Two Wheels on my Wagon

by Paul Howard

  If the rumoured magnificence of the mountains could not be appreciated, at least there was beauty closer to hand. The forest might have seemed superficially homogenous, but clearly there was sufficient variety of habitat to accommodate a wealth of butterflies and myriad other flying insects, mercifully few of which were mosquitoes. Each fleeting glimpse of colour inspired hope of recognition, but my fluttering friends remained steadfastly beyond the limited scope of my powers of identification.

  I had more success with flowering plants. One flower in particular seemed to thrive in the otherwise unpromising shade of the forest floor. Having long had a love–hate relationship with cultivated lupins – their beauty not always outweighing the battle to keep the slugs and snails off them – it was something of a surprise to see great clumps of their wild cousins doing quite well enough without any human help. They were smaller and finer than those in the garden at home, and there was a greater number of flowering stems to each plant, sometimes a dozen or more. There was also no variety in flower colour, every plant the same lavender blue haze. But they were unmistakably lupins and their delicate charm was quite a tonic in such an ostentatiously rugged environment.

  Finally, after nearly 50 miles of trees, I emerged onto the main valley road. It was almost as bereft of traffic as it had been five hours earlier in Swan Lake. A couple of miles further and I arrived at Holland Lodge, where I had initially intended to spend the previous night. A sign on a barn before the main lodge proudly proclaimed that it was a ‘semi-dude ranch’, dude-ranching being the unique brand of cowboy-themed hospitality offered by working ranches to soft easterners – dudes – in search of a ‘genuine’ western experience. ‘Horses, hats and hospitality’ was the aphorism of the Dude Ranchers’ Association. Maybe a semi-dude ranch skipped the hats. Or maybe you had to already have lost some of your ‘dude-ness’ to be able to cope with the rigours of the horses and hospitality on offer, I thought, temporarily concerned about what I might be letting myself in for.

  I need not have worried. The harsh realities of cowboy life were clearly not the lodge’s speciality; demonstrating how refined a log cabin could be was the aim, even if the presence of large, stuffed animal heads on the walls might have left some wincing at such a notion of refinement. It was 11 a.m., and the kitchen didn’t open for another hour. Nevertheless, the lodge owners lived up to the hospitality part of the Dude Ranchers’ Association motto and rustled up crisps, salad and a toasted ham and cheese sandwich. They didn’t even blink when I requested the same again. As I ate, I drank in the panorama across the still lake over the surrounding mountains. It was all the more impressive for its rarity. Two large, black and white swallow-tailed butterflies amused themselves in a nearby lilac tree, oblivious to the persistent chill of an overcast day.

  By noon I was ready to resume my journey, although the prospect of abandoning the comfort of the lodge and its open vistas for another 30 miles of trees held only limited appeal. As promised by the map, the eminently cycleable forest road soon turned into a much rougher trail. Downed trees and grassed-over tracks slowed progress noticeably. Navigation became something of a vague concept as both the official route and unofficial alternatives seemed equally unfeasible. After several anxious moments I emerged surprised and surprisingly unscathed onto another gravel road, blinking like a rabbit released from a bag. I felt like I had won the lottery, and scampered off down the road lest I be recaptured.

  Next on the agenda was the day’s only noteworthy ascent. I had borrowed the phone at Holland Lodge to call home, and had been told, among other things, of messages from racers further along the trail warning how tough certain sections were.

  ‘They said Richmond Pass, or something like that, was particularly tough, all covered in mud and snow and fallen trees,’ Catherine had advised.

  As the obstacle to which she referred meant nothing to me, I reassured her that I’d look it up on the map that night so as to be better prepared. Blinded by the obvious, I was incapable of making the link between the Richmond Pass of my phone conversation and the Richmond Peak I was about to ascend. Blissfully ignorant, therefore, of my impending tribulations, and still fuelled by my comfortable lunch, I waved heartily at two gun-toting quad bikers. They didn’t flinch, continuing instead to chew the cud in a bovine stupor.

  The trail once more vanished into the heart of the surrounding darkness. My enthusiasm didn’t last long. At first, the simple effort required to ensure forward momentum on a rough, relentless incline sufficed to keep my predicament to the back of my mind. When the track eventually became too rough to pedal, however, the folly of disappearing into the undergrowth, towing what had effectively become a giant anchor behind me as I squirmed my way past adolescent Christmas trees, assumed greater prominence (I knew the trees were adolescent because of the way they congregated like feckless youths on street corners to intimidate passers-by, every now and then plucking up the courage for a sly physical assault – a trip, maybe, or an unexpected grab of an arm). The fact that the roughness of the terrain had miniaturised my assailants compared to the lofty jailers of the morning, and that I now had breathtaking views to at least one side, was little more than an ironic consolation. A golden eagle soared effortlessly, mockingly, above me, confirming the scale of the cliffs I could see across the valley.

  Worse than the trees, though, were the bears. Not that there were any, as far as I could tell. The problem was that I couldn’t tell very far at all. In places, visibility ahead was reduced to a few yards. I became convinced I was about to grope my way straight into the arms of a welcoming grizzly. My frazzled, frantic efforts to surmount the physical obstacles of mud and snow and fallen trees betrayed, not inner tranquillity, but equally frazzled and frantic psychological efforts to surmount the demons of the mind. At least I would be mauled to death in an area of great beauty, I reasoned.

  The summit came slowly, after maybe an hour, but when it arrived it had the decency to be sufficiently denuded of trees to allow a moment’s contemplation. I was astride a saddle between two great mountain arenas, the one through which I had just laboured aptly called Grizzly Basin. On both sides, mountains and valleys stretched away to infinity. It was terrifying. It was magnificent. Like Nina Simone, I sang just to know I was alive. More significantly, I sang to let the bears know I enjoyed being alive.

  The descent of the south side of the peak was more open, but fear of the unknown was soon replaced with fear of the all-too-real. What passed for the trail traversed a precipitous hillside, where a slippery emulsion of snow and mud made lateral progress all but impossible. I became inordinately and hypocritically grateful for my bicycle-anchor. Eventually, I reached safer ground and, after another mile or so of bushwhacking, a forest road. It had taken nearly four hours to cover less than 30 miles.

  After consulting the map I concluded that a similar distance remained to be covered if I wanted to reach my intended destination of Ovando.

  ‘Camping is allowed on the museum lawn, contact Barb McNally’, the map notes advised.

  I hadn’t contacted Barb to ascertain whether she (in the case of it being ‘Barb’ as in Barbara) or he (in the case of ‘Barb’ as in a localised phonetic spelling of Bob) had any space, but it sounded perfect. Besides, competition for pitches didn’t seem likely to be fierce. Apart from at Holland Lodge, I had seen no one all day.

  The early start meant time was still on my side but, after 11 hours of riding, I was beginning to flag. Fortunately, the cycling was now much smoother. What’s more, although I was still riding through mile after mile of forest, the nature of the tree cover had changed definitively since crossing the watershed on Richmond Peak. The canopy was less dense and the trees had a far greater respect for the personal space of their neighbours.

  By the time I was enjoying the day’s last descent, the countryside had become, to my starved imagination, almost Mediterranean. The grey skies of earlier in the day had dissipated and I was now bathed in early evening sun. The gentle warmth was al
l-enveloping. Wild lupins had been superseded by a variety of wild sunflower.

  I was transported back to an earlier life, cycling through scented pine groves in southern France. I pictured myself descending to a French port, Cassis perhaps. It wouldn’t be long before I would be enjoying moules frites and a glass of wine . . .

  Not surprisingly, Ovando came as something of a shock. In fact, I was jolted from my reverie by the traffic on the main road on the edge of town; I had to stop for a lorry to pass by before the more habitual emptiness returned. Then I encountered the Ovando town sign, an accurate portent of what lay ahead.

  ‘Town of Ovando, MT. Jewel of the Blackfoot Valley. Pop: About 50. Elev: 4,100. Dogs: Over 100.’

  Two hundred yards further on and I was in the town itself. Rather than having been transported to a different continent, I had been transported back in time. I was now in the early twentieth century, around the time when one of the West’s finest chroniclers, Norman Maclean, had been raised in this same valley and had lived the life he would later recount in book and film as A River Runs Through It.

  So convincing was the scene that it could have been Maclean and his pals, or his brother Paul, standing outside the timber barn by which I stopped. Instead, it was three members of the volunteer fire department preparing for their annual test of fitness.

  ‘What does that involve?’ I asked, trying to reconcile the scene before me – three ever-so-relaxed but not-quite-so-trim middle-aged men – with what I anticipated to be a rigorous challenge.

  The reason for their confidence soon became clear.

  ‘We’ve got 3 pounds of weights on our belts and we have to walk 3 miles in 45 minutes,’ they smiled as they ambled off.

  That left Skip, Mayor of Ovando. His name and stature were immediately apparent, not thanks to any mayoral bearing on his part but to the crumpled, pencil-written note identifying him as such tucked in the band of his equally crumpled straw hat. I hoped such exalted company would be able to resolve the conundrum of where to stay. The lawn outside the museum had turned out to be little more than 10 foot by 20 foot of wispy grass in the middle of a dusty square (though the teepee opposite did suggest itself as a last resort). Any visiting tent also had to share the limited space with three trees, a flag pole, a bench, four boulders and half a set of wagon wheels. Of greater concern, Barb the proprietor – whether he or she Skip never did reveal – was as absent as the facilities I had associated with such an idyllic-sounding campsite. Having coped with 13 hours of cycling and 100 years of time travel, I decided I was in the mood for a smattering of luxury.

  As hoped, Skip indeed came to the rescue, in spite of my being able to decipher only half of the words he spoke. The gist of his proposed solution was for me to knock on the door of a house a few yards away. I duly complied, and a beaming face soon appeared.

  ‘Hi, I’m Nord – N-O-R-D,’ said the owner of the face, pumping my hand energetically.

  I explained my predicament.

  ‘Well, I’ll just open up the store and the guest house and you can make yourself at home.’

  We returned past the camping lawn to the timber building of the Blackfoot Inn and Commercial Company where N-O-R-D was as good as his word.

  ‘There’s rooms upstairs but I can open the store too if you need any provisions.’

  I certainly did, having virtually run out of cycling food and having nothing for tomorrow’s breakfast. While I browsed, N-O-R-D told me that I wasn’t the first cyclist to stop by. Alan and John had stayed the night two days previously, with the Petervarys’ ‘Love Shack’ tandem also having called in.

  ‘Seen any bears?’ asked N-O-R-D.

  ‘Just one.’

  N-O-R-D sounded disappointed.

  ‘One of the riders had seen 13 by the time he got here. And a mountain lion just as he was coming into town.’

  My fear of bears, whether real or perceived (the bears, that is, not the fear – that was very real), had been so all-consuming that I had neglected to worry about mountain lions. This was clearly an error.

  ‘How big is a mountain lion?’ I asked, trying to gauge the prominence to give them in my informal animal-anxiety ranking.

  ‘Oh, plenty big enough,’ said N-O-R-D, pointing to a skin on the wall of the stairwell. It was 5 foot long, excluding the tail. I didn’t fancy trying to grapple with it, even if it was only a rug. Nevertheless, it was significantly smaller than the grizzly skin next to it that had belonged to an animal shot in 1948.

  After settling in, I followed N-O-R-D’s advice to head another 200 yards to the other edge of town for dinner at Trixie’s (truth be told, competition was strictly limited). It had previously occupied centre stage in the middle of the town, but the coming of the state highway had inspired a move to catch the trade from passing motorists. As a result, the original Trixie’s had become the museum, while the restaurant itself was now housed in a former barracks imported from Helena. The eponymous founder had apparently been a daredevil horsewoman famous for her bareback tricks (the horse was bareback, that is, not the rider – had it been the other way round her fame might have been even more widespread).

  The atmosphere was convivial. I sat at the bar and uncomprehendingly watched baseball on the TV. A few locals played pool while some more itinerant guests quietly ate their burgers to a country soundtrack.

  The lady behind the bar took my order. Having now seen all that Ovando had to offer, I asked her what it was about the town that justified a museum.

  ‘Not much,’ she replied. ‘It just tells you about the history, the logging and ranching, that sort of thing. There are a lot of old pictures.’

  It used to be quite a bit bigger, she continued, pointing out that at Ovando’s height there had been more than 200 inhabitants, before adding, a touch wistfully: ‘And we had our own dance hall. They also thought about bringing the railroad through the valley but then they decided against it.’

  My history lesson was disturbed by the arrival of another visitor to the bar who started talking embarrassingly at cross-purposes with a much younger female acquaintance about his relationship concerns. I devoured my excellent burger listening intently but discreetly to this real-life soap opera. Any lingering yearning for moules frites and the Mediterranean had by now been completely dispelled.

  CHAPTER 10

  THREE KINDS OF PSYCHOPATH

  DAY 7

  Leaving Ovando the next morning was a chore. It was another frigid, pre-dawn start. My gloves had proved themselves to be singularly inadequate for sub-zero temperatures, and holding onto the handlebars with unfeeling hands took a conscious effort. The air was dead still, but the unavoidable wind chill generated by riding at 15 mph froze my gritted teeth into a malevolent grin. As I rode across the broad valley bottom, through pockets of icy patches, I disturbed a herd of female whitetail deer. They cantered away across the surrounding farmland, and I lamented my departure. I would gladly have swapped yesterday’s time travel for the ability to beam up my family to share the experience of such a delightful relic from a different age. The town sign had been right: it was genuinely a ‘Jewel of the Blackfoot Valley’.

  The farmland came to an end after an hour, but not before I had to answer a call of nature. Up to this point in the ride, the need for discretion had not been great and cover had been readily available. Now, in the middle of a wide, open valley, I was confounded by not only a complete absence of trees but also a passing farm truck that materialised from nowhere just after I had concluded I was safe to proceed. The look on the driver’s face was as cold as the morning.

  The wooded climb of Huckleberry Pass at last began to provide an antidote to the chill. The forest retained the appealing, open character of yesterday evening. There was none of the accompanying Mediterranean warmth, however; I was heading east, and the sun was yet to rise over the crest of the pass. Nothing stirred. The only sound came from my wheels as they crunched over the gravel.

  I worked my way up to a small tarn in which
the surrounding trees were perfectly mirrored. Then came the top of the pass, a narrow defile between the rocky peaks to either side. I paused to take in the altered view. Lower-lying ground had now taken the upper hand in its tussle with the mountains. Rather than the topography being dominated by endless mountain ranges and the corresponding valleys in between, such mountains as there were now stood like islands in a patchwork sea. Big, rocky islands, it should be emphasised, and there were still plenty of them, but they were no longer linked together in the succession of ridges that had dominated the scenery since Banff.

  The descent to Lincoln was straightforward, and I was looking forward to a second breakfast in what I had anticipated would be a charming town of a reasonable size and with plenty of services. The reality was rather different. For a start, Lincoln had a rather dubious claim to fame, having been the home of Theodore Kaczynski, the psychopathic Unabomber, who lived alone in a nearby cabin without electricity or running water. It was an uncomfortable irony that I was now appreciating the same wilderness in which he had once lived and the protection of which from industrialisation had inspired him to three murders through his near twenty-year campaign of letter bombs.