Читать книгу Miles from Nowhere - Barbara Savage - Страница 12

Things fell together nicely from the Avenue of the Giants through southern Oregon. I had finally built up and toned my cycling muscles. And on our second day in Oregon, I knocked off my first eighty-mile day. Bicycling felt good by then. I enjoyed working and strengthening my muscles every day, and the constant exercise felt exhilarating, even necessary. On the days we didn’t bicycle, we always went for a hike or a jog to avoid the listless or anxious moods that fell over us when we failed to exercise. Bicycling kept our bodies feeling alive and invigorated.

Now that I was in shape, cycle touring seemed like a great way to travel. We moved slow enough to see and hear things that to passing motorists were only blurs of color and sound. We took in the textures and odors of the soil and the vegetation. And because bicycling is such a quiet mode of travel, wild animals weren’t frightened away when we came up the road toward them. Deer, accustomed to seeing and hearing huge, noisy boxes of accelerated steel on the roads, often loped to the edge of the pavement to find out what we were. And too, touring by bicycle made it easy for us to meet people.

Whenever we stopped in a small town to pick up a snack or food supplies at the local country stores, people always hurried over to talk with us. The Oregonians were extremely friendly folks, and shop owners always took the time to sit down and talk with us. First, they wanted to hear about our trip and how we were faring, then they would tell us what they thought we ought to know about themselves, their relatives and friends, the history of their town, and the points of interest up ahead.

It was also in southern Oregon that we discovered free camping, something which made bicycle touring even more of a joy. At the end of our first day in Oregon there was no campground nearby, so we pulled into a secluded cove somewhere between Brookings and Gold Beach and pitched our tent on a grassy spot along the beach. The cove was surrounded and protected by high cliffs covered with green ferns, and a freshwater stream flowed off a cliff and down across the wide sandy beach and into the ocean. Larry and I bathed in the stream at sunset and watched the blue Pacific turn a brilliant orange and the white sea gulls float back and forth across the darkening sky. That was the first time we camped outside of a campground, and instead of being surrounded by packs of recreational vehicles with rumbling generators and the blaring stereos and televisions that some people like to take with them when they go camping, we were embraced by a quiet peacefulness, free of noise and exhaust fumes. From that night on, we stuck to free camping and stayed away from campgrounds, except when we wanted a hot shower.

The weather along the coast of California had been perfect; warm and sunny days, and cool crisp nights tailored for sound sleeping. But then, being a native of southern California, that was exactly what I expected. When we left Santa Barbara, I was confident that we’d be pedaling through nothing but clear warm weather for the next four months. It never occurred to me that there might be some places in North America where it actually rained during the summer. Therefore, I was flabbergasted by what the owner of the grocery store in Smith River, California—the last settlement before the Oregon border—said to us as we strode through the front door of his shop and made a beeline for the last package of chocolate donuts.

“Which way you folks going?” he asked.

“North,” Larry answered. “Up the coast of Oregon.”

“Oregon, huh? Well that’s Oregon over there where the rain starts,” he chuckled, pointing out one of the windows. “Least, that’s how the saying goes. If it’s not raining over there today, it will be tomorrow. That’s what we say around here.”

Larry and I stepped outside and glanced uneasily in a northerly direction. Sure enough, there were clouds up ahead. I was surprised we hadn’t noticed them earlier.

“People up there have moss growing all over their bodies,” the owner grinned. “And when they tilt their heads, water falls out. You can bet you’re going to get mighty wet pedaling in Oregon. That’s for sure.”

LUCKILY, THE RAINS DIDN’T COME until our third day in Oregon. The first two days were cold and overcast, but we ignored the threatening storm and savored the spectacular coastline and pine forests enclosing our route. Then, on the evening of June 10, we pitched our tent beside a lake near Reedsport and awoke the next morning to the awful sound of a downpour. I peeked out one of the tent windows and watched solid sheets of water descend from the sky. It was raining so hard I couldn’t make out the edge of the lake.

“Looks like we won’t be pedaling today,” I said, climbing back into my bag. “What do you think?”

Neither of us had much experience bicycling in the rain. Southern Californians in their right minds would never consider doing that sort of thing. When it rains in southern California—which almost never happens during the summer—everybody hibernates. The fact of the matter was that Larry and I didn’t know for sure just what might happen if we did haul off and bicycle in the rain.

“Well, you heard what the man in Smith River said. If we decide to sit it out we could be stuck here for a week waiting for it to clear. I figure we’ve got to plow through it. Otherwise we’ll never get through the state,” Larry reasoned.

I was still for waiting out the storm. I couldn’t imagine it would rain this hard during the summertime for longer than a day. But eventually Larry convinced me that we should go on. We packed everything that went into the main compartment of our panniers in large plastic garbage bags and pulled another bag around the outside of each pannier to keep our extra clothes and valuables dry. Then we donned our rain jackets and climbed outside.

It took almost two hours to cook and eat breakfast, clean up our dishes, take down the tent, and pack up our gear. We had absolutely no idea how to cope with the rain. The eggs we managed to cook were one-third water by the time we ate them. I packed the wet cookset in with my dry clothes by mistake. And by the time we collapsed our tent and stuffed it into its sack, the inside of it was just as saturated as the outside. When we finally started pedaling, clad in our sweat shirts, shorts, wool knee socks, and rain jackets, we were already drenched and shivering.

It rained on and off—mostly on—for the next five days, straight through to the Washington border. And since no rain jacket is completely waterproof, Larry and I spent the good portion of those five days cold, wet, and miserable. Even when it was only drizzling, we stayed soaked, because the nylon jackets prevented our sweat from evaporating. Our shoes never dried out, even when we threw them into a dryer for two hours at the laundromat in Garibaldi. Often our hands felt as if they might freeze to our handlebars. And at the end of our second day in the rain, I noted in my journal, “Today, the only warm place on my body was the snot in my nose.”

What helped us through the ordeal of bicycling and camping in the cold, saturated gloominess were Oregon’s friendly people and its beautiful scenery, which we caught glimpses of whenever the skies cleared. Just when we’d think the rain was never going to end, the clouds would lift, and there, in place of the gray walls of rain, would be either a forest thick with trees, ferns, and moss, or a rugged stretch of cliffs and coves edged by the stormy Pacific.

On our third day in the rain, a hailstorm chased us into Tillamook. It was lunchtime when we splashed into the city, and in an attempt to thaw out our icy bodies, we took refuge in the Fern Cafe at the center of town. We scarfed down two piping hot, open-face roast beef sandwiches with mashed potatoes and gravy. Before our meal arrived, we walked into the restrooms, pulled off our shoes, wrung out our socks, and ran hot water over our feet and hands. Then we slipped back to our booth barefoot, buried our feet in the dry carpeting, and inhaled a couple of pots of hot tea. Gradually a feeling of warmth and contentment crept over us, and it was a long time before we were able to pry ourselves loose from the protective womb of the Fern Cafe and take on the rain and cold again.

The rain turned into a light drizzle an hour after we left the cafe. But when another downpour hit us the next morning, I decided it was time to rig up a way to keep the flood of frigid water out of my shoes. In a grocery store north of Garibaldi I bought a package of small plastic garbage bags and a box of rubber bands, jammed my feet into two of the bags, and pulled the rubber bands around the plastic at my ankles.

Except that the bags had a tendency to catch in the chain and the chain ring of my bike, picking up a thick coat of black grease, they did help to keep my feet dry. I must have been quite a sight, though, tramping through stores from then on: two beady eyes peering from a hooded rain jacket hanging nearly to my knees, and a pair of bare, muddy legs with two greasy trash bags for feet. The bags brushed noisily against one another while I shuffled up and down the aisles dripping a trail of muddy water.

It rained our last night in Oregon. We were camped in a forest just north of Cannon Beach, and rather than cook dinner in the downpour, we climbed into our tent, peeled off our wet clothes, pulled our sleeping bags around us, and polished off the supply of cookies, potato salad, and chocolate milk we’d picked up in town. After our meal, Larry poked his legs out of his sleeping bag and studied his feet.

“Look at those things,” he muttered. “Have you ever seen a more shriveled pair of feet? You know, if this rain keeps up much longer they may never look normal again. Hell, they already look like they’re pushing a hundred. Guess I shouldn’t complain though. At least we haven’t gotten sick. You’d think we’d have developed pneumonia by now, being as wet and cold as we’ve been for the last week. But I guess we’re in good enough shape now to fight off almost anything. That’s good. . . . Too bad about the feet though. Well, anyway, maybe the sun’ll shine on us in Washington.”

WE CROSSED THE BRIDGE OVER the Columbia River from Astoria, Oregon, into Washington on June 14. We headed northeast through South Bend, Montesano, and Shelton, and around the east side of the Olympic Peninsula to Port Angeles, where we caught the ferry to Vancouver Island, British Columbia. It rained our first two days and our last day in Washington, but Washingtonians were even friendlier than the people in Oregon, and their hospitality kept our spirits up. At the one campground we stayed at to get a hot shower—near Chinook, next to the Columbia—the ranger let us camp free—“Because anyone who’s bicycling through Washington deserves a free campsite and shower.” After we thawed our rain-soaked bodies in the camp’s hot showers, I hung our wet clothes and towels inside the restroom to dry over night. In the morning, to my surprise, they were gone. For the last month Larry and I had left our bikes unlocked outside of stores while we shopped and along back roads and highways while we hiked. No one ever touched them or any of our gear. So why, I wondered, had someone bothered to steal our dirty towel and wet smelly clothes?

I walked back to our tent scolding myself for being too trusting, but just as I started to climb inside, a hand tapped me on the shoulder. It was the middle-aged woman who was camped in the site across the park. Her arms cradled our belongings, clean, dry, and neatly folded.

“I saw these hanging in the restroom last night when I went in to take my shower, and I knew they had to be yours,” she smiled. “I was going to the laundromat in town last night, anyway; so I grabbed ’em up and took ’em with me. I’m really sorry about the rain. Hope it clears up soon so you can enjoy our state.”

Washingtonians were also the most considerate drivers we would encounter on our trip. They never honked at us, and when they pulled up behind us, they were so quiet we usually didn’t know they were there. On winding roads they drove calmly behind us, sometimes for miles, until it was perfectly safe to pass; then they eased by slowly and cautiously, waving and smiling. Pedaling in Washington was a relaxing experience.

The ferry from Port Angeles across the Strait of Juan de Fuca dropped us off in Victoria, at the southern tip of Vancouver Island. The whole way up the US coast from Morro Bay, we’d made a point of avoiding cities. It was nearly a month since we pedaled through San Francisco—a month free of smog and traffic jams. But as soon as we pedaled into downtown Victoria, we could taste its foul air. It burned our eyes and nostrils. Brakes screeched, horns honked, and dark clouds of car exhaust spewed everywhere. The pollution and noise were suffocating.

We raced through Victoria and pedaled north through the island’s fairyland of bays, long sandy beaches with views of the snowcapped coastal mountains across the straits, waterfalls, lakes, and glaciers, to the end of the road at Kelsey Bay. From Kelsey Bay we caught the ferry along the west coast of British Columbia, where there were no roads, to Prince Rupert, just below the southern tip of Alaska.

Now that we’d pedaled some 1,600 miles northwest from Morro Bay, it was time to turn east. The Yellowhead Highway, the two-lane road that travels east across central British Columbia, covers 685 miles from Prince Rupert to Jasper in the Canadian Rockies. It took us ten days to pedal it. In that time we learned a lot about Canada’s bears and infamous man-eating mosquitoes, about bicycling in a flood, and about pedaling over one hundred miles without passing a single settlement.

From the small frontier town of Prince Rupert, where the ferries sail north to Alaska, it was 454 miles to the nearest bike shop at Prince George. To make sure we wouldn’t be stranded by a breakdown, we had stocked up in Victoria on spare parts—a rear derailleur, two tires and inner tubes, spokes, bearings, a cluster, some brake and shifter cables, and a complete set of tools, including a crescent wrench, screw drivers, and Allen wrenches. Each of us lodged a spare tire in the space near the hub between the spokes of our rear wheels.

From Prince Rupert to the next town, Terrace, it was ninety-five miles. So before we set out on the Yellowhead in the early afternoon of July 2, Larry picked up a two-day’s supply of food: peanut butter (which I scooped from its jar into a lightweight plastic container), two loaves of bread, and oranges for lunches and snacks; a package of our old standby, macaroni and cheese, for dinner; and six eggs and a box of granola for breakfast. The last sign we passed after we pedaled out of Prince Rupert and partway across the dark, barren plateau east of town read, check your gas—next services 90 miles. It seemed strange, almost ominous, to think that for the next day and a half we wouldn’t pass a town or even a house. Larry stopped and rechecked our food supply to make sure we had enough to see us through. About six miles east of Prince Rupert, the road came to the end of the plateau and dropped down into the Skeena River valley. From the top of the plateau, Larry and I looked out over what appeared to be an almost endless expanse of perfect, unspoiled wilderness. Except for the road and its neighboring ribbon of railroad track, there were no signs of man anywhere. Pine forests, unmarred by logging, spread like soft green comforters through the valleys and curled around the lakes and the waterfalls. Jagged mountains patterned with snow and laced with waterfalls sprang up along the valley, creating smaller, deeper valleys and gorges, which funneled off into the distance into other panoramas of forests, lakes, and waterfalls.

We glided down the face of the plateau and followed the Skeena for the rest of the day. There was almost no traffic. The birds, waterfalls, wind, and the river made the only sounds we could hear as we cycled through the grandeur and natural beauty.

At the end of the day, we pushed our bikes into the forest and found a level area covered with pine needles next to a shallow stream. It was an ideal camping spot—or so we thought. The pines would protect us from the wind, and the stream would provide our drinking water, dishwater, and bath. While Larry started pitching the tent, I leaned my bike against a tree, rinsed my face and hands in the stream, then went off to pee.

I’d just squatted down when they attacked. I thought I’d squatted onto a clump of stinging nettles. But soon a few made their way around and up to my face. Mosquitoes, I groaned. I looked down at my rear end: white skin buried in a dark cloud of insects busily sucking my warm blood. Immediately, I remembered what the man at the grocery store back in Prince Rupert had said.

“The skeeters get pretty thick between here and Terrace,” he’d cautioned Larry and me. “Once you get past Terrace, you should be all right until you get up into the Rockies. But let me warn you. These aren’t your ordinary skeeters we’ve got up here in central B.C. They’re what you might call our genuine Royal Canadian Mounted Mosquitoes. They’re bigger and meaner than any you’ve met up with so far, and they fly in swarms as big as a house. Yessir, us Canadians like to consider our mosquito belt our first line of defense against any ground attack by the Soviets.”

I grabbed up my shorts and fled, but the cloud stayed with me. I didn’t want to lead them back to our camping spot, so I ran to the road and back in an attempt to lose them. It was no use. These critters were not only bigger and meaner than any I’d ever encountered before, they were also one hell of a lot smarter. They stayed right behind me no matter where or how fast I ran. When I turned back to the stream, I found Larry battling a swarm of his own. He’d just finished pitching the tent, and the two of us dove inside. Within a few seconds, hundreds of mosquitoes were bouncing against the netting over the four tent windows, trying to plunge through the mesh.

Both of us pulled on our long socks, our sweat pants and sweat shirts, and closed our hoods over our heads, so that only our faces and hands were exposed, and over them we smeared a thick layer of Cutter’s mosquito repellent. Then we went outside to cook our dinner. The smell of food instantly brought what must have been every living bloodsucker within a one-mile radius. The air was so hazy with hovering bodies that we could barely see to cook. While we ate, insects flew into our eyes and mouths and caught in our eyelashes and teeth.

By morning, my behind had turned into a speckled mass of welts. It stung to bicycle on a butt full of itchy bites, but fortunately, just as the man in Prince Rupert told us, once we got past Terrace the mosquitoes thinned out. They never bothered us much after Terrace, except for a few times in the Rockies and again near the Idaho border.

During our first four days on the Yellowhead, until we reached Houston, 260 miles past Prince Rupert, we were surrounded by timber, lakes, rivers, and mountains crowned by snow or glaciers. The road followed along the Skeena and Bulkley rivers, which made for easy pedaling. There were no steep climbs, and we had a tailwind the whole way. We covered around eighty miles each day, pedaling from ten in the morning to seven at night, and we stopped often to fill our water bottles in the icy streams and scout the waterfalls and Indian settlements in the forests. The few times we came to a town, we pulled into the local coffee shop for a milkshake and an earful of small-town gossip.

There were a few minor mishaps during those four days. On our third day, during the ninety-mile stretch between Terrace and Hazelton, we overestimated our supplies and ran short of food. By the time we reached Hazelton, we’d both developed a bad case of the shakes from bicycling for seven hours without eating anything. After that experience, we kept an extra supply of peanut butter and bread and an extra box of macaroni and cheese on hand.

The next day, when we pedaled out of Hazelton, the metal rack that supported Larry’s handlebar pack broke. Larry tied the pack and the damaged rack to his handlebars with one of the two nylon straps he used to secure his sleeping bag to his rear rack. The setup held together for twenty miles, until we reached Smithers, where he had the rack welded. Then that afternoon, exploring an unpaved side road, Larry lost control of his bike in a loose patch of gravel, slammed into a rock, and bent the rim of his front wheel.

Yet, apart from those problems, the ride from Prince Rupert to Houston was ideal. The weather stayed hot and sunny, and the traffic kept to a trickle. Every evening, after having worked out for eighty miles, our muscles felt tired, but they didn’t hurt like they had when we first started out. We’d now come to crave that tired, fulfilled feeling we experienced after a long day of bicycling.

Each night we set up camp in a forest near a river or a stream. Woodpeckers, gray jays, and Clark’s nutcrackers bounced along the boughs over our heads, while we pitched our tent on spongy mattresses of ferns, pine needles, and wildflowers. Once our tent was up, we would start dinner cooking and bathe together in the frigid water, which as often as not came from a nearby glacier. The smell of dinner cooking and the feel of the water cutting away the film of sweat that coated our bodies made a wonderful combination. And because darkness never set in until eleven o’clock, after our meal we’d stretch out in the ferns, dangle our feet in the water, and read a book or reminisce about the day. I always looked forward to the evenings those first four days on the Yellowhead; I treasured the special closeness Larry and I felt toward each other and the wilderness.

Past Houston, the streams and waterfalls disappeared, the trees grew shorter and scruffier, and the mountains and valleys turned into monotonous, low rolling hills. It was near Houston too that we came upon Chris, a Canadian, and the only other bicycler we met on the Yellowhead. Chris was a tall, skinny fellow in his late twenties. He was on his way across Canada to Newfoundland; he had started out from Prince Rupert less than a week ago.

“Looks like you two are headed to the Rockies too,” he smiled. “Mind if I tag along? I don’t much care for bicycling by myself. It gets pretty boring most of the time.”

“Not a bit,” Larry nodded. “We’d be glad to have some company.”

Chris rode and talked with us for only about an hour (explaining how he was taking the summer off from work to tour his country) before he determined that he couldn’t keep up with our pace and told us to go on.

“Listen, you’re biking a lot faster than I’m able to, so why don’t you go on ahead? You wouldn’t have any fun going at my rate, anyway. I plan on staying at the campground at Burns Lake tonight, so why don’t you camp there too, and we can talk when I get there.”

Larry and I reached Burns Lake around six o’clock. Three hours later, Chris dragged in. I felt sorry for him. He looked a lot like I had at the end of each day during the first week of our trip; exhausted and hunched over in pain. I tried to offer him some sympathy after he’d slouched onto the picnic table in our site, but he refused to admit that he was worn out or riddled with aching muscles. Instead, he asked if we had any food we could spare. All the grocery stores had closed by the time he came into Burns Lake, and he was out of provisions.

“I just need a little bit to eat, that’s all,” he said to Larry. “If I eat something I’ll be fine.”

Larry handed Chris the pannier with all our food in it and told him to help himself. That, we quickly found out, was a big mistake. Chris helped himself all right—to everything we had except for the half dozen eggs and the tea bags. After he’d nearly wiped us out of food, he rolled out his sleeping bag next to our tent, crawled inside it, and pulled his waterproof cocoon around him. He didn’t thank us for the meal or offer to share the camping fee.

In the morning Chris asked for a bite of our eggs. He polished off half the batch and most of our tea. I tried to be understanding about the whole situation. After all, I told myself, he’s been touring for less than a week now, so he’s plagued by all the beginner’s aches and pains and that gnawing combination of exhaustion, depression, and constant hunger.

“Today I’m going to try and stay up with you two all day,” Chris announced as we pulled onto the highway after breakfast. But in less than a half hour, he started to lag behind, and we didn’t see him again until late that evening, when he limped into the free campground at Vanderhoff. Pain and fatigue were etched even deeper into his face. He leaned his bike against our picnic table, dropped onto one of the benches, and lowered his forehead and arms onto the table. I sat down beside him and attempted once again to console him and offer some words of encouragement.

“Chris, don’t get too down on yourself about the way you feel. It’s hard at first. I know; it took me a while to get in shape too. I started out slow just like you, and every night I felt like I didn’t have an ounce of energy left in me. But what you’ve got to do is to try and—”

Chris’s head popped up off the picnic table, and the look in his eyes froze my vocal cords. I thought he was going to cry.

“Listen,” he said, almost in a whisper. “It’s not the beat up, sore, dead tired way I feel all the time. That I can handle. I know that’ll go away eventually. What’s really eating me up is the fact that you, a woman, can bicycle harder and faster than me, a man. Look, I don’t care if I’m just starting out and you’ve been at it for a while now. I’m a man; I should be able to keep up with any woman, no matter how out of shape I am. But you know what? The ugly fact of the matter is, you can bicycle twice as fast as I can. Now, do you know how frustrating that is for me? Do you? I’m telling you, my ego will not accept the notion that a woman can bicycle better than I can. It just won’t accept that. Hell, I started out this morning pedaling as fast as I could, and you blew by me like I was standing still.”

Chris rocked his head in his hands, then lowered it back onto the table. I don’t remember exactly how I felt toward him right then. Maybe I pitied him, maybe I didn’t. There hadn’t been any anger in his voice, only remorse and frustration. Neither of us said anything to each other for the rest of the evening.

It turned cold during the night and rained, and Chris emerged from his cocoon in the morning looking a lot like a drowned rat. His hair was matted, his clothes were sopping, dark troughs underlined his eyes, and his lips had taken on a bluish tint. He was too proud to admit it, but his cocoon hadn’t done its job.

“You look like you’re on the verge of icing over. Come over here and drink some of this hot tea. It’ll help defrost you,” Larry said as he placed a cup on the table.

“I-I’m f-fine,” Chris stammered, unable to control his shivering.

“Well you don’t look fine to me,” answered Larry, “so go ahead and drink this stuff.”

Chris moved his right hand next to the plastic cup; the skin was bright pink, and his fingers were so stiff they refused to clasp. Larry reached over and molded Chris’s hand into a half circle, then inserted the cup and closed his fingers around it. The moment Larry let go, Chris’s trembling palm shook the scalding tea into both of their faces. Chris was still trying to rally his body temperature when we pedaled out of the campground after breakfast, and he didn’t catch up with us until after the flood two days later.

The flood hit on July 10, the day before we reached the Rockies, and it caught Larry and me at a bad time. We’d already pedaled seventy miles that day, and we still had another twenty to go before we would reach the town of McBride. It had been a day and a half since we passed a town, and we were down to the very last of our food.

At four o’clock we stopped alongside a stream to rest and eat a snack before tackling the final twenty miles into McBride. This would be our first attempt at pedaling more than eighty miles in one day. Our butts and muscles were already sore, but since there were seven hours of daylight left, we figured we could take it easy the last twenty miles. We figured wrong.

Four miles past the stream we saw the wall. Up ahead, the clouds that had sat overhead all day, without dropping any moisture on us, blended in with the trees and the road to form a single dark barrier.

“It’s dumping up there,” Larry groaned. “We’d better get out our rain gear. We’re headed straight for it.”

I pulled on my rain jacket and wool socks and cycled into the darkness. As the clouds closed in around us, water tumbled out of them in a solid pounding torrent. The temperature fell, and within a mile our bare hands were so cold and rigid we could barely steer. Sections of the road disappeared under the water, and our brakes quit functioning. The rain filled our shoes, turning our feet into heavy bricks of ice. Passing cars and trucks dumped mud and more water over us; the brown water gushing into our mouths and penetrating every thread of our clothing.

After fifteen or twenty minutes, we were too wet, cold, and exhausted to keep pedaling. The cold had sapped our energy and stiffened our joints.

“Let’s pitch our tent and wait out the storm,” I shouted over the roar of the deluge.

“Fine with me,” Larry hollered back. “Pull off and we’ll set up in the forest.”

But when I turned onto the shoulder of the road, my bike slammed to a stop as the bottom half of my front wheel sunk into a foot of water. I climbed off the bike and waded to where the forest started, hoping we’d find dry land, but even under the shelter of the trees, the ground was flooded.

“We’re had,” I muttered. “I haven’t got the strength for another twelve or thirteen miles or whatever it is we’ve got left to McBride.”

“Me neither. But we’ve got to do it,” shrugged Larry. “We’d drown camping here.”

I knew there was nothing else we could do, so I waded back to the road and started pedaling again. Every time I coasted down an incline, blasts of arctic air whipped my body and threatened to freeze my legs into place. Pushing the pedals and holding onto the handlebars became incredibly painful work. Out of pure desperation I started to sing. It was a long rambling song, which I made up as I struggled to keep my legs moving. I called it “The Ride to McBride,” and it talked a lot about what stupid idiots we were for not stopping and setting up camp when we first saw the storm coming toward us; about the quart of frozen water in my shoes; about the tears streaming down my already saturated face.

While the storm loosed its fury upon us, Larry and I had a tough time hearing or seeing much of anything. If I wanted to say something to Larry I had to pull up alongside him and yell. But even then he couldn’t catch all I was saying. So it surprised me when, not more than a half hour after I’d started singing, I heard a faint rustling sound. I turned my head to the right, toward the shoulder of the road where I thought the noise came from, and there, thirty feet away and charging straight for us, was a gigantic black bear. A split second after its massive image registered in my brain, I remembered that someone somewhere had once told me that bears can run at speeds up to thirty miles an hour. I opened my mouth and filled the air with a deafening, bloodcurdling scream.

The bear froze. It was now about fifteen feet to the side and slightly in front of us, and it looked taller and wider than I’d ever imagined a bear could grow. It lifted its head and strained to peer through the sheets of water that separated it from us, and I suddenly realized that it hadn’t been coming after us—it had only been trying to get across the highway before a car came by. Since we didn’t have any headlights or noisy engines, it hadn’t noticed us coming up the road.

The beast made out our outlines almost instantly, and the sigh of us—bizarre creatures, half human and half machine—was enough to send its five hundred pounds into the air. While airborne, the body turned one hundred eighty degrees and landed facing the forest. Its legs were running even before they contacted the ground, and the moment they did, the animal barreled off into the forest at full speed. Over the downpour we could hear it crashing into the trees.

Fifty minutes later, drenched and unable to steady our shivering bodies, Larry and I crept into McBride. We knew the local campground would be flooded, so we pulled ourselves and our bikes through the front door of the aging Hotel McBride. There was no one in the lobby, but I could hear people talking in the dining room as I peeled off my rain jacket and watched a giant puddle form around my feet.

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing for sure. It’s the worst storm I’ve ever seen,” said one of the voices from the dining room. “Even old man Evans says it’s the worst.”

“Has to be. Didn’t you hear the news? It’s flooded our Edmonton. They’re in a real mess over there.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet. Well it better quit pretty soon or there’s gonna be real trouble here too. My yard’s already under more than a foot of water.”

The manager appeared at the front desk. He took a quick survey of us and our bikes, then shook his head.

“Caught you on the road did she? Looks like you two took quite a beatin’ out there. Don’t know how you survived it. Myself, I’ve never seen a rain worse’n this one. I’d a’ thought she’d a’ washed you two right off the pavement. You’re in luck though. I got one room left and it’s all yours. Room 20. The bath’s across the hall.”

We hoisted our bikes onto our shoulders and carried them up the creaking stairway to our room on the second floor, pulled out some dry, clean clothes, and walked across the hall to the bathroom.

I’ll never forget the bathtub in the Hotel McBride. It was deep and long enough to swallow up the two of us. I filled it to within a foot from the top with steaming water; then slower, ever so slowly, we eased our frozen bodies in. My feet and hands felt as if they’d crack when they hit the water.

“Heaven,” Larry moaned.

The hot water and steam soothed our strained muscles, stiff joints, and aching behinds. And after five or ten minutes, we stopped shivering. It felt wonderful to be warm again. Larry and I sat smiling dreamily at each other while the dirt, sweat, mud, and chain grease melted off our bodies, turning the water a grayish brown. It was the greatest bath of my life.

By morning, although most of the streets and sidewalks in town were still under water, the rain had stopped. We headed to the local laundry to wash and dry our clothes. Afterward, we picked up a two-day’s supply of food at the grocery store to see us through to Jasper, 104 miles away. Just as we finished packing the supplies into our panniers, Chris came splashing into town. It was obvious that he and his cocoon had been exposed to the full force of the storm, and it made my stomach queasy to look at him.

“D-Don’t ask m-me about l-last night,” he chattered. “I d-don’t w-want to discuss it. OK? I’ll just t-tell you t-that I slept in m-my cocoon on a p-picnic t-table in a r-rest stop.”

Chris did mention that a couple in a van had pulled into the rest stop shortly before the deluge began and tossed him a few joints to help him get through the night.

“I t-think I’ll c-climb into a d-dryer and stay t-there for t-the rest of t-the d-day,” he stuttered as he waded off in the direction of the laundromat. Larry wished him luck.

TRAVELING BY BICYCLE, LARRY AND I often found ourselves bouncing between super highs and rock-bottom lows. While we were battling the storm, I was convinced that bicycle touring had to be the ultimate in masochistic travel. But the next day, when we climbed into the Rockies and were greeted by the awesome sight of Mount Robson, the tallest point in the Canadian Rockies, I was ecstatic. And, except for the day we cycled to the Columbia ice field, I remained that way for the next week and a half, while we camped amid the glaciers, elk, moose, marmots, and chipmunks of the Canadian Rockies. We did some steep climbing in the Rockies, but our muscles were strong enough then that we could cover our usual sixty to eighty miles each day even with two or three passes along the way.

It was July 14 when we came into Jasper, a date that marked both our fifth wedding anniversary and the start of the third month of our journey. To celebrate, we splurged and stayed the night in a motel. Our room came with a complete kitchen, and as soon as we checked-in in the afternoon, we went out and bought the fixings for a steak dinner—something we’d dreamed about the whole way across British Columbia while we survived on peanut butter and macaroni and cheese. On our way into town, we ran into Chris. He looked like he’d fully recovered from his night under water.

“Hey, I didn’t think you two were in Jasper. I couldn’t find you in the free camping area outside of town. Where you camping out?” he asked.

“It’s our wedding anniversary, so we’re splurging. We’re staying in a motel,” Larry answered, without giving the name of the motel.

“Oh, I see. Yeah, OK. Well, I’ll be seeing you around. I’m sticking around here for a few days to do some hiking. You too?”

“We’ll probably pedal south a ways to hike. Jasper’s too crowded,” I said.

“Yeah. Well, maybe I’ll catch up with you down south. I’m going as far as Banff before I turn east.”

It had been three days since Larry and I bathed, and as soon as we got back to our room, we soaked ourselves in the bathtub. I built a fire in the fireplace, and we stretched out in front of it on the soft thick carpeting and opened a bottle of wine. Lying next to the fire, we talked for a long time, mostly about how we’d been drawing closer together since the beginning of the journey.

“Sure, we get mad at each other sometimes,” Larry said, “especially when we get irritable when it rains—it seems like we always yell at each other when it rains, or when we’re tired or hungry. But what couple wouldn’t? But you know, it seems like the more experiences I share with you and the more hardships we overcome together, the closer I feel toward you, and the more I respect you. Like the night we pedaled into McBride. After we’d gone through that storm together, bear and all, I could feel the bond between us tightening. And we’re learning to support each other, too. We complement one another now: your strengths compensate for my weaknesses, and my strengths help make up for your weaknesses.”

Larry and I talked and made love through the afternoon. In the evening we prepared our feast of steak, baked potatoes, tossed green salad, and chocolate pudding. It had been so long since we’d last eaten these kinds of foods that I almost forgot what they tasted like. Larry spread out the meal on the carpet in front of the fireplace, and just as we nestled onto a cushion together, someone knocked on the door. I opened it, and there stood Chris.

My first thoughts were that someone had stolen his bike or all his money, and he’d searched us out for help. It’s gotta be something really bad, I figured. Why else would he have gone to all the trouble of checking through the dozens of hotels and motels in Jasper to find us? And besides, he wouldn’t be bothering us unless it was something important. He knew that today was our anniversary, that we wanted to be alone. I stepped aside to let him in and waited for the terrible news.

“Nice place,” Chris mumbled as he walked through the room and sat down in the chair next to the fireplace and our meal.

I sat back down on the cushion with Larry, and we watched Chris scrutinize the food on the floor in front of him. While he spoke, his eyes never moved from the piece of steak on my plate.

“Yeah. Well, I just thought I’d stop by and say hello. My bike’s downstairs. Went for a hike this afternoon. That was nice. But you know, the free campground doesn’t have any showers—which is too bad, ’cause I sure could use a shower. Yeah. Well, anyway, this sure is a nice place you’ve got here. And it looks like you’ve cooked quite an extravaganza.”

Chris looked sideways at us and grinned.

“Is everything all right with you?” I asked.

“Oh sure. Everything’s fine. Like I said, I just thought I’d stop by and say hello.”

Say hello and see if maybe we’d invite you in for a hot shower and a free meal, I bellowed to myself. Larry sensed that I was just about to say something really nasty to Chris, so he spoke before I got the chance.

“You know, Chris, there are some hot showers downstairs by the pool. Why don’t you help yourself. And here, I’ll wrap up some of this steak and stuff and you can eat it back at the camp. Sorry to rush you out like this, but Barb and I would like to be by ourselves right now. You can understand that, can’t you?”

“Hot showers downstairs? Great!” Chris beamed, while Larry scraped off part of our meal into a couple of plastic bags. “Hey, maybe I’ll catch you two later this week, when I head south.”

As it turned out, we never ran into Chris or another cycler like him again, although we did meet a number of bicyclers who had their own encounters with what they referred to as “real pain-in-the-butt sponges.”

Larry and I left Jasper the next morning and pedaled south on Route 93, through the heart of the Rockies, to the Columbia ice field. Less than halfway to the ice field, it started to pour. Since we didn’t have our rain jackets on, we pedaled for the nearest shelter, the outhouse in a roadside rest stop. We leaned our bikes against the wooden cubicle, pulled out our jackets, some bread, peanut butter, and oranges, and dove inside. I propped the door open to let the fresh air in and the bad air out, and we huddled together on the toilet seat and ate our lunch. Occasionally, a motorist with an urgent need to relieve himself turned into the rest stop, leapt out of his car, and made a frantic dash for the toilet. But once he came to within ten yards of the outhouse and spotted two bikes and two figures inside chewing on sandwiches, every one of them ran back to his car and blazed off for the next nearest site of relief.

When we started cycling again, the air temperature had fallen and the rain felt like chips of ice. After a quarter of an hour I realized that, even though I had been working hard climbing the grades, my body couldn’t warm up. I shouted to Larry that I was going to pull off the road and put on my sweat shirt and the wool mittens I’d bought in Jasper. Larry was cold too, but he was in no mood to stop. He hated stopping in the rain. No matter how cold or wet he got, he never wanted to stop and change his clothes, as I always did. We still had another forty miles to pedal before we would reach the ice field, and the prospect of spending the rest of the afternoon bicycling in the cold rain started us arguing.

“Why didn’t you put on your mittens and sweat shirt before we left the outhouse?” Larry yelled at me.

“Because I didn’t think I’d need ’em. I didn’t know it was this cold out here.”

“You’ll only get colder and wetter if you stop,” Larry yelled. “All your other clothes’ll get wet when you open up your packs to fish out your sweat shirt. Keep pedaling. You’ll warm up.”

“No I won’t!” I protested. “I’m getting colder, not warmer!”

“So let’s pedal faster. That’ll warm you up.”

“Pedal faster? I can’t pedal any faster! I’m freezing!”

And so went the argument until Larry gave in. But by then I was raging mad, and I wasn’t stopping, no matter what. I’ll just keep right on pedaling, I shouted to myself. I’ll keep right on pedaling without those mittens or sweater, and pretty soon I’ll freeze to death and that’ll show him!

“I’m not stopping!” I yelled out loud. “I’m gonna prove I can be tough, too.”

“Forget it, Barb. I don’t want you complaining; so pull over and put on whatever you want.”

“I am not complaining and I am not stopping!”

I was shaking now from anger and the cold. My hands and feet stung, and the water was already coming through my jacket. Then suddenly, just when I was about to holler something else at Larry, a stream of blood splashed onto my handlebar bag. I stared at the bag a few seconds, trying to comprehend what I was seeing; I watched in horror as more blood poured down the front of my jacket and over my legs and the front of my bike. It seemed that the blood was coming from me. I touched my face. My mouth and chin were covered with the warm, red liquid. I must have let out a shout when I felt the blood, because just after I brought my hand away from my face, Larry pulled up alongside me. Panic shot into his eyes.

“Quick! Pull off the road!” he screamed, as he started to do so himself.

“No! I don’t care if I bleed to death! I am not stopping!” I fired back automatically. But the blood scared me, and after a few yards I turned into the mud at the side of the road.

A vein had burst inside my nose, and a steady flow of blood was gushing out of my right nostril. I sat down in the puddles, tilted my head back, and pressed my fingers against the side of my nose. The passing cars and campers sprayed me with mud and water. While I waited for the pressure to stop the bleeding, Larry pulled my sweat shirt and mittens out of my packs and helped me into them. Then he put his arms around me to shield me from the rain.

“How come when it rains I always forget how much I love you?” he whispered. “Do you think we’ll ever learn to control our emotions when the weather turns lousy? You know, it seems like the minute I feel a raindrop, I start to get upset. I know you’re going to want to stop and put on warmer clothes, and you know I’m going to want to start pedaling faster, and right away we’re at each other. It’s so hard to stay calm in the rain, but we’ve got to keep trying. Maybe someday we’ll get the hang of it.”

After my nose quit bleeding, we pedaled for another three hours in the downpour before we hit the 6,676-foot Sunwapta Pass, only three miles north of the ice field. From the foot of the pass, the road looked nearly vertical; it shot straight up from the flat Sunwapta riverbed and disappeared into the clouds. Traffic crept up the climb at a snail’s pace, and motorists coming down shouted to us that the road was too steep to bicycle. We felt defeated even before we started; our muscles were already sore, and we were shaking from the cold. We stood at the edge of the road and polished off a couple of peanut butter sandwiches, shifted into our lowest gears, took a good hard grip on our handlebars for extra leverage, and started grinding the pedals.

As the road turned skyward, every muscle and all the weight and energy in my body went into each slow, deliberate stroke of my legs. One—two, one—two. First one leg crushed down, then the next bore down, just as solidly. One—two, one—two. We moved up into the clouds, and even though there were glaciers next to us and the icy rain continued to pelt down, perspiration spewed out of me. I peeled off my jacket and sweat shirt and struggled on in only a T-shirt, shorts, and wool socks. For what seemed like an eternity, we inched upward at a rate that felt slower than a walk. I needed all my strength and concentration to maintain my rhythm and keep from teetering to a standstill.

When I reached the top of the pass, a feeling of triumph and relief washed over me. It had been a long seventy miles. We pitched our tent next to the ice field, which was almost totally obscured by the low-lying clouds. Camping beside a flow of glaciers is a lot like camping in a freezer. I climbed in the tent, yanked off my wet clothes, and pulled all my dry clothes—two T-shirts, down jacket, sweat pants, two pairs of socks, and a stocking cap—over my sweaty, muddy body. Then I slid into my down sleeping bag, zipped it around me, and stayed that way for the rest of the night.

By morning the rain had diminished to a drizzle—a Canadian spit, as the locals called it—and the mountains were dusted with a thin coat of freshly fallen snow. The clouds began to clear shortly after we got up. Within a couple hours the glaciers were glistening in the sunlight. It was a spectacular sight, and we made a quick rebound from the previous day’s rain-soaked low. For half the day we hiked around the ice field in the warm, glorious sunshine. The other half we spent pedaling forty-five miles south to the campground at Waterfowl Lake. There were no clouds that afternoon to obscure our view of the chain of mountains that towered over both sides of the road.

The campground at Waterfowl Lake nestled in a forest beside a clear turquoise lake, which reflected the surrounding glaciers. Because we arrived on bicycles, the ranger let us camp free. She gave us a campsite near another couple who were bicycling through the Rockies. She warned us that bears sometimes wandered into the campground looking for food, so before we went to bed, Larry gathered all our food, put it into a pannier, and hung the pannier from the middle of a cord he’d tied about ten feet off the ground between two trees.

At three o’clock in the morning I awoke out of a sound sleep, startled. While my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I listened for the noise that might have awakened me. At first I thought I heard a rustling sound, but then everything was still. I rolled over and looked at Larry. He was sitting up. His body was tensed and rigid, and his eyes were the widest I’d ever seen them. He was straining to listen to something.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Shh,” he answered in a barely audible whisper. “Listen.”

I did, but I couldn’t make out any peculiar sounds. Larry sat motionless for several minutes, listening, then he leaned forward and put his face up against one of the windows. He carefully surveyed the outside world before he sat upright again and listened intently for another few minutes. Still there was no noise.

“A little before you woke up, I heard something moving beside the tent,” he whispered. “Then it sounded like something brushed the tent, so I rolled over and looked out that window. I put my face up against the mosquito netting, and right there at the very tip of my nose, staring right back at me, was a bear. I could feel him breathing on me! I half jumped out of my skin, and my heart started pounding in my throat so hard I thought I was going to choke. Well, thank God the sight of me scared him as much as he scared me. He jumped away from the window and took off running. He made a lot of noise when he went, too, and that’s what woke you up.”

Larry stopped talking, listened to the stillness, and looked through each of the tent’s four windows. I was too nervous to move.

“The food,” I whispered. “Are you sure you put all the food in the pannier outside? What if there’s a candy bar or some fruit still stashed in one of the packs in here?”

“I think I got it all, but we’d better check everything to make sure. If another bear comes by that’s not as skittish as the last one and smells something in here, we’ll be in real trouble.”

Our search turned up nothing, but even so it was an hour before either of us fell back asleep. We lay in our sleeping bags, our ears straining to pick up the slightest movement outside, our bodies tensed and ready to bolt out the door.

In the morning Larry checked over the tent. He was convinced he’d felt the bear swat it last night, and sure enough, he found a cluster of holes in the rain fly above one of the windows.

“Looks like he was getting ready to claw his way in,” I winced. “It’s a good thing you sat up and looked through the window when you did.”

While Larry started breakfast, I pulled the plastic water bottles off our bikes and walked to the nearest faucet to fill them with water for tea. When I turned on the water into the first bottle, it became a sprinkler head; as fast as the water flowed into the bottle, it came shooting out through a half dozen holes near its base and splattered over my legs and shoes. The bear had sunk his claws into our bottles as well as our tent.

Larry was talking with Karen and Dave, the bicyclers from San Diego who were camped near us, when I got back to the campsite. Dave was doing most of the talking, and he was jumping around a lot, waving his hands in the air. Karen stood next to him staring at the ground, mumbling long nervous groans.

“I’m finding out what happened after the bear left us last night,” Larry explained to me. “Turns out my ugly mug scared him so bad that, when he took off, he didn’t even take the time to look where he was going.”

“You bet,” Dave nodded. “He was makin’ for home for all’s worth, and I guess our tent was dead center between yours and home. When he came flyin’ by us, he tripped over one of our guy lines and crashlanded into the top of the tent.

“I’ll tell you something, wakin’ up inside of a collapsed tent and feelin’ a bear on top of you is one horrifyin’ experience. I knew it was a bear right off, ’cause one of its paws was spread out over my face, and I knew that only a bear could have a paw that big. It was a soft paw—no claws. But I knew they were comin’. I lay there frozen in sweat waitin’ for those damn claws to pop out. ‘It’s just a matter of seconds now,’ I kept sayin’ to myself. ‘A few more seconds, Dave, and those claws’ll be slicing your face apart.’

“Then all of a sudden I hear Karen whisperin’ something to me. She wasn’t movin’, but she kept whisperin’, ‘Dave, there’s a bear on us. We’ve got to do somethin’, Dave. Dave there’s a bear on us!’ Do somethin’! What the hell were we supposed to do? I couldn’t talk; not with a paw in my face. It felt so soft and harmless when its claws weren’t out. Like the calm before the storm, I figured.

“You know, it seemed like half the night went by before that paw finally moved to more stable ground. Then the bear’s mass started to rise up off of us. And once he got himself up, he lumbered off into the forest.”

Dave paused here long enough to spread his right hand apart and cover his face with it. He rolled his eyes and lowered his head.