We've traveled a few weeks to come across Nebraska, Iowa and Illinois, and have found the landscape to be a lot more varied than I expected. Each state seems to has it's own distinct character, each of which we've had several days to soak up as we ride. We've come to the start a new chapter of the trip; The Visiting of People We Know. We've crossed a wide part of the country where we haven't had any acquaintances, and we've arrived at the home of Megan Holland, my best friend Elliot's older sister. In the coming weeks we'll be visiting friends and family in Chicago, Indiana, Ohio, and North Carolina.
We've been doing a fair amount of reading on the trip, some of which has seemed very relevant to the experiences we've been having of the land, the process of taking a journey, and the identity of America and Americans. Over the next few posts we'll probably be sharing some quotes and poems from the authors we've been enjoying. Below are some excerpts from John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, a personal account of his travels around the country in 1960 with a french poodle as a companion (followed by trip pictures!).
-Dave
“A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperment, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”
“A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase in life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not wan to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage.”
“I know people who are so immersed in road maps that they never see the countryside they pass through, and others who, having traced a route, are held to it as though held by flanged wheels to rails. I pulled Rocinante into a small picnic area maintained by the state of Connecticut and got out my book of maps. And suddenly the United States became huge beyond belief and impossible ever to cross. I wondered how in hell I'd got myself mixed up in a project that couldn't be carried out. It was like starting to write a novel.”
Carhenge! Say what you will about Alliance, Nebraska, but don't think that they lack in kooky art.
We saw an almost unfathomable amount of coal being moved by train in Nebraska, day and night without end.
The sand hills of Western Nebraska
Dinner time!
The Missouri
Storm clouds in Iowa
The Mississippi
Repairs? Or wild "I am the wheel"meditation time?
Windmills in Illinois
Lots of tiny graveyards dot the countryside in Iowa and Illinois, often far from any communities.
We have made it to the plains! Many people describe places like Nebraska as being “flat.” We have found otherwise. True, there are no significant mountains here, but riding a bike across this part of the country dispells any myths of flatness. Rolling hills are the norm, and often a day of biking up and down them can add up to as much overall climbing as a day in the mountains.
We've gotten a bit behind on the blog- haven't found much time to be on the internet. We're almost all the way across Nebraska, but here's an update about our time going through the Eastern half of Wyoming and our little jaunt through the Southwest corner of South Dakota.
As we traveled through Wyoming, there were a lot of opportunities to observe and ponder people’s relationships with animals, both wild and domestic. Wolves, bears and cattle are all of constant concern with all sorts of people we meet. It’s interesting to me that most people seem to have very low opinions of animals’ intelligence and reasoning abilities. In contrast, I have been struck by the many psychological similarities between animals and humans. A few examples:
-Recently there was a fatal bear mauling near Yellowstone. One of the reasons the bear frequented the campground was because campers had been leaving food unattended in their sites. It’s a phenomenon of bear behavior: if they find a good meal somewhere once, they will always come back in hopes of finding more. This may seem simple minded. The thinking goes, “why should a bear expect to find another meal just because it randomly found some food laying around in the woods?” Truth is, I think people work the same way. I’ve traveled all over the U.S. with my family and the UC Davis marching band, and of all the memories that stick with me, some of the most clear are of the random places where I’ve had delicious meals. I can’t tell you anything about Colorado Springs except that there’s an amazing Mexican restaurant there. And the next time I’m there, that’s the first place I’m going to want to go.
-We heard from a National Park employee that mother bears in Yosemite are teaching their cubs to distinguish Volkswagon Beetles from other cars; apparently a bear can climb on the roof of a Beetle, jump on it, shatter all the windows, and eat whatever goodies are inside. Some people seem awed that a bear could be smart enough to distinguish between different makes of cars. I just think that humans, bears, dogs, etc all have similar learnin capacity, it’s just that we only take time to learn things that are relevent to us. After working for Unitrans for 3 years, the difference between an Orion, a Bluebird, and a Gillig bus are glaringly obvious to me- to the point where I’m almost incredulous when other people can’t tell one from the other. It’s all about what we feel the need to be familiar with. Until recently, bears never needed to know the difference between car makes. Once they learned that a Volkswagon Beetle was an easy access vending machine, they learned to pick one out as easily as I can pick out a Gillig.
-In the Shoshone National Forest we came upon some cattle that were being herded along the highway. Cars were passing within a few feet of the cows annd they barely blinked an eye, but when Neale and I biked past we spooked them all. It seems possibly “stupid” for an animal to be afraid of a person on a bike and not of an SUV many times my size; the SUV is infinately more dangerous to the cow. But it all comes back to familiarity. The cows have cars driving by them hour after hour, day after day. Bikes arer completely foreign. If you had never seen a bicycle before, you’d be quite afraid (for multiple reasons) if you saw me hurdling towards you at 15 miles per hour with flailing legs, an untrimmed mountain man beard and covered in road grit. Some people in the plains states are as weirded out by us as the cows are.
Now for pictures! Most are from the Bighorn Mountainsand the Black Hills.
-Dave
Neale and the looming Bighorns.
In the mountains!
Out campsite in the Bighorns, just a few miles to the pass.
Powder River Pass, 9,666 feet. Highest point of the entire trip!
Leaving the Bighorns, headed for Buffalo, WY.
Hungry as always. We made "camp pizza"- triscuits, tomato, cheese and pepperoni.
Beautiful Wyoming day with tailwinds up to 35 mph!
Heading across Northeastern Wyoming; clouds over the Black Hills in the distance.
South Dakota!
The Black Hills.
Wind Cave National Park in the Black Hills. There's a maze of over 130 miles of caves in a 1 square mile area. This tiny hole is the only natural entrance. The first explorers went in with just a candle and a ball of string. We got to go down through a man-made tunnel, thankfully.
Neale inside Wind Cave.
Tunnel in Wind Cave.
Leaving the Black Hills.
Fill 'em up! We stopped for lunch at an abandoned gas station- the only place with shade for miles!
I once read an account of a poet from Wyoming (sorry, I can't remember his name), who after sending his poems to his editor received the comment, "There are a lot of bones and wind in these poems." The poet hadn't realized these images were so prevalent because he was subsumed in the place. But being a traveler here, I can corroborate the sentiment. Bones and wind, prairie and sky, the Wyoming plains.
Bones, and hides, guts, dark meat. Roadkill is the fruit of the highway, as well as expedient travel. I smell the carrion more often than I see it. Today I saw a badger in the middle of the interstate, lying on the yellow hash marks as if asleep. Later, a deer carcass that had been literally ripped in half, bowels trailing across the shoulder. These sights will not be ignored when you travel at this speed.
Nor the wind. In the last four weeks we have had several memorably difficult days when biking upwind. It can be more demoralizing than climbing a steep pass: the pass has a definite end, and the climb stores potential energy you can reap when you head down the other side. In strong wind, you winch yourself along at six miles per hour, for hour after hour, bags and clothes like sails heading the wrong direction. Some of these days we end at the forty or fifty mile mark, instead of the expected seventy or eighty.
But today we bike where the wind blows! The rolling highway sails under our tires, while the high winds carry us along. When biking with the wind, at speeds of twenty-five or thirty miles an hour, the air goes preternaturally still. One has to look for other signs of the wind's vector: the burnished grass rolling like the pelt of an irritated horse, the ghoulish howl of telephone wires.
Under force of that wind today the flat-bottomed clouds skated close enough to brush fingers through it seemed. On the horizon storms stood rooted to the earth by rain. And all the rest seemed an outsized analogue to the hills and valleys through which we sped. For all the work other days, today we get to look and laugh and roll on.
Some notes I wrote as we were passing through these incredible and austere landscapes:
Yellowstone
There we passed among the high desert sagebrush, the mudpots and hot springs smoking sulphur, deep carved canyons and saw-tooth peaks. It is as likely to snow in August as anything. It is the burning, freezing corpse of an ancient mountain.
There live the grizzly bears and the black, the prong-horned elk, the few remaining North American bison not interbred with domestic cattle. When the bison venture beyond the park they are killed, and the bears too. So they keep to this inhospitable place, with its stunted trees and grey snags, its boiling rivers, its year-long winters.
I looked at these cracked rock faces, and fields of dead white calcium, the clouds close and dark and fast, and thought the place was not made for us. Nor even the bison or the bear. It is the burning heart of a wild country.
The Shoshone Forest
We come down through rain in this steep mountain gorge, the water spitting up from our tires. The air is winter-cold in August, our fingers numb in our gloves. Past deep wet woods, green shadows, misted meadows. And above us rising steep and bare, the walls of stone, their feet and heads hazed with dead forests. It is a long while that we pass each one, wide as they are, and I look up from the road at their deep crevasses cut by water and ice, their jagged steeples. They seem open and wounded to me, huge hurt hearts set out before the world, this valley, its snow and sun. At once they are not there for anyone to see. As Peter Matthiesen writes in The Snow Leopard: "The mountains have no 'meaning,' they are meaning." Solitary and self-composed.
We've made it to Cody, WY, and have crossed the last pass of the Rockies!
We're a little short on time today though, so we'll post some pictures with just a few brief descriptions.
Neale in the early morning fog at our campsite near West Yellowstone
Long line of vehicles waiting to get into a road construction site with one-way at a time traffic. They had to wait that much longer because of a few bicyclists going the opposite direction......
Beautiful country and clouds in Yellowstone!
High desert near Mammoth Hot Springs
The pass down into Mammoth Hot Springs
We picked up a traveling buddy named Taylor. We were heading in the same direction for a few days and decided to team up.
Peaks and pond on the other side of the pass.
We stayed near Mammoth Hot Springs with a cool trail crew worker named Kip. One night his roommate showed up a little tipsy and insisted we drink his beer and wear his Park Service hat and motorcycle helmet. We were only too happy to comply.
Heading East out of Yellowstone it got cold and rainy. But the sun came out just in time for lunch!
Got an awesome campsite in the Shoshone National Forest!
We climbed up all these switchbacks (and many more that are out of sight) from the bottom of this valley to Dead Indian Pass at 8,000 feet. Worth it for the view- and the ride down the other side!
Neale at Dead Indian Pass
Coming down the other side of Dead Indian Pass toward Cody. These were our last views of the Rocky Mountains.
