Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
One of the things that makes me feel as though this bike ride was like my life is that it
has been long enough in both time and distance that I can't remember everything about
it. (One of the things that makes me feel as though it isn't like my life is that it'll be
over tomorrow. But that's only marginally pertinent.) Scenes from the West keep running
through my head, but I have to remind myself again and again that these were my ex-
periences, that I'm not remembering photographs or a movie, and that indeed the twist-
ing path up the Columbia River gorge, the glorious ascent to—and descent from—Logan
Pass, the passage through vast sunflower fields in North Dakota, and the fog-shrouded
ride past small-town Paul Bunyan statues in northern Minnesota are part of the same
path that I'm still tracing in the direction of home.
Details, for example, from my several days' ride through the Montana Hi-Line are
hazy, the towns I stopped in mixed up in my head. Was that meal in Chester or Malta?
The picture I took of the silos and the passing freight train—was that before or after I
