A sample expenses list from a day on the road:
- food: apple, orange, sardines, bread, chewing tobacco $2.50
- cheeseburger, salad and pie a la mode at cafe $3.25
- lodging $2,00
- Total $7.75
It’s interesting that I grouped chewing tobacco with food. I definitely considered it a staple; it’s narcotic effects helped to power me along over many long and boring miles.
I took part in a photo session this morning with Greg Siples, one of the Bikecentennial group overseers at White Bird. He was one of the cartographers for the B.C. map set, and has personally accomplished many feats of derring-do on a bike, including a trip from Alaska to the tip of Sourth America.
Greg, joined me, snapping photos of me and the scenery, as I rode up out of the Salmon River Gorge at 7 a.m. today, the sunlight peeking over the tops of those weird grass-covered mounds that are common to the area, but unlike anything I’ve seen elsewhere. They are so sculptural and organic-looking, almost animate, certainly sensuous.
There was little traffic on the way into Riggins, 30 miles down the road, but I was hating the Sunday riding, just like I have every week of this trip. There’s only more left. I don’t quite what this feeling is about. Sundays are lonelier somehow. Most stores aren’t closed on Sunday, so the problem isn’t the absence of commerce. I wonder if Sundays feel lonelier in the U.S. than they do in other countries. That’s the kind of question that only Walkder Percy and I seem to have an interest in.
Before I entered Riggins, the time zone changed again, back to Mountain, so I lost that hour I’d gained going over Lolo Pass.
One annoying aspect of the B.C. route is the way it takes one so far north (to Missoula) before heading south again to enter Oregon. I’m almost finished with the southward backtracking, but I’ve paid the price. As ever, on this second half of the trip, it’s been the winds, not the mountains, that have been the more challenging. Today I fought wind almost continuously, but especially from Riggins onward. How maddening. Most of it was uphill too.
North of New Meadows runs the 45th parallel, marking the half-way point between the equator and the North Pole, or so said the sign I passed.
The campground was nice, but it cost $2. In my opinion, that was $2 too much for a National Forest campgrounds.
At the end of the day, I, about to complete two months of this epic voyage, and on the verge of entering my tenth and final state, I reflected on states past. The states from Kansas onward left marks on my mind in ways that Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri did not.
Kansas — I kept hearing a haunting melody and seeing a storm-torn sky, infinite in size, raging over the gently-swaying fields of wheat. It’s a dull, sun-scorched land, yet generous, still something like the soul of America and, at night, awesome, with a horizon to horizon sky like a tear in the curtain separating us from the beyond. Distances are too far to even bother with, and the imprecision of man’s calculations brings him up short agains the force of the land’s inhuman size and scope.
Colorado — Ah, the Rockies! Sunny days in pure, thin air, and Coors beer all around. This is the new American, the mountain man reborn as Fitness Man.
Wyoming — Butte me no buttes, skeletons in Bell helmets notwithstanding, the moon can be a beautiful place. The Tetons are beyond words, and Yellowstone is too majestic to be diminished by even the most annoying tourists.
Idaho was harder to summarize. But it was beautiful for sure .. and wild.
Tomorrow I’m off and running into Oregon.