Wet roads and wind

The brightest orange

Is the highway median

Laid out on wet pavement

Beneath autumn leaves.

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Clouds of gray drift in

Above still-green birches

Of the bitterroots

To wash away the summer.

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“REG. 3.07”

The sign flashes red and green

Outside Ron’s Gas and Go

As the trucks push on

To Kootenai National Forest

In clouds of dirty mist.

The hours of wet, cold and monotony are fine times for philosophizing and poetic musings. I’m in a better mood when the sun is out and the road is easy, but I can only go so far exulting over beautiful sunrises and pristine landscapes before the writing gets damn boring.

So now that I’m sitting comfortable in a warm, dry place, I’ll go ahead and thank Mother Nature for being such a burr in my ass in the days that I pedaled out of Northwest Montana, across the Idaho panhandle into eastern Washington.

I got to enjoy about 12 miles of steady biking after I left my campsite north of Missoula before the brutal wind set in. It was like someone had put superglue on my tires. I could crank for all I was worth and go maybe a mile an hour faster.

Highway 200 follows the wide and blue waters of the Clark Fork through pastureland and stands of conifers. The wind kicked up whitecaps on the river, meeting the rain-swollen flow head-on. Unfortunately, the thousands of cubic feet of flowing water were much better equipped to resist the blustery air than I was.

I hadn’t packed enough water. The Clark Fork was a tempting refill option, but I was reluctant given the number of farms in the area. Eventually, I pulled up at a farm stand that was closing down for the season.

I asked a guy loading stuff into his pickup if he had a hose out back.

“There’s a spring down the road,” he told me. “It’s the best water in the world.”

The water ran out from a faucet in a rock wall beside the tracks.

A BNSF train thundered by as I filled my bottles. I took a drink. Indeed, the water was pure, almost sweet.

A truck pulled up with a bunch of empty jugs. I got moving again.

The wind let up a bit by the afternoon, allowing me to finish the day with about 75 miles of progress. I did an additional four miles of pedaling to get to my campsite, located along a tributary. A sign said that there was potential chemical contamination in the water, so I skipped the boiled pasta dinner I’d planned for myself.

I was the only person in camp excepting for an RV parked at the other end.

That changed around 8 p.m. at night when an SUV pulled up about 100 feet from my tent.

I peered out and saw the guy in the cab. A light was on, like he was reading something. I was a little annoyed, but figured he’d drive off soon enough. I made note of my bear spray nearby. If he was thinking about doing a little axe murdering he’d get a face-full of capsaicin. 

I felt a certain reluctance to go to sleep with the truck out there and its little light. Finally, I decided I had to see what was up. I walked over and waved through the window. The guy waved back.

I introduced myself and asked how he was doing.

He was out of the house because he’d been in an argument with his girlfriend and didn’t feel like staying at her place. The argument had been going for a couple days, he said, and he’d been parking in the same spot where my I’d set up the tent.

We talked for a while about different parts of the west where we had traveled. It turned out that he had rafted the same section of the Green River that I had guided that summer.

I was reasonably convinced that he was not the axe murdering type and went back to the tent.

There was a cold drizzle the next morning. On the way back from the campground’s outhouse, I saw the guy walking outside with a handgun holstered at his belt (for the bears, he said.)

I started down the road again with numb fingers. Double dump trucks and logging rigs flew by, kicking trails of spray up off the pavement. The Clark Fork was a dead fish gray under the rain-swollen sky.

I crossed into Idaho for the third time on the trip and kept going to the massive Lake Pend Oreille, whose shoreline I’d be following for almost a day.

The map showed me a campground that was about a mile and a half out on a peninsula. When I got there, I found that it had just closed for the summer. I ended up camping on some public land on a wooded hill across the street.

I went into Sandpoint the next day, a city that my Rand McNally atlas identified as the most beautiful small town in the U.S. Much of the scenery, such as views across the lake, was shrouded in the fog. Traffic was busy along the narrow road and made for a harrowing pedaling until I got to the bike paths.

I splurged on some hash browns and hot coffee in town then peddled across the lake on a two-mile long highway bridge. When I got to the other side, I realized I’d been going the wrong way. Rather than face a stiff headwind, I decided to go on the south side of the lake and rejoin my course near the Washington border.

One disadvantage of this plan was that the south side of the lake turned out to be relentlessly hilly. I was exhausted by the time that I got back on course.

Finally, I got back on the main road and crossed the border to Washington. The area was wooded and it was easy to find a tent stop. It would only be a couple days until I got to visit friends in Wenatchee and Seattle. Now that I was out of the mountain states, I figured there would be easier going and looked forward to some more leisurely days ahead. I soon found out that Washington would have plenty of challenges of its own to throw at me.