Читать книгу Miles from Nowhere - Barbara Savage - Страница 13

From the Canadian Rockies we pedaled south through southeastern British Columbia and into Idaho at the end of July. Both of my parents were raised in Idaho, and many of my relatives still lived there. All my life Dad had told Idaho huntin’ and fishin’ stories and had talked a lot about the wilderness—and a little about rattlesnakes. As Dad put it, “The first time you hear a rattlesnake cut loose, you know exactly what it is. No one has to tell you it’s a rattler.”

But Larry and I entered Idaho with more fear of its ranchers, cowboys, and farmers—the fabled western rednecks—than of its rattlesnakes. We’d agreed never to tell anyone in Idaho or Wyoming that we were from California—that decadent, overpopulated strip of America, teeming with drug addicts, perverts, hot tubs, and super-slick real-estate agents. And we prayed that the hair hanging over Larry’s ears might pass unnoticed.

The first time one of Idaho’s countless two-ton American-made pickups with a gun rack mounted in its rear window eased past, then pulled off the road in front of us, I was sure the man inside wearing a cowboy hat had decided to personally decrease the traveling California freak population by two, or at the very least blast a few holes through their panniers just for the hell of it. I died a thousand deaths before we came up to the truck, and its burly, tough-looking driver stepped out.

“There’s a steep climb comin’ up,” the rancher smiled when we slowed to a stop. “Need a lift?”

“Thanks a lot,” I smiled back, “but we ought to be able to make it all right.”

“Well, it’s good to meet some tough, adventurous sorts. Have a good ride!”

After a few more encounters with the Idaho rednecks, we realized our preconception was totally false. They didn’t seem to care where we were from or that Larry’s hair was a lot longer than theirs; they were more interested in what we were doing than what we looked like. Wherever we went in Idaho, people pulled us over to offer a ride or food. One woman, Mrs. Thurber from Sun Valley, threw her shiny new van into a sideways skid across the gravel shoulder of the road when she spotted us resting at the top of a pass in eastern Idaho. She and her two teen-aged daughters leapt out of the van and handed us two boxes of donuts and a jar of ice-cold grape juice. Things like that happened all the time in Idaho. Its generous, kindhearted people and its ample national forest (60 percent of its area) made Idaho our favorite bicycling state. We encountered little traffic (the population of the whole state was less than that of the city of San Diego), not a single no camping sign, and plenty of dirt and gravel roads on which to explore the isolated wilderness of the northern and central regions.

In Idaho I not only changed my opinion of ranchers and cowboys but also of health food. I don’t remember exactly why I decided, in northern Idaho, to try out yogurt, that rotten-tasting fermented-milk concoction, which most true junk-food aficionados detest more than anything else. I was shocked to find that I actually liked the stuff; after a week I even developed a craving for it.

My addiction to yogurt proved to be the first step on the road to a major change in my diet. Pretty soon I was creating all sorts of healthy and hideous mixtures. I stirred granola into my yogurt. I sliced bananas onto my peanut butter sandwiches, then sprinkled on sunflower seeds and raisins. I opted for fruit instead of chocolate bars, and I switched from soft drinks and chocolate milk to fresh-squeezed orange juice. The only drawback was that the sudden change in diet gave me a monumental case of the runs. My stomach didn’t know quite what to do with all the new, strange foods I was feeding it, and for the first ten miles after I’d eaten, the meals would churn and gurgle inside my belly, then dive for the escape hatch. But even so, I stuck to my new diet, and after a few weeks my stomach agreed to accept it.

At first Larry was repulsed by what he viewed as my “sudden, unfathomable fetish for the inedible.” Eventually, though, he too began to change over, and we started to eat other things besides canned foods for dinner. We steamed vegetables, melted cheese over them, and mixed in sunflower seeds; we cooked vegetable stews and simmered thick spaghetti sauces. Canned meals were still the most convenient and the easiest to carry and prepare, but the more nutritious the foods we ate, the better we felt and the fewer stomachaches we had. By the time we reached Florida we were no longer belting down daily fixes of candy bars, pound cakes, donuts, and ice cream, although we did continue to indulge in an occasional junk-food pork-out every now and then.

UNCLE BILL AND AUNT MARGE, my father’s brother and his wife, owned a cabin at Cascade Reservoir near the town of McCall, in central Idaho. Larry and I arrived there on July 29, and planned to stay a week to give our seats a much needed rest.

About midnight on our second night at the cabin, Aunt Marge barged into our room yelling for us to wake up. Then I heard a second familiar voice say something to me, and I parted my eyes a crack, just wide enough to recognize my father standing at the foot of the bed.

“Wake up! You’re having a bad dream!” he laughed.

Seeing Dad standing there with a gigantic, mischievous grin splattered across his face was a wonderful surprise. He’d decided on the spur of the moment to fly up from San Diego to spend the week with us. Mom had stayed home to run their gift store, but in May she and Dad planned on joining us in Spain.

For the first few days, Larry and I bent Dad’s ears with our stories while we sat on the front porch of the lakeside cabin, cleaning and adjusting our bikes. Three times a day Aunt Marge cooked up a colossal feast, and by the end of the week, I’d put on ten pounds. On the weekend, sixteen of my aunts, uncles, and cousins rendezvoused at the cabin for two days of swimming, waterskiing, canoeing, sailing, hiking, and endless talking.

Monday morning Larry and I awoke to a lonely silence inside the cabin and inside ourselves. The festive, secure feeling was gone. Everyone else had gone home. After breakfast we packed our gear, but we were so homesick we couldn’t force ourselves to climb on our bikes. Instead, we walked down to the lake and sat on the shore and wondered if maybe it wasn’t time for us to go home, too. We sat and watched the empty canoe bob in the water, listening to the echoes of the voices of our family. Now, once again, it was just the two of us, and that day proved to be a long, lonely one.

We left the cabin early the next morning. Within a couple of hours, our homesickness subsided, and we were content to be back on the road again, meandering through the mountains, past waterfalls and meadows, headed southeast toward the Sawtooths, the Grand Tetons, and Yellowstone.

In the late afternoon of August 10, Larry and I found ourselves in a desolate stretch of central Idaho, just south of the town of Challis. By now, after nearly three months of pedaling and camping, we’d learned a few things about the ways of nature, including how to smell a rainstorm approaching and how to spot a distant stream by its surrounding vegetation. This afternoon we were especially dirty and sweaty and in need of a bath; while we pedaled, we scanned the barren landscape for a telltale row of trees or bushes that indicates the presence of a stream.

The creek I found was in a shallow ravine about fifty yards from the road, and there was a plateau nearby large enough to hold our tent. To get to the plateau we had to climb over a six-foot-high wooden fence, hop the little creek, and hike uphill some fifteen yards. We carried the tent, mats, sleeping bags, and our handlebar packs to our campsite. Then, while Larry pitched the tent, I began to haul over our bikes and the rest of our gear. I was retracing my route between the road and tent for the third time, carrying a rear pannier in each hand, when, a couple yards from the creek, a sudden noise at my feet halted me. No one had to tell me what it was I’d heard. Dad was right; I knew there was a rattlesnake at my feet.

I knew it was a rattlesnake. But I couldn’t make myself accept that fact; so instead, I decided to believe that what was slithering next to my feet was a harmless garden snake. This was an unreasonable decision based on what I’d just heard; but it was a comforting one, and it calmed me enough so that I could force myself to look down. Six inches from my right foot lay a rattlesnake. It looked to be about three feet long and had thick brown scales, dark markings, and a mean, arrowhead-shaped head. While it watched me, I had the distinct sensation that snakes were slithering up the backs of my legs.

Finally, I bolted into the air. I heaved the panniers out of my hands and ran for the road. When I got to the fence, I grabbed the top rung and flipped myself over. Larry had looked up from his work just in time to see the panniers soar through the air and me fly over the fence. He ran to the edge of the plateau, and as he started down the incline toward the creek, I screamed a warning from the road, “Don’t go down there! There’s a snake!”

“You and snakes,” he laughed. “As many as we’ve run into these last few months, you’d think you’d be used to them by now.”

“This one’s a rattler!”

“Rattlesnake, huh?” Larry hesitated for a moment then continued moving down the slope. When it came to snakes, I usually blew things way out of proportion, so he figured he was perfectly safe. At the bottom of the hill, he calmly stepped across the creek.

Larry spotted the rattler—it was now partially hidden beneath a shrub—a moment before it coiled. When the ugly hissing sound cut through the air, he screamed something unintelligible, grabbed up a rock, and fired it. The rock hit its mark, and the serpent shot out from under the shrub. Next, Larry ripped a limb off a tree beside the creek, and when the snake coiled again, he let out another high-pitched wail and swung the branch. The limb missed the snake. The serpent slithered to the right a few feet and prepared to strike. And again Larry cried out and brought down the branch. On his fourth swing he connected with the rattler’s head. He lifted the dead snake with one end of the branch and carried it well away from the path and the tent.

Convincing myself to walk back down the path took some doing. Larry brought me a branch of my own, and as I made my way toward the tent, I swatted at the bushes with it while my feet did a fast jig.

After dinner, Larry went off to take a picture of the snake, but when he came to the spot where he’d left it, it was gone.

“When I saw it was missing,” he explained afterward, “for a fleeting moment, I thought maybe it’d come back to life and was coiled up right behind me ready to strike. That was an awful scary experience. But then I found it not too far from where I’d set it down. It was dead all right. I guess it had crawled over there by some sort of reflex movement.”

For over a week after the rattlesnake incident, I suspended my practice of walking back into the bushes and trees alongside the road to relieve myself. Instead, I would wait until we came to a town or a gas station and use the public toilets. Sometimes, when the toilets were few and far between, I thought for sure my bladder would burst; but nonetheless, I refused to go into the bushes.

A LUCKY THING HAPPENED WHEN we pedaled out of Idaho and into Yellowstone National Park—it snowed. The tourists fled the park in droves, leaving it nearly deserted at the peak of the tourist season. It was extremely cold cycling the park. The mountains were covered with snow, and every time we pumped over a pass snowflakes sprinkled down on us. But we had the mud pots, the geysers, the hot springs, the canyon, the deer, the moose, and the rest of the wildlife, almost all to ourselves. We could hardly have asked for more.

It took almost an hour to cycle over the 8530-foot Sylvan Pass at the east exit of Yellowstone. When we came down off the pass and out of the Rockies, we figured we had a long, relatively flat haul to the East Coast. As far as either of us knew, there weren’t any real mountain ranges along our tentative route through Wyoming, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, lower Ontario, and New York—only flat lands or rolling hills until the Appalachians. No one had said anything to us about Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains, and we failed to notice them on our maps. The first person to mention them was the owner of a sporting-goods store in Cody, where we picked up white gas for our cookstove.

“So yer headed east are ya? Which pass ya figure on tacklin’,” the man asked.

“Pass? What pass? We’re going east, not west,” Larry answered.

“Well, I’ll tell ya folks somethin’. Goin’ east from here, yer headed straight fer the Bighorns. They’re only ’bout eighty miles away, and they’ve got some of the most treacherous passes you’ll find anywhere. Worse than that part of the Rockies ya just came through, that’s for sure. I’d recommend ya turn south up ahead at Greybull, go down to Worland, then head over the Powder River Pass into Buffalo. If ya keep on straight at Greybull, you’ll be headin’ over the Granite Pass road into Sheridan, and that’s a bad stretch in there. Powder River’s a higher pass, but it’s a better road.”

At 9,666 feet, Powder River proved to be the highest pass of our entire journey. In the fifty-five miles between Worland and the summit, the road climbed 5,600 feet, most of it during the switchbacks in the last fifteen or twenty miles.

We started up the switchbacks in the early afternoon on August 24, when the air temperature hovered in the high eighties. For three hours we ground up the grade. The climb was slow, hot, and tedious, and along the way we passed two giant recreational vehicles that had conked out. From the summit we plunged down into Buffalo, then set out across eastern Wyoming.

Two days later we entered South Dakota. We’d heard a lot of stories about South Dakota from other bicyclers.

“Nothing but flat or rolling empty prairie,” one of them had told us. “You’ll die of boredom.”

“I’ve never heard of a bicycler catching a tailwind in South Dakota. Everyone has headwinds no matter which direction they’re pedaling,” said another.

“South Dakota? It’ll test your ability to remain sane and married,” someone else had assured us. “Headwinds and nothing to look at. I read a newspaper article while I was there that said some Russian scientist that was visitin’ South Dakota thought the terrain looked just like Siberia! And there’s lots of mosquitoes, too. They’re the state bird.”

We came into South Dakota at Belle Fourche and followed Route 212, the scenic route, as someone in town referred to it, for four hundred miles, straight across the state to Minnesota. The first twenty-five miles, from Belle Fourche to Newell, weren’t too bad; there were some farms to look at. But the next thirty-five miles, from Newell to Mud Butte, lived up to everything anyone had told us about the state. We had a headwind the whole way and were surrounded by rolling hills so barren there wasn’t a single tree to break up the monotony. I’d never seen land so empty. There were no crops, no livestock, and no vegetation except for short golden grasses here and there. The bare hills rolled, one after the other, for as far as I could see. From the top of each rise, I usually could count eleven more ahead. And so it went for the entire afternoon—up and down, up and down, up and down; boring, boring—boredom at its finest.

It would have been nice to have been able to stop and rest our muscles, or eat a snack, or read a little, to break up the tedium of the empty landscape, but the mosquitoes wouldn’t allow that. When we stopped they swarmed over us. They also determined our speed, because when we slowed down below ten miles an hour, they were on us and biting.

We pedaled nonstop for three long painful hours against the stiff winds and over the low, but steep, hills. To keep my speed up and help block out the monotony and fatigue, I tried daydreaming about South Sea islands. But I tired of that after an hour and went back to staring blankly at the bare land around me and the ribbon of asphalt that stretched on and on and on to the horizon without making a single turn and without passing a tree, or shrub, or animal. When we came into Mud Butte, after three hours in the prairie, the two of us had our doubts as to whether we’d be able to endure another 340 miles of headwinds, mosquitoes, and nonexistent scenery without going completely batty.

Booming downtown Mud Butte, South Dakota (population two), consisted of a rustic coffee shop on one side of Route 212 and a one-room volunteer fire station on the other; if a fire broke out in the coffee shop, the McGillivrays, the middle-aged couple who ran the coffee shop and lived in the cottage connected to it, would, I suppose, dash across Route 212, jump into the fire engine, drive back across to the coffee shop, and put out the fire. As Larry and I stumbled through the front door of their shop, the McGillivrays took a look at our long faces and heavy bikes and shook their heads knowingly.

“The last bicycler that rolled in here hitchhiked out,” Mrs. McGillivray shrugged as she slapped our iced teas onto the counter and straightened her cotton dress. “He dragged in here ’round noon a few months ago, and he was a real wreck. That long dry stretch between Newell and here ’bout drove the poor kid to despair. He was a real nice boy, though. Was bicyclin’ from somewhere on the West Coast to his home on the East Coast somewhere. Boston, I think it was; somewhere big, anyway. And he had his heart set on bicyclin’ the whole way; and up until South Dakota he was farin’ just fine.

“When he pulled in here, he wanted to know how much longer the type of terrain he’d just come through lasted, and I had to tell him that at the rate he was movin’ he had another seven or so days of empty, wide-open spaces ahead of him. I figured seven days was how long it’d take him to get out of South Dakota and into Minnesota, where there’s lots of farms and towns and green grass. When I told him the scenery got even more borin’ east of Mud Butte, ’cause it flattened out and then there weren’t even rollin’ hills to look at, he looked like he was gonna cry.

“From what I hear, it’s real crowded back East—people and buildings everywhere—and I guess folks from back there can’t take to travelin’ for hours and hours for a bunch of days without seein’ anythin’ but rollin’ or flat dirt. In a lot of South Dakota the only time ya see a buildin’ or a tree is when ya come to a town, and a lot of times there just aren’t a lot of those around. I’m used to it though. I like it here. No sir, I wouldn’t want to live back East, where there’s people all over everywhere and everythin’. I need room to move around and be by myself.

“Anyway, me and my husband talked with the kid for a long time. He was all torn up. Didn’t want to get back out again into that ‘lonely emptiness,’ as he called it. But he didn’t want to cheat and hitchhike, either. He sat and argued with himself for hours.

“After a bit, a rancher from over there by Watertown, almost to the Minnesota border, came in for somethin’ to eat. He was on his way back home from Wyomin’ in his pickup, and he offered to give the kid and his bike a lift. Well, I’ll tell ya, that boy hemmed and he hawed a good bit, but finally he decided to take up the offer, and off he went.

“A month later we got a letter from him. He was back home in Boston or wherever it was. Said, after he got to Watertown he cycled the whole rest of the way to the East Coast. Never had to hitchhike again after South Dakota. Guess that says somethin’ ’bout this here state. It does in the best of folks.”

“Yeah—I’ll bet it does,” Larry grunted while he stared out the window.

That evening Larry and I pitched our tent behind the coffee shop in the only patch of green grass in the seventy-five miles between Newell and Faith, forty miles up the road. The mosquitoes were so thick that we ate dinner inside our tent. We were exhausted from battling the headwinds all afternoon, and we fell asleep early.

The ripping and chomping started around two o’clock in the morning. I was the first to wake up, and I listened to the sound—rip—chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp—rip—chomp, chomp, chomp, rip, rip—chomp, chomp—for a few moments until the ground began to vibrate under the weight of heavy footsteps, and something snorted. I looked out the window; we were surrounded by six steers, each with a pair of two-foot-long horns. The animals were grazing on the grass around our tent. While I watched them graze, one of them tripped on something and nearly put his horns through the side of the tent.

By now the chomping had awakened Larry, and we agreed that we’d better chase off the steers before a couple of them accidentally stumbled into the tent. We shooed them off fifty yards, then climbed back into the tent, squished the half dozen mosquitoes that followed us in, and fell asleep.

Ten minutes later the rip—chomp, chomp, chomp started again. And again we chased the steers away, and again they came back. We chased them away four times, and they stumbled back four times. The fifth time that they wandered back, Larry bolted out the tent door without taking the time to pull on any clothes, grabbed up a stick, and herded the steers across the prairie. Had the McGillivrays wakened and looked out their bedroom window just then, they would have witnessed the peculiar sight of a human form, stark naked and glowing in the moonlight, chasing behind a group of trotting, four-legged, long-horned beasts. I watched Larry and the steers top a rise in the plain and disappear. Eventually Larry came back, but the steers never did.

“Rodeo steers!” Larry grimaced when Mrs. McGillivray gave him the news in the morning. “You mean the kind that gore the cowboys in the rodeos?”

“That’s them,” she nodded. “They’re a tough bunch, those six. Real prizes, too. I can’t figure how the blazes they got out of the corral last night. But there’s no need to worry. My husband’ll catch ’em. ’Round this country, there’s no place to hide.”

Mr. McGillivray was still off searching for his steers when we left Mud Butte to start our second day in South Dakota, and Larry was feeling quite lucky to be in one piece.

We cycled eighty miles that day, and they all looked exactly alike. It was as though we were pedaling yet standing still. Our surroundings never changed, and the boredom grated on our nerves. We felt trapped. All day we argued and complained about trivial things.

The next morning both of us agreed that we’d better make a real effort at getting the hell out of South Dakota, because if we weren’t out soon, our mental health would disintegrate altogether. We started out from Eagle Butte at seven-thirty. One hundred ten miles and fourteen hours later, the two of us collapsed in a deserted camping area outside of Faulkton. This was the farthest and longest we’d ever pedaled in one day, and except for the Missouri River, which we crossed at midday, the landscape remained just as monotonous as it had been for the last two days. We battled a headwind the whole day, and by evening every part of my body hurt. I couldn’t pedal fast enough to keep ahead of the mosquitoes, but I was too tired and sore to care.

When we pulled off the road at nine thirty, our knees had given out. Standing was painful and squatting proved impossible, so we pitched the tent while sitting down. Our aching bodies kept us awake all night.

In the morning I awoke to the terrible realization that I was still in South Dakota and that the sharp pain in my knees hadn’t gone away. Always before, when I’d gone to bed with sore knees, they felt fine by the next morning. We hoped to put in another one hundred-plus miles this day, which would take us as far as Watertown, so that by the following morning we’d be out of the state. But with my knees as sore as they were, I wasn’t sure I’d last that distance.

We pedaled into Faulkton after breakfast and bought our day’s supply of food. Faulkton turned out to be a kind of oasis. Unlike the other towns we passed through in the last three days, it was a pretty place with lots of greenery. It had neat, well-kept houses, lawns, and flowerbeds, and there weren’t any mosquitoes in the city park. We locked our bikes outside the grocery store and spent an hour walking around the town, looking at the grass, and standing in the shade of the trees, pretending we were someplace far away from South Dakota and its barren plains.

This was our fourth day in South Dakota; August 30, the day that state nearly conquered us. We pedaled for six hours and covered a grand total of forty-one miles, thanks to the howling headwind that was waiting for us at the edge of Faulkton. Larry cycled in front, to block the wind, and he cursed it for the whole two hours it took us to go the twelve miles from Faulkton to one of those rare points of interest in South Dakota—a turn in the road.

At the turn, we stopped to eat lunch. The terrain offered no trees or bushes to block us from the wind, and it occurred to me that I’d forgotten what it was like not to hear wind all day. Frustration and depression overcame us as we stared at the empty land. There were 125 miles of Route 212 still before us, and it appeared as if we were going to have to fight through each and every yard of them. Larry talked about hitchhiking to Minnesota, but as sick as we were of the headwinds and the never-changing plains, we couldn’t bring ourselves to admit defeat.

After the turn, the wind hit us at a slight angle instead of straight on, but even so, it was tough pedaling. In the next two hours we could only manage to cover fourteen miles. We argued a lot during those two hours, mostly out of frustration and pain. Larry didn’t think we were moving fast enough, and I thought my knees would fall apart. There was nothing to look at except each other, as had been the case all morning and for the last three days, and by now we could hardly stand the sight of one another. To escape the other person’s constant griping, we began cycling farther and farther apart. Two hours after the turn we inched into Zell—the first sign of civilization since Faulkton—another Mud Butte minus the fire station. We hadn’t spoken to each other in well over an hour. Even so, we both entered Zell’s lone store and coffee shop with the same idea in mind: to get drunk quick.

There were two wooden benches outside the store, one on either side of the front door. I dropped onto one with my three cans of beer, and Larry sat down on the other, as far away from me as possible. I popped open one of the cans and looked over to my left, toward the east, at the long, straight, flat band of pavement that cut through the flat featureless plain. The wind picked up the pop top and whipped it out of sight. For forty minutes I drank beer, watched the road, and let the wind spray me with dirt. My knees never quit aching. When all three cans were empty, I climbed back onto my bike. I didn’t feel any different mentally or physically from when I arrived.

It took us almost another two hours to pedal the ten miles to the town of Redfield. By the time I could make out Redfield’s cement buildings, the dry heat and the wind and dust had cracked my lips and parched my throat. We stopped at a hamburger stand at the edge of town and ordered a snack, and Larry asked for two cups of cold water so we’d have something to drink while we waited for the food.

“Sorry, you’ll have to pay for water just like you would soft drinks,” grumbled the man behind the counter.

Larry canceled our order, and we pedaled to the grocery store in town.

Redfield had a bad feel to it. The people on the sidewalks looked away when we cycled toward them, and no one returned our greetings. As soon as we picked up cold drinks at the store, we headed for the state campground eight miles to the east.

Just outside of Redfield, Larry stopped at the Wilson Motel, which had an adjoining camping area for trailers and recreational vehicles. And for the first time in half a day, he spoke to me in complete sentences.

“What do you say we call a cease-fire? I’ll apologize for saying you’re the world’s slowest bicycler, and you can tell me you didn’t really mean it when you said you didn’t care if I disappeared off the face of the earth and you never saw me again ’cause you’ve never had a good time doing anything with me anyway. OK?

“Look, I’ll tell you what let’s do. It’s been three days now since we washed last. We’re both getting pretty ripe, so let’s go in here and ask the manager if the campground up ahead at Fisher Grove has showers. I got to thinking maybe it doesn’t, and that’d mean another night of sleeping with our sweaty legs sticking to each other and our arms sticking to our sides. If the manager tells us there aren’t any showers up ahead, maybe he’d let us wash up here. I figure a nice cool shower’d pick up our spirits a lot, and this way we’d make sure we got one today. What do you think?”

The owner of Wilson’s assured us that there weren’t any showers at Fisher Grove. “I don’t usually let people who aren’t stayin’ here use our facilities but since we’re not really set up for tent campin’, and seein’ as how you two look like you could really use a shower, especially after a hot day like today, I’ll do you a favor and let you use our bathrooms for two dollars for the two of you. How’s that?”

As Larry suspected, our outlook on life took a sharp turn for the better after we got out of the wind and ran some cold water over our burnt, sweaty bodies.

Real, honest-to-goodness green grass, bushes, and trees covered the campground at Fisher Grove, and we decided to stay there rather than free-camp out on the prairie. The wind was blowing too hard to set up our tent without a windbreak, and here we could pitch our tent behind the shrubs.

When we checked into the campground, the ranger informed us that the restrooms had showers.

“Too bad the man at the Wilson Motel didn’t know that,” I shrugged. “He said there weren’t any here, so we paid him two dollars to use his.”

The ranger shook her head. “Oh, he knows all right. He and his family camp here every year. He just saw an easy two bucks in the wind, and he took you for it. Some folks are like that, you know. Even so, it’s hard to imagine someone takin’ advantage of a couple of worn-out bicyclers.”

This news capped our day. And all through the night, the wind roared past the trees and bushes and made our tent walls jump and snap so loud we couldn’t sleep. It sounded as if the whole tent was being ripped to pieces.

“If this wind keeps up, it’s going to take us another three or four days to get out of the state,” Larry grumbled. “Three or four more days of poking along at six miles an hour with nothing to look at, the sun frying our skin, and the wind howling in our ears.”

I spent all night contemplating that sobering thought. But by morning the wind had died down somewhat and had shifted its angle, so that it hit us more from the side than straight on. Any place else we’d have thought it was a bad day for cycling, but in South Dakota, the lack of a full-blown headwind was a relief. Around midday the wind shifted again and angled almost to our backs. We took advantage of this and pedaled as fast and hard as we could for the rest of the day. We rode until dark, to within fifteen miles of the Minnesota border.

On September 1, a tailwind picked us up at the Minnesota border and blew us halfway across the state. It was one hundred degrees and 98 percent humidity, but Larry and I were in heaven; we’d escaped South Dakota. Two weeks later, with Minnesota and Wisconsin behind us, we pedaled into Michigan, where practically everyone, it seemed, was waiting for the opportunity to invite us into their homes.