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rock. My ass was killing me; halfway to Circle I vowed, at last, to replace my saddle at
the next opportunity. And it was ninety degrees by 10:00 a.m.
Having Rich along, cruising up and down Route 13 and stopping at odd points to
achieve different vantages for his pictures, added a strange element to the ride. Overall
through Montana traffic has been light—his passing me a dozen times going one way
or another probably doubled the flow today—and with the exception of the occa-
sional farmer repairing a fence or hewing wheat in a combine, actual people on the
road have been few. Periodically, lazily grazing horses have been noting my progress,
but mostly my company has been entomological. The region had a very wet spring,
and insects are everywhere. For the last three hundred miles, grasshoppers have been
leaping from the roadside and bouncing off my ankles, pinging off my spokes. Black-
flies (I think they're blackflies) and mosquitoes have lain in wait for me to stop for a
swig of Gatorade. Moths and butterflies flutter in the weeds. The sound of millions of
what?—crickets?—has been following me everywhere, a lighthearted white noise that
sounds almost like jingling bells.
I'm stronger than I was back in Oregon, but even so this was the toughest riding day
of the trip, which is now slightly more than a month old and slightly less than fifteen
hundred miles long; the last few miles today the road flattened out and the terrain grew
more forbidding, dry and rocky, a suggestion of the region of badlands that I'll be riding
through soon. I could see the town of Circle in the distance and watched it crawl toward
me, as if it, too, were facing a headwind. Slow motion. Slower. Arrrrgh.
I took my displeasure out on Rich, I'm afraid. I probably should have welcomed the
company; I think that's what he expected. But as we checked in at the Circle motel I was
pissy enough that he left me alone for a couple of hours to go of and photograph the
town on his own.
The good news is that I'm getting in shape; it's a day's ride I doubt I'd have finished
four weeks ago.
This chunk of eastern Montana is as foreign a puzzle piece of the American jigsaw as a
New Yorker can imagine. Let's put aside the fact of the eerie emptiness; I've been riding
through vacant landscapes for almost two weeks now but I haven't felt quite this odd.
And even in this fragmented and hostile political season, let's put aside politics; Montana
is clearly a red state and New York City is the brightest blue, but I haven't made or heard
a single impromptu comment about the president or the Republican candidates prepping
for next year's primaries. For all I know, I've been flamed online by every person I've
met out here, but face-to-face I've met with nothing as much as inquisitiveness (“You're
