Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
That's the image I conjured up about an hour or so beyond Browning when I en-
countered a cyclist going the other way. He stopped only briefly to say hello because,
he said, he intended to make it to Glacier Park that night, sixty miles or so from where
we were, and he was bravely contending with a wind that was clearly more problematic
for him than for me. As I watched him pedal off, he seemed to be working much harder
than I had been and making slower progress—this was when the musical theme for the
wicked witch passed through my head—and I didn't know whether to pity him for the
miserable afternoon he was looking at or admire him for having made it this far across
the plains already. I didn't know where he had started, but given where we were stand-
ing it had to be a long ways away. In any case, I was glad not to be in his toe clips.
From Browning I progressed through the empty landscape for thirty-five or forty
miles, accommodating myself to a road I'll be living on, perhaps, for weeks. I know I've
described it as a tabletop, and taking it in as a panorama that's the impression you get,
but it isn't exactly flat. Rather, like the ocean, over the long haul it's vast and uninter-
rupted but full of swells, the sorts of gradual inclines and swoops that only cyclists and
sailors notice, that don't make you strain but make you work. (Enjoying the seagoing
metaphor, I entertained myself—please forgive the self-aggrandizement—by comparing
myself to Columbus; even though I'm heading in the opposite direction over dry land
and knowing that civilization actually exists out there, it's also true that for who knows
how long I'm not going to see anything appreciably different in front of me than I see
right now.)
On my 1993 ride, I was farther south—traversing a hillier, more varied part of
Montana, between Livingston and Billings and down through Little Big Horn, followed
by a dip into northern Wyoming—and never had a stretch like this, facing days on end
of prairie riding, chasing an ever-retreating horizon. The closest I came were the two
days it took to cross the bleached ranchland of eastern South Dakota, from Pierre to
Grand Forks, on the Minnesota border. Tom Scribner had warned me that the landscape
of the Montana plains would be maddening, that after not too long, twenty or thirty
miles, I'd begin to hunger for something new to look at or a different set of conditions
to ride in and to despair that such a thing was so far off. About halfway to Cut Bank I
discovered he was right. It isn't boredom, exactly, but a blurring of focus.
The pedaling you do when the terrain changes underneath you is natural as a heart-
beat; you do it without thinking. But when the road and roadside go by beneath you and
beside you with mile-after-mile uniformity you grow self-conscious, and I began watch-
ing my knees pumping up and down and counting my pedal strokes. How far do I get
in a hundred revolutions? How many strokes to a mile? How many until I let myself rest
and ease the perpetual soreness in my tush? This is a way of passing time, of course, of
