Day 70: Clarkston to Dayton (74 miles)

8/04

Israel Golden
Aug 9, 2017 · 4 min read

My alarm clock split the cool air of the morning at 4 am. It was still dark. It was still cool. Today we would get just a little further out of the desert.

At around 4:15 I was out of the treehouse and getting my bicycle ready to go. I said to Lila in my kindest morning voice “hey Lila, it’s time to get up.”

“Mrrraaa,” she said and then rustled a little bit. This is a typical morning-Lila response. Morning-Lila is an altogether different Lila than the cheery, good spirited woman you are all familiar with. Morning-Lila is something to treat with adequate respect and fear, like a surly buffalo. I figured if she wasn’t out of her tent in 15 I’d bother her again.

By 5:15 she was mostly packed up. We ate breakfast and we’re just about to roll out around 5:30 when we noticed that I had one flat tire and Lila had two.

We inspected them and found that our tires were riddled with goat heads. Goat heads are basically gigantic sandspurs that cut through tires like a hot knife. We spent the better part of an hour picking them out of the tires and changing out tubes. Every minute spent picking out the thorns the giant ball of fire rose higher into the sky.

I will remind the reader that I had just bought Lila two new tubes. After having them stolen in Kamiah, she had got to have the security of spare tubes for maybe 12 hours before she was back to none. Unfortunately, if we were going to beat the heat, and, more importantly, finally leave Clarkston, we couldn’t wait for the bike shop to open. We left at 6:30 into the warming, but still cool, morning.

The first few miles out of Clarkston were remarkably flat. We continued along the river until about 20 miles in where we encountered our first pass of the day. My legs were fresh and the sun hadn’t heated things up too much so I climbed the 1000 or so feet with relative ease.

As I’ve mentioned before Lila and I seem to have different strengths when it comes to cycling. She can whoop me in a headwind but I almost always pass her going uphill. As such, when I got to the top it took her about 15 minutes to join me.

In that time I met another bicycle tourist also on top of the pass. He was probably 65 but looked more like 72. He was missing one arm and within 5 minutes of meeting me told me that he had been arrested for aggravated assault, kidnapping, and luring children.

I would have left but I still needed to wait for Lila. Eventually she came up the pass and he gave the typically creepy and expected response to her presence: “you didn’t tell me you had a pretty lady with you! So hot!”

Lila then took a good 5 minutes to fill up her water, leaving me to shoot the shit with this wildman. I learned that he was planning to camp exactly where we were that night (great). Once she was done we took off down the hill, hoping to outpace him.

Almost immediately after the pass, during the descent, the wind picked up. It blew us back so hard that it was an effort to pedal downhill. The hot headwind would remain this ferocious for the remaining ~50 miles of the day.

As I fought in the desert heat and wind to go a meager 7 miles per hour I fantasizes about throwing my bicycle into the bed of each passing truck. I would scan the empty bottles on the side of the road hoping that just one of those Coors Light cans would be full, that just one of those Gatorade bottles wasn’t full of chewing tobacco, that just one of those water bottles wasn’t full of trucker piss.

For those of you who drive and have made a habit of reading this blog, I have a request. If you see a cyclist on the road, stop and give it some water or soda or something. We definitely suffered that day and a well placed can of coke would have made all the difference in the world. That coke never came.

While climbing the second and final pass of the day we met another bicycle tourist. This man was actually from Durham and hadn’t been convicted of kidnapping (score!). We decided to split the cost of a tentsite at the Lewis and Clark Trail Park a few miles west of Dayton.

When we got to the park Lila and I ate our chef Boyardee lasagna (which Lila now affectionately refers to simply as Chef). I made a few phone calls, read my book, drank about 4 liters of water and went to bed. Thankfully the one armed man never arrived. I hope he’s okay but I am happy that I could leave that memory back by Clarkston.

    Israel Golden

    Written by

    Bicycling, Music, Science

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