I’m on the road again.
I’m changing the format of this blog. I’ll start with cycling info and move into my personal experiences.
Cycling
In the last three days I rode from Detroit to Mitchell, OR on the TransAm. Highway 22 is often narrow and heavily trafficked, even when I rode it mid-week. It’s also a logging corridor and busy at the moment with forest managers dealing with the colossal burn scar from the 2020 fires. Then, near Sisters, the traffic is worse.
I rode Santiam Pass on account of the heat. Everyone else I’ve talked to has done McKenzie, which is more scenic. I would’ve done that one if it wasn’t so freaking hot. In retrospect, I should have done it anyway. Santiam is less scenic and has little or no shoulder for much of it. I camped at Blue Bay Campground. It’s $22 but I was able to talk the camphost down to $12.
To Sisters, the road is wider. There was still a good amount of traffic when I rode this at 6-7 a.m. The route to Terrebone is excellent and was popular with local cyclists. The views of the Cascades are extraordinary. And at Terrebone, you gotta go to Smith Rock. I don’t care how far you’re riding that day or how hot it is. Shut the hell up and do it. It’s awesome.
Good riding on country roads to Prineville. Stay with Marcel and Anne on Warmshowers. More on this below.
After Prineville, you’re on 26 over Ochoco Pass to Mitchell. This pass is really gradual, and the downhill on the other side is really, really fun. I had a headwind coming out of Mitchell in the a.m.
This region east of Sisters is the territory of goat heads. They’re problematic plants that spread their little burrs around like the plague. I think they’ve gotten me. I’ve had two slow leaks two days in a row.
Prineville and Mitchell are bike meccas. People are super friendly and the local businesses rely on bicycle tourists. Be nice. Hit the bike shop in Prineville and hang out. And in Mitchell you gotta stay at Spoken Bike Hostel. It’s free but give them a good donation. This place is where I am writing from now. It’s really fun here. It’s like sitting at the water hole in the desert where all of the cyclists on the TransAm find themselves and realize that they’re not actually alone out there in the void. And the air conditioning works. There’s food in the fridge, showers, a TV, big bunk beds, couches, fresh towels, bike stands and tire lube and patches, and there’s a line in the back where you can hang your laundry in the blazing sun.
Encounters, Musings, Tiny Tortures
The heat wave abated early lat week. I was cranky in Portland, and my time window was narrowing. So instead of driving out to Glacier National Park on the Fourth of July weekend — likely a shit show — my Mom and I camped for a night at Detroit Lake. It was really pleasant. In the morning she tucked a note underneath my bungie cord: DETROIT TO DETROIT. This plan gave me a 10 day stretch through the high desert at about 50 miles a day to Missoula, where I’m meeting my dad and my cousin.
I set out the next morning, at 6, after a night of little sleep.
The process of leaving home again was surprisingly difficult. I had road jitters all over again. The traffic seemed too close, too fast. I felt lonely. And on Highway 22 out of Detroit, the logging trucks were back. My body felt weaker, not stronger, from commiserating with my friends during the unbelievable heatwave. My knees buckled, my hands clenched. But by the end of the day I was at lovely Suttle Lake with another gnarly pass under my belt, drinking beer and swimming. I dozed off and on that afternoon in the shade at Blue Bay Campground. The kids next door sprinted around my tent playing tag, which I didn’t mind. I finally got up around 7 to cook dinner and watched, bleary-eyed, as a chipmunk scurried out of my pannier.
By 1 p.m. it was hot as hell. The forecast in central and eastern Oregon this week has been reliably hot. Temperatures in the 90s, occasionally the upper 90s. One simply cannot ride a bike in the desert in those temperatures. But this new danger element, the afternoon sun, has also introduced a level of tactics into the ride that previously wasn’t present. In the morning my alarm clock rings at 5 or 5:15 and I’m on the road, munching on a crumbly pop tart, around 6. The roads are quiet at this hour and it’s beautiful. By 11 a.m. it’s in the 80s. As of writing I haven’t been caught on the road past 2 p.m. yet. I don’t plan to.
I rode the next morning into Sisters, and then to Terrebone and Smith Rock State Park. This stretch is blissful. The Douglas Firs become mighty Ponderosas, and then the forest ends altogether and becomes arroyos and sagebrush, junipers, the territory of rattlesnakes and bull snakes. On the desert floor the mountains are now in full view and you see the skyline of the central Cascade volcanoes: Jefferson, Mt. Washington and the Three Sisters. Far to the northwest, for a moment, Mt. Hood stood shining. And Smith Rock is an unlikely treasure, a scaled-down Zion. I hit 1,000 miles this day and immediately found that my back tires was slowly leaking air.
I swore and pulled over in the meager shade of a juniper to pump it up. Not two miles later I checked the pressure. Leaking. I swore again and resolved to keep a good attitude during this first mechanical trial of my tour. Lucky me: a grove of cottonwoods provided ample shade in the yard of a country home. I took off my panniers and began sweating as I took the wheel off and took out my tools. What I did not see at this moment was the irrigation ditch beyond the railroad tracks that was a breeding ground for mosquitos. Of course.
I groaned as they swarmed me. My legs seared from the bites and the delicate work of patching the tire became more difficult. The fiasco attracted the attention of six cows, who loped across their pasture to gather at the wire fence, where my bike was upturned and leaning, and chew on my handlebars and stare at me. I patched the tire and rode into Prineville’s Crooked River Brewery. It was more of a family joint and the music they played was an awful amalgam of flapper jazz and dubstep, but hey, they had Coors pints for $4.
In Prineville I used Warm Showers for the first time and I will never forget it.
I knocked on the door at 4:30. It was 95 degrees and I was soaked in sweat, caked in grime from working on my bike. A woman stuck her head out of the door and introduced herself as Anne. I recognized a French accent. Not what I expected in this conservative stronghold smackdab in the center of Oregon.
It was a small ranch house, with a flower garden and a tangled mass of ivy grown up its side. In the backyard an awning mercifully shaded the porch from the sun. Three elementary-age girls splashed around, cackling, in an above-ground pool. And two more girls, middle-schoolers, sat on a porch swing. Anne sat me down and brought me some water, cherries and watermelon. She was friendly, joyful even, with grey hair in a ponytail with cropped bangs. We decided that I would pitch my tent on the grass strip in the backyard.
For the next 16 hours I felt like the lone male member of a four-person family in Prineville, Oregon. Anne explained to me early that, even though she had not logged any bike tours herself, she has hosted many, many a cyclist for two reasons: to familiarize her children with the reality that strangers are overwhelmingly kind, and to “pay it forward” as someone who traveled widely in the past. An incredible tactic. I asked her if, among her hundreds of guests, anyone had ever stolen something. She told me that she’ll go so far as to leave the back door unlocked and let people stay there even when the family is away, and laughing, she spread her arms wide.
“What do I have that someone would want to steal?”
Her husband, Marcel, is a veteran fire fighter who has deployed to Alaska. I learned that this is very hard work and that these patriots are underpaid. He loves it. The whole family loves it. This is their family’s main source of income, as Anne is home with the kids. This is their culture; the kids can tell you what a sherpa is, where the smokejumper crews are headquartered in the West, why backcountry firefighters rarely use chainsaws and how savagely the veterans haze the newbies.
Yet their household is the purest expression of that cliche that money is not the same as wealth. The kids’ Legos were sprawled across the small dining room table. Musical instruments and books, and hanging plants, lined the walls. There was no TV or air conditioning. Where a TV would be in many households there was a wood-fired stove and a constellation of photos of their family and others’. To avoid making the house so hot, Anne shrewdly barbecued home-made pizzas. The oldest daughter, Lou, was more at ease with me in her own home than I was. The girls occasionally broke into French; Anne is French Canadian, and Marcel is from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and they’ve raised a bilingual family. Lou sang to herself on the floor while crafting an intricate pinata for her sister’s tenth birthday party. She dashed into her room to show me the impressive dress she’d made from a parachute and then a small dog she’d sewn of paisley fabric. After dinner we did the dishes together — they don’t have a dishwasher — and then Anne told me to pick up a guitar, so I did, and Lou picked up a fiddle and put a book of music in front of me. We played a few folk songs together. She’s really good. At Marcel’s behest the family had taken in a rambunctious, poorly-trained named Sherpa who is adorable but can only express affection by clamping his teeth around your arm and gnawing. He would explode through the back door without notice and gallivant through the home.
At sundown Anne took the dog on a bike ride to burn out his energy. That left me with these three girls, who decided to jump in the pool. That pool was ten feet from where I planned to set up my tent, and it was my bed time. I looked up at the darkening sky and wondered how I’d gotten there.
Two of the girls began frolicking in the pool, throwing water on each other, playing “don’t touch the bottom with your butt.” And the third girl, the youngest at 4 or 5, was running around the backyard giggling, stark naked. She asked her older sisters whether they could all go in the pool naked.
“No,” they say in unison. “You have to have your bottoms on.” I’m just shaking my head, laughing, staking out my tent, and this little one crouched on the porch above me and whispered to me, “Hi,” and then abruptly pulled on her bottoms. I facepalmed.
She asked me if I was going to sleep in the sauna, where Anne had laid out a mattress pad on a shelf for travelers. I told her no, because it would be a bit hot in there. She agreed and then asked me how long I was riding my bike for. I told her across the country, and she awed and slapped her hands to her cheeks.
“Across the country?”
“Yeah, all summer.”
“Won’t you get a summer break?”
I thought about that for a moment. “This is my summer break.”
She thought about that for a moment. “Camping and…riding a bike all day is your summer break.”
“I guess so.”
***
This hostel in Mitchell is also run on an ethos: “Radical Generosity.”
If I am able to better myself during this ride, I hope I can nurture just a kernel of this magic powering Anne and the hosts here.
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