Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ing sense of wilderness—deep pine forest with sun dappling the floor; the road runs
alongside the Kootenai and at one point crosses a wild tributary, the Yaak. (Great names,
right?) As I passed from Idaho into Montana, Pacific Time changed to Mountain Time,
a significant psychological boost. Jan and I were now only eight hours apart instead of
nine.
Even so, that night I stayed in a hunting cabin in Troy and felt the first tweaks of the
unease I'm feeling now. Something about the size and scope of things here, the depth
of the forests, the height of the trees, the furious onrush of the rivers, and, of course,
the gigantic mountains that are waiting for me in a matter of days. The Columbia River
gorge and the wheat fields of the Palouse were daunting in their way, but somehow their
magnitude and beauty seemed manageable, and as I trudged through them and put more
miles behind me, and my strength improved and I grew more confident in my physical
ability, I began to feel larger in relation to my surroundings.
The last few days I've been shrinking again.
The ride yesterday was on the short side, less than fifty miles. I started early, along Route
2, and was shaken a bit by a pair of trucks careening around a downhill corner from
behind me. Before the morning chill had lifted I passed a road sign beckoning me to a
parking lot at the head of a scenic hiking path: this way to the swinging bridge. I parked
my bike and locked it and walked off into the woods.
The trail is about half a mile. You go over railroad tracks on an enclosed path and
then descend into deep woods, where with each step the sun seems to recede a bit and
the temperature clicks downward. I was wearing my bike shoes with the pegs that clip
into the pedals fixed in the center of the soles, so walking was a little unwieldy. But I
kept going and finally came upon the bridge, a wood-planked footpath with cable-strung
fencing along the sides that was built during the Depression by the Civilian Conserva-
tion Corps (it's been reinforced since then) for use by miners. The river is, I don't know,
maybe a hundred feet wide there, and the bridge does swing, creaking in the wind even
with no one on it, twenty or thirty feet above the water.
It's intensely beautiful, and the view up the Kootenai River gorge includes a thirty-
foot falls. I didn't cross, I made it maybe two steps onto the bridge before chickening
out. I'm not so great with heights to begin with, and with my fortitude at a low ebb
and declining, I decided to marshal whatever I had left for bike riding. The whole scene
pleased my literary self if not my actual one; the swinging bridge is a hell of a metaphor,
a dangerous, rickety path from one safe haven to another, and you have to overcome
your trepidation to make progress, to succeed, to get to the other side. In general, cyc-
