Travels with Dog, pt. 2

I think I have a new favorite road, now.  As usual with these sorts of things, an accidental happenstance leads to a discovery.  When you are on the road for whatever reason, you are also on an adventure, and should be open to new experiences when they present themselves.

In this case, we were on our way home with the dog, Nash, or Fuzzbutt, as I call him, from the National Specialty show for the Bouvier des Flandres breed, held this year in a suburb of St. Louis at a facility owned by Purina Farms, maker of Dog Chow and so much else.  The factory resembled the place where Soylent Green was made, to me, but the show facilities were top-notch, even air conditioned, a rarity in the Dog Show world where local fairgrounds are the most common venues and rustic is the most common description. It turned out we were right close to Route 66, the Mother Road, and I spent some time retracing its path as I explored the neighborhood.

We were running a day late because we had gotten caught on the east side of the Continental Divide when a big storm blew down from Canada and blanketed the Great Plains with an unseasonal early snow from Alberta to northern Texas and I-70 was shut down for miles west of Cheyenne, Wyoming, forcing us to wait it out in a Hotel in Kearny, Nebraska.  This was far from the worst case scenario, given that the Seahawks were on the tube in London and the local beer was fresh and good.  We seem to have finally arrived at the way things were back before Prohibition was enacted, with small breweries in every town making great beer for the locals, and travelers lucky enough to find them on their way through.

We finally got back on the road on Tuesday morning in sub-freezing weather, but clear skies and dry pavement supported the decision, and we made good time after that.  Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, and most of their neighbors have a 75 or 80 mph speed limit on their freeways, which helps gobble up the miles.

On the morning of the last day we woke up early in our hotel in Evanston, Wyoming and beat feet out of town in the shivering darkness on Interstate 84.  I have found that when you hit the road early and wait a while before breakfast, it tastes extra good when you finally find it, as if your body is celebrating the realization that you weren’t actually trying to starve it to death after all.

We blew through the last of Wyoming and a good chunk of northeastern Utah before we stopped for lunch in the very cool small town of Baker City, Oregon.  This is an old Western town (1874, with movie-set buildings to back it up) tucked into a valley where the burnt scrubland hills of Eastern Oregon give way to trees and sheltered dales with cultivated fields and small-town cafes like the Oregon Trail, where we sat at a booth and relearned that banana cream pie is a universal language.  Okay, okay, I will stipulate any kind of pie, but banana cream is the one for me.

Of course, after lunch my wife had to get the dog out for a walk before we left, which caused all of the servers  and at least one customer to abandon their posts for a look-see.  A purebred Bouvier in full show trim is a rare thing in these parts, apparently.  You have to admire their innocence.

We finally got back on the road and drove through town admiring the architecture and the old houses, only to discover that the onramp to Interstate 84 was closed and locked with a padlocked gate!  There were no signs, and nobody standing around explaining matters as a steady stream of cars and trucks were detoured back through town to state highway 30, which at that point had become a parking lot.  We skipped back to the original offramp we had taken to get in, only to find it also locked down!  The busy freeway was as empty as a politician’s heart at tax time.

In the old days I would routinely stop at a hardware store in these small towns and buy a Metsker Map of the county, which always had all the back roads, paved and unpaved, on it, a useful source of information and a pleasure to read later and mark the roads you had taken while setting aside others for next time.  Nowadays, I just pulled out my phone and hit the Google Maps button.  It seemed to show me that State Highway 203, otherwise known as the Medical Springs Highway, which started right at one of those closed-off onramps and seemed to head straight into the surrounding hills in the wrong direction altogether, actually wandered about through those hills and came back down to 84 some 35 miles down the road, which should have bypassed whatever problem was happening on the freeway.  So that’s the way we went, up into the hills in search of another way home.  What we found was delightful.

As we later learned from an Oregon Department of Transportation tweet, “I-84 closed in both directions between #LaGrande & #BakerCity due to a roll over crash involving a semi tractor-trailer hauling cattle. ODOT attempting to round up cattle. No detour at this time. Extensive closure possible.”  Some poor cowboy bought the farm out there, along with several of the cows he was hauling to market, while we were having our lunch.  The rest of them wandered the freeway until people arrived to round them up again.  I hope a few of them escaped to live an outlaw life hiding in the canyons and gorges that populate that country.  If they only knew where they were headed, they would have all run for it.

But for us, the closure led us to this old back road that twisted and turned up and down the scrubby hills outside of town for miles, until it picked up and ran alongside Catherine Creek before coming to the town of Union, which is where we picked up I-84 again, well past the chaos caused by the accident.

There is a town called Medical Springs, out there in the middle of nowhere.  Blink twice and you’ll miss it.  It reminds us that, back in the late 1800s, most of our ancestors lived in those small towns scattered all over the West.  Baker City was a pretty big town for the times, and the idea of a Portland or a Seattle or a San Francisco was too much to think about.

The State Park on Catherine Creek was beautiful, and empty on that particular day.  Nash got to take a long walk on his leash, out over the bridge to look down at the creek, and wander through the trees.  Here’s some pictures:

Our restful interlude in a beautiful little park out in the country by a creek was the high point of a day spent flogging our new van through parts of four states toward a home that was all the more desirable for the twelve days we had been away.

The best part of any journey is the homecoming.  That, and the little adventures that soothe your soul along the way.  :-{)}

To Ride, or To Trailer... that is the question

Well, funny you should mention that, but it does bring on a story, so I’m glad you did.

It was back in ’03, it was, and a group of us were on the road headed for Milwaukee.  The Harley Davidson Motor Company had somehow stayed in business for a hundred years, and they were promising a big ol’ party for anyone who showed up.  Now this is a company whose customers have a tendency to get the corporate logo tattooed on various parts of their bodies, so that gives you a hint at the depth of their affection for the brand, and at the wildness of the parties that develop when enough of them get together in one place.

I was riding with Rachel and her gang.  She was the escort rider on her cop bike, which gained us some respect from the locals, when she didn’t run off and leave us, which she occasionally did.

I had looked at the map and realized that good old Highway 2 ran right across the top of five states between Seattle and Green Bay, which was just a hop and a skip north of Milwaukee, so that was our route, over the mountains and across the rivers and the wide open spaces with the great big skies.  I wouldn’t recommend that route today, the parts through North Dakota are pretty fracked up. We traveled light, and stayed on the cheap, mostly at KOAs or one of the many little clapped-out resorts that grew up along the highway in the ‘50s that would put up a biker for $10 a night, but the communal shower had floors that sagged under my weight.  It was at one of those where we saw the essence of the old biker question:  “Should I ride, or should I trailer?”

This little resort in upstate Minnesota had been carved out of an old quarry on the riverbank, so you drove down a steep entry to get to the campsites, one of which was enough to fit 4 motorcycles and their tents.  Up top, by the highway, was a strip mall that contained the restaurant and the gas station that completed the roadside oasis.

So we’re down at our site, sitting around the table, when we witness the arrival of a motorhome the size of a Greyhound Bus, which pulled into one of the full-service sites towing the largest Wells Cargo enclosed trailer you can buy.  Two guys get out, wearing biker leather vests and bandannas on their heads.  They’re, ahem, experienced, been around, shall we say, not young bucks anymore, but who among us is, either?  They fold down the ramp that closes off the back of the trailer and proceed to back out two brand new looking Harley Baggers, one a Softail Heritage and the other an Ultra Classic, which they fired up and rode on up the hill to the restaurant for dinner, just like we did.  After dinner, they rode back down to camp and went in the motor home to watch tv or something, while we sat outside and watched the stars come out.

Next morning, while we were packing to leave, they climbed back on their bikes and rode back up to the restaurant for breakfast, just like we did, too.  As we gassed up and hit the road East, they went back to tie their bikes up in the dark inside that trailer before they followed us out of the quarry.  I later saw that same motorhome and trailer parked on a back road outside the Milwaukee Town Center.  There were so many of them there it looked like a convention of Good Sams had hit town with all the bikers.

The bottom line is that it doesn’t matter if you ride or drive, as long as you get there in one piece and have a good time.  And it’s perfectly understandable that everyone gets to a point where the pleasure of the long ride is not enough to make up for not being able to do it with the same attitude you used to have, the knowledge that your skills were at their peak, and you were prepared and ready to handle anything the road put in front of you.  And, of course, if time is a factor it’s better to dash in, drink deep, and dash out again than to have stayed home.

But the ones who drove deserve a certain amount of pity from the ones who rode, and they know it.  Here’s a little experiment you can do on your way back from Sturgis this year that illustrates my point:  As you ride by a pickup with one or two perfectly capable motorcycles tied up in the back, glance over at the driver and give him a nod.  Nine times out of ten, I have observed, he will not meet your glance, but will look away.  He knows he’s depriving himself of the authentic experience of being on the road on a motorcycle by being belted into that cage, for whatever reason, time, health, whatever.  He knows that when you’re out there leaning into that nasty side wind outside of Caspar, Wyoming, or powering into a set of dark clouds forming outside of Bozeman, that’s when you’re fully alive.  Just you and your bike taking on Mother Nature, and winning.  It’s something not everyone can do, and it’s what sets us apart from them.  Ride on.      :-{)}

The dope selling expedition

The white ’61 Chevy sailed through the night, as much like a ship at sea as it was a car on the road.  Not only was the front end pretty clapped out by then, the ball joints loose in their sockets and the tie rods tired, but Shifter had fitted it with a foam padded steering wheel that was all of 8” diameter, like a huge fat donut attached to the column.  On a back road like this one somewhere near Elma, with a pronounced crown to the road and the memory of thousands of log truck loads imprinted in the blacktop, driving the car was an exercise in controlled drifting from side to side as the slack shifted from one wheel to the other, requiring correction by the driver.  That’s probably what caught the attention of the cop who was behind them at the time.  Under Lefty’s seat was a pound of the lowest grade of cheap Mexican pot, so when the lights came on it was a special thrill.

Shifter was Lefty’s high school buddy.  He was lean and mean, and could grow a beard years before some of his classmates, the cause of much envy and status among the boys.  They worked together at the smorgasboard restaurant and partied often.  The Chevy was his car, handed down from his big brother.  They had spent all of one night working on it shortly before that trip to Ocean Shores.  They replaced a used clutch disc with a different used clutch disc for some stupid reason.  It didn’t help much that they put it in backwards, either.  They didn’t know any better.  He had to tow it up to the local shop to get it fixed for $20, and for that they stayed up all night and got all dirty.  Good thing they had lots of peed spills.

So the way it started, there was this musician guy, and he had quit his band, but they held on to some of his equipment and promised to pay for it, but never did, and he wanted to repossess it.  A friend of his was an entrepreneurial sort, and he arranged for Shifter and Lefty to accompany him to the band’s house and be the strong-arm goons in case there was any trouble.  There wasn’t, and the payment for their efforts was the bunco Mexican dope, which the musician guy had been burned on during a setup deal in a parking lot on the side of Aurora Avenue North where you pay your money and hope they come back with something and sometimes they do, but it isn’t worth a shit.  They didn’t know any better, so they took it.  It quickly became evident that they were stuck with this stringy bale of raw hemp that smelled bad, and tasted worse than it burned, which it didn’t, much.

Getting rid of this stuff was the problem.  They started in White Center, of course, their home stomping grounds.  In the parking lot of Lou’s or Herfy’s they ran into Pat Goonbart, one of the local potheads, whose claim to fame was that he could roll joints faster than anyone, having practiced to the point where it was one smooth motion, very impressive.  He got stoned a lot for free with that skill of course, which showed he was a pretty sharp guy.  “Hey, Pat”, Lefty yelled out the window. “What’s goin’ on?”  “Not much”, he said, leaning in.  “Hi, Shifter; what are you guys up to?”  “We got a bunch of dope we want to sell”, Lefty replied.  His ears perked up at that.  “Why don’t you climb in the back and take a look?”  “Certainly!”, he said.  “Fuckin’ A!”.  That proved to be a mistake.  Pat was no fool, and he quickly realized what they had.  “This stuff is bunk!” he said.  “Let me outta here.”  So their goose was cooked, since Pat knew everybody and talked to all of them.  They had to get outta town with the dope, find somewhere the local denizens of wouldn’t know them.  Ocean Shores was the place.  Everybody knew it was party central on weekends, even in October.  Yeah, right.  So off they went, figuring to sleep in the car or get a hotel room with all the money they made selling dope to the tourists at $10 a bag.  Sure, Eddie.  They didn’t know any better, and it sounded like a good idea at the time.

When the lights came on Lefty went into flashback mode, to the time when after the community meeting at the drop-in center he noticed that someone had left their keys in their car in the parking lot, so Shifter  snatched them out of the ignition and they came back later and stole the car.  They went for a joyful joy ride until they ran a stop sign on Roxbury at high speed in front of a cop just getting off duty, which in retrospect turned out to be a mistake.  The cop peeled out after them and caught up by the old reservoir, which was surrounded by a thick salal patch in a forest of madrona and hemlock that was the hangout of all the kids in the neighborhood.  As the cop pulled up behind the stalled car, Shifter turned to Lefty and said, “Scoot over next to the door and hold the handle open, but don’t open the door till I say run!”.  Then he rolled down the window as the cop approached.  “You got a license and registration?” asked the fat old officer as he reached the driver’s door.  “Sure”, said Shifter, and then pulled down the visor as if looking for the registration, which wasn’t there.  Then he scooted over a bit and pulled down the other visor, likewise empty.  He scooted over a bit more, opened the glove box door and shouted, “Run!”  Lefty threw the door open and they took off like track stars.  That salal patch had to be 40 feet wide and a good 4 feet deep, and they blew through there like two gazelles beating feet from a hyena.  All the old cop could do was stand there and say bad words out loud.  They stopped to catch their breath on the other side of the patch in the woods, and listened for signs of pursuit.  They knew the patrol cars would be out looking for them, so they had to get through the projects, which were between them and the safety of home base, before he could call out the reserves.

That proved to be a good strategy, as the police naturally assumed it was a couple of bad boys from the projects who did it and concentrated their search in that neighborhood.  They only ran into one prowl car on the way home, cruising down the perimeter road shining his spotlight on all the houses and driveways.  They just had to keep the house itself between them and the spotlight for a bit, then slipped out over the fence in the corner lot and got away clean.  It’s interesting that poor people projects are fenced to keep people in, while rich people projects are fenced to keep them out.

But this time they were far from home in unfamiliar territory, and would have to bullshit their way through it.  Fortunately, they didn’t have any beer with them, and had been smoking only cigarettes on the road, so they got off with a lecture about defective equipment when they said they were headed for Shifter’s uncle’s house in Ocean Shores.

When they got to town they realized they had a problem.  They didn’t know anybody, weren’t old enough to get in the taverns, and there didn’t seem to be any local public events happening that Saturday night where they could mix with our potential clientele.  So they resorted to the desperation move of pulling up alongside some likely customers in a grocery store parking lot and asking out the window, “Hey, do you guys know anyone who wants to buy some pot?”

The first time they tried it actually worked.  Three guys climbed into the back seat and asked to see the merchandise.  They bought one bag for $10 and stole three more from them, assisted by Lefty handing over the entire grocery bag and enabling the old switcheroo con.  I’m sure they had a great laugh over it later, until they smoked the first joint and discovered how badly they had been burned.  By then Shifter and Lefty were already out of town, having realized there was no future in selling bunk dope to strangers in parking lots.  As they sailed down the highway toward home, Shifter and Lefty looked at each other, and, by unspoken agreement, Lefty rolled down the window and threw the remaining bags of worthless dope into the night.  Sic transit Gloria mundus, caveat emptor, and carpe diem.

The Campground in the Little Belt Mountains

There’s a magical feeling I recall when I think back on that trip, the one I got when we were gathered around our campfire in the early evening as a light summer rain fell through the dying embers of the day’s sunshine on our camp in the Little Belt Mountains of Montana on our way to Sturgis in 1995.  We were listening to Craig Chaquico’s “Sacred Ground” from the Harley Davidson Road Songs cd on L.C.’s stereo as the rain fell and dissipated the heat of the day around us.  Something about the light and the music combined to form something special.  Then reality set in.

Our day had begun in the KOA campground in Glacier, Montana.  The five of us had decided to vary the routine that year by taking Highway 2 out of Washington State through Glacier Park, then cruising the back roads of Montana down to rejoin I-90 and the parade of bikers headed for Sturgis by the direct route.  It was our third day out.  It began when my bike wouldn’t start when we were packed and headed to breakfast.  I sent them on ahead while I fiddled with the starter relay and caught up shortly when that worked.  The old girl gave me a scare that day, but never let me down when it counted, then or later.

Breakfast was in a bar, of course.  Everything in Montana happens in a bar, (except for the Tastee-Freeze in Laurel, which serves the best biscuits and gravy in the whole state, but that’s another story), in a bar, or on the road.  After breakfast we saddled up and headed out into the morning, always the best part of a day on the road.  First thing we did was head up the Going-To-The-Sun Road, and we caught perfect weather.  If you’ve ridden that section in bad weather, as I have, it can be nasty, but in the warm sunshine it is impressive.  You can see the handiwork of thousands of farm boys from across the Midwest who the government put to work doing something useful, with lasting results.  Their work is evident in the scattered National Park Lodges, great timbered structures that drop your jaw every time you walk in the door, and hidden in the roads that lead to Sturgis and Mount Rushmore.

  On the way out of the park, we bore right at Browning and took Highway 89 south and east to Livingston.  This is a classic forested beautiful two-lane highway with few people living along it, the type for which Montana is famous.  No speed limits, no traffic, no cops – a biker’s paradise, and, at the end, a good lunch at a nice little bar in downtown Great Falls.  That’s where we made our critical mistake.

Leaving Great Falls on 89 you literally ride off the end of the earth.  There’s a valley that starts outside of town where the cliff wall drops a few miles abruptly, and, as you approach the cliff at 60 miles an hour and wonder where the road is, the downhill right that starts the switchbacks gets close enough to make you hold your breath and cover your brake until you see it.

We rode across that valley until early evening, then pulled into the first roadside campground we found as we left the grasslands and headed into the Little Belts.  Our mistake was, when we left Great Falls we were full of food and beer and just assumed there would be a place to stop for dinner, not a good assumption in the back hills of Montana.  When we arrived at what proved to be our campsite, it was early evening and a squall was forming over the mountains that promised to drive us into our tents for the night.  We held a quick conference by the fire.  Everyone was tired, we were miles from anywhere, and we had no food, and a little water.  I volunteered to run down the road a few miles and look for a truck stop.

As I pulled out of the campsite I remembered to look back and form a mental picture of what the driveway looks like coming back.  Hate to miss it at night in the rain.  Then I booked on down the highway.  That’s a moment when you really get to know your bike.  It’s just the two of you powering into the gloom on a hope and a maybe.  This was before the cell phone era, and if a guy disappeared out here on a blind curve they might never find him.  It’s a time when you feel fully at attention and alive.

About 14 miles down I spotted our salvation:  An obvious roadside store with an old gas pump under the canopy and a general store in one end of a long structure with outbuildings.  There were lots of cars and trucks in the lot. I parked and walked in the door.

I offered the two old ladies behind the counter a heartfelt, “Boy, I sure am glad to find you here, still open!”  They gave me funny looks, and said nothing.  Then I glanced to the side, and realized the long low structure to one side of the store was one big room, connected inside the building.  There were rows of picnic tables arranged inside, and at those picnic tables sat what appeared to be every man, woman and child who lived in them there hills, and they all sat quietly staring at me, not saying a word.  There had to be 50 of them.  They were all white folks, dressed plainly, and it seemed on that quick glance that all the women wore full length skirts.   I had barged in on a town meeting, or a revival, or a church service or something, and it was quickly evident that they did not want me in their midst at all, no how, no way, and I should leave at once.

I turned to the old ladies and said, “We’re camped up the road and we need food.  Is there anything you can sell me?”  “Sorry”, she replied, “we got nothing for you.”  I looked wildly around the room.  There on the bar was a display case with candy bars and potato chips, about 5 of each.  I pointed.  “I’ll take them”.  She rang them up, I said thanks, and out the door I went.

We had M&Ms, both plain and peanut, for dinner that night, along with Doritos for dessert and bottled water to wash it down.  It was a splendid repast.  The next morning we rode by that place on the way out of there, but not a creature was stirring.  We found a little town, White Sulphur Springs, about 18 miles down on the other side of the state forest, and stopped there for breakfast.  It was a lesson learned:  never leave lunch in Montana without knowing where your dinner is going to be, or take it with you.

The rest of that trip was a typical Sturgis experience, noise, heat, smoke, sweat, lines for everything and all prices doubled.  That’s why it took me 5 years to go back, the memories have to fade some.  But that picture, those 50 people sitting in silence staring at me, that is a picture I will always keep in my brain.  What were they doing?  What was their story?  Some things you just never will know.  :-{)}