Hoping for a Tail Wind

My homie Damon loves discussing self determination and the mental approach around that. Particularly the phrase abundance mindset. Sometimes it’s difficult to have such a mindset when resources get paper thin scarce. Five days of that scarcity is a challenge. Adjust your safety harnesses as we go from scarcity to abundance real real fast. Really fast. On a Saturday no less. 12 paved trail miles out of the campground and its culture shock city for me.

Harrison, Idaho brings a lot of everything all at once. People. Dogs. Coffee. Breakfast potatoes. Ice cream. Beer. Beach. Swim. Park. Chill. Live bands. Bikinis. Sports!!!

Paved asphalt. 0% grade. Lakes. Trees. Water. Wilderness. Trailheads. Zero cell service. Friendly and good looking humans, on bikes. It’s a dream come true.

It’s a whole lotta hyper-normal world after a whole lotta nothing at all. Humanity to a certain extent. Still no cell service. I’m ok with that. My phone doesn’t seem to work even on this cafes wifi. Oh well. Nice $500 paperweight, Apple. Haven’t had a beer in a while, this Irish Death is putting in work though, ask Steve Jobs ghost.

The live concert series is today. A guy my age named Eric E is up there playing the shit out this guitar. So yeah, a theee year old is playing rock covers. Two songs in and he’s all like “pick a year!”, I yell out “1977”. So he plays “Carry On Wayward Son” hard as fuck. I accept it, even though the Kansas album that song is on was released in 76. 77 is when it hit the billboard top whatever. A few more years are called out — 1983: “I’ll be watching you”, 1992: “Tears in heaven”, 1991: “Losing My Religion.” Not bad Eric. After a second 7.8% beer I’m heckling him, yelling future years at him “2134!”. He ignores me as any professional should. 1988 brings Tracey Chapman’s “Fast Car” along with a third beer and I now know it’s time to roll on.

It’s all bikinis and boats and party time on this summer Saturday along this trail and every piece of the landscape contains its appropriate level of beauty. Especially these trees. Abundant trees. So many trees. Cooling us off. Smelling so good. Cleaning the air. These trees are gods. Tree-gods. I would have paid 20 bucks to have magically popped up one of these for an hour at almost any point in the last three days. I might have to hug one… maybe not. I’ll praise them. Like i should. Also. Why do the kids refer to “throwing shade” as something bad? This shade is good. Throw throw throw oh glorious tree gods.

Thirty three miles later and the sun is getting low in the sky. We ain’t got a set place to stop and the one campground I looked at isn’t very communicative. In fact the whole day feels so vacation-esque at this point that I don’t think we care. We push on. There’s no cell service. No ones wifi seems to work either. There is this crew of five young ladies riding, one is rocking a trike hard. She’s definitely got a be named Lindsay. Maybe Lindsey. Not buckingham. She smiles and asks for high way we’re headed. “East”. “Us too. Go to the Snake Pit for dinner, just north of 90”. Hmmmm. We push off. There it is. We stop for Mac and cheese and another beer 14 miles up. Lo and behold Lindsey and her crew arrive 20 minutes behind us. Super friendly smiles and conversations and I can tell this whole area is trying to trap me. Chad says a shotgun wedding is not for him. I tell him to relax, no one makes calendars with high school English teachers in them and I’m not marrying anyone. We bid the ladies on wheels adieu. We roll and the sun is below the mountainous horizon. Eventually we’re in Kellogg and it’s dark. We pop for a hotel room. First night inside and it’s day ten. I like camping but in this case the extra miles, the laundry and the breakfast are all worth it. Oh… and air motherfucking conditioning. Plus they give a discount to firefighters. Comfort!! Abundance. Sleep!

Doing things matters. The order in which I do them matters more. What this really means is that you’re wasting your time reading this because I’m way too focused on the ride to provide good writing, the order is riding. The writing. One has to suffer just like all living things. I’m feeling all philosophically wise this morning and I’m pretty sure it’s this mountainous desert air and all this sage growing about. Sage advice I suppose. Puns. Poops in a proper toilet, campground sunrise. Slow moving coffee and oatmeal. These are the things I’m doing. Packing up. Stretching. More pooping. Filling water. Fixing a water bottle fail with plastic bag and duct tape. Stretching. We roll out, it’s hottern hell at zero eight hundred.

This heat is the main order of the day. That and a whole lotta nothin’. It’s gotta be over 100°, and there’s not a tree or a shrub to seek shade under for hours and hours. Reminds me a lot of southern New Mexico or west Texas. Endless desert of nothingness. Rock and wind and dust and sand. Somehow less shade than yesterday, my spidey senses indicate this is likely to continue.

Today is the hardest day so far. Level up the gruel, por favor. Even with just about 50 miles. Chalk it up to even less coverage from sun and even more degrees of heat. Plus no towns between here and our intended camp spot at the Adams County Fairgrounds in Othello Washington. Nothing. Eventually a farm or two or three.

Each mile is difficult and grueling. We can see heat waves over barren rock and over farm crops. Triple digits is no joke and I can feel the effects of heat exhaustion onset lingering. 5 liters of water for 50 miles and we barely survive it. Definitely one of the more challenging rides yet.

So yeah we basically overdose on sun and heat and we make it to the edge of this Shakespearean town. A 76 gas station is the first anything we’ve seen in over 80 miles. I grab me the now standard one two refreshment combo Topo Chico and a body armor. Neither of them pay me but they both should give me free product. At least on these rides. I get me this 76’s AC and ice too. We chill. Literally, figuratively and miscellaneously. Whatever in the fuck that even means. We push three more miles and get tacos. Despite my innate desire to drop mixed race couple jokes here, we appear to me in Little Mexico. Like this is one serious enclave. Population 8,500 and there’s at least 50 tacquerias. Also the Mecca that is Walmart, the first one of this ride. Damon would be impressed. They have anything we could need and just people watching the staff and customers is hella enjoying. The word robust always comes to mind. There’s a dude named Moose working here. Legit his name tag reads “Moose”. Gotta love that. I get bananas and cliff bars and a whole ass chicken. Chad gets steaks. No nevermind, he gets stakes, for his tent. Not nearly as protein rich.

The sun sets and I’m still pooped. We are set up in the Adams County fairgrounds: $25 for water electric showers and some legal land. Not too shabby. Sleep cometh in the required order — like right on time — and that’s not nothin’.

The seventh day begins and it’s clear the grace of the spoke gods has been laid upon us. That whole lotta nothin’ just gained a something: clouds. Hay nubes. That is not Spanish for hey noobs. Clouds keep us cooler or at least make our minds feel better. We take our time getting out because of it. I once again take two poops. And a morning shower. Coffee. Oatmeal. The yoojz. An extra pilgrimage to Mecca is required as my Bluetooth speaker has died and I don’t wanna ride with out music every now and then. Moose is still working and hooks me up.

We set out for Warden and then Lind. Not much in either place but Lind is the last store for 80 miles. The grocery worker confirms this and she uses the word “services” so I know it’s a whole lot of nothin once again. We stock up and fill up water. The cloud are thinning but we head onward in the heat.

Also something about else that ain’t nothing coyotes. We see them running around all dog like. They ain’t Wu-Tang but they still ain’t nothing to fuck wit. They low key make me miss my dog, Minerva.

Rattlesnakes too. Chad sees a dead one. lots of deer. Deer. Deer.

Ralston is the targeted landing. A guy named Randy is gonna turn the sprinklers off in a small memorial park there. It’s also got water. So it’s as good as we can get, considering we haven’t seen a stitch of grass since this morning. We arrive and Randy’s got some trail magic to lay on us: he’s opened the Grange Hall to us. Bathrooms. A kitchen with a fridge and microwave. Even snack and cold drinks for sale. A total score! Thanks Randy. I take an outdoor hose shower, wet wipe the rest of me, pop up the palace and head inside to make dinner and cool out. An our passes and I get this alert:

Sure enough I peek my head out and it’s nasty out. My tent and things are good but Chad decided not to use the stakes he just bought and his tent is blowing away. I can’t understand that save his tent anyway. In his shame for being such a noob, Chad opts to sleep in the cool basement in the hall. An hour later and the winds have calmed so I crawl back into my tent and settle in on some needed rest. Two bunnies live in this park. They are fat and are clearly fattened by someone. One brown and one white. So cute. I doubt one of them is named Jack but bet they’re fucking all night like one was. I snooze though it. Insert delayed Othello joke here.

The morning of day 8 is already hot. We’ve got a water source here and another 53 miles away in Malden. There’s isn’t a town nor a water source on that stretch. I’ll later find out that there were only about 3 shady spots on that stretch. This is the most brutal stretch of I’ve been on. In the most brutal weather. In short, it’s the most brutal day of riding I’ve ever undertaken. We locate an extra water source in the form of a solar powered water pump feeding a cow trough. I’ll take it. A second one near a grain elevator. Not sure we’d make Malden without these two surprises. I don’t have the energy to go to lengths on how difficult it this is but I do like the grade of the trail. Railroad grade. Chad is an English teacher. He loves grades. So at least there’s energy for a quick pun.

Malden doesn’t have much, having been ravaged by wildfires in 2020. They are rebuilding and fortunately for us the town has a portable toilet, a hose and a community park we can camp in. I don’t need much else beside ramen, ibuprofen and sleep.

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