Twisted Rope

The first part of my bicycle tour is done for the year. I made the continental divide but the wind and temperatures were too extreme to ride further. So, if I am able to come back next spring to ride some more, I will start at the continental divide and head east on Highway 2. I don't know what to expect as I ride across the “big flat” as I've named the northern Great Plains. But we did take time out to see what we could see of Glacier National Park. In spite of the rain and wind it is a breathtaking landscape.

The east side, the short grass prairie side, the big flat, is mostly the Blackfeet Indian reservation. The Tribe seems to be working to keep the land functioning. There doesn't seem to be evidence of overgrazing, unmitigated development. It would be a stunning place to live even with the wind. All of the trees, aspen, fir, pines close to the toe of the Rockies are stunted and all lean towards the NE pushed into a permanent stoop by the wind. There are streams in the draws, ponds both natural and man-made in low areas, and lots of habitat for the creatures of the Plains. 

“That's a great view,” I said, pointing out of a west window at the peaks of south Glacier National Park. The waning moon hung high above the mountains. The red sunrise reflecting from the rocks of the peaks. The aspen along the creek behind the lodge were being scourged by the wind. Leaves exploded off of the trees every time a wind gust hit them. The man I talked to was washing window sills. He was from the Blackfeet Reservation.

“Yup,”

“I guess you get used to it because you see it everyday,” I said.

“I was born here. Right up the road about 15 miles. Now I live up by St. Mary”

“You work here?” I asked.

“Forty-one years I've been here except for two years I was in jail. Best job on the reservation. Where you from?”

“Salt Lake now but originally from southwest Colorado,” I said.

“Did you ever know Benjamin Yazzie from down that way? He was a Navajo”

“No,” I said.

“He and I were in a boarding school together when the government made us kids leave the reservation for school. It was down in Utah. So he came about halfway up and I went about halfway down. I'd never known a Navajo but he was okay. There were lots of Indians from your country but very few from the north, from up here. At least he wasn't Crow.”

“Brigham City?”

“Yup, that was the place. Lots of Mormons. Are you being a tourist?”

I told him about my bicycle trip; that I didn't really know why I had felt compelled to do it; that I had learned a lot from it about people, other places, other environments, my own contradictions. I told him I had forgotten what Glacier looked like from a previous trip to Kalispell and the Bob Marshall. I told him about seeing a sow grizzly and two cubs up Many Glaciers creek. He told me that I had driven by his place that was almost burned out in the huge fire in 2006. We talked about many things in the brief time we visited.

“Have you found out what it is that you were looking for?”

“Not quite but its like a feeling of deja vu, I feel like I've seen it before and its just at the corner of my minds eye.” I said.

He asked if this was a vision quest. I felt uncomfortable answering because I knew what my friend Clifford from the Ute Tribe thought about those words, how they came about, how the basic idea had been subverted and stolen by whites. The Blackfeet man saw my discomfort and smiled. He said he could tell I knew some real Indians and what they felt about the spiritual inventions forced on Tribes and then hijacked back by white people looking for answers.

“Oh,” I said, the word for a yes in Navajo. It felt right and appropriate to say it.

“You know some Navajo,” he said.

“Some, but I've forgot most of it. I learned it when I was a kid.”

He told me that he had went on a personal journey for much the same reason and at about the same age as I am now. I asked him if he had found what he was looking for.

“Yup, it was right where it had been all the time. I just had to do some stupid shit to get to it like drinking and losing my family, being put in jail for a couple of years.” he said.

“What was it you were looking for? If you don't mind me asking.”

“I'm not sure exactly but what I think I found was me.” he said. We exchanged names. His was Arnold. Then he shook my hand and went on with his morning chores at the hotel. As I left, I passed him and smiled, nodded my head to say goodbye.

“Hey,” he said. “my real name is Twisted Rope.”

My first bicycle

I found my first bicycle in a ravine filled with other trash when I was ten. It was a rusted blue color, a Montgomery Ward bicycle missing both wheels and tires. The chain was fused, welded by rust into a tangle of links, the sculpture of a frozen snake in agony. “I can fix this,” I told my grandfather from the bottom of the ravine. Around me was the discarded flotsam of a society that he abhorred. Because of his world-view our family was slow to accumulate these things of the twentieth century and the electricity to run them! Agüelo which means grandfather in the Judea-Spanish (Ladino) that our family of crypto-Jews spoke, was smoking a cigarette of harsh tobacco hand rolled in coarse paper. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and carefully ground the ash he had shaken from its tip into the red earth. He pushed his chapao back on his head and pointed with his thumb at two saddled horses we had in the truck behind him. “Why,” he asked. “would anyone kill their legs to give their ass a ride when we have horses with us?” Indeed!

Had it not been for an afternoon temperature of 40, the 20 mph tail wind blowing out of the canyons of Glacier NP, could have pushed me at least halfway across Montana. I watched in envy as last summers tumbleweed and tumble mustard rolled across the prairie. During other wind events I'd experienced on this tour, like when I was crossing the wheat fields of Washington, I had given some thought to designing a sail to take advantage of a tail wind. But I know nothing about sails and even less about sailing. But I do know a little bit about the instability of two-wheeled vehicles at high speeds. So, it might save some brain power wasted in designing a sail and simply throw a grappling hook at the rear of a passing semi and hope for the best! But given all of the givens it is probably more prudent to get my bicycle re-tuned and return to this point next summer and pedal east. But there is something to be said about my idea especially if there is as much up on the short-grass prairie, east of the Rockies, as there seems to be in the wheat fields of Washington.

Montana looks larger than it is looking down at it from the east edge of the Rockies. Instead of being the fourth largest state what I can see could represent the remaining landscape that circles the rest of the earth; a broad band of rolling flat making Montana the largest state and largest land mass. In the mountains, above, there are trees, cascading rivers, steep rocky slopes on both sides of narrow canyons and then, like stepping out of a narrow hallway onto a large field, you ride right into the Great Plains or what some pioneers crossing this expanse named it: the Great American Desert. Less than a hundred miles north of the point that Highway 2 exits the mountains is Canada. Montana is the northern extent of the short grass prairie in the U.S. But the flatness goes north, way into Canada, past the curvature of the earth.

The rolling hills of the prairie seem boring to casual observation but here, in the grasslands and hidden draws, there is a broad diversity of life. Indeed this ecosystem has significantly more diversity than do the Lodgepole forests that carpet the steep mountain sides above it. The Rockies have a habit of ending abruptly all along their eastern flanks until you reach east-central New Mexico. There the Rockies end in the Llano Estacado, a broken country of rough hills, rocky ledges, broad mesas of piñon and juniper, sagebrush, grasses and forbs.

This place is also highly diverse when unmolested. The Llano, instead of being located on the prairie, could and should instead be located inside of the mountains that ring the Colorado Plateau. There it would blend in to the fractured lands of narrow canyons, broad mesas, and even the flat-earth part of the Plateau; the shale and volcanic landscapes of the Plateau. The Plateau is likewise a highly diverse landscape but is in serious peril from unmitigated over-use exacerbated by a drying trend well into its fifth decade.

In a car driving across the wide spaces of our globe: the short-grass prairie, the Great Basin, central/eastern Washington state, visiting the Serengeti, or watching a documentary about Mongolia, it is easy to think that there is a whole lot of flat going on across the planet. It isn't hard to imagine how the flat-earth thinkers got to their belief. I could have bought into this idea when I was a child. The broad mesas of the four-corners were generally flat. And the blue shale seemed to stretch endlessly from the toe of Sleeping Ute Mountain well past Shiprock to the south. Crossing east-central Utah, on the old highway between Crescent Junction and Price, the land between the escarpment of the Book Cliffs and the red rocks is likewise endless.

The Colorado Plateau is the confluence of sedimentary rock leaping into the sky to form a mesa edge, layers of shale deposited in deep primordial seas, the basalt and lava flows of long-extinct volcanic activity, and a conspiracy of wind, water, and time that work slowly on the mountains that ring the Plateau to flatten them.

This where I grew up: riding after cattle in the valleys of the San Juan mountains, chasing wild horses with my grandfather in the deepest canyons of Mesa Verde or the Ute Mountain Ute Indian Reservation, or exploring the flat red earth of piñon covered mesas. Agüelo was a hard man to the rest of the world. He was a man made even harder by his stubborn reluctance to let the twentieth century into his or our family's life, a man made hard by his resistance to government, change, and people in general. To me agüelo was the model of the love a grandfather should show his grandchildren.

He and I, as his quiet saddle partner, rode quite a bit of the heart of the Colorado Plateau; both the mountains and the arid lands common to the province. He was a livestock man who raised sheep and cattle and grazed them in the summer on the high pastures of the San Juan mountains managed by the USFS. Agüelo and the employees of the Forest Service—the agency that John Nichols named “the pendejo factory (means pubic hair or congenital dumb-ass, your choice) in The Milagro Bean Field War— had a relationship built on fear of Agüelo and their big hammer: regulatory intimidation and distrust and disdain on my grandfathers part. He finally sold his grazing permits after the USFS issued him a “trespass” for putting out to few cattle.

My grandfather said the range couldn’t support full numbers and only turned out about half. The USFS “specialist” told him (my agüelo) that he didn't have the data nor the right to make that decision. I remember my grandfather standing, staring at the ranger who after a few uncomfortable and silent minutes lowered his head and said: “I guess that's all. If you'll excuse me I have other work to do.”

That was the last season we grazed on public lands. Agüelo said we couldn't make money grazing forest lands for several reasons. Our fellow grazers on the allotment wouldn't provide the day-to-day herding needed to prevent unhealthy concentrations of livestock on stream-banks or fragile soils, wouldn't fix fences or repair water holes, and frequently turned out more cattle than they were permitted to. And last that the FS employees weren’t managing a resource but were managing a process built to serve the illusion of preserving custom and culture All of this added up to costs to us that negated any profit made even though grazing permits were sold at significantly less than fair market value.

I wonder what my agüelo would have thought about the continuing issues on public lands. He would have said something like: “we're pissing into our own cup of coffee and can't admit it.” He would also have said:” . . .time to pull the cows off. If we don't it's like you taking the principle out of your savings account to spend today and going broke collecting the interest tomorrow.”

And I wonder what he might have said about the short grass prairie; a landscape that I don't think he ever saw. But I know had he ridden his horse into the prairie from the Rocky Mountains he would have gone into the Tribal headquarters of the Blackfoot Indians and before very long he and the elders would have been in a coffee shop swapping stories about another century.

Last leg of 2010 tour Just When my Legs were Reviving

My internal debate about routes to take east has been intensive. I have scoured the web for notes from others who might have ridden a certain route and I have zoomed in on highways, with Google Earth, to try to see how much paved shoulder I might find to ride on. Had we spent this much time researching weapons of mass destruction in Iraq we might never have had to go there!

My legs are doing well! And the load they're pushing along is doing quite well.

I decided when we picked up my bicycle and trailer in Missoula to try Highway 2 again. This is the highway I rode on between Puget Sound and Idaho. (Thanks to Tom and Jo for storing my equipment. I trust that the Marquis d Sade and the Machiavellian Humpbacked Bastard were well behaved in your garage!)

I went up Highway 93 from Missoula to Kalespell MT. where I could pick up Hwy 2. But the segment of that highway is a narrow four-lane without a shoulder until it makes the turn towards Glacier National Park so I stayed on Hwy 93 (with consistently wide paved shoulders) to White Fish MT. The connecting road hooks up with Highway 2 just outside of West Glacier. Then it's southeast and over the continental divide.

Once again I visited the St. Ignatius Mission in St. Ignatius MT. I'm not sure why other than to show it to my benevolent chase-car driver Shen. She was less than impressed having had religion force-fed to her in Salt Lake all of her life. I didn't want to go there to find anything; I didn't lose anything there the first time. But I find the idea of a priest painting two Native Americans with halos inside of a church refreshing. Especially inside an edifice owned by a big business that has been one of the champions of the single most devastating weapon of mass destruction known to humankind: religion.

But even with the rain and fog the trip to get to Highway 2 has been cold but enlightening. My goal for this last segment of this tour is to get over the Continental Divide and further at least to Great falls if I can. The weather window is closing fast. Aspen, birch, and other deciduous trees are rapidly changing color. Other than mountain maple the colors in Utah are slow to change. So, even though I new it would be so, I was surprised to see the bright yellows, oranges, and reds especially up high in Glacier and the Bob Marshal wilderness area.

Later I will write about the foolish protectionist mentality of the NPS, promulgated by an archaic Organic Act, that contributed to a fire in 2006 (I think it was that year) that according to one ranger I visited with: burned 15% of the land mass in the park and quite a bit outside of the boundary. Much of what can be seen of the fire shows a complete burn. That is: every tree killed and not even a lone live tree left here and there as an island. The fire had enough fuel and burn conditions were just right so that the fire must have been very intense and very hot. This indicates several things but the more significant one is: archaic fire management practices whose managers do not realize or admit that even in “pristine” sites, most ecologic sites are departed from properly functioning condition.

Bottom line:even in these protected areas the “hand of man” has influenced the ecology of these sites. All along the route of this tour I have observed the same denial by the USFS and BLM that most ecologic sites are seriously departed and therefore "normal" management and uses on public lands can not continue. More later.

So, I will post this and then head out on Highway 2.

Brain Flotsam and other Detritus

Sometimes, perhaps most of the time, unsolicited opinions about love, religion, economics, and politics  should be kept silent and allowed to fall off of the edge of the earth with hate, anger, religion and its mass wasting disease, weapons of mass destruction, excess adverbs and unrequited love. 

Today is either the first day of autumn or the last day of summer; I can never remember. But if I missed the equinox yesterday or if it's today I will still miss it anyway due to rain and clouds hiding the Continental Divide in Glacier national Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area. I decided to try to get back on Highway 2 in Kalispell. Highway 2 is the highway I took across most of Washington state. Thanks, many appreciative thanks to Tom and Jo Graff in Missoula for storing my bicycle and trailer. I trust that the Marquis de Sade and his humpbacked companion didn't take up a lot of room in your garage. 

Fall is my favorite season, at least most of it. I love the part without a lot of snow; the part with changing leaves; cool evenings warm days; and most of all I like the smell. It brings back memories of the scent of contentment my grandparents had. The crops were in, wheat had been traded for flour, the lambs and calves had been sent to market, and the deer and elk, fattened on our hay fields all summer watched us warily for signs of predation. The autumn air has the scent of accomplishment and the breeze has enough chill in it to make us aware of measurable change. I'm not afraid of change, rather I embrace it. I remarked to one of the kids that I was fascinated by the process of growing old. I could do without the bad knees, memory issues, etc! But even these are part of my observations. I look forward to the double hip replacement I have scheduled later in the fall, if for no other reason than to see what I will be like when I recover. The doctor told me I would be less bow-legged and consequently taller! 

Fall is the season of fattening, of eating voraciously to build up fat reserves to make it through the harsh winter in a cold cave. It is primordial and I wonder if putting most of the fattening holidays--Halloween, Thanksgiving, Xmas, my birthday--in the fall and early winter was accidental or random. I told my therapist once: "I get the urge to go down to the stream behind the house and wait for spawning salmon. I salivate from the primordial memory of the taste of salmon roe, pink flesh. I empathize with grizzly bears." He took a long look at me and sighed. I wonder what he will say when we next meet when I tell him or ask him if it is weird for a practicing vegetarian to love fly fishing (catch and release of course) and having strong urges to gorge on salmon.

The absolute truth, denial, and opportunity and phase four

I finished phase three in Missoula Mt. This leg of my journey was wet, windy, and mostly cloudy but not any less contemplative and enlightening. Have I learned anything more about myself that I already didn't know?

Some, but mostly I clarified for myself more of my own contradictions. One of these contradictions is my ability to look at the big picture future while ignoring the nuts and bolts needed to make my ideas/plans work. I am simply not good at minutia. For example I was able to work with Rory Reynolds to design and implement the west's first large-scale (state wide) ecologic restoration program right smack in the middle of red-necked Utah. Both of us were large-scale thinkers and had it not been for the luck of designing a program that relied on minutia managers and finding key players, we probably wouldn't have had the success we had. And we both stubbornly refused to hear the word "No" or phrases like: "we've never done it that way," "why fix it if it isn't broken (in this case the environment was and is really broken)", "why should I care?", and "we don't have a process in place to deal with that."

One of the things I've thought about is "truth." I've said that: "the absolute truth is always filtered through your personal paradigms." This is what makes us unreliable witnesses.
"But I saw it (the accident, human exacerbated climate change, etc) differently therefore your version is wrong and if  you insist on telling the story that way you're lying!" we say or at least think it when someone shares a different version of the truth.

But the truth is either boring or very scary. For example a well written memouir--which should be about your truth--would be boring if the author didn't color in the edges of the true story as that person remembers it! One of the more serious consequences of exposure to the absolute truth is the denial that we pull on like a coat to protect our values, our world view, our version of the truth. Everyone does this!

The biggest challenges we had when we started Utah Restoration Initiative were paradigms like:

1. there isn't anything wrong with ecosystems! (in fact most systems are seriously departed from naturally functioning processes)
2. climate change is natural and no, we didn't exacerbate it! (climate change is natural but we've been changing the carbon load since the beginning of the industrial revolution, increasing silt in our reservoirs by destroying native ranges by grazing (cattle and other ungulates including some wildlife species) and arcane fire management practices, increasing devastating infections of vast public land forests and increasing silt loading by "tree farm management" practices, etc.)
3. if we only kick the cows off, quit cutting down forests like we do, etc. it will all look nice in our life time; (maybe but only if a number of things come together like we pull out of the five-decade long general drying change in the west, we change other adverse actions like: arcane fire control/reclamation policies, fragmentation of habitat, poorly planned uses on public land, poorly planned development, really poor use of water, etc.)
4. and last: why should I care? (zero sum is a hard thing to overcome!)

Part of denial is that we're stuck in the present, assaulted by conflicting media, conflicting science, conflicting world views,poorly articulated truths about the environment (especially by me!) and poorly articulated opportunities for fixing things. We have a great number of options. But we don't want to see, for example, that a southern Utah stream needs periodic devastation to stay healthy in the long-term. Instead we want to see knee-deep grass, sprouting cottonwoods waving in the breeze, trout jumping, and Bambi snuggled down in its warm bed. These are part of stream health but the nasty side: scoured stream beds, raw gravel beds, ripped up clumps of willows, etc. are just as much a part of that health. So. I've coined a phrase that fits ecologic things as well as personal "truths." I call it:  Polaroid Mentality or Snap Shot in Time Mentality. This thought process is the poster child of denial, does not allow for growth, for evolutionary change, for opportunity instead this denial blinds us to potential, to hope, to action. Everyone who has adult children has a snap shot in time of their favorite age of that child. When we first see them we usually don't speak to the adult child instead we speak to the child in that photo! Conflict!!! This by the way is one of my personal contradictions.
The absolute truth can be disheartening and very scary. But the consequences of denial are devastating in the long-term to the environment around us, our relationships with family, and with our personal growth. I am stubbornly committed to seeing the facts of life (the world around us): over-population, pollution, personal conflict, as incredible opportunities. It is incumbent on me to think long-term (I can't think any other way anyhow!); to have faith that the restoration work I've had a hand in, that my personal changes work, that I can only fix things incrementally, that I can rally just enough people to take action, and last that I may not live long enough to see the positive results of my effort!

I had to use my stubborn streak to make the miles I needed to make in order to get to Missoula in time to catch a plane. The minutia I left out was forgetting that I'm 61 and don't have the legs I once had to pedal several 50+ mile days consecutively. In this case, I got rained out the first couple of days and was able to ride just half of a daily goal. I'm not a Tour d France competitor. They only drugs I take are lots of B-complex, protein, and chocolate--dark 70% chocolate if you please. So I had to do three back-to-back days of at least 75 miles. I can and have done 100 (century rides) or even a couple of 100+ (super-century) rides but I have only attempted to do two of them back to back once.  My legs felt like wood when I finished, I couldn't feel anything from my butt both ways, my brain was seized, even the little bit of hair I have left on my head hurt!
But I did it. I ignored my butt, popped B-Complex like candy, drank protein shakes (chocolate of course--thanks to Rob my trainer at Holladay Health and Fitness in Utah who sold me chocolate protein powder), and I stopped often to see the sights. Seeing an Osprey struggling to pull a fish out of the Clark Fork (bigger than any trout I've ever hooked!), listening to the silence of the wind, the river speaking words of a language that we have forgotten how to hear, seeing a deer with her fawn resting under a shrub at streams edge, made it much better.
Part of the road (nine miles) was cliff on the uphill side, white stripe, two winding narrow lanes, white stripe and river! Oh! The distant sound of two logging trucks approaching: one upstream one downstream, the adrenalin surge needed to pedal hard around a tight curve in the hope that they would see me and at least know what they had run over, the muscle spasms in my back when I made it out of this section alive; oh yes, this is fun! When I got out of the gauntlet I stopped, and after I dislodged the bicycle saddle from my lower body, I lay down next to the river and thought about my family, my grand daughter, and how luck can work out sometimes instead of pre-planning!

Next and last phase for this phase is Missoula to Great Falls. I need to finish this part of the tour on the eastern slope.

A view of 9/11 from a rock in the Clark Fork River

Today I had breakfast in a small motel on the Flathead Indian Reservation, in or close to Ravalli MT. My blog has been full of contradictions I am painfully aware of, paradigms and stereotypes that have been confirmed or busted, and a shifting, more positive worldview.
I grew up in the Four-Corners in Colorado on a remote ranch to feral people. Around me were the reservations of the Dine', Jicarilla Apache, and Ute Mountain and Southern Ute Indian people. I learned Navajo before I learned English. My observations then and now are of the tremendous contradiction between the image of the earth-loving people of literature and common speak and the reality of the living conditions these people endure. My friend Cliff, a South African journalist, brother of my friend Peter who lives in SLC, told me that our reservations were not in the running for crime, squalor, poverty compared to the shanty-towns in South Africa. I agree.
Another friend of mine, the keeper of traditional/cultural ideas, values, knowledge for a Tribe in Utah told me (with a crooked smile)  when I asked him about the number of non-Indians wanting to be part of the Native American Church: "you people (whites) all want to be Indians but none of you want to live on a reservation to learn how!"  He went on: "the American government gave us blankets with smallpox to try to kill us. Got some of us, so they gave us whiskey and now drugs, and STDs. It's killing a few more. But the worst thing you gave us was Jesus Christ who invented the Native American Church, and the National Park Service who reinvented our histories and traditions. That has been deadly not so much in lives but to our spirit. We don't have the energy to fight off your (white people) crazy stuff and pick up trash!"
The Flathead Indian Reservation has probably transitioned through these feelings. There is still visible poverty, the impacts of drugs and alcohol, the visible contradictions between the traditional view of Indians by whites and the reality of being forced to live apart from mainstream America. But they have also do wonders with their farms and ranches. The Tribe has set aside the National Bison Reserve and seems to be interested in ecologic restoration. I will come back up here and spend time visiting with Tribal members.
Before I leave this area for Missoula I want to visit the St Ignatius church just north of here. I have no desire to worship, because I do not and have not since I was about eight or nine. I want to sit in the church and think.
My mother converted to a Pentecostal faith around the time my brother was born. She was a fragile woman who always seemed puzzled by the intricacies of personal relationships. Even though we lived in the country and she had just learned to drive, she drove my brother and me, each Sunday, to a Pentecostal church in Durango Colorado. Rain or shine, blizzards, herds of sheep, stray deer or elk in the road; we went to church each Sunday. My father stayed home, stuck in the quagmire of his bitter thinking.
The routine at my mother's church was predictable enough that without owning a watch one could tell what time it was. First, exactly at 930, the minister greeted the congregation and for four or five minutes he admonished his parishioners to get ready to relinquish any transgressions that they had incurred during the week or suffer the consequences. They sang a couple of hymns. My mother always sat close to the piano so she could watch it being played. It was one thing she really wanted to do; my mother would have given up anything to be able to play the piano.
After the children, including me, had been sent to another room to have a bible lesson, and within a few minutes of us leaving the minister would crank up the amps of guilt and threats of retribution. We could hear him in our study room. I could hear the congregation shouting hallelujahs, speaking in tongues, the thumps of some falling to the floor in the ecstasy of receiving the holy spirit.  I thought I could smell the scents wafting out of the gates of hell that had been opened to receive bad people. But for whatever reasons I could never hear the songs of angles waiting by the gates of heaven to greet good people. It always made our teacher nervous, so nervous that she didn't notice that I slipped out the back door about the time the shouting of hallelujahs from the main room shook the windows of the church. As an aside I put the puzzle back together several years later and determined that our teacher was with child and not married at the time.
I ran down the street to the Catholic Church getting there just in time to hear the priest chanting a mass in Latin. The church was dark lit by hundreds of candles around the walls. Pre-Vatican II Catholics were still wallowing in their own traditions. I loved hearing the clicking of rosary beads, the whispered prayers of old ladies wearing black mantillas. They rose and sat by rote seemingly not paying attention to the Latin chanting. They were in their own world, praying I assumed then, just in case they dropped dead during the service. I was in my world sitting in the back pew, thinking about my mothers god and how it seemed to be different from the Catholic god. But mostly I thought about Roberta, daughter of one of our farm neighbors, who had developed physically quite early. I sat in the back and lusted for her, daring the more forgiving Catholic god to zap me into a pile of cinders.
I want to go into the St Ignatius church, not to visit god, nor to lust after Roberta. I want to sit in a religious place and think about 9/11. Yesterday on my very long trip from Thompson Falls to Ravalli I stopped and sat on a huge rock at the edge of the Clark Fork river. While I watched an osprey fish I thought about 9/11.
When I go into the church on the reservation I want to compare feelings, to see if my thinking was different in a place I was more comfortable in yesterday to a place that represents the darkness of our world. (I don't suggest that Catholics have cornered the market on repression. I could have stopped in a mosque, a synagogue, a Pentecostal church and had the same feeling)
I have listened to a number of people on this trip. I have heard fear, uneasiness, racial tension, and some hope. Since 9/11 we seem to have become a more divided nation, a less tolerant nation, a nation where it is OK to practice overt "soft" racism, to practice religious intolerance. We have become a country of short-term memory. How many remember the balanced budget at the end of the last decade? (balanced does not mean we didn't owe money!) How many Americans, who believed the President when he said "If you're not with us you're against us," understand where those words have led us? Our own religious right is one hallelujah away from strapping dynamite to themselves. Would they seek out the "infidels" to kill? I doubt it. We would do as they (infidels) have done and seek to destroy those in our country who are different from us.
This blog entry has been depressing but I really do have hope. I think that the more rational people on both sides of the political fence will see that a coalition of rational thinking is needed to bring balance to a divided nation. It is these people in whom I think the hope for a brighter future lingers yet untapped. The tails of the curve of normal distribution (thanks to Fred for this metaphor) have been plundering hope and good will, tainting common sense with fear and innuendo, preying on our collective insecurities to spread rumor, hate and discontent. Are we satisfied to let them continue? I'm not. Think AJ think! How do we get the middle of the curve of normal distribution to take back their brains, form their own thoughts, rationally sit down and negotiate a new mainstream world? I know it's there. I just need to sit on a rock by a river and contemplate. I need to listen to more people. I need to smile a bit more.

Butt Bumping Buxom Mennonite Matrons

One of an ever increasing number of things that bother me include the guy on the airplane wearing a day pack. It isn't the wearing of the day pack. It's when he turns in the aisle to try and cram a bag--that clearly exceeds not only the size but weight requirement--into the overhead compartment, his day pack, that he isn't aware he's wearing like a hump, smacks into my head. And then as he turns to seek help from a flight attendant he smacks everyone in the closest four seats.
Point?
I was contemplating which of the rapidly ripening bananas I wanted to buy, at a really small grocery store, to replace the ones I lost (or that were stolen by big foot) yesterday, when I backed into the back side of elderly Mennonite woman who was contemplating some other outdated item. I was chagrined! Who was totally clueless about his surroundings this time? !
There are several Mennonite settlements along highway 200. Something about the draft horses (even though they use tractors) grazing in fields reminded of the draft horses my grandfather had on the ranch. As a child I remember a Mennonite colony (?) very close to my grandfather's ranch in SW Colorado. He traded them bulls, rams, and an occasional saddle horse (that he stole from the NPS as yearlings and then gentled) for produce, honey, fence posts, hay. . . .   They have been gone from that small mountain valley for years. As I rode past a couple of the colonies today I wondered if any of them living here had ever lived in the Four-Corners.

Marquis de Sade and the Humpback Machiavelli Bastard posing in front of a Mennonite store

I stopped in Belknap hoping for a cup of tea at the Belknap store. No tea. But this tiny store is crammed full of the most incredible selection of fresh produce, farm raised staples: wholewheat flour, beans, honey, etc. And they had a bakery. I've been good about not buying donuts and such, but. . . . I had to try a raspberry tart (fresh raspberries and home made cream cheese). WoW! As the song goes (I think): "I'm in heaven, simply heaven and I'm so in love that I can hardly speak. . ." I sat on the bench outside and thought seriously about licking  the wax-paper napkin. If I lived in this area I would weigh close to a ton; all you can eat fresh farm raised stuff and fresh tarts. None of their farm-raised stuff was organic, instead as it was explained to me (my words translating from proper Mennonite language into my version of proper English) "we don't use anything foreign. We use lots of fresh dairy barn cow slops on all of our crops." So I bought a tomato to cap off my experience with the tart. I must have looked like a vampire with red gore leaking from the sides of my mouth. The Mennonite woman who came out to talk to me was a bit taken aback by a grown man from the "outside" sitting by her (their) store dripping red gore all over the front of his windbreaker.

Again it reminded me of my grandfather who took me with him to bring a truckload of fresh tomatoes back from the truck farms around Delta Colorado. He did anything to make a living. He bought and sold fresh fruit and produce, contracted laborers in the truck farms, raised cattle and sheep, stole horses and made whiskey both of which he sold to the Mormons over in Bluff and Blanding Utah. I sat in the back of his truck eating tomatoes, throwing the smaller ones at road signs, and finally throwing up all over my jean jacket. I still love a home-grown tomato raised in natural cow slop.

I was rained out today. I made it as far as Thompson Falls before I had to bail. What an incredibly beautiful place. I don't know if there is a waterfall or not but the Clark Fork river runs through town; Osprey perch on pines and other trees growing in yards watching the water below for fish; and there are just enough red necks here to make me feel like I'm home. I've started to believe that this social group may actually be a cousin species. Who's to say? Maybe we, the educated and cultured elite, are the side branch that is doomed to die out. Maybe the next dominant hominid species will be red necks. If so I'm in. I grew up as a red neck.

Lost all of my bananas

Tuesday September 7--North Spokane to Clark Fork in one very long day!! Some rain and cloudy but pleasant otherwise. The roads—highway 2 from Spokane to Sandpoint Id and 200 from Sandpoint to Clark Fork—have had adequate shoulders with a couple of tight places on Hwy 200.

A few miles east of Sandpoint Id is another in a long line of coffee kiosks on the NW. (However, as you travel east they get fewer and fewer until you get to Clark Fork where you might not be able to get a cup of decent coffee.) The coffee kiosk is called Colleens Coffee Corner. As you might expect Colleen runs the place with the help of Jan. Both are part of a group of motorcycle riders who sponsor the “Scootin Sisters Ride Toys for Tots.” What a pair!

The vistas have been splendid. Open pine forests and a huge lake from Sand Point to here. The lake is the remains of Lake Missoula that flooded this entire area carving out the deep canyons and gullies in Idaho and Washington states and formed the Columbia gorge all the way to Eugene Or. I would have like to have seen the ice dam break and watch the tremendous volume of water cut through basalt to carve the canyons. You can go to "http://www.nps.gov/iceagefloods/ for more information. As an aside, why does the NPS always appropriate all of the cool stuff? One would think that because a great number of miles of those gully cuts are on BLM lands and the old Lake Missoula would have been partially on USFS lands, that these two agencies would be on this.

As a further aside, my observations across the northern part of the country has been that BLM and the USFS may have outlived their usefulness. The BLM, contrary to their protests otherwise, is not fulfilling their mission as laid out by FLPMA. And the Forest Service never really practiced what some of their more enlightened employees suggested that they do: sustainable vs. politically expedient timber production. This coupled with a five decade general drying trend in the west has resulted in seriously degraded public lands. If you add cows and OHVs to the equation, unmitigated development around cities and towns, the fragmentation of habitats as a result of these activities and oil/gas development, you have a serious mess. On a brighter note, we have been trying to do something about this in Utah.

Somewhere west of Clark Fork is a town called Hope. It clings to the side of a hill above the huge lake mentioned above. There are fruit trees, an apple here a pear there, berry bushes, a grape vine or two seemingly untended. The golden delicious were just coming in! And the pears. I stopped to pick a couple and then rode on. I hadn’t ridden a hundred meters or so and I saw a black bear eating fallen pears from the ground. He/she looked up at me as I rode by less than three meters from it. I stopped just beyond and tried to dig my camera out of my bag but the bear ran across the road and up into the trees.

Wednesday September 8 Clark Fork to Trout Creek. I didn’t get as far as I wanted today. I had another flat less than three hundred meters from the east side of Clark Fork. But the sun was shining. Later, clouds rolled in and I had to shelter under trees on occasion to keep from getting soaked. Once I got to Montana I noticed that many of the citizens are armed. Side arms usually. Why? Other than a lone coyote that ran across the road in front of me, that bear yesterday, there doesn’t seem to be anything to fear except maybe other armed people. I was stopped at an overlook having a peanut butter and jelly burrito and a motor home pulled up. The man jumped out, side arm on his belt, took a picture and jumped back in and rode away. He didn’t even look around to see if there were any desperadoes waiting to take him hostage nor did he look at me. I had a bandanna wrapped around my head. If he would have seen me he might have captured me thinking I was a member of Osama’s bicycle brigade, sneaking through Montana, seeking to destroy sacred road-side shrines, pervert our youth, or undermining an American’s right to bear arms (with our without tattoos) and wear a sidearm. Tis a strange world we live in!

When I stopped at the overlook next to the gunslinger I had several bananas strapped with bungee cords to the top of my trailer to keep them fresh. I was going to have one but I worried that the gunman might think I was reaching for my side arm and shoot me dead. I can't imagine dying with my banana in my hand. A few miles from said overlook I stopped at yet another overlook to have a banana.They were gone! Conspiracy? Did the gunslinger's wife sneak around me and steal them hoping to provoke a holy war in the wilderness? Did a bigfoot snatch them when I was pedaling up yet another long hill?
Finally rained out. Staying in Trout Creek about 20 miles shy of today’s target. I don’t have cell phone coverage but I do have wifi. Last night in Clark Fork I had enough bars on my phone to call the moon, if I stepped outside of my room and stood next to the highway, but no wifi. I just don’t understand technology.

Partly Cloudy but a hope for sunshine

It might be that my mood has been compromised this morning because it is seriously partly cloudy in the NW. Seriously partly cloudy is a weather term that I'm proud to say I coined. It means 80% clouds with 90% humidity, 5% blue sky, and a passive/aggressive breeze;just enough to cause the tops of trees to sway slightly. It is a high humidity wind that doesn't soak you all at once but it adds moisture to your sweater one molecule at a time. It whispers that you're getting cold, maybe hypothermic, because of your belief system not because the wind chill is low and you're soaked through after a couple of hours in the wind.

I don't think that it is the cloudy weather that is influencing my mood. I think it is that I've been brooding about being profiled yet again at the SLC international airport. The last time was at the Las Vegas airport coming home from a business trip in western Arizona. That time they used a very attractive young woman who wore the security uniform quite well and who was all about smiling. She walked down the line waiting to go through security and asked the more olive-skinned and darker passengers if: "they were having a good day" and while reaching for their ticket: "can I help you with your ticket?" "Oh I see you're going to visit the middle east/Mexico/etc. Have you been visiting our country for very long?" etc. On occasion based on some sign that I couldn't see her give other TSA employees would also visit with certain passengers. They didn't seem to be as pleasant. When she came to me and went through her spiel I told her I was going back home to Utah and thought but did not say: "I'm technically an illegal alien. My family came to what is now the United States well before the Pilgrims bumped into a rock in the NE. They've been here since the middle of the 16th century. But better sense prevailed. I knew I didn't have time to win that fight so I smiled back and handed her my ticket.

Phase Three starts tomorrow

In the morning I will get on a plane and fly to Spokane. I will gather all of my equipment (I know the bicycle is safe but the trailer?) spend the night and head out early Tuesday morning for Montana. I am taking the route north through Sandpoint Id and then dropping onto Hwy 200 that heads more or less southeast towards Missoula; the target for this segment. I have to really pedal hard to make it by a week from today (Sunday) as I want to be in SLC for family coming in from L.A., a meeting of the Behavioral Health group that I chair for SL County, and a meeting of Writers @ Work which I also share. In the words of Bokonon (Cats Cradle? by Vonnugut) "busy, busy, busy."


I will return later in the month to continue east. I want to at least get over the Continental Divide before I mothball for the winter.

Other random thoughts.  I watched a documentary on Neanderthals a few weeks ago that suggested that our cousins had adapted quite well to a number of habitats but failed to evolve technologically, hence their demise. After some speculation and after watching the "Restoring Honor" rally at the Lincoln Memorial on TV I have to disagree; I don't think Neanderthals died out. I think they adapted well to the societal habitats of the modern world. I think they are walking among us! Their tools have also evolved. I submit as proof Glen Beck. His tools aren't a club and spear but innuendo, misinformation, and the ability to leverage mass displeasure and hysteria. And understand this: he is damn good at it!! We don't need this kind of rhetoric. It solves nothing and further divides out country. I pity us: those who follow him blindly and those of us who walk around impotent  not knowing how to work with his stuff.

I wonder if the people who live here give a damn what Glen or I think?