francisco. caught up on eight years passed (but not without intermittent contact in this case) in the easy way childhood friends can do. love and death and family dynamics and work and aging and one particularly nasty motorbike accident. I'm fancy-free on a motorcycle with that dissertation looming at home, jt is a brand new father with a seamless marriage and a long stretch of home-rehab in the rearview.

jogged some hills in the morning and set out for the mission for some mexican pastries and philz coffee (brewed one cup at a time), inappropriately dressed in a t-shirt and plaid shorts and flipflops. I knew it was still chilly in the morning, but only a couple of days removed from las vegas I was counting on an afternoon warming trend. but this is san francisco, and there wasn't a single soul wearing shorts anywhere, let alone fratboy plaid. not that it mattered...I settled in at philz after wandering up and down past brightly colored taquerias and a 'mexica-tessen' and pastry shops and bodegas selling phone cards and coffee shops and watched the parade. not nearly so much hipster quotient there in the absence of the desperate midwesterner's need to stand out. just authentic difference in person. the kid with the gold-plated, low-rider bicycle. zoot-suited oldsters. parents with kids in every manner of conveyance, from plastic-wheeled stroller to jogstroller to sling. back to alabama street for some exquisite but unpretentious home-cooking and wine with a couple who had cooked their way through a recipe book that required lots and lots of foie gras. see above for opportunities seized. and again conversation that didn't dwell on idle reminiscence but mutual experiences beyond hershey.

and in the morning another run followed by a perfectly timed street food festival that was predictably amazing. I had some sort of african beef-on-a-stick and some goat curry, and for jt and mr some hickory smoked pork shoulder with apple slaw and a cuban skewer. and unsampled ramen and pho and kebabs and veggies, just a touch different than endless variations on bratwurst and goetta and limburger. not that I'm complaining about cinti fare on that score at least.

day 20 -- ely to san francisco

2010-08-25T16:48:00.004-05:00

the early stop in ely left me with most of nevada and all of california to cross for a promised arrival across the bay on thursday. I wisely didn't chart the mileage, but I knew it was far enough for a long long day. but how better to appreciate the loneliest highway than to run it in one stretch? new for this still slightly damp morning was a chill! just a day removed from sweltering, I had to stop and layer up at breakfast in eureka. (and not just from the road...the diner was frigid as well.) this is unsurprisingly one of the best parts of this trip, esp in the west. back home you have to go a long long way to find an appreciably different climate. heading north or south or west in summertime from southern ohio doesn't really bring any appreciable change for hundreds of miles. same soupy hazy air, perhaps a couple of degrees change, but the extreme elevation of the smokies is about all that would make a difference anywhere within a two-days ride. but out here, the climbs and drops and rain shadows are striking...I noticed this first somewhere between flagstaff and the grand canyon. motoring through cool ponderosa forest, and then suddenly a slight drop and the trees disappeared into the edge of the painted desert. no fire damage, no national forest line, just a hard elevation/vegetation mark. I'd looked forward to climbing back out of the heat, but of course sweating out a touch too warm is always easier than shivering your way out of too chilly. the scenery made up for it. dead flat and unwatered valley floors stretching from sudden volcanic ridge to the next, so long zooms alternating with sweeping switchbacks...not a straight line across topography but a meandering zigzag following the flats seeking an easy pass over the ridges. later I was reading an excellent local history broadsheet in austin, NV, the author of which discussed traveling with and against the nevada grain. east-to-west, though higher mileage on account of the topography, is more tolerable driving than north-to-south with the grain and the interminably long stretches 'can't be completed in one lifetime' from the air (googlemaps) the apparently seamless flats are streaked by creek beds that are either dormant (making this landscape martian) or seasonal/occasional flood washes. stopped off at the petroglyph campsite and regretted again that the rain kept me from a night in the desert, but I took some time to take in the windy isolation. alas no picnic. one important thing I learned on the nevada open range is that cows don't just stand docile on warning signs as they do in most states...instead they turn menacingly into a threatening trot toward you!

somewhere about midway I stopped in austin, which is more than 100 miles from anywhere, and read that broadsheet I mentioned. tiny town with a remarkable local historian. he crammed everything interesting and nothing trite into a smoothly written piece on living in austin, not just dry history and facts...down to houses piled onto the north side of the highway (south-facing) to take advantage of sunlight, and his own personal encounters with the same patch of ice on two occasions spaced six months apart. the rest of the town's signage didn't add much to this history, other than turquoise for sale and a 'serbian christmas' celebrated january 7th. another place in which to tarry and explore, and a local historian to interrogate, but there was still a state-and-a-half to go, the full 122 miles to fallon first. some ugly strip mall stretches in dayton (I like the repeated town names...this trip has taken me from florence, KY to florence, AZ; dayton, OH to dayton, NV...) and then a spin through downtown carson city instead of the bypass. I was hoping to glimpse what has to be one of the smallest state capitol buildings in america, and I wasn't disappointed. its silver dome nearly obscured by much taller trees in front, the seat of nevada government was smaller than many east-of-the-mississippi county seats. but the legislature has its own separate building, so an allowance for that.

and finally finally into the california mountains and over into the central valley via the carson pass on SR88, squeezing between yosemite and tahoe. the former I've visited briefly, but the latter I'd like to see, but the crush of national park traffic kept me away. fantastic (but hazy) vistas of pine forest and granite cliffs, historical markers about the emigrant trail and the various iterations of roadway over the carson pass...and on the way down I knew, suddenly, that I was in california. it's not that there wasn't significant traffic around carson city, and of course I'd negotiated endless lights and eight lane suburban arteries in las vegas, but here were cars and trucks and boats piled up even in the countryside. recalled northern jersey in the clusters of boutique-y commerce along forest roads...but rougher edges and more frenetic driving. I expected as much in the valley on the way to stockton, but not so much in the foothills. into the burnt grass pastures edging the valley and then into cornfields and fruit stands and flat ground. made a good decision to skirt stockton and take SR12 straight through lodi and then turn south through the california delta. I had no idea california had a delta, but sure enough SR160 follows winding levees along marshy wetlands down to a soaring bridge over the sacramento river outlet and estuary. california freeway with traffic slowed to a crawl through the caldecott tunnel north of oakland and a blast of cool bay air on the other side, that legendary meteorological quirk. across the bay bridge (got there just in time to save $2 on the evening toll), which was shrouded in an otherworldly and notably-late-even-for-san francisco fog...hazy sun disk, prowling tendrils, and a dark purple wall in the direction of the golden gate. finally down to the mission district and a clumsy backwards push of the bike down into a hillside garage. 572 miles, all before sunset. knees sore from body armor, but otherwise intact, if a little wired.

day 19 -- vegas to ely, NV

2010-08-24T18:12:00.004-05:00

I skipped the obligatory ride across the hoover dam since I'd decided to head north into the heart of nevada instead of continuing down into death valley. visiting badwater in the heart of august was appealing, but really seeing the valley requires some off-roading for which the big ol' bike isn't well-suited. and given the visit-places-I'd-otherwise-not-see thing, a run across the middle of nevada made more sense. death valley and the rest of socal deserve more leisurely inspection some sunny spring. cruised the strip at the wrong time of day, and then back into the searing desert, but this time earlier in the morning and heading into the uplands sooner. watched for the elevation-sensitive band of joshua trees come and go. geology on parade...reclining mudstone and sandstone mountains on one side, lava surges on the other, from octahedral magma columns to immense pillows of lava formed from undersea eruptions (just a guess on that one). towns that are more meeting place for far-flung ranches than proper focused communities. I stopped in alamo, NV for the midmorning coke-and-snickers ice cream bar perk-up, not expecting much from the darkly tinted windows across from the gas pumps. but inside was a service station slash convenience store slash grocery store slash bank slash deli slash chinese restaurant. and way more people there than the town (such as it was) could possibly hold. the UPS guy attempting to make deliveries to folks in the restaurant instead of driving out to their ranches, high school kids idling, a guy working out some sort of post-divorce financial arrangement that would avoid a trip to far-off pioche. down through the dazzling but sun-washed-out rainbow canyon into the surprisingly green railroad town of caliente and back into the formerly mining hills to pioche. it was there that more rain-in-the-desert stymied me. up to that point I was happy to have taken US93 north toward US50 so that I could run more of the 'loneliest highway' across the state, but the alternative and even-more-isolated 'extraterrestrial highway' could possibly have steered me around the storm. as it was I started out of pioche on the last valley stretch toward US50...pointed directly into a fierce-looking thunderstorm. headed back to pioche, which is an old mining town that looks to be sliding down a steep hillside -- it even has the skeleton of a cabled incline on display. had a couple of beers at a dark dark pub with a real live intact wild west bar that was far fancier than the beer-in-a-fridge selection. looked out again...storm hadn't budged. to the cafe for battered shrimp and soup and random chatter from a hyperactive kid who wanted to be anywhere but that lunch counter. and still the storm was parked in the same place, though it had moved slightly east and the purplest out of the way.

san francisco was getting no closer, so off I went. suffice it to say that I got wet, but not that wet. enough that the leather was still damp the next day, and luggage was soaked through, but no big deal. that didn't stop me from losing the whole zen-of-rain sense...and I grew angrier when I realized there was no one to blame. I tried the storm for not moving more quickly, but that didn't make too much sense. I tried the weather report I'd halfheartedly checked, but there was indeed a solid blotch of green there too. I blamed a conspiracy that had led me to believe that it never rained in the desert. nothing worked. all told it only rained on me for about 15 minutes, but I still found myself cruising along at, um, too many mph afterwards until I remembered that there wasn't any more rain to outrun.

I had set sights on a quiet campground at the hickison petroglyphs a little farther west on the loneliest highway, but the rain was still threatening when I reached the now-casino town of ely, and in the event it rained off and on throughout the night. I really didn't need anymore dreary casino experience, but I figured it was better to stay at the 'historic' hotel nevada that the motel 6, so I parked around the corner from all the other cruisers (several with gas cans strapped to the back fender, apparently anticipating that the overplayed 'loneliest highway' bit was accurate). a free 10-oz beer at the 'club' across the street, a free hand of blackjack downstairs, and a free margarita came with the room (in which katharine hepburn may or may not have stayed), but apart from wondering who would come to nowhere to gamble I couldn't really muster much interest. I suppose it's convenient to the utah crowd, on the way for US50 aficionadoes. who knows. the ely strip is retro-70s enough (I'm sure the casinos are no older than that), and the neon reflecting off rainy streets was picturesque, but for a town crammed with motels there was a whole lotta nothing going on. slot addicts, barflies, trudging families. the hotel nevada was plastered with signs advising guests that the water may scald them. chalking this delightful quirk up to the age of the building (1929), there were poems, placards, and serious cautions on this subject, some right next to each other. something about low-flow shower heads, but dubious considering there are plenty of 19th century buildings in which the water works just fine. borderline charming/chintzy.

day 18 -- vegas on a tuesday morning

2010-08-24T16:50:00.001-05:00

really vegas has no appeal to me. I know I'm supposed to marvel at the excess, the fabulous garish lights, the supposedly vivid reflection of . but reveling in the consciously artificial strikes me as more than a little forced...what's really human about vegas is not the cultural studies-ready casino fantasy landscape, aging pop stars on the marquee, even the miracle of a booming city in the desert. the real vegas is gambling addiction and unrealistic expectation. I know that sounds over-dramatic...people go to vegas to gamble and eat cheap food and go to fake paris. but head to all the casinos off the strip where the hard-core gamblers go for better luck -- texas station in far north vegas, the 'fremont experience' downtown, the slot machines in the grocery store. talk to the young woman who's stuck in vegas pushing the cocktail waitress angle after her boyfriend the 'professional poker player' has crapped out and headed home. the ironic/hipster detachment is fun, ripe for knowingly snide comments, but ignoring the rest is tough.

but I was there...the original plan was to head through death valley on a loop to the bay, I figured I should ride across hoover dam and see the strip at least once, it was a on schedule for an oil change on the bike...and, most importantly, I had an accommodation offer from a high school teammate who lives in palatial digs with a pool on the mountainous southern edge of metro LV. I knew this can-do kid first from the just-turned-15 summer of 1988 and parents driving us to hersheypark to earn $3.35/hour for running crappy carnival games on the 'midway' while wearing yellow shirts with blue collars and short blue shorts, memorizing the nametag-color administrative hierarchy (red-green-blue-brown-gold), and watching rob fogelman get unceremoniously canned for stealing the proceeds. the can-do kid comes from a can-do family (I think I flew once in a plane his dad had built from scratch -- okay, just kidding), which explains why 1) he started his own business right after college, which is impressive to me, whose most entrepreneurial moves involve opening online checking accounts that promise free $100 and cashing in my discover cash back rewards; 2) he bicycled across the country -- solo -- around the same time, therefore making this whole trip look a little less remarkable; 3) he excavated and built his own pool complex in his backyard; 4) he still has a job in the rapidly shrinking housing-construction industry; and 5) he once attempted to 'debrade' severely gravel-burned hands by himself in the shower. and so on...fitness serious and still has the junior charles atlas physique he had in high school, whitewater rafts around the world, runs up a mountain every day. you get the picture. he settled in vegas after rocketing up the company ladder on the strength of specializing in efficiency (energy and production), bought the big house at the peak of the real estate boom and is gamely hanging on through the downturn. anyway, he's not really a vegas guy in that he's way too sensible and frugal to wrap his head around the whole gamble-and-excess game...and he's seen the city chew and spit a few too many eager souls.

so he knows the strip, but he's taken advantage of the outdoor mountain west more than embraced the air conditioning and taxi culture. so the highlight of the stay (ahead of an oil change in the middle of nowhere and a bus ride downtown, lounging by the pool, and of course the random mania of catching up on 20 intervening years) was a speedy hike up black mountain behind his neighborhood. this was slightly intimidating given the can-do kid's generally aggressive approach to motion, so naturally I strapped on the no-padding vibrams for the rocky ascent and rockier descent. in the event the atmospherics were sublime...dark rain clouds threatened to the south all day without any actual rain (the virga effect, I learned from c-dk), and you can imagine the dramatic lighting when the sun neared the horizon. (better with pics, but I figured a dangling camera on a rock scramble wasn't the best idea.) the hike is a steady walk through basalt-strewn desert dotted with joshua trees and a ball-of-string-like red cactus followed by a short clamber up the top of the ridge. from that vantage: the dusty city in one direction and endless empty desert in the other, purple skies to the south, yellow setting sun west...and a sudden rattle from a pile of rocks a couple of feet from where I was balancing on rocks. we'd seen a baby rattler on the way up, and here was a not-quite-grown version helpfully announcing his presence before I stepped on him. alas, no camera. anyway, have I mentioned how sublime the light was? even better on the way down balding grass a livid yellow, deep purple backdrop, rocks glowing black. all this is federally managed land, and the can-do kid provided an interesting perspective on negotiations on expanding vegas, mediation compromises, and the like. some notes...las vegas is actually far more water-efficient than its near-neighbor in the desert (los angeles), notably because most of its residents understand they live in a desert, unlike angelenos. but native las vegans (there are a handful) are more likely to want an exotically green front yard than are immigrants. so its share in depleting the colorado is far less than its garish footprint...and on that score the electricity that lights up the strip doesn't come from the dam just down the road. hoover was built -- and its allocations contracted -- long before vegas was more than an outpost, so this desert town is powered by a coal-fired generating station of all things.

back to the land of planned exurbs in the desert. I worked at removing the layer of dead insects from the chrome and then some grill and wine and whiskey and predictable musing on 20 years past. the can-do kid's roommate and sidekick appeared...both youngsters from youngstown attracted to the bright lights and alternately philosophical and indifferent about their prospects in this harsh city. the official roommate had apparently rescued the younger one when the latter's planned stay with aunt and uncle fell through. easy to shower unsolicited concern on these bold choices, but these women at least looked to have some control over where they were headed, unlike the chain-smoking shadows I found parked in front of slots in 'the fremont experience' at 10am on a tuesday morning.

day 17 -- zion to vegas

2010-08-20T17:54:00.002-05:00

las vegas was the destination for this day, but I still had the bryce and cedar breaks loop to cover before sin city. I managed to recognize that what looked like a short jaunt down to las vegas was a bit longer...I got it that nevada is a big state crammed onto one atlas page, so I actually counted up miles and convinced myself (grudgingly) that it was a longer haul than I wanted to believe from glancing at my ripped-from-the-atlas pages. wasn't going to miss out on bryce, but I made the painful decision to skip escalante and cottonwood canyon. hidden there are hundreds of those cliff dwellings, but most are far off the road, so riding past them wasn't of much use anyway. naturally skipping any road with the dotted-green scenic drive line was tough, but I knew that there was no way I'd complete this drive if I added any more than bryce and cedar breaks. that and I was now on a mormon history kick and wanted to visit the mountain meadows monument to see how that episode was narrated...and to find out who was doing the narrating. I had toyed with the idea of spinning out to bryce the previous afternoon and then returning to the campsite, but the spectacular and tunneled east gate entrance road to zion was heavily under construction -- rutted dirt, one-lane delays, and the like, so it was a good call to cover it only one way. back on US89, but this time more peaceful since the lake powell traffic had turned off to the south somewhere...and more rain that looked poised over bryce. I was emboldened by earlier screw-the-rain efforts, so headed up to the canyon anyway. through the spectacular red canyon and back into national park land...shuttle buses and motorcycles and RVs, but quiet enough once I rolled down up to the southern reaches of the canyon. this was a place for spectators mostly, viewpoints and turnouts more than backcountry hiking, though there's one long trail that leads from the southern point 22 miles under the red rock formations back to the visitor center. it is gorgeous, but honestly I was tiring of redrock, even if this was limestone, not sandstone, so the highlight was a couple of bored fire rangers watching a lightning strike fire burn a couple thousand feet below yovimpa point...there mostly in their soot-stained yellow shirts and walkie-talkies to discourage onlookers to 'report' this fire repeatedly.

and I was on a schedule, so back out through the red canyon (all this backtracking was killing me, I'll admit) and north to panguitch to catch SR143 up to cedar breaks. it was evident that this was a serious road...several times signs warned that snowplows operated in daytime hours only, that trucks shouldn't attempt the ascent, and that, in the words of one sign, 'this is NOT US89.' I started to worry that there'd be snow at the top though this seemed unlikely in august. in the end this was one of the most scenic drives on the trip, even (or especially) the part in the dixie national forest, not just the sliver of cedar breaks national monument. high grassy pasture, truly alpine meadows and lakes, the sharp blues and greens of pines and sky and water and grass. scrappy ranches, cedar vacation cabins with green roofs, lonely gravel roads. windswept and silent, so much so that I startled a couple of construction workers lazily idling on the wrong side of the cones when I crested a hill. and then a turn into the breaks, which, again, I hadn't bothered to investigate in advance. again no anasazi, but instead a staggering redrock ampitheater that summed up the grand canyon, zion, and bryce all in majestic spot. that adjective is overused (and possibly misused here because too weak), but it'd be completely acceptable for anyone on a tight schedule to abstract the other three parks with a quick trip here. indescribable (but I tried to photograph it anyway). a handful of tourists had found a way up here and were being led around by decidedly junior park rangers. I guess because this place is certainly closed most of the year (over 10,000 feet a.s.l.) and because it's so out of the way, it looked like this was where NPS interns are sent. and not just those on duty...like mcdonald's anywhere else in the country, the off duty rangers-in-training were hanging about on their off days.

on the way down the mountain past the by now famililar sediment layers...but here the profile was turned over on its side and pointed to the sky on the edge of some faultline. I really need to sit in on a geology class this fall at wright state. partway down I stopped at a scenic overlook where a tall (even 'willowy') blonde woman was waving an old-school radio antenna around in the air next to her pickup truck. for some reason I didn't ask her what she was doing...I was losing the ethnographer's touch after so many nights in the tent and in national parks where there were no interesting locals to interview. that and I feared she was on the frontline of a defense of america from UN invasion or muslim conspiracies...not far from sharron angle country, after all. reached the bottom and cedar city and had to skip the mountain meadows detour if I was going to make las vegas in sunlight. this was a hard failure, but I figured whatever interpretive center might occupy the site was likely closed anyway. and I realized that I'd gone through the least-heat moon progression that took him a couple of decades between books in just two weeks. in 'blue highways' he's gregarious and inquisitive, if with an angry hippie edge and mopey post-breakup malaise...but by the time of his 'river horse' journey he's grouchy and rarely gets off his boat to do anything but find sandwiches and an occasional beer. so I was updating that model by skipping the site and reasoning that I could just wikipedia it later. (turns out that I need to do some more research on that front...I did find a local korean war-style monument in several photos but no evidence of much else there. I did find an account of a memorial service at its dedication in which descendants of mormons and the arkansas emigrant victims of the massacre worked on reconciliation. though it looks clear enough to me. brigham young and company were under serious US army pressure at the time and sought to keep out any non-Mormon settlers who might complain to the gov't and invite intervention -- they likely understood how bad this dynamic was for the indians pursued by custer, for example. so, allied with some utes, a band of mormons surrounded a stranded wagon train and killed everyone. but there was much talk about 'we'll never understand the motivations here' at the memorial service from important voices like the president of BYU and an elder of the church.)

anyway, at cedar city I hopped on I-15 instead for a too-long interstate stretch down to vegas. noticed right away that even southern utah is inhabited along the interstate...the emptiness and isolation I'd seen the past week wasn't really visible from the 'superslab' as the author of a motorcycling proficiency book calls it, absurdly. time and distance are different there as well...it's self-evident that you can get places faster on an interstate -- no stoplights, straighter lines, fewer climbs -- but there's something more magical about the accelerated travel. but also more miserable on a motorcycle is the wind...no matter in which direction I travel on routes that are blue on the map, the wind is worse. open plains, broad mountain cuts, buffeting wind from other traffic...who knows, but it's actually much harder to ride fast on the interstate than elsewhere. a stretch through arizona was pretty dramatic, though, a video game rollercoaster down into and back up out of a canyon cut by the virgin river...all just-barely-highway-grade sharp turns and corkscrews down and back up again, the sun disappearing early behind rock walls. but then into the furnace blast of the real desert. desert conditions had been advertised all the way from big bend to zion, but this...this was the real desert. more exposed soil than plants, scrawny cactuses, and a glaring sun that made me uncomfortably hot on the bike for the first time. I finally saw the dusty track between power lines from 'seven' that for some reason was lodged in my head as the primary image of the southwestern desert. it was 5pm and I was still baking on the bike. the sun was ahead of me and to the right since I was heading southwest, but the back of my neck was on fire, and I felt like my nose was sunburning through my dark faceshield. while the vegas explorer who was my next host was downing a post-workout protein shake, I was downing a liter bottle of fanta at a dusty service station. dramatic enough? I nixed a proposed detour past lake meade and headed straight toward a hazy skyline in a sickly yellow light. the sun winked out behind the mountains at 7.17 and I zoomed past the strip just as it was lighting up. my destination was actually henderson, NV, which I reached after another half hour of planned community curved boulevards and streets and a few minutes wrangling with the security gate code which ended with me hopping back on the bike and squeezing through a closing gate in a very slow-motion approximation of something from a bond flick. high excitement. vegas!

day 16 -- zion; hiking with kim jong il

2010-08-20T16:33:00.006-05:00

spun down the long road at dawn and got dawn pics that no one but fishermen on their way to kolob reservoir likely see, caught an early shuttle to the angels landing trailhead midway up the canyon, and hiked without too many companions up to a breathtakingly scenic rock 1200' above the canyon floor. the pictures tell that narrative well enough, but this is where the dear leader comes in...midway up I passed a huffing and puffing caricature of kim jong il struggling earnestly up the switchbacks. he honestly looked more like KJI than the team america caricature, and given the real version's tendency to sneak out of north korea once and a while on secret trains, I figured even money it was him. and the can-do spirit that he substitutes for food to his starving people was there, too. thought there was no chance he'd tackle the last, rock-scrambling chain-grabbing last half mile to the pinnacle...but just as I started down after reclining on rocks for a while and snapping photos for various families (including a german one whose father was terrified I was going to back off the cliff in an effort to get a good shot of them), here came our hero. when he reached the top he waved frantically to his wife waiting on a lower shelf and exulted in his triumph for the fatherland. (not really.) all this excitement about asian dictators was part of creeping delirium from a lack of food. at the bottom of the trail I tacked on a loop around the 'emerald pools' to the lodge, and along the way I saw a woman in a teal top and dark sunglasses sitting beside the trail. she turned out to be a cactus. and so on.

the way down was a touch crowded, as was the rest of the day's exploring. crammed on the shuttle bus, herded up the riverwalk into the narrower stretches of the canyon with crying babies and squirrel-feeding new yorkers. wished I had planned this all better with backcountry hikes up the narrows or the trail back to the campsite (now it was too late to trudge 14 miles up), but another time. I did get to ride a shuttle driven by ned beatty, though, even after I'd foraged some food. another quiet night at the campground away from the crowds...the first night I'd occupied the same bed/patch of ground on the trip.

day 15 -- north rim to zion; starvation camping

2010-08-20T16:26:00.005-05:00

dutifully dragged my camera out of bed before sunrise so as to make up for missing the grand canyon sunset...though I doubted that even that would top the dazzlingly starry and meteor-y night sky. strapped on the vibrams for more free advertising (kids love 'em) and wandered out to bright angel point with the intrepid masses. the standard cast of characters...talkative bespectacled middle-aged guys from chicago with fancy cameras, can't-miss-this-moment families with disinterested kids, showoff teenagers clambering around on rocks as if a foot higher/closer to the south rim will make a difference in photos of cliffs five miles away, the tai chi guy, southern europeans in their hiking-inappropriate footwear (only americans, brits, and germans wear hiking boots to walk a paved, level path...or any hiking trail for that matter), and chattering japanese with their backpacks full of who knows what. the show was predictably stunning though a summer haze was in the way, the sort of scenery you can't really capture with a camera. peaceful and quiet with the exception of a couple of loudly unaware english kids yammering away in that inimitable english way. snapped some decent shots of hummingbirds on beebalm and headed back to the lodge to sit on the balcony and catch up on writing. and listen to more visitor varieties, like brooklynites giddy at the big skies but at the same time nervously filling in that unaccustomed space w ith shouts of 'echo.' repeatedly. chatted with a handful of passersby, but not the same as the locals I'd encountered before...that local contact slipping away was inevitable in the park detour section, but I missed it.

back up over the humpbacked kaibab plateau on the way to bryce and zion. hadn't really worked out how to cover southern utah, only that I knew there was too much to cram in without losing time later on in the trip. I figured that saturday night in zion was a no-go on campgrounds, esp with a likely late-ish arrival, so I aimed the bike straight up US89 toward bryce with a loop up to cedar breaks for a campground stop in mind. but the cliff-dwellings siren was activated when I saw in fredonia a sign for pipe springs national monument. I had no idea what was at pipe springs, but nat'l monuments are usually human-made sites. I also could have checked on it, but I like the surprise, so I detoured west and on the spot changed the plan to zion first. so pipe springs was nothing like what I expected...instead of cliff dwellers I found mormon homesteaders and, later on, an LDS tithing ranch. steer donated to the church by cash-strapped faithful were shipped south to this unexpected spring in the desert, in what everyone thought was utah but was actually across the arizona border. milk and butter and occasional steer fed on arizona rice grass were then sent back to st george to feed the men building a temple there. what remains at pipe springs is a grand house/fort that was erected as a bulwark against raids from all comers...indians and the feds alike. not quite the case of mormons-barging-in that some would like to tell, since the original paiute inhabitants were already encamped some distance away since hanging around the springs exposed them, one of the more pacifist tribes, to slave raids from apaches and utes. these settlers weren't very good at accommodating the native way of life, naturally, and their cows ate the rice grass on which the paiutes subsisted, but blaming the mormons doesn't work perfectly. anyway, just as interesting was the use of the ranch as a shelter for illegal wives. when LDS honchos realized that the ranch was in arizona and hence a different federal court jurisdiction, they sent extra wives there to hide out when the feds conducted anti-polygamy raids. no direct evidence of multiple wives-in-residence, no arrest.

all this from a drawly NPS ranger speaking to a group with only one native english speaker (me). pretty sure everyone followed, though one dad was translating the best parts for his kids along the way. the stop turned out especially fortuitous when the next town I rode through on the revised route west was colorado city. western town signs as you probably know record two of three bits of information (whichever two are most notable?) -- population, elevation, and date of foundation. this one had #1 and #3, and I took a double take when the foundation date was 1985. now I know the arizona strip is rough country, but it was likely filled in more than 25 years ago. stopped briefly at a car wash to check the map and adjust luggage, saw a woman in a long orange and yellow plaid dress washing a minivan, and rusty gears started to crank. warren jeffs, fundamentalist mormon separatists, and federal raids came to mind. dawned on me that this is was the core of breakaway polygamists now on the run from not only the feds but split from the mainstream church as well. same factors in play as in the 19th century...arizona jurisdiction not so dialed in on polygamy, out-of-the-way towns that the feds can't be bothered to raid (though not nearly so wild as it's often portrayed). of course jeffs doesn't exactly inspire much sympathy as a crusader for his religious beliefs given his penchant for expelling dozens of young men for the community so there are more wives to go around for the community elders, but in broad outline not much has apparently changed. and at a gas station in laverkin outside of zion I saw the expected 15-passenger van crammed with a conservatively-dressed crowd of women and kids. later on I checked up on colorado city and learned that it's not exactly brand new, but the result of a schism within the schismatic community engineered by jeffs, and that recently arizona authorities (state, not federal) have moved against the community, seizing municipal records and alleging misuse of public funds (though surely they were checking marriage records, too, right?). heartwarming to see gov brewer acting with equal opportunity suspicion against all 'immigrants' to arizona.

at this point I was on the wrong side of zion to get to bryce or cedar breaks, so I headed for the one campground that I figured might have open sites...the 'primitive' campground at lava point, high above the canyon in the northwest corner of the park. I knew it was a long way up and far away from services, and likely waterless, so I vaguely considered stopping at subway to grab a sandwich to take with me and fill up on water. but I was pessimistic that I'd find a campsite even there and in a go-go mood, so I just fired up the long twisting hill past the western cliffs of the park, burned out juniper forest, and cattle grates when I came to the turnoff from the main route through the park. so the good news was that only three of six campsites were occupied when I arrived, the view over the park from a nearby overlook was sublime, and the campground was quiet except for chirpy chipmunks. the bad news was that I had no food and only an emergency liter and a half of water. really this was only a problem because I was thinking more about food than about enjoying the sky and the views and the serenity...I considered muscling in on the neighbors' campfire feast (they had a fully-stocked SUV and trailer), but figured I'd make it. in retrospect the real problem was that I had to drive down to the park entrance and explore the canyon from the shuttle bus instead of hiking down a long trail into the canyon from lava point (named for a thick cap of basalt on top of the sandstone layers for which the park is famous), and then finding a ride from the various outfitters who advertised trailhead rides from the visitor center. but this was the cost of not over-managing the trip, so in the end it was fine. waited for the hunger to subside, took in the view, watched the spectacular sky until I caught some more perseids, and turned in early for a pre-dawn rise.

day 14 -- flagstaff to the north rim

2010-08-16T10:30:00.003-05:00

I was well-positioned in flagstaff for a quick run to the grand canyon and had lucked into a last minute opening at the north rim lodge (campground full). leisurely ride, early arrival, time to settle in and then drive to a good spot for the sunset. but that's not how this trip is going. as always...too much map to cover -- in this case couldn't resist a loop south to sedona and from there to the sinagua sites of montezuma well and 'castle.' logically I knew this would make the trip to the canyon tight, but I can't quite shake the have-to-use-all-daylight-hours to ride imperative, so off I went winding down through the spectacular oak canyon to sedona. there I hoped for a quiet breakfast and some blogging time, but chintzy main street sedona, despite the redrock beauty, was too much. I can see finding a tucked away spot to stay for a week and explore the canyons, but the tourist strip was too much. it didn't help that at the outdoor breakfast buffet I was accompanied by a small wedding party that was retelling some nightmare accommodation story repeatedly for every new couple who wandered down. so I moved on to the beaver creek valley.

I had no idea what montezuma well was other than its likely prehistoric-ness. from aztec in wisconsin to toltec in arkansas there was for a while in the 19th century a tendency to give north american sites fanciful mexican names. whether this was part of an intentional program to strip north american indians of a connection with 'great monuments' or just part of the siam to attica thing, who knows. anyway, montezuma castle sounded more interesting than montezuma well, but I got off at the montezuma well exit anyway just in case there was a non-interstate connector between the sites. happy that I ended up on the way to the site, though, because it's like nothing else I've seen. cliff dwellings and remains of pueblos surrounding a giant collapsed limestone aquifer, one fed by 1.5 million gallons of water a day and that since around 11000 bce has formed a deep pond in the middle of desert, complete with an outlet suitable for irrigating fields below. the only thing the lucky inhabitants were missing was enough land to use all that water. chatted with park rangers who were inspecting a check dam they'd built on the pond side of the outlet to catch algae that was clogging it and listened to them discuss a monumental poison ivy-clearing enterprise. the glorious life of a park ranger. montezuma castle was a more conventional cliff dwelling, albeit five impressive stories high and next to an even larger but now collapsed structure. I realized I was stepping into the grand canyon penumbra with the throngs of school kids and vacationing families crowding the short loop path in front of the ruins.

now past time to head north I got back on the interstate and stopped over in flagstaff to recharge the camera battery at the largest mcdonald's I've ever seen. and a clientele of baffled european tourists and nonplussed locals. headed out toward the north rim but decided to spin through one more detour, a NF loop past the volcanic landscape of sunset crater (erupted last in 1064) and then north to the pueblo and affiliated sites of wupatki NP before rejoining SR89 toward page, AZ. the parks are joined not just incidentally, since it's quite possible that the pueblos were built by sinagua pushed northward by the ashfall that buried their crops and ruined their fields. rolling cinder hills, trees still struggling to take root, rumbling lava flows, vast red scree slopes...unforgettable. I thought I'd scratched the volcano itch in idaho and iceland a few years ago, but this was fascinating still. a brief low-piney interlude with a preview of the painted desert, then into wupatki; first stop wukoki ruins. nothing more than a small pueblo built on top of a projecting rock, but the red rock here made it spectacular, as was the case for the main pueblo complex. tried hard not to delay too much at these sites, but didn't succeed -- back on the road north after 4.30.

two-and-a-half hours for 170 miles. I figured I'd encounter another straight fast stretch through the painted desert, but SR89 is something else completely. it's the main artery toward lake powell, so it was packed with drivers just as impatient as I was trying not to be. slowpokes were doing 80mph, but that wasn't enough for some. there were occasional passing lanes, but for the majority two-lane stretches it wasn't an easy task. not just the oncoming traffic, but ADOT's practice of putting a rumble-stripped trench down the middle, plus deep gashes that held reflectors, are not so motorcycle-friendly. so I tried to settle in and pick spots, but overall the breakneck pace was a bit much. all the while passing stunning scenery -- the plateau edges that make the painted desert look so colorful from a distance. deeply incised and veined red rock faces with formations pouring down like mud, as well as lower more subtle mudstone and sandstone formations closer to the road. low humps of brown and grey that likewise looked like claymation clay worn with rivulets -- nothing dramatic about these but the colors and shapes were marvelous. on the narrow racetrack that was SR89, though, no chance for photos.

counting down the miles to page, gritting teeth through a sloshy tar-and-chips stretch, and then an unexpected reprieve as SR89A turned off toward the north rim earlier than I expected. the traffic disappeared, the wind softened, and making the turn toward the destination was a positive. I was planning on filling up in page, so gas was a minor concern, but one that was swallowed up by the redrock scenery as the road descended toward what is the far upstream end of the canyon at lee's ferry. bridge over the mini-canyon and then a run along the brilliant vermillion cliffs on the north, the just-visible and deepening canyon to the south. still stupidly trying to make the sunset and didn't pause to take a shot of the cliffs as I climbed the kaibab plateau. finally reached the park and wound through the spectacular open meadows and juniper/pine to ash/spruce forest. and the late timing was fortuitous in at least one regard...in one of the last meadows before descending into the rim forest I saw a brown shape jogging through the grass. I figured coyote, so I slowed down to watch, but then realized that it was a bit too large. and the way it moved was suspiciously feline. I got off the bike and fumbled for binocs but didn't find them in time. as it ambled into the woods, though, the last couple of bounds made me pretty sure that this was a lion. I realize this sort of lion isn't much of a grassland denizen, but at 7pm that's where the deer were...

stuck to the plan even though the sun was nearly down and headed to pt imperial to the east of the north rim lodge/campground, gradually getting seriously cold on the bike for the first time. the sun was indeed down when I arrived but there was still a pink glow washing over the canyon, and that I could see back across the plain I had just crossed a couple hours before was perfect. switched to the clear face shield and puttered back to the lodge (so as not to hit a deer) and checked into the 'rustic cabin' they'd assigned me in lieu of the motel. took some time to stare up at a sky full of more stars than I've ever seen -- overwhelming really -- and caught the tail end of the perseids meteor shower. several meteors-with-smoky-trails in just a few minutes, a darn sight better than last summer when I battled mosquitoes at caesar creek state park south of dayton in search of a reasonably clear sky in the right direction. and finally to bed and the sounds of the couple on the other side of the cabin wall watching an episode of the simpsons. he thought it much funnier than she did.

day 13 -- tucson to flagstaff

2010-08-14T13:45:00.003-05:00

rolled out of tucson at 9.30am energized from the run and itchy's scrambled eggs and then immediately needed to take a nap. found a roadside picnic table, took the obligatory pic of a saguaro (promised myself that this was the only one I'd take, but soon broke that one) and dozed off until a friendly cop pulled in and checked on my health when he saw the mostly healed but still pink scars on my arm (I think it kinda looks like little more than eczema). so off again through desert scrub that looked like new mexico except now with saguaro patrolmen. climbed again this time into mining country and the bluejay copper mine in miami, AZ. the didn't-leave-enough-time-to-reach destination for this evening was the barringer meteor crater. from time to time I remembered that this is something I've always wanted to see, or that 12-year-old aaron-with-a-moonscape-mural-on-his-wall wanted to see, but I didn't really have a good idea where it was / hadn't bothered to check. was relieved to find that it was still ahead to the northeast, so instead of a planned loop past phoenix and up to flagstaff through prescott, I veered off the scenic route and toward winslow, AZ, hoping to make it to the crater before sunset. of course, though I'd promised myself that I'd avoid falling into the collecting archaeological sites trap, when I happened by cliff dwellings above lake roosevelt, I couldn't resist. that the misnamed anasazi decided to start living on dramatic cliff faces in the 11th century made them much more archaeologically visible and inevitably romantic as well. pueblos and hohokam great houses and the like are just as socially interesting, but people climbing 35-foot ladders to live in cramped dark caves is naturally alluring. so I stripped off the leather and exhanged it for shorts and running shoes and climbed a short paved trail to these ruins, supposedly now guarded by africanized honeybees. initially that sounded like a dubious way to keep tourists off the ruins, but since other ruins have more permanent barriers than the hastily thrown-up cones and sign here, I believed it. (not that climbing around on ruins is all that more instructive than appreciating from a few yards away.) a couple of college-aged wisconsiners tried to get me to convince them that it was okay to disregard the ranger's warning, but I demurred...and they came tittering back when one heard a buzz.

this put me a bit off schedule for the crater, but uninformed optimism is the best kind, so with only a vague idea of mileage I pressed on. and there was a desert road toward winslow that was wide open and smooth, so I opened it up and made great time into another scrap-of-rt 66 community before a stretch of the dreaded I-10. I got over a fear of truck traffic on interstates when I was forced onto I-75 in toledo on the ontario trip, but that doesn't make them more appealing. it's invariably windier on the broad open road and less scenic...and in this case straight into the setting sun. but there's no other way to the crater. billboards emphasized that this is the best preserved meteor crater on the planet, and there were other such encouraging signs on the entrance road. weirdly the signs continued to extol the virtues of the crater even after I'd traveled 6 miles off the interstate, as if I was likely to turn around if I didn't know about the 10 minute movie and guided walking tour. I arrived with time to spare, paid the entry fee and headed past apollo astronaut barracks to the crater. pics galore. best part of the museum, which continued to sell the site even after you'd paid to get in, in a very 19th century museum/circus kind of way that you find at this sort of anti-national park holdout site. I was reminded serveral times that this was the best preserved meteor crater on the planet, and that scientists found indisputable confirmation of meteor strikes on earth here first. there was constant reference to dr. eugene shoemaker's contributions in this regard, as if his phD was a magic badge. beyond the braggadocio the museum was packed with interactive exhibits like one that allowed you to model a meteor impact (size, speed, angle of impact) so as to see what it would take to destroy the planet. overwhelming and breathless in route 66 carnival way that a more restrained NPS museum couldn't capture.

an evening with itchy

2010-08-14T13:43:00.003-05:00

itchy requires no introduction to many of you since his place in running spot lore is a favorite topic. suffice it to say that if you know itchy he's The Nicest Guy You've Ever Met by default, and beyond that remarkably open and generous and sincere. the easiest and least complicated person to know in the world. itchy moved back to tucson and broke away from cincinnati's clutches in january and has set up in another running store gig, great apartment nestled up against the northeastern hills, already months in to preparations for the stillers' 7/11 year. complete with hundreds of football cards (and one willie stargell card) pasted to the wall in a pattern that supposedly shows the outline of the lombardi trophy. (sorry, itchy, I still don't see it.) a bo jackson shrine, and a newly acquired lifesize jordan cutout by the microwave. anyway, he was generous enough to put me up for a night and drive me out to a fine burgers and beer joint (first decent beer in weeks -- an unexciting microbrew stout, but better than the usual choices in the uninspired plains). itchy and I were evenly matched as runners when I worked at the store. matched in terms of speed, that is. otherwise there's nothing in common. build, stride, form, training schedules...couldn't be more dissimilar. what we share, though, is unfounded optimism. this may sound unlikely given that itchy will never give up on running a 2.30 marathon and I've 'retired' five times in the last eight years, but the thing is that I always come out of retirement and itchy has a tendency to throw away running shoes and announce his disillusionment with running every time the next injury crops up. so I pretend not to harbor hopes of running fast again and itchy claims not to remember his myriad injuries, but in the end we arrive in the same place. and it shows in its purest form in the one running aspect where we converge -- race 'strategy.' that is, neither of us has a race strategy other than to go out hard and hang on. most decent runners who continue running into their late 30s figure this out, but I never have. perhaps itchy has, but I doubt it. for me this comes partly in a lack of confidence in my kick and wanting to establish a finishing position early on, but it's also that optimism. I may go into a race with modest (realistic) goals, but on the line they always evaporate.

anyway, this optimism infects more than just running for itchy. it's in his general outlook, it's in his unfailingly optimistic appraisal of people he knows, it's in his absolute conviction that the stillers will win every year. he's been commissioned to liven up the only steeler bar in tucson after his brief cameo at the tail end of last season. so it's not surprising that we were up at 5.30 for a 6am run up the sabino canyon trail not far from his apartment. itchy waited up for me as I lumbered up the trail...lumbered and tiptoed since I was wearing my vibram slippers. gorgeous run, great scenery, cool air before the blast of the morning sun. itchy inexplicably doesn't wear his glasses while he runs and kept jumping out of the way of 'snakes' that turned out to be cracks in the paved trail, and he sprinted ahead at one point where there's a sheer dropoff into the canyon (safely behind a guardrail), but it was great to run in the mountains. we talked about the usual topics -- but not just the same old boring running spot tales -- in the way that's so easy with someone like itchy. no agenda, no motives, no lame attempts to impress. if you're ever in tucson, look him up. just not on a sunday afternoon in the fall.

day 12 -- el paso to tucscon

2010-08-14T13:40:00.004-05:00

didn't have much interest in exploring el paso, which I kept calling 'UTEP' in my head, and when I staggered out into the blinding sun I was on the clock. I had reserved space on (running spot vet now retired to the southland) itchy's couch in tucson. hadn't checked mileage, but I figured it was a pretty good run...straight through new mexico since I'd covered it previously but a few scenic detours planned for arizona. headed to the mighty I-10 to skirt downtown traffic and remembered why interstates are mostly off limits for this trip. manic rush hour, had to dodge a ladder that clattered off a truck, and negotiated lane changes over a gap broad enough that it had sprouted a sash of grass. el paso inevitably recalled a second world city to me in the way I drag irrelevant comparisons to greece into everything. part of this was surely the bright sun on a treeless city, and the city looked 'mexican' (scare quotes because I've never visited mexico) because of spanish street signs and because it blended seamlessly with the sprawling-to-the-horizon juarez on the other side of a boundary I couldn't see. but...I think there was also something about how the components of the city were arranged -- apparently haphazard zoning, retail oriented toward the outdoors, garish signs everywhere.

the only way to new mexico SR9 was an awkward loop on a square-shaped belt road named after esteemed legislator pete domenici. I was for some reason worried that I'd miss the turnoff and end up in the queue for a secondary border crossing at santa teresa. ended up in an el paso suburb at a gas station with an attached 'tortas' burrito joint, where I had a kickass chorizo/egg burrito. eventually crossed into new mexico proper for the quickest non-interstate traverse I could find. SR9 was another why-is-there-a-road-here strip of asphalt that passed nothing but ranches that probably reached all the way north to I-10, in sight most of the time. in any case, I soon realized that I was sharing this road with the border patrol (late-teenagers in ill-fitting uniforms). more than half the traffic was an endless stream of white broncos with dark-tinted windows, either on the road or creeping slowly along on a dirt track immediately to the south of the tarmac. I even spotted what I swear was a refueling truck. every few miles there was some sort of mobile lookout post that brought to mind an imperial AT-AT from Hoth. not that these looked like they could move, but the cockpit was raised and lowered on jointed legs...not sure why these weren't just fire tower-like constructions. too easy/inexpensive. so...your tax dollars hard at work -- I must have seen 80 vehicles (very low estimate) prowling along this unlikeliest of crossing points. I tried to figure out how the tea party/NRA/free enterprise crowd can reconcile all that goes into 'defending borders.' federal agents and federal regulation and restricting the free (labor) market and expensive federal programs -- surely doesn't add up, right? right.

most of the other vehicles were mysterious late model black sedans of uncertain make (no hood ornament). for about an hour they passed going east, one by one at regular 2 mile intervals. looked nefarious to me, but surely nothing was getting by the patrols. anyway, the first town on this road to nowhere in particular was columbus, new mexico. and amidst the sleepy/dusty border town vibe was something remarkable. a coffee shop...the first sign of coastal affect I'd seen since downtown cincinnati. outside of college towns (and not even all of them), the south I'd seen had resisted the cafe that has invaded so many formerly french-coffee-resistant places elsewhere. no starbucks even. so a mark of things to come, esp in arizona. because arizona is where the west coast starts in earnest -- tourists and jewelry stands and mochas and real estate brokers. sleepy towns are not so sleepy, and the resigned-to-oblivion attitude disappears. that this rather more refined west is also the home of a refusal to observe daylight savings time (because who doesn't want to get up at 5am?), a refusal to acknowledge MLK, and of course enthusiasm for a 'papers, please' police state could suggest contradictions. but I think not...the reactionary garbage from a state that's really not so backwards is a symptom of trying too hard. arizonans really want to be daring frontiersmen in texas-white pickups. but in reality they all live in phoenix and sell insurance...and moved there from somewhere else. and can live there because the corps of engineers has built dams for them. the cowboy hat doesn't quite fit when you're driving a lexus SUV. so they overcompensate by electing a 'maverick' and begging the rest of the country to outsource its inmates to florence. this isn't new...this is the state that brought us barry goldwater, after all.

the 'real' arizona is unabashedly contrived. real cowboy towns like lamesa have nothing on bisbee and tombstone anad sedona, which have managed to turn that one colorful event (the OK corral, for example), mountain scenery, and proximity to LA into tourist gold. towns as theme parks, and a long history of self-promotion that predates the new american tourist city by decades. the neon motels advertising 'refrigeration' (I think that's A/C), the whole route 66 phenomenon...the American roadtrip started in arizona. and the shift to this was immediate and remarkable...SR9 ended near the border, and as I looped south to douglas, AZ and then back north into the mountains the towns transformed. land for sale, horseriding/canoeing/ATVing outfitters, and those ubiquitous jewelry stores. and on cue the landscape changed as well from the undifferentiated scrubby desert of southern NM (not all of the state looks like this) into an almost lush grassy plain that recalls iceland or sound of music alpine. back to desert, then into cute mountain village territory and ponderosa pines.

and so I found myself in the late afternoon sitting on a wild west boardwalk in the utterly fake town of tombstone stealing wireless and making an appointment for a bike tuneup in las vegas. the flies were swarming me mercilessly...at first I figured it was the stench of me/my jacket. or was it the patina of smashed insects? or did they think that the leather was still attached to a cow / water buffalo? I would have camped in tombstone and taken in a show at a saloon, but I didn't want to keep the early-to-bed itchy waiting, so I set out for the final stretch to tucson. high desert now with saguaros starting to pop up on the outskirts of the city. finished with an edifying tour of the industrial wasteland of east tucson when I tried to outsmart the googlemap directions only to be blocked by the airport, but arrived before sundown this time nonetheless.

day 11 -- big bend to el paso (embellished)

2010-08-11T12:27:00.005-05:00

and then off again...repacked the bike for the trip north. this is one of the less liberating aspects of the ride. the new bike has large saddlebags and I've kept the gear limited enough. but the arrangement is still slightly complicated. I have a bike-specific framed bag that fits over the rear backrest and sits on the back seat. that's simple enough, but to it I've lashed the hiking backpack, which is suspended over the back fender. ideally I'd have a luggage rack to support it, but as it is is rests on top of the license plate. the whole deal is stable enough, but of course it's hard not to glance in the rearview to check it once in a while on a 350-mile ride. inevitably it's not perfectly centered, and it's easy to get a touch obsessive about it. but this ride was stunning enough to distract me from the rearview...long empty roads from the edge of the park north to alpine and then from marfa to van horn. another six or seven storm systems to dodge...by this point I'd realized that no matter how much I wanted to I didn't have any control over the situation. but it was fun to pretend, even if it took away some of the sit back and relax vibe. climbing into the first town above the desert (alpine) there was even a towering dust devil visible from a mile away, a wispy dust column that probably wouldn't have been too fun to ride through. but it spun off harmlessly. crossing west from alpine into marfa, though, there was a solid wall of purple grey that was more than the two minute splashes I'd ridden through so far. they were without fail rain under sunny skies, so sparkling pavement and big drops but no risk of a long-term soak. this was different...a slow-moving giant. enough to have me scanning escape routes...best bet was a pavilion built from which people can gather to watch the mysterious 'marfa lights' (moonlight reflecting off mica? highway lights? swamp gas?). I could just squeeze by the barriers and pull into the broad bay of the men's bathroom. but of course the highway veered off to the north just enough to skirt the edge.

I thought about tarrying in marfa for a while since an eccentric high school friend lived there for a while, but the storm kept me moving onto the 'no services for 75 miles' stretch into van horn. opened up on this dead straight stretch, an immense plain between low ridges, grassy scrub with a handful of cattle herds. plus a possible explanation for the 'marfa lights' -- a USAF experimental dirigible station with a huge white unmanned blimp tethered next to the road. absolutely breathtaking and impossible to capture with a camera...exactly the landscape that this trip is about. nobody around for miles, just the bike and the mountains and the grass. and occasional jackrabbits, once close enough to see one have to drop his ears to squeeze through a barbed wire fence. after a late lunch of carnitas at chuy's in van horn, which heavily advertised the fact that it's a regular stop on john madden's bus trips along I-10, I turned north toward the guadalupe mountains and then one more long stretch into el paso. and here one more thing to worry about. for the first time I was in a gasoline situation. 4.9 gallon tank, getting about 50 mpg for most of the trip. 135 miles since the last fill up, so though I'd never really pushed it to empty, all the way to el paso was out of range. but there were a couple of towns on the map, so I figured it was fine. 14 miles to salt fork, then another 23 to cornudas. salt fork was nothing more than a greyhound bus stop cafe -- charming in itself because that's the kind of place where people always board the greyhound in movies...but I'd never seen one. dusty highway, one shop, no visible population center. I think I had just missed its opening hours since I'd seen a greyhound roll by at the last intersection. figured that cornudas might look the same, and google-text confirmed that. so it was either backtrack to pine spring at the guadalupe national park or take a shot with dell city -- 35 miles out of the way. I was in press-on mode, so I hated the detour, but the serendipity was perfect in the end. past salt flats and then into the 'city,' population 415, now very much a transient community of migrant workers. that at this time of evening was under a cloud of irrigation spray. just as I pulled into the only gas station, manuel was closing up and walking toward home. incredible timing again...without this I would have had to backtrack another 40 miles (and hope). I think it was evident that I was desperate, though, given the unlikelihood that anyone would randomly visit dell city. he had shut everything down, so we went exact change, which was just $6 since I didn't have anything else smaller than $20. (in retrospect I should have filled up and offered the change in thanks). enough for a couple of gallons. looped back to the highway on another road, which of course led to a lone gas station that I would have found had I pressed on another couple of miles. ah, but no hurry. long ride into the blinding sunset in el paso and the shock of the strip malls and traffic of a big city. ugh.

day 10 -- big bend

2010-08-11T11:17:00.003-05:00

pulled into the park headquarters after a rolling ride across the tip of the chihuahua desert that's protected here. as oklahoma territory faded into an empty landscape along the washita it felt like I was at the edge of the earth, but this, this was even more so. knowing the road ended in the park, that this land wasn't protected from much of anything now that no one would try to scratch a living from it (though of course they had at some point) gave it a sense of finality. it's not on the way to anything, but at least in theory was the sort of desert desperate immigrants cross in hopes of finding work farther north -- hence the border checkpoints placed some 40 miles up the road on both US385 and SR 118. in the off chance that you'd survived the desert and found a ride (often no cars either way for 20 miles), you were out of luck just when you thought you'd made it. big bend is a huge park with four scattered campgrounds, three main roads radiating from the central 'panther junction,' and dozens of miles of jeep roads. and though it looks relatively benign...lots of low scrub, cactuses, green hillsides, there's no water anywhere. so there are only a few miles of trails cut into the wilderness around the main campground at chisos basin, enough for a couple days' hike but not much more since carrying water farther would get a bit heavy. all this means there's not a whole lot to do here but camp out, watch for bears and mountain lions, and take drives in the summer heat. it's relatively quiet this time of year because of that last point, though really I didn't find it that opressive...105 degrees at lower elevations, 90s at the 5400' of the basin.

I set up camp and wandered up to the lodge to post the days' travels -- no cell phone service anywhere but wifi at the lodge -- and get a meal. I hadn't taken time for a relaxed not-on-the-road meal in a while. ate a burger, slipped out onto the patio to snap sunset photos, and listened to the very european clientele. about half the guests there and in the campground were foreign, which is interesting given the remote location, but it's quieter and much easier to get into without reservations than the grand canyon, I guess. slept in here in the far west of the time zone where the sun comes up late, even later in the basin. the basin itself is one more geological phenomenon...in addition to criss-crossing low folded ranges and the vast ancient sea, this was an isolated volcanic incursion, a high tower of upthrust rock with a slightly better watered basin in the center. dramatic scenery, lively flora and fauna. so after a quick ride down to the river in the afternoon sun, I packed up the tent and set out for a backcountry overnight. I planned a later afternoon start to avoid the heat, but in the event that wasn't an issue. it started raining about ten minutes into the hike, and I took shelter a couple of times in an effort to keep the tent and camera dry. but this was the ethereal, whimsical rain that is desert rain -- big drops and the swoosh of wind and rain through branches but not all that much water. it did pull up a new smell, a damp peppery sage.

the hike climbed to the rim of the basin and then along the south edge with forever views across the river into mexico. reached the campsite next to an outcrop above a 1200' drop around sunset, so I'd hiked through shifting light and the phases of afternoon/evening bug sounds. spent a breezy and solitary night at 7400' and dragged myself out of the tent in time to pack up and catch the sunrise. as I turned back to the campsite to grab food out of the bear locker, I saw a buck nosing through where I had set up the tent. but no bears or mountain lions.

day 9 -- lamesa to big bend NP

2010-08-11T09:45:00.003-05:00

I wasn't up for the hoedown after the rodeo, though I'm sure there was square dancing. and kid rock. so an early start instead for big bend NP...not exactly on the way, but the sort of place that's so far out of the way that it's hard to imagine heading back there again. so. back onto the cotton plains, which started to sprout pumpjacks and derricks in the permian basin pretty much at the same time that cultivated fields gave way to low texas scrub. the stench of oil was already in the air as far north as post (one town up from lamesa, founded by the cereal magnate cw post in a cloud-seeding and grain-growing scheme...), but this was now full-on oil country. I wanted to spin through midland, the boom capital of texas oil, and it didn't disappoint. blue glass and concrete and local conglomerate drilling headquarters and banks and health centers, the sort of exurban sprawl that I hadn't seen since cincinnati. the only tinted glass I'd seen was the 'dark glass' car-pimping outfit in pampa...partly because I've avoided cities, but there was nothing like this affluence in similar-sized towns. a truly towering downtown that dwarfed the town itself, so oil-fueled commerce linked into much more than midland. but then onto odessa, midland's much-more-texas twin...that is, where the people who work(ed) on the rigs -- not the bankers and executives -- live. this is all chronicled in bissinger's 'friday night lights,' (the book, not the tv show), and I wanted to see if this is overdrawn. obviously I didn't see enough (that is, see a football game) to confirm it, but it looked about right. I can say that all the down-home breakfast spots I passed up in midland were replaced by a sea of crappy chains in odessa. so I missed breakfast and settled for some greasy fried burritos at a burger joint in the ghost town of ft stockton, a place that bragged of burgers made since 1959 but in a not-so-recently converted subway -- the booths were still yellow, and the stock nyc transit maps were still on the wall.

from odessa started down US 385 to the park. a remarkably shiny new road that didn't lead much of anywhere but the park...even though there's another road that parallels it not far to the west, SR118 out of alpine. signs along it marked US385 as part of a mexican-american freight corridor, but that really wasn't clear given that there are no crossings from the park. it does intersect I-10 and US90, both of which lead east and west to border crossings, so I guess that's it...but odessa/midland are an odd inland destination. in any case, the country was big-sky stunning, especially since I had to calculate some more storm avoiding. I'll skip that one since I've already told that story, but once again that was high excitement...was sore proud that I split two systems this time and outran a third with only five minutes of rain-riding (and no hail, crucially). pretended this was some nifty maneuvering, but with the twists in the road I had no real idea how it would turn out...one moment it looked like I was safely clear, then one turn and I was headed straight for the middle. in anycase it worked out since there was zero cover. this was severely treeless country, the bottom of the immense staircase I descended from pampa downward (or at least that's what I figured). that's one of the grandest aspects of the plains, that there are always swells and rises that afford sweeping panoramas once in a while before you drop back to the flat horizon. the sweet sweet grass of oklahoma and upper texas was replaced by the just plain arid smell of the south, with the first cactus-like plants showing somewhere south of ft stockton. only occasional cows on the ranches now, and infrequently roadrunners. geology galore (pointed out by informative texas historical markers), from appalachian-age ground-down and scarred hills running SW-NE to newer hills folded out of the limestone that had covered the older formation (running perpendiculat from SE-NW) to the most recent volcanic intrusions. in some sense it's surprising that any texas kid would want to be anything but a geologist, meteorologist, or cattleman. the sky is right there, you can see clouds and rain developing constantly...as is witnessed by my enduring fascination with texas rainstorms here. and the broken and upturned rocks of the mountains are right there too, never invisible and impossible to ignore.

rodeo!

2010-08-09T12:36:00.003-05:00

not only did I stumble into a rodeo at the end of the line on the only saturday in texas, but I ended up at a motel on the south edge of lamesa that looked cheap but not dingy...and it was three blocks from the rodeo fairgrounds. I've noticed that (not surprisingly) every texas town has a rodeo ring, just like every indiana town has a souped up basketball gym and every ohio backyard has cornhole boards. (does every carolina town have a dirt race track? every florida town a dog track?) events started at 8pm, with the obligatory post-rodeo dance at 10pm. knowing that texans like to dress for the occasion, I was in a bit of a quandary. no pearl buttons, no string tie, no tight jeans, and no stetson. I wasn't about to head to the local western outfitter, not least because I've got nowhere to store any extra gear. and I doubt the george strait look suits me. so I went with the only uniform I had (no, not 70s runner)...jeans, cycle boots, leather jacket, and rode the bike those three blocks so I could justify the get up. as if anyone noticed. parked the bike in a dust pit just as the announcer was going over thank yous and obligatory patriotic platitudes. sure enough the crowd was uniformed...men and teenage guys in tall hats, pressed pearl-button shirts, high-and-tight jeans, boots. many women (and all the teenagers) in some combination of sundress/daisy dukes/short skirt and showy boots. pink boots, suede boots, alligator skin boots...matching optional. I didn't fit so well. that and the constantly snapping camera...I was determined to take pictures of people, something I've rarely ventured to do.

anyway, I settled in next to the rail -- the stands were packed -- while the announcer ran through a gushy prayer heavy on the troops. and then cut seamlessly from francis scott key to the village people (not even a beat in between). I had figured out from what I knew of the rodeo in ralls that I skipped that these were fairly packaged affairs. a town contracts the rodeo portion at least (presumably city council can handle the parade and 'miss rodeo 2010' part) to one of a number of rodeo production outfits. the latter supplies the broncos, the calves, the announcer, the clown, the referee, cowhands, one 'specialty act' involving lassoes, and so on. then locals show up to ride the broncs and rope the calves, along with a handful of semipros who bounce from show to show. all this makes practical sense...but it takes away some of the local-ness of the event, especially when the announcer and the clown need to put themselves at the center of it all. predictably, the show for them was all about 'firing up' the audience and instructing us when to cheer and make noise. now these were texans, but there was no beer at the rodeo, so most were content to sit on their hands and watch the action intently. that wasn't enough for the showman duo, which asked several times if anyone there was from lamesa. such is american entertainment. strange mix of cornpone morality (how many people here are happily married?) and jokes about marital infidelity, brokeback mountain jokes, and the like. and a conspicuous lack of country music.

other than the blather, hext productions did put on a better show than if the broncs were tired old castoffs from local ranches. so there was bronco-riding of the standard sort, calf-roping, and the rope tricks guy. I left after a couple of hours, so it's possible I missed the bull-riding, but I'm guessing that's something better left to professionals. but since this was a local, non-competitive thang, there were also kids' versions...namely donkey riding and 'mutton-busting.' so tykes strangle-holding terrified sheep as they sprint around the ring doing their best impressions of broncos...kicking like real horses. unsurprisingly these six-year-olds had some moxie, hands vised/tangled in wool, legs flying, body sliding off the side. nobody attempted an odysseus hold, unfortunately. needless to say a slightly different take on acceptable risk for kids...one kid took a pretty good stomp to the gut from a sheep. got up and staggered off, collapsed, writhed around a bit, and was carried off. the kids' event highlight was the calf chase -- ten or so holstein calves had been tagged with various prize tickets, from $5 to a shopping spree at walmart. and about 100 kids. slow-motion chaos as the increasingly panicked calves jogged around the ring just in front of the throngs before they were swallowed up. I guess farm animals put up with a lot every day, but this looked excessive. but hilarious.

spectating the spectators won the night...I'll let the photos tell that story. I realize I snapped way more cowboys than cowgirls, unfortunately, mostly because the interesting outfit accessories were on top for men (pearl buttons, hat) but down low for women (skirts and boots), so the men were more readily photogenic sitting in the stands. and it's hard enough (for me, at least) to snap covert candids of strangers, but taking pictures of legs and boots was a step too far...so you'll have to imagine the wonderful array of boots on parade.

day 8 -- clinton to lamesa, TX

2010-08-08T09:24:00.006-05:00

after some maintenance checks on the bike I rolled on toward the grasslands that had eluded me the day before. I stopped first at a national park visitors center on the edge of black kettle recently built to narrate the events of a massacre on the banks of the washita. standard custer...settlers who were squatting on land assigned to the cheyenne by treaty complained loudly to the feds that they were terrified of the continued and sometimes violent indian presence. something must be done to protect their 'rights.' (these are ancestors of the self-starter modern westerners who rail against washington while happily consuming two federal tax dollars for every one they contribute -- alaska comes to mind. some things never change.) just a few years removed from the sand creek massacre, where he chose to attack a band of elderly, widows, orphans, and otherwise disabled cheyenne under the protection of chief black kettle, custer again chose the weakest possible target. there were encampments of actual cheyenne warriors downstream, but custer knew (for the most part) to pick on defenseless parties. the exaggerated results looked better in the paper. (sound familiar?) in fact, this was again the camp of black kettle, who had broken with the war faction in the cheyenne to sign a treaty with the governmend even after sand creek, and he and his community were shunned as a result. so...predictable slaughter, falsified reports (custer claimed to have killed 103 warriors, when in fact he killed 40 men/women/children). the visitor center represented all the best of current american museum work. there was a strong introductory video that didn't pull punches, with a graphic reenactment that showed what actually happens when soldiers attack a village but more importantly abundant reference to native traditions about the event. there were displays that told the story in the words of those involved, indian and white, instead of an omniscient 'this is what happened' voice. and a visitor comments board that I'm sure some academics in the crowd will mock. but it's great to read how others have absorbed the material, what other thoughts they bring, and so on. in the gift shop I finally found the book for this trip. I'm toting along a ridiculous and ill-conceived library of deloria's 'god is red,' essays on collective memory by maurice halbwachs, and 'nine innings' by daniel okrent. not really into any of them. but this is a book on custer that's more about the myth of custer than the never-to-be-resolved 'facts' of his life.

stopped at the battlefield itself, where a ranger was leading a somber methodist church group on a wander through riverside trees decorated with prayer ribbons. finally through the grassland, which isn't much different from the rest of western oklahoma except less cultivated...not the sea of tallgrass I was imagining. and texas. I had packed that long-awaited picnic lunch but passed up a couple of roadside tables in the grassland hoping for that just-a-little-better spot, but no luck. so I pulled off at the border and sat hunched under a tree, resting on an old boundary stone and surrounded by keystone light cans. picturesque nonetheless. as soon as I crossed into the lone star state the red dirt disappeared under texas capstone, and the state lived up to its reputation. everything huge. a feedlot with tens of thousands of cattle. fields with hundreds of oil/gas rigs pumping away. and at buddy's country store where I stopped for a coke...in the back was a wrench as long as my arm that only texas oilmen could use. these legends were more ordinary up close, talking about family connections and picnics and whatnot, but that didn't shatter the strangely romantic image I have of wrenching a living from such vast inhospitable land. ranchers, farmers, oilmen constantly covered in dust, buffeted by frigid winter winds, baked by the sun. something attractive about the extremity of the conditions they work under, though their bodies certainly showed the effects of that work.

passed through the mid-size town of pampa before turning south on SR 207, which bisects the panhandle roughly parallel to the interstate that connects amarillo to lubbock. a billboard there bragged that pampa is the place 'where the wheat grows, the oil flows, and the wind blows.' well-off towns like pampa show signs of the oil/cattle/cotton ethos, with the BNSF freight barreling through the center of town at a full 70mph...no slowing down for safety here. towns further south were ghosts on a hot saturday afternoon. the matching brick streets and courthouse squares of floydada and ralls were completely empty...not dead on weekdays, presumably, but saturday looked almost as holy a day as sunday in west texas. very few cars on the roads (I stopped twice in the stretch of a couple miles on 207 to take pictures in places where there wasn't a shoulder, and nothing passed me either time, making me the only driver/rider for miles). and just as the relentlessly cultivated flatness, though beautiful in its own way, had me questioning why the atlas had designated 207 as a scenic route, I looked to the west to find crumpled dark terrain in place of endless cottonfields, and up ahead the 'silver mesa' ranch -- and the road started twisting dramatically down into the valley of the big bend river. I was pretty much shocked at the change, lulled into the sense that the pasture and fields were literally endless. so suddenly scrub backcountry and layers of the red earth otherwise covered over by capstone. historical markers for frontier pioneers, a the brilliantly red sand of the river bottom, and another, more scenic picnic spot. (though after I sprawled on the roadside grass and was covered in little ants, it occurred to me that this is fire ant country and that I should check more carefully before hitting the deck. these were benign, however.) climbed back to the plateau and continued on through more of the same, but now with the endless prairie myth dispelled.

in ralls I stopped at the only open place to grab some food, a taco place in a 'stripes' gas station. and there I had to make a decision. on this only weeked of the trip in texas a rodeo was very much on the agenda, and so far I was a weekend off...lots of action august 13th-14th. and in the tiny town of ralls there were banner for the lions' club rodeo and parade. perfect...except it was only 5pm, I wanted to cover more miles so I could reach big bend NP sunday, and there was nowhere to stay nor even to hang out (other than the taco stand) in ralls. so I gambled that I'd run into another one further along without losing those three hours of driving time. completely blind gamble, and I knew I'd kick myself if I traded a real live rodeo (as packaged as I knew a traveling show rodeo would be) for another hundred miles. I even got the 411 on the ralls rodeo from locals in ralls, a sherriff in his 10-gallon hat, badge, and bluejeans, and an older couple who encouraged me to stick around for the post-rodeo dance. but I rolled on, and after finding no nearby rodeos online when next I had wireless access, was resigned to a tactical mistake. but then I pulled into lamesa (lah-MEE-sa) for the night...and was greeted by banners for the rodeo, august 5-6-7. when I'm good, I'm very very good.

next up, the rodeo...but pics already posted.

day 7 -- lake sardis to clinton, OK

2010-08-08T03:32:00.002-05:00

trickling rain woke me up early early on sardis lake...scrambled for the tent fly but didn't need to transfer gear from the bike. got an early start on a winding ride through southern oklahoma that for a while avoided even secondary roads. passing so much backroad landscape left me with a pile of disjointed images and comments overheard and facts read.

genuine cowboys gathering at a breakfast griddle gas station, their real cowboy (TM) nissan and subaru pickups. skinny old men with outsized hats and miniature trucks, so very different from the fleets of gleaming white F-250s patrolling the texas plain. wanted to join them for breakfast, but if I acted on that idea every time I'd spend all day eating...I'd already stopped at the golden arches. currently alternating between mcdonald's breakfasts and diner lunches...ronald mcD doesn't fit well with the standard image of authentic roadtripping, but there's just as much community there as in more picturesque venues. regular coffee breaks, kid transfers, the next shift. and as many non-locals at the diner as at mcdonald's. so really the conventions of authenticity are irrelevant. and in this stop I talked with a burned-out biker who survived melanoma by...doing nothing, an aging boomer who regretted not getting a bike in his 40s, and a michigander wishing he was on a motorcycle alone than driving the family in an RV.

silos and grain elevators marked the approach of every oklahoma town, but outside of binger a sign announced an extra claim to fame...one johnny bench. hinton, the next town up the road has the thirty-foot deep 'red rock canyon' state park. the rocks matched the distinctive red dirt of oklahoma and were striking enough, though campers and picnic pavilions and a snack stand and a pool blocked most of the canyon walls. no viking runes that I could see, though. better yet was a graveyard for disused carnival rides on the edge of town...I wish I'd stopped for photographs, but that keep-on-moving imperative got in the way.

on the way to norman I passed through some suburb-tinged towns on the old oklahoma city - dallas road. pauls valley is home to a 'toy and action figure museum' and mimi's diner. it too had the blinds drawn against the sun like the pizza joint in anna (illinois), but inside it was straight 1970s. cheap wood paneling floor to ceiling, dim fluorescent lighting, formica. a can by the register for the garvin county news...and no clues of the 21st century. no cell phone conversations, no credit cards, a typewritten menu. and very puffy chocolate custard pie for the oilmen in red and blue coveralls emblazoned with 'halliburton team.' grain elevators and oil rigs, that is, for the oklahoma skyline.

norman was an unsurprising college town with a decent main street district, including a hipster coffee shop like any other hipster coffee shop. 70s furniture, obnoxious barista talking up his 'major rap label' based in, um, norman, carefully selected 'incidental' books lying around like a 1960s kids book entitled 'all about monkeys.'

was hoping to reach the black kettle national grassland at sunset and cross into texas, but the roads were twistier and slower than I figured (not that I'd bothered to tally mileage anyway), and I realized I wasn't going to make it. three nights out in the woods meant I needed a motel night to clean up, do laundry. and in watonga, remarkably, there was a downtown bed and breakfast in a quaint old porched building, complete with bustling restaurant...a couple of things I hadn't seen since illinois. but that the rear room was reserved for some cattlemen association's gathering -- no rooms. not there and not at the cheaper 'proudly american owned' alternatives either. so onward...custer city looked promising when I crossed into custer county. the county seat surely has a motel. when I get there I take a brief detour to snap a shot of the town co-op's grain elevator then turn down broadway to get to downtown. but broadway ends in a cornfield, and doubling back takes me to no town at all. apparently not the county seat. arapaho is (solid irony that), but no motels there either. last choice is clinton by I-40, which happens to have a scrap of US66 and jetsons-style motels before I have to resort to another super8. even has a laundry.

lake sardis (end of day 6)

2010-08-06T09:54:00.004-05:00

so not exactly the day I'd planned, but an oklahoma folk historian and oklahoma vikings in one day? it works. it never did rain much in heavener, but I was locked in by a solid wall of purple occasionally showing sharp white veins. it blocked the way south, and a greyer mass blocked the north. after an hour a gap of blue opened up in between, and I guessed unrealistically that it marked the way I was headed. in the event the deep blue wall stayed safely to the south and always just one ridge away but squarely over the talimena parkway. so the detour worked, I reached the end of the parkway a few hours delayed and continued southwestward into the choctaw nation; one bank had the temperature plummeting all the way down to a chilly 80 degrees. abandoned the atlas-approved scenic routes for a grey-on-the-map state route past lake sardis. I considered a wireless and laundry night in the mountain gateway town of talihina, but am happy I pressed on a bit more to an army corps campground right on the lake. for $10 I have a lakeside site with nobody around, enough breeze to discourage the skeeters, a decent sunset. (but no food.) the lake itself is vaguely lochesque with sharp hills on three sides, though it's a bit wide and of course manmade. that piney sandy smell that somehow evokes both greece and the outer banks at the same time for me. and intermittent bursts of frognoise. if only I knew my frogs...these are no spring peepers or bullfrogs that I know. what sounds like dozens explode together at random intervals, one company in a grassy lagoon to the left, one to my right, and I swear the ones on the right are deeper-voiced. their call sounds like a cross between donkey braying and goose honking, if that's possible. and then silence, except for one loner who keeps going for a while until realizing he's all alone. the bugs have quieted down as well...just one katydid left.

day 6 -- rainstorms and oklahoma vikings

2010-08-06T09:53:00.004-05:00

last night I charged the netbook at the campground with the expectation that I'd take a scenic picnic break somewhere in the mountains and catch up on writing. preferably with a baguette and brie in hand, olives, the whole trying-too-hard aesthetic. instead I'm writing from the unoccupied bay of a car wash on the strip outside of heavener, oklahoma, where I've parked the bike for the second rain delay of the ride. so let's back up.

coming down out of the mountains I stopped at mcdonald's for a sausage egg mcmuffin and hasbrowns in booneville, arkansas (unfortunately passing up the 'donut palace' chain again) and then a turkey-bacon-swiss sammich in mena near the oklahoma border. both less for the food than for the possibility of local news and notes. I'm constantly torn between the quiet mountain picnic and the lure of overheard conversations and the clatter of diner dishes. so far the diner sentiment is winning, even though there's really no such thing as the lunch counter of road trip fantasies anymore. I figure I'll hit one someday. I wasn't far from it in a pizza place on the courthouse square somewhere in illinois. blinds pulled way down for the sun but busy at lunchtime. grandma and mom with the kid, city maintenance workers, a text-frenzied quartet of teenagers, and larry. larry most likely has williams' syndrome (a developmental disorder) was accordingly unabashed and friendly...of course he greeted everyone by name and got hugs from all in return. and the sunny (sunrise? sun?) cafe in mena was closer. sit-down-at-your-table proprietor, orders shouted from across the room, 'the usual,' and so on.

I had roughly charted a route through the rest of the ouachita NF into oklahoma and beyond, taking the shorter of two routes, but when she was ringing me out the sunny cafe lady asked if I was headed 'up the mountain.' I said that if that's the way to go then yes. she proceeded to issue dire warnings about taking the turns slow enough, which I said I'd heed...and then five seconds later an old regular repeated her warnings (independently), noting that 'there's a wreck up there every day.' and more about his motorcycle days commuting 60 miles roundtrip throughout chicago winters (really?). now perhaps all that should have scared me off, along with the 'steep and crooked road next 12 miles' warning sign, but where there are curves and hills there's scenic. after a brief false start (doubled back to mena for gas, where I unwisely changed out of a left-hand turn lane into somewhere in between to more easily access the gas station and disturbed a burly arkansas state trooper. this one less friendly than the first two I met, but no ticket), I was off and up the hill. and well well worth it...the talimena parkway runs something like 50 miles along a high ridge with sweeping panoramas on either side every couple of miles. compares favorably with the blue ridge parkway / skyline drive. deep blues and greens and hazy beauty, supposedly bears (not for me) and definitely coyotes (one scurried across in front of me). thrilling ride, no traffic. but after I'd passed the state park lodge I noticed that some of the blue and purples were in the sky squarely ahead of me. now, I've ridden in rain when I didn't leave myself a choice on the way back from ontario...had to get from bucyrus, ohio to dayton by 10am for a class. but this is vacation, the chrome on my bike is spotless, and I really don't want to mess with soaked leather, tricky-slick curves, and twisting rain covers over my jury-rigged packs. so a mantra: I'm not in a hurry, I'm not in a hurry.

but if you've traveled with me or heard me narrate travels, I don't really work that way. sensibly, that is. instead of turning around and finding cover at the lodge, I calculated where the clouds were actually raining and where they weren't, gauged the direction, watched for windshield wipers on oncoming cars, and the like. I pretend in these circumstances that I'm calculating, but in reality it's more like wishful thinking. like the time I set off on a cross-hamilton-county run, 12 miles from the glendale running spot to a point on the far northeastern reaches of the metrobus system, with a mistaken time schedule in mind and only a vague idea of actual mileage. and got to the bus route for the last bus of the evening with, oh, 20 seconds to spare and no other options for the 15 further miles it would have taken to return to walnut hills. so...since it worked out I can pretend that I had this excursion under control, but really? pure luck. the talimena parkway is a parkway, which means there were no turnoffs. only forward or retreat. the latter isn't really an option, though I know I'm unlikely to find much cover ahead. but there's that gap between thunderheads that I can just squeeze through, surely...

just when the first drops splashed my faceshield I reached the first intersection in 25 miles, which conveniently led north and around the front edge of the storm. four miles to the bottom of the hill, road just barely damp. at the bottom another intersection, this one with an abandoned gas station...possible shelter. but the sun was out again, so I pressed on toward heavener, only 18 miles away. clouds keep advancing, the ozone smell and cool breezes that first hit me a half hour have intensified. 9 miles to go. (again, a little rain won't really ruin anything, but this is a full on rolling thunderstorm, and at this point I had convinced myself of the worst. tornadoes, hail...) puddles on the road, but no rain. approaching headlights and windshield wipers. and just as it starts to spatter me again, in the distance I glimpse a red-and-green lighted signboard...first open gas station in the last 40 miles. it's a 'tote-a-poke,' in the grand southern tradition of choosing the most ridiculous and meaningless names for gasoline / convenience store / grocery franchised chains. piggly-wiggly comes to mind. I pull in literally seconds before it really opens up and buy a snickers in exchange for the parking space.

conventional banter about the trip until the clerk motions me toward one of two booths, half-occupied by a tall skinny cowboy with a white hat, amber glasses...and a shiny laptop. (there's another cowboy there too, who gets out of his truck carrying -- no kidding -- a lasso, which he brings into the tote-a-poke.) great, another opportunity for conversation of the type that I figured I'd never initiate, the kind that makes me jealous of least-heat moon's travel writings. but Gary Courtney was even more than I expected. sparkling easy-winking eyes, white-blonde hair under a white 8-gallon, incongruously dark mustache, constant glances back toward the laptop (ebay? checking his book sales?). the conversation meanders from topic to topic, almost all about his experiences, but the gist: grew up and spent most of his life in tulsa (occupation unknown), with proudest accomplishment heading to some durango, colorado trail and hiking to 14,000 feet seven years in a row, and then taking his teenage kids with him the next two years for the same journey. catch the steam train out of town, have them let him off and hike around the wilderness for two weeks. took the kids when he had 'em for the summer after the divorce and saw the journey as an 'outdoor classroom,' which they apparently enjoyed enough to come back the next year. in all honesty you can see a dad like that cutting two ways for teenagers...an opportunity to get out of houston for the summer, but he talks a lot. and you can imagine him repeating stories. a lot. but not obnoxious...soft spoken and prepossessed, easy smile. anyway, at some point he retired from tulsa to concentrate on his book-writing (he noted that you can find all his books on barnes&noble.com). lived at the clear creek campground outside of hodgen...six weeks in a tent through a frigid winter. and now a year-and-a-half in a no-electricity, no-running-water cabin halfway up to the talimena ridge. he writes about the pioneers of northeastern and southwestern oklahoma, about the etymology of country phrases, about clear creeek campground ("the most beautiful place on god's green earth, and I've been to colorado"), and so on. proud of a daughter just out of the navy (destroyer-navigator) who's back in grad school at UCSD and recently required dad's presence at her wedding -- he took the greyhound, naturally.

the facts he dropped on me are far too numerous to recount, but one stood out. when I mentioned archaeology (barely getting myself in edgewise, just to be polite?), he directed me to the 'viking runes' on a hill outside of the next town, heavener (pronounced HEE-ve-ner). viking runes. so I know about the modoc tales of blue-eyed native americans in the great lakes and thought them barely plausible, but viking in the southland? when the rain cleared I headed into town and followed little blue signs that wound through the weedy streets of heavener and up a steep hill past the 'heavener wolves' water tower. and there it was. signboards outside a visitor center explained that 'some epigraphers' (dr so-and-so and dr such-and-such) believe that the symbols are scandinavian runes and have translated them. I jog down the steps to the rock (rain is suddenly threatening again) and sure enough there are some definitely-not-native-american symbols. a double-axe, some crescent-shaped thing. no accompanying picture because the rock is in a dark shelter...you can find one at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavener_Runestone. convincing? these were found supposedly by a 'choctaw scouting party' along with several other similar runes in the area in the early 19th century. and documented by europeans in 1874 with the sort of witnessed affidavit that suspiciously recalls that associated with joseph smith and his golden plates. so who knows...easily forged, that being the era of 'canaanite' tablets found buried in the tops of hopewell burial mounds as well.

day 5, part II -- lake pointsett to mt magazine

2010-08-06T09:51:00.003-05:00

fortified with the vitamin c the peach farmer promised, I headed away from the tar-and-chips hazard and back to arkansas SR1. that gave me an idea for a themed journey (since I now need an excuse to take this sort of adventure whenever possible)...follow all of the SR1s throughout the country. in most cases there's something special about the route given that auspicious number. except in indiana, where it is utterly forgettable. followed a broad arc south of little rock toward the next finance-related stop, a US bank in sheridan where I could deposit the settlement check. more endless bottom and blazing cement, broken only by a magical winding bridge over the white river estuary just west of clarendon. the high bridge over the river (matched downstream by rusted railroad bridge that in its heyday featured a central section that climbed supports accommodate river traffic, complete with a little house for the operator) dropped into a narrow walled bridge through a wide bayou. striking how the bridge wound its way through the mangrove just a few feet above the water. would have made for great photos except for the complete lack of a shoulder. back into the paddies and into the rice capital of arkansas, stuttgart. home to riceland corp, the road into the town was lined with sprawling silo complexes and railyards that I couldn't capture with the lens. the town was a little less impressive despite snappy banners along the main street. I miscalculated on a place to eat, skipping a bustling diner on one end for the surprisingly empty 'chicken country' on the other, though the fried chicken and okra was just fine. on to and around pinebluff, then sheridan. found the cute ice cream cafe I was waiting to visit for an afternoon cool-off...just after it closed at 2pm. dodged a sudden cloudburst that a passerby assured me wasn't even 'on the radar.' hot springs and the first nat'l park on the itinerary, a row of spring-fed bathhouses in a town that's a now a cross between asheville and gatlinburg. grand old hotels that looked all the more towering for steep slopes behind, gleaming white bath-houses, and now ice-cream shops, a wax museum, 'gangster'-themed shops, and the like. the hot-springs-for-healing history was a testament to the enduring american addiction to snake oil and quick cures. it was all startlingly busy after so many empty towns, so I hustled on into the mountains. stopped briefly to post some ramblings in an odd coffee shop outside the closed community of hot springs village and listened to some old guy rant about sharia law and east africans in columbus. and then all ouachita NF...gorgeous winding roads, vaguely smokey-like except for scrub(by) oak and pine. practiced curve-handling and climbed into the petit jean valley (french names for topography here, english for towns) in ola heading west on SR10. and there I felt that I had reached the west for the first time. wide shallow valley, hundreds of grazing steer in scrappy pasture, long long driveways behind ranch-named gates, and sprawling low towns (danville, havana, magazine) with storefronts also set far back from the main drag. and the big sky...I missed a spectacular shot of clouds and sun since there was no place to pull off easily. and then SR 309 climbing and winding up to mt magazine state park and the highest point in arkansas (2957 ft)...absolutely stunning drive just before dusk, views back over the valley, rich piney smells, a blacksnake that looked dead (I was assuming that sunning on asphalt is generally hazardous to a snake's health) but reared and soared back out of my way as I approached. motorcycle training guides often give advice about dogs (slow down, then speed up to throw off their timing), but not snakes. ended up in the state park campground under the high point with rather more company this time, so camper air conditioners and phil collins and barking dogs competed with the cicadas this time. up in the morning for a long trail run in new vibram five-finger slippers and spectacular sunrise views (not included here.)

day 5, part I -- on peaches and auto parts

2010-08-06T09:46:00.002-05:00

squeezed in a quick jog to some scenic spots on the lakeshore when the sun rose...in part to let the tent and sleeping mat dry out. found that the temperature had dropped all of, oh, two degrees it seemed. so I now understand the dawg's (roll tide) prodigious perspiring abilities -- it's a southern thing. another useless shower, clothes on at the very last second to avoid getting immediately soaked, but all to no avail since I had to stop at the office to pay the campground fee. then back onto a southward scenic route past fields just on the edge of the first topographic relief west of the river. crop dusters climbing and swooping over fields and a strong smell of pesticide when I timed it wrong. I had seen a couple from a distance the day before and mistaken them for an air show; not sure I've ever seen them in action.

the scenic route turned onto a newly tarred-and-chipped surface that I figured wasn't the best idea on a day that was likely to hit 105 degrees again (I could picture a slow motion topple into a sticky black mess), so at the intersection I stopped for peaches in an open tractor shed. the peach farmer himself was there and took me to a bin of newly picked when I told him I could only handle a couple given my limited luggage space. most were on the hard side as they awaited ripening -- have to pick them early for delivery -- but we found a couple that were on target. 'yellow prince' or something like that, a variety that he proudly told me were new to the local peach repertoire. he had just recently picked up the peach bidness after 23 years loading pallets for a series of ever-merging trucking companies in west memphis (not a short commute from wynne, AR) and before that a few years running cattle trucks eastward. laid off because 23 years wasn't enough seniority (isn't that great? 23 years of back breaking labor and he's cut loose so we all can save 5 cents at the grocery store), he landed in his 'daddy-in-law's' orchard. early-50s, peppery hair and matching goatee, a loading dockworker's body downshifting into the softer frame of a peach farmer but moved easily without the back-injury limp you'd expect. amazing what OSHA regulations can achieve to make tough jobs more humane (okay, I'll stop). and somehow the way he stood was remarkably friendly and thoughtful, if that makes any sense. he'd evidently taken his late career change well in stride, though he admitted to liking the farming a whole lot more than the selling...even after only a few years he very much looked the part of the farmer and had clearly developed the farmer's loving connoisseurship. he talked worms and rot and leaf blight, how important it was for it not to rain during fruit-growing season lest the peaches get too watery and tasteless, the risk of frost and the importance of waiting to fertilize/pesticide until later so as not to waste capital on crop that could be lost. but most striking was his reaction to finding out I hailed from dayton. 'things are rough up there, aren't they?' now that's true, but from where I'm standing the south doesn't look in great economic shape either -- shelled towns, abandoned commercial campgrounds, rusting farms. I suggested that 2008 was the death knell marking the end of a four-decade slide, and he considered that and concluded that the difference now was that people now had someone to scapegoat. infer his politics as you will, but it was clear once again that the monolithic stereotypes we apply don't ever really work. here a very rural someone who identifies with out-of-work dayton autoworkers without blaming the government or immigrants or a manchurian candidate conspiracy. contrast to a proud teapartier in a rural county in illinois...sprawling mcmansion fronted by four very angry looking gargoyles perched on brick pillars lined up along the road. fully fenced yard despite the fact that there was no sign of human occupation within five miles. and a billboard in the front lawn frothing about 'voter fraud,' surely the most pressing issue our great nation faces right now, especially in a small, homogeneous illinois county of maybe 40,000 residents.

day 4 -- mt carmel to lake pointsett, AR

2010-08-05T10:47:00.003-05:00

I didn't really do the economy inn express (and its proprietor) in mt carmel justice. the initial first night's destination was somewhere to camp in the shawnee state forest (illinois), but a late start meant that I didn't get anywhere close. and as I was starting to press dusk I stopped in the first sizeable town for miles. (I've promised myself not to ride at night for this trip, though I violated every other safe-riding prohibition already on the trip to ontario. in this case riding at night is pointless since the idea is to see places, naturally). on the outskirts of town was an old school wooden billboard tucked into some trees...but with modern info on wifi and the motel's convenience to 'downtown' eateries. I was sold...I mean, what small town has any but out-by-the-interstate chain motels anymore, and who'd think to advertise his property's proximity to 'la tierra mexican-american?' so it was indeed right on main st squarely between the quirky downtown and still-close taco joints. but the building...not quite as promising. long low brick structure that looked like a company-town dormitory, but I figured out later that this was purpose-built for a long-dead motel chain -- there was another one somewhere in arkansas. a less good sign was the assortment of mismatched curtains, the hall carpet laid down but not trimmed, gutted rooms, and so on. but for $35, whatever. the very friendly proprietor balked at the discover card which he hadn't seen in 3 1/2 years (not too popular with his clientele, apparently) and couldn't get a mastercard to work either, but suggested that I come back later to try again. I didn't get to chat with him much then, but he was out all morning as I went for a jog around mt carmel and loaded luggage...tuesday was dumpster day and his was piled high with a week's worth of plastic bags that he was trying to corral. his young family was rummaging around the motel backyard and bouncing on a sagging trampoline. we still had to wrangle a credit card transaction, so he started talking about his motel experience. he was quick to shake his head at the migrant workers who made up the bulk of his summer business -- he claimed that men working on the power plant stay with him often also, but it seems more likely that duke would put its workers up at the super8. he was suspicious that many who claimed no habla ingles actually could do so and wondered at their supposed resistance to provide US identification. there was nothing bitter or nasty, but certainly the perspective of an immigrant who came to the states for college looking at more conspicuously economic migrants. and of course his evident attempts to assimilate, not least of all the decision to settle down in an isolated illinois small town surely far from many other indians.

and more on the theme of the rural downstate. I know that the vast vast majority of the planet's surface is uninhabited, and I know that the USA is much less crowded than other places, but the visceral reality of open land never really strikes me until I'm out in it. it's as if I forget the emptiness as soon as I leave it...there's something intimidating about it to humans in general. even those who write encomia to the great plains tend to retreat eventually to somewhere more peopled and write of sometimes oppressive open spaces. no doubt that it exerts a strong pull, but it's not the default human experience. we've always named places and populated them with mythic tales...and truly unknown places are pushed off the edge of the map and safely out of mind. anyway...this is a damn big country, which is easy to miss even on the interstate. tuesday morning started out in melon country in the wabash drainage but quickly climbed into the river hills around which the ohio makes a sharp southward detour. this is a land of state forest and the illinois department of corrections...a gleaming new jail over every ridge.

then back into the mississippi bottom on the way to the high modern suspension bridge into cape girardeau, missouri. by this point a 5pm deadline in jonesboro was looming, so missouri was mostly for driving through. time for a roadside watermelon stop and break from the blinding concrete-slab highway heat. the all leather gear I'm wearing of course prompt incessant 'aren't you hot?' comments, but actually it's not bad as long as I'm moving. except on concrete, which reflects the sunlight a tad more efficiently. along the way I discovered that armadilloes are native to missouri (roadkill) and that it's nitrogen-fertilizing season by the overpowering odor of piss-soaked fields -- wash your tomatoes!

as always I hadn't really charted the mileage and time required for the trip, relying just on gut estimation and my now extensive knowledge of the american bottom. rolled through paragould, arkansas and the busiest mcdonald's in america and then the non-scenic route into jonesboro with twenty minutes to spare. a couple of beers in a lame downtown jonesboro bar with some fratboys and folks in from the countryside and then back on the road for a piece to reach lake pointsett state park outside of harrisburg, arkansas. found a spot in a 105 degree weekday-emptied campground right next to a scenic little lake. had enough time to set up the tent before dark, but not nearly enough to cool off. sunset did nothing to cool the air, and even after a lukecool shower sweat was pouring off me, pooling in the ridges on my sleeping mat and leaving puddles that were still there in the morning. and skeeters. I thought I was careful about zipping and unzipping the tent, but not enough. I heard the mosquito whine and thought initially that they were buzzing outside the mesh, but when I switched on the headlamp there was a veritable cloud around my head...luckily they risked drowning if they'd attacked me then, so I had a reprieve long enough to dispose of most of them. then settled into fitful first-night-camping sleep in the loud hum of cicadas and others and an occasional owl.

day 3 (?) -- cincinnati to mt carmel, IL

2010-08-04T17:55:00.003-05:00

so...starting over. [details on the new bike to come, but for those who need to know, it's a yamaha vstar 1300: fuel-injected, belt-driven, liquid-cooled.] given a tendency to confront mistakes/setbacks by erasing them -- as with a dent in the gas tank from my very first riding lesson under the watchful eye of the westside espaniard and st dominic, the repair of which delayed the initial departure -- a complete reset was tempting. scenic kentucky to tennessee to arkansas...but of course not. new bike, new route...no interstates still but not obsessive on the scenic routes either since I don't want to dawdle in places that are within weekend trip range. arkansas was still on the itinerary for a wrecked bike title exchange for an insurance settlement check, so I went with a northern passage through not-sure-which-side-we're-on border territories. US50 through indiana, southward along the wabash in illinois toward the ohio and then through river hills to cape girardeau in missouri. was hoping to ride along ozark foothills into arkansas, but the immediate destination was jonesboro in NE arkansas (insurance settlement check waiting), so more long miles in the bottom were inevitable.

indiana in a swath from ft wayne to bloomington and south is familiar, but of course not on the bike. so tall corn on broadly rolling fields, patches of woodland, quiet rivers with low indistinct banks, long-since faded towns, a general rejection of small-town aesthetics in favor of miles-long strip malls. was rolling by too fast to snap the iconic/cliched consolidation-victim abandoned high school and its only-in-indiana souped up outdoor basketball court with (now broken) glass backboards, but you get the picture. indianans have always struck me as uncomfortably caught in-between. not yankees, not rebels; too many towns for mississippi-delta rural but certainly not urban; rust belt but a still-solid farming backup; country pride but on the outskirts of four or five major metropolitan centers. this engages an insularity that's more than just 'we're different here' rhetoric. motorcyclists offered the low-five less often here than anywhere else. there's little state spirit other than basketball in indiana, perhaps because it's self-evident that a hoosier is a hoosier. out in force, though, were anti-abortion billboards that are more than religious fervor...they mark a confederate streak in the southern tier of border states like indiana and illinois, with choice just another sign of yankee imperialism. images flashing by for further exploration someday...shoals, indiana trumpeting that the town is known for gypsum, catfish, and jug rock -- evidence of the ancient sea all around, and a breathtaking view of the river from an overlook outside of town. the 'campania mall' in loogootee, indiana...especially for the saugerties slugger.

and then across the inert wabash into southern illinois. road-tripped to cairo and the confluence of the ohio and mississippi a long time ago, but had forgotten just how rural this 'downstate' was. when chicagoans head downstate for high school sports competition and to prison they very much mean a different world. soybeans and melons and steadily pumping oil/gas rigs standing alone in the middle of cornfields. the decay and slow disappearance of towns that's familiar from the delta has crept this way. crowding out the anti-abortion slogans were urgent warnings about the dangers of methamphetamine addiction. I ended up in mt carmel on the wabash, a farming town bolstered by the nearby gibson coal-fired generating station, apparently the second largest in the country (or in duke energy's portfolio, at least). standard deserted main street...where the lights are always flashing red, but to the east nearly forested brick-paved streets with well-kept victorian mansions. if you're looking for a grand old house cheap, this is the place. there's even a college in town. that and the electricity explains the prosperity, surely...other people's money flowing into town. I just missed AgDays, which were starting the next day, but I did learn that they'd have walking tacos...and a pre-teen beauty pageant. I found myself thumbing through the local weekend guide as I wolfed down carnitas at tequila's mexican restaurant, only to peruse pages and pages of smiling 10-year-olds. I felt a bit self-conscious / creepy, naturally, but puberty is apparently not an issue in mt carmel. the mexican restaurants in town hinted at some ethnic tension -- one emphasized its 'mexican-american' fare, and on the marquee beneath the tequilas sign was a reminder to celebrate the september 'birthday' of the US constitution. the south indian proprietor of the shabby economy inn express where I stayed assured me that this wasn't the case, that indeed he was one of only three minorities in town, not including the vans full of migrant workers staying in his motel for the watermelon-picking season. he'd moved from missouri three years earlier and was proud of his anomalous downtown motel (convenient, certainly) and had nothing but positive experiences with small town illinois despite his not-surprising reservations starting out. the standard odd assortment of downtown shopfronts -- antiques and the utility company and herbal supplements and hawaii vacations and billiards and tattoos and furniture repair...

toad stranglers

2010-08-03T18:23:00.002-05:00

of course there were many others in batesville. those tentatively dipping a toe into the waters of the new south at natalie's cafe at the corner of college and st louis st, in a jarring cluster of prefab little cottages reminiscent of the faux bohemia of nashville, indiana...squeezed in between a service station and kroger. lattes and mochas and panini for the aspiring-to-atlanta crowd, though other closet coffee afficianados trickled in, like the construction worker from the bridgework down the hill who was flummoxed by the baristas barrage of questions on milkfat and sweetness and roast but game for the other-than-mccafe experience. mom having an important community service meeting while the nanny shepherded her too-old-for-a-nanny sons. on a bank porch where I took shelter from an earsplitting rainstorm..."my husband [in truck] said the rain don't matter," "think if I run I can miss the raindrops?," and, most importantly, "this is what they call a 'toad-strangler.'" another theme was the dark evil of the next town over, newport. part of this is explained by denise's identification of the town as 'niggerville,' of course with the qualification that she's 'not racist' and that 'there are white niggers too.' but I think there's some standard 'the next town over is on the wrong side of the tracks / wrong side of the river / down on its luck / whatever going on.

anyway, in the end a fellow motorcyclist offered me a ride 'home' (to the super8) in his dry truck. southern hospitality and the amazing capacity of the cross-country motorcycle ride to instigate conversation.

batesville part II, or two accidents in two days? really?

2010-07-30T16:40:00.012-05:00

denise arrived in lisa's jeep and we headed into those same hills. as a local 'turr' guide denise was much more than passable. not for what she knew about batesville -- there wasn't much of a history review -- but for how she'd experienced it. in no particular order...ghosthunting is a popular pastime for arkansans. denise grew up with her grandfather's ghost, which not surprisingly inhabited her grandmother's house after his death. she saw him once as the vague profile of a man in the kitchen, but such sightings and affiliated sounds disappeared after grandma died. when not ghosthunting denise and crew tightroped along the top of a dam across the white river, fished from a sandbar the soft sand of which deterred meddling cops, and dreamed of careers as dallas cowboy cheerleaders. or playboy models. denise considered this a shrewd career move and had suggested the same to her daughters -- one centerfold spread and royalties set you up for life. not sure of the calculations involved. alas, denise's father is a very serious missionary baptist and frowned hard at this idea; denise in turn though pushing the playboy career was horrified that one daughter considered appearing on a girls gone wild party boat because the compensation wasn't sufficient. so with that in mind we discussed her theology/religion over chain steakhouse steaks without resolving much. she acknowledged that her beliefs were enforced mostly by guilt, but the existence of the supernatural and the fundamental truth of the bible were self-evident. that said, church didn't hold much allure, and there was a healthy dose of a much more general spiritualism (see ghosts above). after a second traffic-related incident on sunday night (see below), both denise and lisa were quite serious that I must burn a black candle to ward off whatever curse someone has placed on me. that commitment to the informal again...she saw no contradiction in dealing with (perceived) evil curses through conventional christian means and at the same time falling back on more voodoo-inflected strategies.

anyway, denise has also pursued more practical turns as bartender, bar owner, interior designer, housecleaner, hunting cabin builder/renter, and racecar crew member. batesville is the home of nascar semi-star mark martin, as just about everyone was keen to point out, but always with the qualifier that perhaps mr martin has grown too successful, derisively pointing out that he's built a turnaround in front of his house for photo-seekers to use. success and respect are tricky in the south...and so denise was proud that she really didn't have to work. she lived in her grandmother's house and had earned enough money bartending in indianapolis (while following an itinerant-welder husband) that she was set for life...and hence free to pursue the opportunities of the informal economy with abandon. she was proud of her soon-to-be anaesthesiologist daughter -- but more of the scholarship money she'd racked up -- and disappointed for her son who's sure to bounce around from tough manual job to the next, not because she's judging his ambition but because he'll have to work hard his whole life.

the highlight of this arkansas experience was of course the event that to denise suggested that I'm cursed. we had driven into the ozarks about as far as she wanted to venture...and I had suggested we could catch the batesville community acting troupe's performance of madagascar at the local college that evening. but she didn't choose a great place to turn around...from the right lane of a briefly-three-lane road left into a gravel lot. that took us right into the path of a beat-up cherokee passing us on the left. bam. the shocked-incredulous look on the other driver's face was unforgettable. his right headlight was busted and quarterpanel mangled, but miraculously lisa's jeep had only some scuff marks on the hubcap. slightly angry words were exchanged before the combatants retreated to their respective corners. and then it got interesting. lisa hadn't told her husband todd that she'd loaned out the jeep for this sightseeing expedition, so it had to stay on the downlow. that I understood. denise was furiously chainsmoking for another reason, though. when the cop sidled over to gather information, I was surprised to hear him calling denise 'lisa' and asking if I was 'todd.' mm-hm. denise was pretending not to have her license and that she was lisa. figured I'd roll with it but not too much -- I wandered off so I wouldn't have to participate actively in this ruse, especially since I had no idea why this misdirection was necessary. turns out denise had found out that her license was suspended -- er, expired -- a couple of weeks ago. a clerk had carded her at a liquor store and pointed out that the license was, oh, 10 months expired. (or suspended.) denise figured it was better to impersonate her friend (and implicate her in an at-fault accident) than take the driving-with-an-expired-license violation. I'm all about volunteering as little information as possible to a cop, but willful misrepresentation seems unlikely to end well. there was confusion over middle initials...but the trooper didn't catch on. and actually denise came off the more believable of the two drivers since the other guy was just a bit twigged out and was wearing a tshirt spoofing the eyeballs-on-money GEICO ad campaign in which the money-eyes were labeled 'the money you could be spending on weed.' in the end denise (lisa) was cited for an improper turn, and both drivers had serious problems with IN-surance documents. through all of this denise was in constant communication with lisa, but somehow the fact that denise was foisting her moving violation off on lisa didn't come up. even when we swung by the hospital for a damage inspection, lisa still didn't know that she'd picked up a ticket while sitting at the hospital admissions desk.

denise stands out, maybe because she conveniently illustrates my from-the-hip estimation of southerners...the informal economy, a don't get above yer raisin' mentality, satisfaction with what is, quirky independence on some things but docility in the face of authority on others. the collision meant we never did make the play. instead we went to the riverside park and watched water spill over the dam. there again southern (non-)contradictions. no bars in batesville, and a standard curfew for minors...but the park was apparently open at all hours. no fear-of-the-dark 'park closes at dusk' here. one place I did find a beer was josie's, a steakhouse on the river. locals have to sign up to join the drinking club, but visitors like me only had to sign the guestbook at the front. the moral fabric of the community is at stake, but what you do on your own time (esp if you're not staying long) is on you. get drunk and fall into the spillway? check. provide a place for unsupervised indulgence in vice? not okay.

batesville part I

2010-07-30T16:40:00.011-05:00

I'll skip the emergency room tale, since that's inevitably boring. all emergency room stories are the same...not that this has kept me from repeating the previous emergency room story incessantly. but I'm moving on. I'll pick up the batesville thread on the way out of the white river hospital. I stiffly staggered out of the ER around 9pm, sore mostly from lying on a backboard for two hours, and wearing a ripped t-shirt and shredded leather pants and armored boots. wallet and phone in my possession but little else...all my luggage was with the wrecking company. so I tracked down mr baker the wrecker and negotiated a gear transfer. had to be right now because he was off to bed, and sunday was out of the question because of church and other commitments. his place was a fur piece (at least), so not immediately accessible. and I've packed efficiently for a six-week trip, but standard luggage plus hiking backpack plus helmet was a bit much to lug on a 5-mile walk around batesville. spending all day sunday in shredded leathers wasn't a great option, though. taxi? by that point my hapless/vulnerable and polite-for-a-yankee schtick had attracted some attention at the admissions desk. the woman who had taken my IN-surance information kindly offered to ferry me out to baker's and then back to the motel strip during her smoke break. there was much talk about southern hospitality and a long discussion about how best to arrive at 2105 n central ave. turn by wigguns'? or out past the western sizzlin' toward the fairgrounds. or even through the bayou? I was about to suggest they googlemap it, but it was resolved with bystanders' assistance. (that community spirit again.)

so I climb into lisa's wrangler and get the life story...she's a transplant from valparaiso, but was plenty dixie-transformed. we discussed the standards...what motorcycle accidents usually look like, her conviction that everything happens for a reason and that perhaps my stay in batesville would lead to great things (this was a hint), maybe god stopped me here so as to avoid a worse fate further down the road, and so on. we find mr baker, I rouse him from evening TV, he generously fetches the truck that's storing my gear, and we're headed back down the hill past the independence county fair. I settle on the super8 as the cheapest option, and as I grab the last of my gear out of the jeep, she hands me a napkin on which she's scribbled the phone number of her friend denise. denise will surely be happy to show me around batesville and vicinity, so I should give her a call. lisa also helpfully notes that denise is single, 'real cute,' and has blonde hair and blue eyes. and, most importantly, she's a 'real southern girl.'

I wake up sunday with a hip too sore to run on but in need of bandages and food with which to eat antibiotics, so I grab the camera and a book and head up the hill to town, completely unsure of what I'd find. everyone the night before had happily emphasized that there's nothing to do in batesville -- and that it's mostly dry except for josie's and a drinking club at the ramada that you can join for $5 -- but it's got a hospital and is the county seat, so I knew it couldn't be too small. a sign at the top of the hill announced that batesville was the 2nd oldest town in arkansas, founded in 1812. promising. wandered east along the ridge toward lyons college first through quiet shady neighborhoods. gave up on the college after a few blocks and almost stopped into a just-starting baptist church service. really should have pulled the trigger on that -- what better smalltown southern experience than the SBC? -- but methodist propriety stopped me since I was wearing shorts, tshirt, scruffy hiking boots. that and haphazardly wrapped bandages (not easy to wrap one arm with the other hand), a camera, and the inconvenient choice of vine deloria's god is red for the day's reading. really the outfit wasn't out of place in southern casual, and I'm sure nobody would have cared about the rest -- just my picky propriety. anyway, crossed over to the main street side of town and found grand victorian mansions identified by family name, including the house of one JW Barnett Barnett. authentically picturesque and a little bit run down, sprawling chicken processing plants by the river. finally found food back on the commercial strip at Kelley Wyatt's -- southern fried buffet by that point packed with the after church crowd.

I made the call to denise, unsure of whether lisa had informed her friend that she was passing her phone number out to stranded/possibly concussed bikers. we arranged to meet at 5 after she was done babysitting her new granddaughter and after the 45-minute drive into town (!) from the nowhere burg of strawberry somewheres out in the hills.

on rambling

2010-07-30T16:38:00.000-05:00

better than expected stories from the time stranded in batesville (see next post), but first...parsing the frustration of this temporary stuck-ness. I don't think that I'm an inveterate rambler, but when I'm on the road I want to go. in this case the uncertainty was the annoying part -- not sure whether the trip would continue, how long repairs would take if the bike wasn't totaled, unsettling motel-on-the-concrete-outskirts-living. lots of alternative plans...hiking in the ouachita NF for a couple weeks, exploring little rock, switching to amtrak, but no reason to commit as long as I was still waiting on the IN-surance adjuster to assess the bike (I saw a scraped gas tank, snapped-off clutch pedal, and bent forks). without all that I imagine I could have settled in a bit more. despite that itchy urge to move, I did well to shift into stationary observation. well, more like pedestrian observation...I was the only person in batesville who walks anywhere, as far as I can tell. but on rambling...

for two years now I've crawled through PrairyErth (William Least-Heat Moon), 800+ pages of musings on just one county in Kansas at the geographical center of the country, a literal slow walk across every square mile. I bought it four years ago at kaldi's along with blue highways after reading Kathleen Norris' references to it in dakota. I read his 'blue highways' and 'river horse' first. I liked blue highways and the people in it, but not so much the author's relationship angst and general bitter old hippie passive-aggressive anger. but it was more that I knew prairyerth was great, and I wanted to put it off as long as possible. I do this often...putting off sublime reading so as to delay the experience and save it for another time. other books in this category are various unfinished faulkners and let us now praise famous men (evans/agee). for the latter I could read a page a day and still it would pass too fast. just achingly perfect. so it has hidden half-read for most of this decade, and prairyerth is destined for the same place, I think.

I know I don't have trogdon's patience, but his passion for thick description resonates. when I'm on the road I get wrapped up in speculating on people at their kitchen tables, what it would be like to spend an evening with each of them, daunted by the sheer impossibility of the number of those implausible encounters. wanting to stop and just set out diagonally across a field walking forever in no particular direction through landscape distinguished only by its lack of distinguishing features. and on and on. trying to do something like that now, though I've already cluttered the drive around in no particular direction with a handful of destinations. the genius of prairyerth is in its random accounts history and people, moments that he can't force but has to wait for. I'm working on that a bit now, but struggling a little to suppress the countervailing urge to regret all the landscape that I wasn't seeing while walking batesville.

day 2 -- clarksville, TN to batesville, AR

2010-07-27T10:40:00.001-05:00

anyway, back to tennessee. it was another day of trails...the trail of tears, the purple heart trail, the crowley ridge trail (and forgot to mention the bourbon trail the day before in kentucky). america loves paved trails. tennessee trails led westward into the american bottom. and where there's flatness there's order and homogeneity and measured civility...nothing like the freewheeling bootlegging chaos of appalachia. that of course makes tennessee fascinating since this long skinny state connects the top of the appalachians with the mississippi. there's something of that intersection of the south and the midwest in the tennessee accent. I love tennessee-speak...genteel and slowtalking and not south carolina militant, alabama jangling, georgia defensive, or mississippi mushmouth. I reached the edge of the bottomlands somewhere around paris, tennessee...that's about where I started to smell sand. stopped at a county courthouse farmer's market (more like local folks' garden market) and ended up with some sourdough. visions of a roadside picnic of san fran sourdough and st andre slipped by briefly, but I knew that dixie sourdough is sweet and soft, and that sharp cheddar was the best I'd find in the kroger. instead of a roadside park/rest stop (none here) I ended up wolfing some down by an abandoned garage in blinding sun next to US 412 in missouri. I'd forgotten the desolation of the floodplain bottom and the increasing distance from civilization the closer you get to the river. towns that chains haven't reached, ever sparser traces of people beyond the endless acres of tomatoes and peppers and, on the arkansas side, rice paddies. oppressive flatness, totally different from anything in the upper midwest. not the broadly rolling ancient sea floor that entranced william least-heat moon and kathleen norris in the dakotas and kansas, but flood-scoured nothingness. then a dead zone within 20 miles of the river...no towns, no houses, one cluster of abandoned silos.

then the progression in reverse after I climbed over the river into missouri and crossed into arkansas...miles of rice paddies, then fading towns, then snapping into standard american...golden arches and supercenters and so on. and I was just starting the climb toward the ozarks when that '88 ford bronco inched out from a driveway and then roared out into my path. dangit.

old south, new south

2010-07-27T01:26:00.001-05:00

Rolled out of Clarksville under muggy blue skies, following the cumberland river for a while before turning past fort campbell. puffy white clouds are a good sign for the ride, of course, but with the open sky overhead so much of the charm of riding, the streaked colorful dramatic skies around rain are compelling. not much chance of that the farther west I get...but coming back across the northern plains should change that. signs littering the country side showed that it's election season in tennessee, and tennesseeans love their politics. congressmen, state senators, county 'mayors,' clerks, sheriffs -- 'your sheriff,' 'the best choice,' and so on. the most opaque -- 'let's plow congress' in grain processing facility. lots and lots of 'conservative' tossed around. party affiliation doesn't count for much in a midterm election, but conservative colors in shades of red or blue do, apparently. that said, though, there's more than stereotype to the real south...this is the state that produced a vintage southern democrat who morphed into a climate change crusader even as his wife continued to struggle mightily against 'cussing' in music lyrics. I caught a political ad from a candidate for governor in which the candidate proudly trumpeted his support for clean energy and challenged the billions spent on the conflict in Afghanistan. remarkable, that, given that it's hard to imagine those positions in a supposedly more purple ohio right now. but then again, not so remarkable given the 'new south' and 'old south' rhetoric that's also very much on display. the 'new south' from economic development types ('gateway to the new south'), and 'old south motors' on a rundown used car lot and a 'your south' boyscout campground sign festooned with stars and bars. given that the new south is hardly a 'socialist' project -- shiny new research centers and sprawling exurbs full of yankee immigrants -- and the old south is crowded with farmers and unionized textile workers, the divide doesn't align with what we're conditioned to expect.

at the serious serious risk of stabbing at broad explanation for a phenomenon I barely know, the old south is a trenchant defense of a past for the sake of little more than...the past. it's hard to argue against the economic prosperity of the new south model (not that its benefits have trickled out of the metropoleis nor brought any sort of equitable distribution of wealth) and even harder to argue that big cotton and textiles and farming will bring the south 'back.' most notably because that model never really worked out all that well, not recently and not even in the antebellum south. from slavery that benefited only a restricted aristocracy...to sharecroppers and underdeveloped cities and thousands fleeing for northern industrial jobs from 1865 forward, and still wealth tightly controlled by a few. many of the towns I've driven through were never broadly prosperous...unlike what I know of many towns in the rust belt with their grand old neighborhoods and once thriving manufacturing districts. yet a quarter of a million soldiers died for a confederacy that didn't represent (many of) their economic interests, and millions more now defend an old south that has never and never will serve their economic interests. this comes from more than greed and has nothing to do with thinktank ideology/propaganda. for example, it's true that tariffs on foreign imports were a flashpoint in the runup to the civil war, but that was less an ideological point than a visceral reaction to national policy that differently impacted the less industrialized south more than a north that consumed fewer foreign commodities.

the suggestion: that the old south impulse certainly has more than a twinge of dogged resistance to any change, some xenophobia, some racism...but what it's really about is an ingrained discomfort with the social realities of yankee capitalism. I think it's more about southern culture that is (still) based on barter and reciprocal generosity. the southern hospitality thing is not just superficially polite gestures...it's a stronger cultural current that's rooted in a commitment to kin and home(land) and christian charity. not valorizing any of this, but the yankee get-ahead-at-all-costs attitude is incompatible with some fundamental (and apolitical) southern values. this isn't to overdraw some communitarian impulse. instead, in the context of endemic and persistent economic struggles in the south, perhaps yankee-style prosperity looks dangerous illusory. so...what can look like a commitment to failure -- the iconic lazy southerner -- just might represent a sense of lost tradition that is far more compelling than the prosperity northern-style capitalism promises. and I'm seeing more of this in batesville right now...

269 allen chapel road, batesville, AR

2010-07-24T22:21:00.003-05:00

...is the end of the line for now. kid pulled out of his driveway in front of me, turning left and blocking most of both lanes. with 75 feet to spare, it wasn't enough. I managed not to hit him, but I went down with the bike. I'm fine thanks to the ridiculous gear I was wearing, but the bike is not. now I get to experience small town arkansas in depth for who knows how long. at least it's county fair weekend. too pissed off / disappointed to continue this, but thanks for reading.

and now for more self-indulgence: the why

2010-07-24T14:38:00.003-05:00

but back to festivals...this ride is also about quick glimpses of what makes places local. really quick glimpses, of course, but it's impossible to know a place short of a several months stay, so a day vs a week doesn't make much difference. this past saturday I finally stopped by east dayton's appalachian festival, a one-day only affair I tragically missed in 2008 and 2009 in the annual sprint out of dayton immediately after the summer term ended. and would have missed it this year but for mechanical delays. nearly forgot about it anyway, but there I was running the hard streets of the gem city and stumbled upon it. and jogging through the parking lot of the east dayton community center / jobs center was just about enough. some fried food, some yard-sales-relocated-to-the-festival, and an empty music stage promising some bluegrass gospel. utterly unremarkable, but uniquely there nonetheless. so that's the first reason for this trip...soaking up the local as impenetrable as it has to remain from the outside.

it's about fresh eyes too. wednesday evening I grabbed some bbq brisket from 'smokey joe's' (5th and jefferson on the edge of the oregon district in dayton) -- I know, just before heading into the heart of western bbq country -- and looking out the window I noticed for the first time (?) the quirky y-shaped intersection at 5th and jefferson/patterson and all the modernist forms surrounding it. and then I noticed the soaring parking garage attached to the ramshackle dayton convention center. suspended helical ramps and a stepped-down arrangement of parking levels stacked on top of what used to be the greyhound station. all empty and unexplored by me. finished the brisket and headed across the street for a climb and a view. struck me that I'd never climbed anything in dayton other than the low southern hills, and the only time I'd taken in a view of the city was from the pinnacle of the cemetery next to the UD campus. so the view even five stories up was striking. the same streets on which I've trudged uninspired miles came together for something coherent. I realized that I recognized all the landmarks and topography that I could see, that I've covered a lot despite the desultory running of the past couple of years. realized that I've looked at dayton with my head down, that the lack of connection I have with the city comes not just from spending too much time in cincinnati and never reading the dayton daily news. cincinnati was intelligible from the start because the topography invites pseudo-aerial inspection. none of this is surprising in retrospect, given (for example) that the first thing I do when visiting anyone in the hospital is to inspect the view from the window. as if the typical convalescing person is concerned with the view. but face it, hospital rooms have great big windows often looking out over tree-y neighborhoods. if you get the window bed. (I better get the window bed.) marion's blog-laureate and the ohio scotsman should remember this quirk. anyway, the point is that I need aerials to go along with my on-the-ground mapping. I've experienced dayton in the wrong order...moving there in a snowy winter and living a workaday grind (I'm grossly exaggerating on that score, but teaching at wright state is my first real job, after all) inured me to any but the well-worn tracks to the bus stop, the bank, the coffee shop, the grocery store, and so on. so...getting the hell away from dayton actually does in a way fit in with knowing dayton: seeing brand new places reminds me how to look.

and it's about motion, inertia, miles covered. that much is self-evident, and the pictures will tell that. later I'll write about motion on the bike itself. in short (ha) I'm endlessly frustrated and invigorated at the same time that I'll never see 99% of this planet's surface. that today I'm driving past thousands of personal saturdays that I'll never know. but sensing all that is better than forgetting to consider...

prologue and day one -- dayton to clarksville, TN

2010-07-24T07:23:00.002-05:00

after retrieving my bike from the shop just under the wire thursday night I scrambled stuff together to ride toward a thunderstorm in cincinnati. and after rearranging luggage for the third time was underway for real by 10.30am friday from newport, KY. highway miles to get some road between me and home and then into the bluegrass scrubland. abandoned pasture and clearcut forest on the comeback, lush tobacco fields and horse fences. land that is ever so clearly suitable for coal and cash crops and now sometimes goats. and on a mid-july day, lots of swimming cows. 97 degrees had brown and black shapes crowding around and sliding into muddy ponds. the best picture I didn't take (see link at left) was of holsteins submerged in a lividly algae-green pond at the bottom of a woodsy hollow.

towns tidily composed at the center but with a sense of the provisional creeping in just a few blocks out -- no sidewalks, haphazardly named streets. and I was unwittingly on the 'abraham lincoln heritage trail' on US31E -- boyhood homes and birthplaces and museums and the 'Lincoln freeze' dairy bar. (I also noted a place that sold 'multimile tires,' and other that advertised 'soda and heavy explosives.') kids driving off to war wearing desert fatigues in a convoy of deep-emerald humvees. and after 350 miles or so I pulled into the hilly river town of clarskville, where a generous couchsurfing host sent a friend to open up her cottage and introduce me to her fly-chasing cats maya and sophie. and now into the valley of the big muddy and then a long climb into the ozarks -- conway, AR next.

insert obscure title up there

2010-07-23T23:54:00.000-05:00

though jumping straight into the action is way cooler, introductions are what I write. and what better (read:contrived) start than explaining a suitably obscure blog title. a couple of weekends ago was a dry run on the bike to central ontario and back, full of aaron-on-a-motorcycle firsts. 200+ mile days, highway (I-75 to detroit -- rain, construction, uneven pavement, sarajevo potholes), 80mph, riding onto a ferry, and finally a forced ride through a driving early morning rainstorm in order to get back in time to teach a class on monday morning. on that last kinda miserable stretch (annoying only because I was worried about packed stuff getting wet...the rain itself wasn't that bad) in ohio I passed through the whistle stops of siam and attica, separated by just a rural mile of SR4. neither stood out in any way, but that on a rural route in ohio I was in siam and attica in the space of two minutes...this is what the trip is about. an only-in-america sort of thing (Greece you can go from greek to bulgarian to albanian village in quick succession, but that's different), but more exciting is imagining how some pioneer/homesteader/community settled on 'siam' as a likely name for a crossroads in the northwest ohio flatlands. siam! I'll wait for the resident ohio historian to correct me, but the possibilities are endlessly amusing...a reference to the silk road? antipodal estimation? optmistically exoticizing the prairie? renamed with yule brenner in mind? attica is less interesting in the welter of greek/trojan/roman names that litter the victorian midwest hinterlands, but which toponym came first? rivalry? jokingly contrary? anyway, there wasn't a shred of evidence that either community has held onto any particular related identity, as is the brutally homogeneous nature of the midwest (all the small town festivals outfitted with the same rides and the same italian sausages and funnel cakes and elephant ears and walking tacos and that reference only in passing the apples or the pretzels or the fall colors that headline the gathering). this is what I'm looking for. american whimsy and dulled memories. not the idealized 'backroad america' of the imagination but the clashing individuality and indifference of real communities. places I've never seen before and around which I'd never plan a specific trip. arkansas ozarks and the ouachita nf, sprawling gridded oklahoma, west texas, nevada other than the colorado river-destroying monstrosity in the desert. meandering nowhere in particular, turning off on roads that lead who knows where. stumbling into county fairs and festivals that look redundant but are the big thing on the calendar and full of stories that I can't hope to glimpse as an outsider.

so siam to attica. there's more on that score for another post, but for now, full disclosure on the long-provisional name for this...freedom overspill. as much as I lovelovelove the idea of referencing steve winwood, let's face it: steve-o shucking and jiving to synthpop really won't resonate with any who weren't 13 in 1986, hoping that the girl of his dreams would drop out of the sky at geek camp. and that somehow the lyrics to valerie ('come and see-eee me...I'm the same boy I used to be') were relevant. that and the title sounds stupid anyway except in a way-too-self-conscious (and militant?) 'I'm reveling in my late-30s decline, so what's it to you?' vibe. but for those children of the 80s -- and no it doesn't count unless you were pubescent in the 80s -- keep it (and winwood's feathered locks and skinny ties) in mind. him and huey lewis. and perhaps bryan adams. I'll stop there. but for charlie daniels fans 'uneasy rider' was a sentimental early favorite (and had strong backing from the p-ridge posse), but at this point I'm neither uneasy nor queasy...far far too smoove.