Travel Reference
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He'd had a nightmarish few years, had lost his job at Canon, a company he'd started
working for in the 1970s, had seen his marriage disintegrate, had moved out of his house
and into an apartment in a complex more suited to college students than a middle-aged
businessman. At least his kids enjoyed the place; they liked visiting, swimming in the
pool, and playing in the game room. That was cheering for him.
Diagnosed a year ago, he had an operation last fall to remove his bladder; the initial
tests afterward were promising, but then he stopped going to the doctor, even after he
started experiencing pain in his gut in the early spring. He thought he had hemorrhoids;
that was his unlikely story, at any rate.
Billy's sister, Margie, called me with the news this afternoon. I'd just made it here after
a brisk fifty-five-mile ride from Umatilla, Oregon, following the Columbia until it turned
north and, somewhat ruefully, waving it good-bye and continuing east into the dusty
onion fields of Washington State toward Walla Walla.
Brisk? Ha! It was hot, and my ass hurt—I'm beginning to worry that I'm riding the
wrong saddle—but the route was not especially challenging, the wind was well behaved,
and my legs are slowly growing into the habit of pedaling beyond their initial weari-
ness. I arrived about 1:00 p.m., ate lunch, drank a couple of beers, and heard about Billy
shortly after I checked into the local Best Western.
That's where I am now. I was planning on writing about the last couple of days and
I think I will, at least for a while, because I can't bear to think about what I'm thinking
about. So . . .
Umatilla was appealingly grim, a sunbaked and unattractive place that for years has been
known mostly as the home of a chemical weapons storage facility. The only place I found
to eat was a strip club on a night the strippers were off. Still, I enjoy feeling adrift in
America, and Umatilla is that kind of place, where if someone from my life were look-
ing for me they'd never think—or want—to look. In fact, I'd been proud to arrive there,
because the ride from Biggs Junction was more than eighty miles, eighty of the most re-
mote miles I've ever ridden, actually. You cross the Sam Hill Memorial Bridge from Biggs
over the Columbia and climb a long, spirit-breaking hill, at the top of which there's one
sign that welcomes you to Washington and another, a little ways down Highway 14, that
says there are no services for the next sixty-two miles. I was thrilled by the name of the
bridge because I thought it was a bit of local humor, taken from the euphemism for hell,
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