T+16: Creep Up, Zoom Down

CASTLE ROCK, WA, Mile 132:  We set a new record today:  33 miles.  We are in a fancy-schmantzy RV park, where in a few moments we will go sit in the hot tub to massage our sore and tired muscles.  Wes’ back has been talking to him for a couple of days, and my gluteus extra-maximus runs in and out of spasm.



When we left Portland, we wanted to go to the coast, to begin on the actual Pacific, so we followed the Columbia down the Oregon side.  Just outside of a little town called Rainier, we encountered our first big hill.  The road left the lovely cool confines of the river, and climbed up on the coastal range.  In the space of a few miles, we had an elevation change of more than 725 feet.  This required something we have done a lot of in the past few days---getting off the bike and pushing it up the hills. 

The Columbia Valley from a Rainier Ridge overlook

This was so steep and so long, I resorted to my tried and true, “I can get through anything strategy.”   100 steps…stop and breathe…100 more steps… stop and breathe again.  There were numerous turnouts where we marveled over the beautiful Columbia River valley.  I took a great panorama photo with a program on my phone.

We walked and pushed and sweated up this big hill, watching trucks gear down and down as they too struggled up the top.  At the very top, we cruised for a very little while before we saw signs warning us “6% grade next 2.5 miles, trucks use lower gear.”  

Zooming down a mountain on a bike on this grade is both exciting and dangerous.  Focus is essential, because the littlest piece of gravel can upend you, and flying off your bike at 30 miles an hour is a particularly bad idea.   I roar along, barely aware of the passing scenery, braking just enough maintain control of my bike.  After about a mile, my hands are completely numb from the vibrations of my front wheel.

There’s another warning about the grade: “6% grade-- 1.5 miles.”  I keep my wits about me and hope Wes is making it down ok.  I dare not look back or even to the side on this descent.  When I make it to the bottom, the first thing I see is a coffee house called Latte Da and roll in there as smooth as can be.   Wes comes charging right after.  We didn’t need to exchange a word to know that this was our next stop. 

We are utterly exhilarated, and perfectly exhausted. We take our coffees to the edge of Klatskanie Creek, look at the dairy cows, listen to the trilling birds, and feel pretty darn good about ourselves.  We are up the ridge from the Columbia Valley, and this has a remote mountain town feel to it, though it is 72 miles (by our bikes) from Portland.

We decide to get a motel room because we and all of our clothes stink.   We rent a room at the Northwoods Inn  from an East Indian woman whose kids are raising hell in the next room and keep distracting her.  A big family of Latinos, presumably Mexican by their Spanish dialect, are cleaning and painting the building, which looks not all mountain town, but somehow just right in mango and tangerine. 

The room has a microwave and refrigerator, so we decide to finally make the rice I have been carrying since Portland.  We walk all around the town and see that there are many empty buildings and closed businesses.  We have seen this pattern throughout the area: a side by side mix of cute, quaint, and yuppified right next to the vestiges of what looks like a more working class and resource based economy. 

We see it in the people too.  American made pick-up trucks, some of them quite old, being driven by what Wes would call “Red-neck hippies” are interspersed with many Toyota sedans, especially Priuses, driven by people who make us feel fat and unfashionable.   In this neck of the woods, it seems like working people are lot poorer than they used to be and middle class folks are just holding on.

We frequent a few dive bars and talk to the locals. At the Pastime Bar, established 1928, decorated with tens of deer, elk, and caribou racks, in Castle Rock, the cook confirms what we have been seeing.  The timber industry went through a near death experience after 2008 meltdown, and even now most of the timber is being sent overseas, loaded on giant barges as raw logs and shipped to China and Japan to process into lumber.    A long haired fellow laments, “I don’t know why we can’t do that millin’ here, ‘sted of shippin’ it over there.”   The accent here has long, soft vowels, but with very strong “r’s”  “Over there” is rendered “ovr eyar”

This is some amazing tree country.  I have never seen such huge cedars.  Right now, I am sitting under some kind of straight trunk spruce that must be 80 feet tall, even if it is only 2 feet around.  We constantly look at the trees.  Michigan is good tree country; we always remark how small the trees look when we start to get into western Iowa or western Minnesota.  But this stretch of the Columbia is full of giant Douglas firs, and enormous white (like) pines.  We know this is mostly second, or perhaps third growth timber, but it looks pretty vibrant from our limited bike view.

This is also really fun and great bird watching.  There are lots of osprey all along the river.   They are great talkers, and will sit high on a tree, whistling and calling like a song bird, before jumping to soar along the river, then dive falcon-like, into the water to catch a fish.

There are also many bald eagles, and huge, ancient nests along the river.  We hear lots of singers, recognize a few species like gold finch, swallows, and larks.  There are many more we don’t.  I wish I had loaded my on-line bird book on my computer before I left

I note that many of the flowers I am trying to grow in my yard in Detroit are wild flowers here.  The stands of sweet peas bring vibrant pinks and reds to road-side culverts.  There are coral bells, and wild raspberries, and astilbe bushes.  (Who knew astilbes could even be bushes?)  The hydrangea, rhododendron, and holly are epic.   Roses thrive here.

We see few mammals.  In the 132 miles we have covered since we began, we have seen two deer, a few road kill raccoons, but no squirrels, no rabbits, no chipmunks—even in campgrounds where there is plenty of food for scavenging rodents.   We see lots of very small dogs and few horses.  This is quite curious to us.

When we get to the estuary of the Columbia, it was great to take the ferry to Puget Island, then cross the high and windy iron bridge over the main channel of the big river.  Wes asks, “Wasn’t the river going backwards?”  I ask at the next diner, if the river is subject to tides and am surprised to hear that the tides are over 15 feet at this juncture. Cathlamet is the furthest west we go, just across the channel and a bit upstream from Astoria.  We can smell the sea breeze and the talk in these towns is all about fish, not logs.

All along this route back from the sea, we see lots of weekend fishers and hear lots of talk about the steelhead salmon run that isn’t.  In the papers, there are notices that the sockeye salmon fishing is reduced to two days a week within a greatly reduced season.  None of this is good news for the earth or the people who depend upon the fish.

Wes is much better at engaging strangers in conversations than I am.  He has had some doozies-- with Daryl Carson, a direct descendent of Kit Carson, who has spent his life in group homes, but has some sort of photographic memory.   Wes also engaged a grump of a fellow named Larry, who when we told him we liked his little town, told us that he didn’t like living there.  The people were insular and wouldn’t know a good idea if it bit them on the leg.  He’s lived there close to 30 years and they still haven’t accepted him.  This leaves us speechless and mumbling how everyone has been kind to us.  There are more, but I will let Wes tell the tales in a “guest post.”

Right now, the hot tub is calling and the mosquitos are starting to swarm.  The last two days of pushing our bikes up steep hills (none of them as bad as that first one) and screaming down the other side is ready to be bubbled off in a nice warm tub.  I can hardly wait.

ps. Went to the hot tub and it was out of order.  Sigh.