Monday, July 18, 2011

Idaho


Island Park to Mud Lake (94 mi.)
I was hot and tired from the headwind so looked forward to cool refreshment when I biked into Rexburg around 3 pm. I found a city of empty streets and closed stores. If I had entered this town of 17,000 the way I left it, I might have been better prepared for the emptiness.  From 15 miles away, I would be able to see the city's temple, "this House of the Lord" for which  "The finest materials were used... including wood imported from Africa and stone and tile from Israel", this temple with "a white quartz finish... [and] water-proofing compound allow[ing] dust to wash off in the rain, keeping the temple a radiant white," this temple with a gold-leafed statue of the angel Moroni... installed atop [its] spire" (http://www.ldschurchtemples.com/rexburg/).  No wonder the central business district was unsullied on Sunday. Only a couple of the fast food franchises and superstores were open: their workers had the look of outcasts--grim, harried, guilt-stained. I even heard one laugh demonically when a co-worker referred to his teacher's reprimand for using  "an 's' word". Having had access to the info from which the above quotes are taken might have kept my thoughts from going the way they did as I pedaled away from the city. When I looked back, the structure dominating the city reminded me of a "white-washed tomb" and as I advanced through the emptiest land I had yet been through, I wondered how what was within paralleled what was without: plenty of sagebrush but nothing else. No cattle, no antelope, no fences, no houses.  Apart from a glimpse of those in the few cars that passed, I saw only one other person. He was sitting in a fold-up chair next to his pick-up parked by a fuel tank adjacent to an 8X12 shed. I thought of biking down the dirt way to ask him what he was doing there but imagined him smiling and tossing his cigarette toward the leaking tank.

After 20 miles of biking through this desolate land, a bridge took me over Interstate 85. Just before leaving Rexburg, I had thought of getting another cold drink but decided I would wait until where, after twenty miles through the empty land, my Route 33 would intersect Interstate 85; I assumed there would be a service area there... Nope. Just a state storage facility and a closed weigh station. As I crossed the overpass, only one car and a pick-up were coming from the north, huddled together, and one car from the south. This on the weekend of July 4.

After ten more miles of the same, and as the sun was setting, I came to Terreton: a few houses and thousands of cows packed together in a couple stockyards, but no store or service center. When I got to Mud Lake (pop. 300), five miles further, I was thinking I would camp in the sage brush; that was okay but I was concerned about my dwindling water supply, especially since the map indicated the next morning's ride would also be through sparsely populated land.

I braked in front of a slumping house where a woman was watering her meager front lawn. As I started towards her, a twelve-year old ran into the house. She did not look up. Before I got up to her, a stern-faced man in a wife-beater came striding out. I extended my hand and said "Hi, I'm Tim. I'm on a bike trip and wondering if I could have water from your hose." He shakes my hand, smiles and says "I am Jorge. The water from the hose is drinkable but bottled water is even better. Let me get some for you." He brought me an armload of bottles from the house.  I told him that I could not carry all but would use a couple to refill my bottles. After I did so, he asked where I would stay and, not hearing a specific place identified, asked if I would like to camp in their yard--or, better yet, in the barn behind their house. The woman he worked for usually kept a tractor there but it was now in the fields, leaving enough space to sleep. "Well, thank-you!" He brought out a denim quilt to lay on the floor to keep my sleeping bag from getting dirty and provide cushion.

I slept well.

Mud Lake - Arco (51 mi.)
I left Mud Lake just before sunrise, pulling my windbreaker's sleeves over my hands for lack of gloves, the temperature being in the low 40's.  Within an hour after sunrise, it would be warm enough to continue in short sleeves. More empty high desert except for a couple clumps of buildings scattered through the 900-square-mile domain of the Idaho National Laboratory, center of research on nuclear energy. 

On the edge of the INL is Howe, where three tractors side by side were pulling hay balers. Not the balers that I see in the farms around Murfreesboro leaving one bale at a time, to be later loaded onto a wagon. These were raking the hay up into walled-in machinery that pushed out cubed packets of around 50 bales that would be stacked into long walls of hay. To later be sent to stockyards such as those I saw yesterday, I would guess.

I arrived in Arco just before noon, July 4, and got a place in a motel with a laundry room. Arco, pop. 1026, has a sign proclaiming it to be "the first city ever lit by atomic power".  That night I sat in front of my room to watch the town's fireworks set off on the hill directly across from the motel. 

Arco - Bayhorse Campground, west of Challis (85 mi.)
Gorgeous, blue-sky, 70's day. First 15 miles were straight toward a snow-capped mountain, then a sharp turn to parallel its chain.


I had lunch at the Mine Hill Grill, on one corner of Mackay's downtown intersection. The walls had pictures of recent high school football and volleyball teams--and scholastic all-stars, whose number equaled that of the players on the football team: 19.

In the afternoon, Tess called as I was beginning an ascent out of the longest valley.

What I was looking at while talking with Tess.

She asked if I ever got bored on this trip.  Never. Before I started on this trip, a friend from church said he had read about some who biked across the country and said their biggest challenge was boredom. I don't understand that.  There have been times when I have been tired, puzzled, uncertain, uncomfortable, irritated, discouraged, concerned, or struggling, but never bored. I had been biking for a couple hours through the valley where we talked: way too little time for sensing I had really seen it, really taken it in.  And so it is for the other places I've biked through, even the hundreds of miles of corn fields in Nebraska.

Soon after Challis, a caution sign warned that bighorn sheep could be on the road but I did not see any as I went through the canyons leading to Bayhorse Campground and beginning the ascent to Stanley.



Bayhorse Campground - Stanley (64 mi.)
Last night, as I came into the little campground, I met Shirley walking to the old SUV she camps in as she goes around the country working on her family geneology, which goes back to an assassin for the king of Normandy and, perhaps, to the owner of Quebec, she says. This morning, she called over to ask if I would like to share her eggs and coffee for breakfast. Sure!  We talked about her research and travels through this sparsely inhabited land: the tenuous nature of existence and the wonder, the beauty, the goodness glimpsed, rejoiced in, between the tombstones. And today's ascent up Salmon River gorge to Stanley would be an extra special glimpse.



I do not remember ever seeing my father tear up or cry but I heard that he would occasionally do so during the period of his chemotheraphy, weeping for joy as well as for negative emotions. Today was the second time on the trip that I wept, overwhelmed by the beauty of the surroundings and the sense of its harmony with what the human is meant to be and the divine is. And in reflecting on these Moments, I saw this trip as a treatment for the cancer that has been eating away at my mind and spirit for who knows how long. A cancer that cannot be totally eradicated but can at least be checked if not--please, God--sent into remission. I have not had a thorough exam: I will go only so far in responding to the questions and suggestions of the sacred and profane saints. So I do not know the extent of the damage of moral organs and psychological networks and even on this most beautiful of days am seized by memories and visions of decay.  But this treatment of the past several weeks, this exposure to the radiation of the divine expressed in the environment and in persons, has at least allowed me to appreciate another day in the eternal day of health and life and to thank God for it.

The ascent took me past Sunbeam. It is a dot on the map indicating where an unsuccessful gold mine once was and where a lodge and a rafting outfit now operate. For me, it was a reminder of one of the first solos I sang in the small church that my father pastored in Lincoln, Maine: "Jesus wants me for a sunbeam to shine for him each day..." With my lisp (that a friend from kindergarten says still lingers), and imprecise word-final enunciation the chorus became "A thumbbean, a thumbbean, I'll be a thumbbean for him."

Another musing on this trip: future bike trips across America with small groups of relative and friends? with others?




Stanley Lake: Rest Day
I camped in the national forest area near Stanley Lake, just a few hundred yards from two small campgrounds around the lake where I could get water.


Stanley Lake


The only biking today was 9 miles into town to use a computer in the library. Before the library opened at twelve in this tourist-centered town of motels and restaurants, mostly all of them with attractive log frames, I had breakfast in the only one of several eating places with a pile of cars and bikes around it, a bakery with good coffee--and a price to remind you that you are in a resort area.  

I was in the library until around 5, posting the blog for the Wyoming part of my trip, going through personal and school email, and considering alternative plans for the rest of the trip. I was further along than I thought I might be so, after an exchange of text messages, decided that, rather than going directly to the Oregon coast, I would head for Vancouver, British Colombia, where I could spend some time with my cousin Robin (Taylor) and her husband Ray. Why not make this a trip from C to shining C be from country to country as well as from coast to coast?

When I was about to leave, the librarian introduced Bill, the only other person in the library, to me, telling him about my trip since she and I had talked the previous afternoon.  We talked for a bit, then I went outside to read on a bench on the library's little lawn, waiting for food booths to finish setting up for the weekly dance in the square which the library bordered. Bill came out, asked what I was reading, and we continued to talk while a guy with a guitar sang country over a mike. He excused himself to look after his dog but then came back a couple minutes later, as I was checking a menu at one of the food booths. He said, "My wife and I had ten guests a couple nights ago and I still have chicken, potatoes, and dessert. Why don't you come over and eat at my place?" It was just a couple hundred yards from the library, on the other side of the road through Stanley. His caretaker's log home was on the front of the property, then a motel of 5 rooms, and his own house that he designed and whose logs he brought in from Montana, bordered on the north and east side by the Salmon River, narrow and shallow at this point. We ate on the south porch, facing the Sawtooth Mountains, whose highest peaks he had climbed. I enjoyed talking with him about the area and his family, including his mother who had recently died at 106 and his grandfather who was the first mayor of Boise. We put my bike on the back of his pickup and he drove me to my campsite.


Banker Bill B from Boise (that is not poetic license) 

Stanley Lake - between Smith's Ferry and Cascade (110 mi.)
A lot of up and down, with headwinds and, so slow that I thought the problem was limited to legs tired from the first two factors, a leaking front tire.

Late afternoon, I turned north rather than the originally planned south at Banks (pop. 17), thus committing myself to heading for British Colombia. For the next 17 miles I was climbing through the narrow canyon of the North Fork of the Payette River. I had seen a lot of white water on this trip but no stretch as long and wild as this one. I wondered if even a kayaker could make it down this stretch. But I also had to pay careful attention to the powerful stream roaring by the other side of my bike: it was Friday, summer time, and this road that would have been practically empty on, say, a Wednesday morning, and was nearly empty in the south-bound lane, was surging with motorcycles, economy cars with full luggage racks, pick-ups, RVs, trailors laden with stacks of bicycles emptying out from Boise, some heading for the wildnerness areas but most for the campgrounds and resorts around Lake Cascade. One driver particularly in need of weekend peace nearly brushed me off the shoulder after swinging his trailor into the slow lane and gunning his motor to pass a few cars, then break back into the line, thereby assuring that he could arrive at his campspot thirty miles down the road a minute earlier than if he had simply kept his place. (I have a vague memory of my right hand jerking up high in his wake: maybe a benedictory gesture reflecting my growth in patience and benevolence on this trip...maybe not.)

It was getting dark by the time I reached the Cascade valley so I began looking for a place to camp, a bit troubled by how the pedaling seemed so labored. A chained gravel drive--but no "No Trespassing" sign or houses around--led me around a hill of pines, reminding me of some of the stands in the woods behind my mom's home. The sky was clear, the air quite cool with little wind, so I did not bother with my hammock. I  laid my sleeping bag on a the mattress of pine needles and slept well.

South of Cascade to North of Riggins (89 mi.)
One of the first things I saw when I awoke was a quite flat tire. I couldn't bring myself to change it cold and hungry.  I pumped it up and set off, the wind breaker sleeves wrapped down around my hands, hoping for a decent breakfast--and continuing to brood over the question that was increasingly on my mind from about the time that the trailor had brushed me the evening before: was it right to head north?

The first diner I came to had several cars parked in front of it: a good sign. As I parked my bike, two portly elders of the community asked where I was biking from, expressed their support and went on in. When I entered, the one's voice filled the restaurant: "This man is biking across America: feed him well!" I had the good fortune of having Dolly as my server, one with the gift of sharing her happy sisterhood in a way that assures that your coming into this cozy, oh-so-fine-smelling place, three shelves of homemade pies getting your eye as you enter, was just the right thing to do.  And I did indeed have one of the two best breakfasts of my trip (tied with Chatters Restaurant in Lyons, Georgia): biscuits with gravy, eggs sunny-side up, and hash browns with coffee of course. That was plenty but I didn't think it would be right not to have a slice of pie. Dolly, smiling, brought a huge slice with ice cream piled on top.
      Ty and Lisa, in their early twenties, sat at a table next to me, and Ty said "Weren't you biking up from Banks yesterday afternoon?" Yes. "I said to Lisa 'That poor guy. It's got to be tough biking in this traffic. Such a narrow shoulder and so much traffic." He assured me that the traffic would practically disappear once I got past McCall. They were here for the national freestyle championship in kayaking that would start in an hour or so in the Whitewater Park just a few hundred yards away.  Ty worked with a rafting company and, in one of the vendors' booths, would be displaying a rack he had developed to secure waterproof safety boxes in rafts. I asked him about the rapids I had climbed by the evening before. He said that it is possible to go down them but they are treacherous. Just two weeks before, expert kayaker 19-year old Stephen Forster came from Conneticut to run them with a friend. "He didn't make it; they haven't yet found his body." What was "believed to be [his] body" would be found two weeks after our conversation, a news article reports.
    I had been charging my phone in a plug under my table and asked Dolly if I could plug it in somewhere out of the way while I changed the tire tube. "Leave it where it is. If we need the table, I'll take care of it." It was in the same place after I finished. She wished me blessings and safety as I left.
   I biked to the kayaking site. It's in Kelly Whitewater Park, just a year old. A kayaking club had raised a few thousand dollars to work on developing a place here for learning, training, and competitions when a summertime resident at a fundraiser said she would contribute if the park was named after her sister who had died in a car accident. The organizes resisted the idea... until a $500,000 check was offered.
    In today's competition, the participants would have a couple minutes to do as many maneuvers as they could in a standing wave with a green shoulder. The more difficult the maneuver the more points. I don't have to bike out here next year to see expert kayaking: the winners in three of the classes were father Eric, daughter Emily, and son Dane (17, winner of a "World's Top Boater" award after a record-breaking European competition). They are from Rock Island, TN. Eric co-founded Jackson Kayak located in Sparta, TN. Between rounds, a Hawaiian showed how one can surf in a river:
Surfing in Idaho (beyond the kayaks in the foreground)

I left the park around 1pm, along with a year-round resident on her bicycle. She encouraged me to take a little detour a few miles away that would take me on an unlined but paved back road through the intersection of Roseberry, with its museum on one side and general store from 1910 on the other. The museum hostess outlined its history: settled by Finnish farmers, developed into a thriving community in the early 20th century as an important railroad junction, then dwindled when the railway was moved to pass through neighboring McCall--a story similar to ones I had heard from Nebraska on.



By this time, I was thinking that my decision to head north the previous day was quite alright.

The traffic did indeed go way down after passing through McCall and I pedaled in quiet for miles until suddenly coming to cars crammed side-by-side into gravel or makeshift parking lots along the narrow, fast Salmon River, aptly named for what the hundreds of fishermen were going after in this spawning season. The motels were full and campgrounds crammed or improvised along the road. I went up one steep canyon road but could not find a satisfactory place to camp, turned around and started back down, fell off the bike when braking on a steep, sandy patch, readjusted the luggage, twisted the front brakes back into place and turned my lights on, it now being dark. I asked a sherrif about a place to camp, hoping he would suggest the small town park. He said there were places in one of the primitive campsites next to the road, 6 miles north. That is where I camped. The next morning I would realize that I was between the tents of a group of bulging muscles, flesh, tatoos, and fishing rods.

Riggins - Lewiston (113 mi.; route 95 the whole way)
The morning ride was the hardest of the whole trip: a climb up an average gradient of 7% for 7 miles taking about two hours. After a relatively short descent from the summit of White Bird Hill, I was for the rest of the day back in high plains with farms of wheat fields and cattle.





Lewiston is just across the river from Clarkston, WA. I got to a motel with a laundry just after sunset. After 5 nights of camping, the shower, clean clothes, and bed felt oh so nice.


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