Wanderlust

I’m in Missoula, Montana, after a week of exciting adventures that have included, but are not limited to: three mountain passes, spit eventually traveling to the Atlantic and the Pacific, dog bites, raft rides, and more touring cyclists than you can shake a proverbial stick at. I’m just passing through Montana, because the locals have told me in no uncertain terms that although they like it when visitors appreciate Montana, they’ve had quite enough of them moving here.  Apparently country like this is getting relatively popular, as things go.

When last we left off, I was in West Yellowstone, feeling inordinately proud of myself for making it up a particularly excruciating series of hills.  From there, I spent four days traversing southwestern Montana. I think that people who live in Montana can be forgiven for thinking they live in paradise.  There are more colors of green here than I ever knew existed, and every turn of the road reveals more breathtaking scenery. I had a relatively uneventful day out of West yellowstone – there weren’t even any exciting hills to climb, but there was an utterly ferocious headwind out of the valley.  That night I ended up camping in the West Fork of the Madison River, which is incredible fly fishing territory if you like that sort of thing. The next day I was determined to make up time, as I had scheduled myself to be in Missoula on Saturday and was behind schedule. 

I got into Twin Bridges, where I had planned to camp, around 6:45 PM, and the first thing I saw was a giant billboard that said "Meth: Don’t try it. Not even once." I thought to myself, uh-oh.  If that’s the FIRST thing they’re trying to communicate to people coming into town, that’s maybe not a good sign. The next town, Dillon, was almost 30 miles away, but these days it doesn’t get dark until 10 PM and I had the wind at my back, so I decided to make a break for it. On the way there I paralleled the Lewis and Clark Trail, which luckily is littered with highly informative informational plaques.  Near a distinctive rock promontory, there was a sign that explained that when Sacajawea saw the promontory, she knew that she was near her tribe’s summer home.  It struck me that most people have totally lost the ability to navigate by topography – I know I certainly have. We rely on road signs and GPS to get us where we’re going, and the landscape in between is rarely more than an afterthought unless it’s a designated scenic byway. (Which inspire some of my favorite road signs ever, which say "End Scenic Byway" at some totally arbitrary place in the landscape, as if everything after that – no longer scenic). But to be able to navigate by the mountains, to read meaning in the bend of the valley and the lay of the land, that would be incredible.

After the night in Dillon I climbed over two passes into the Big Hole Valley, notorious for having incredible swarms of mosquitoes.  In Jackson, I ran into Ben, who just graduated from high school and is riding his bike from Ft. Collins, Colorado, to Alaska.  We’ve been riding together ever since, and I have to say, there are some things that are just more fun with more than one person, and camping seems to be one of them.  I’ve discovered, in these past few weeks with quite a bit of my own company, that I really like people.  I think that the combination of riding by myself during the day and staying with people at night has been pretty perfect. Camping alone is different – it’s peaceful, it’s introspective, but it’s not really my idea of fun.  

That night we camped at May Creek, just up from the Big Hole battlefield where the Nez Perce began their last long and desperate flight from the American troops. The story of the Nez Perce is as tragic as the story of all the Native Americans, but I didn’t have a lot of time to appreciate their particular tragedy because I was literally engulfed in a swarm of mosquitos. I got 37 mosquito bites on my right leg alone. I counted. 

We stopped down the hill in Wisdom in the General Store to buy stuff for dinner, and I decided to get some beer. I only wanted four beers, since there were just two of us and beer is heavy, so I carried a four pack of Fat Tire, a delicious microbrew, up to the counter.  The cashier explained that she couldn’t sell me just four beers, so I had to buy the six pack. Well, I decided that I would be generous and give the two extra beers away. I walked to the back of the store and picked up the other two beers. There was a guy standing by the beverage case, so I asked him if he wanted two beers. He looked at the beer in my hand and asked "of that stuff?"

"yup." I said, offering it to him.

"naw, that’s hippie shit" he replied, and grabbed a case of Coors Light.

So that’s Montana, right there.

The next day I was determined to get to Missoula and a bed, laundry, and a hot shower.  It’d been weeks since I had slept anywhere besides my tent and the appeal was wearing off. We ran into a whole group of cyclists that are doing a supported "Tour de Continental Divide" from Mexico to Canada. I crossed the Continental Divide (which is the place where the continent divides, in case the name was confusing) for the first time at Chief Joseph Pass. Spit to the East, your spit ends up in the Atlantic. Spit to the West, ends up in the Pacific. That, my friends, was some big fun.

It was fabulous to be in a big pack of people, especially when the wind was blowing us backwards and I was drafting off the three people in front of me.  Unfortunately, they left us in Hamilton, which is a good 45 miles outside Missoula.  Ben and I decided to press on, so we started making our way through the back roads in order to hop on a parallel to the main highway.

We were riding through the valley when I heard a dog barking. Usually when this happens, I look around to see where the dog is and if it’s behind a fence. If it’s not behind a fence, I get off my bike and yell NO at the dog as loud and as deep as I can.  I should preface this by saying that when I was riding to San Luis Obispo last winter, I was riding with three guys through rural California north of Monterey. A dog came tearing out of a farmhouse and Scott, who was in the front, literally vaulted off of his bike and used it like a shield, thrusting it at the dog and roaring "NO" as loudly as he could. The dog was backpedaling so fast he was practically skidding, and he immediately turned tail and ran home. I kind of though Scott was overreacting.  

Not anymore.

A few seconds after I hear the dog bark, there’s a german shepard lunging at my left leg. I started to yell and kick, but the dog managed to clamp its jaws down on my leg twice before I could get myself off the bike and fend it off.  I was screaming at it and it finally went growling down the driveway it’d come from. I looked at the damage – two fairly good size teeth marks on the outside of my leg and smaller ones where his other teeth had hit.  They were bleeding pretty badly, so I stopped and got out my first aid kit (which mostly consisted of a few miniature bandaids and one trial size packet of neosporin, a deficiency I have since remedied. I talked to the owner, who promised me the dog had all its shots, and I washed the wound out as well as I could stand with really hot water. Luckily Keith, whose house I’m staying at in Missoula, used to be a NOLS instructor and so has everything you could possibly imagine for wounds. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that we don’t have to amputate.

I do feel like I’ve experienced some sort of rite of passage.  I hope that when I’m an old lady, huffing and puffing around on my touring bike, I’ll be dispensing nuggets of wisdom on the 20 something whippersnappers breezing blithely by me, like "You hear a dog barking, get the hell off  your bike – don’t wait to see if it’s fenced in".

Today Keith took us rafting down the Clark Fork, which was one of those ask the universe and the universe delivers type of situations. I had JUST gotten done telling Ben that I was going to go rafting in Glacier, and hang the cost, because I’d never done it before. Then I called Keith to tell him when I’d be arriving, and he said "we should do something fun tomorrow, like maybe go rafting." It was a perfect rest day, stretched out on the pontoon sunning and talking, watching the fish jump tantalizingly just out of reach of the fishing poles.  There weren’t more than a couple of really exciting rapids, which was okay by me, quite frankly. The air was crowded with raptors – ospreys gliding and weaving, a bald eagle riding the currents above the river, fanning its tail to roost in a dead Ponderosa.  

We returned to Keith’s home in the hills to a dinner of elk fajitas from an elk he killed himself, and  it occurred to me that it was probably the first time that I ate big game that was prepared by the same person who killed it.  Elk, for the record, does not taste like chicken, and is delicious.

Today we talked some about the work that Keith and his friend Grant do, which involves buying up land in Montana and other places in order to preserve it.  We were talking about whether or not Grant’s degree in sociology is helpful in the work he does, and he said that his work – their work – is mostly about incentives, and figuring out how to provide people incentives that are in line with their goals.  I thought that was really interesting, because there are a lot of parallels in the work that I do and the work that they do – we’re both trying to persuade people to make "good decisions" that will result in a future where the things that we value are present – in their case, a healthy environment, in my case, healthy relationships. 

So that got me thinking, how do you provide people incentives to use contraception?

I haven’t been visiting, well, really anyone lately, as far as my exploration of sexuality and reproductive health care goes, but I have been thinking and learning a lot about the culture of our fine country and the way that people are in different places, the premises their realities are based in.  I’m heading off to Glacier National Park tomorrow, to ride Going to the Sun road and hang out with some icebergs.  On Thursday I’ll be on a train to Seattle and the last leg of my journey – still a month to go, which seems both like far too long and far too little simultaneously.