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Just a little winded... 2AM, and the adrenaline is still pumping over the last-second Arsenal win over Fulham. If this be escapism, I'll concede. More tragic news... heard on a distant television in the bowels of a dusty flea market. At first, I'd thought that the proprietors had a horrifying replay of the Challenger demise playing to no one... until I heard the name not fitting the story. What was already becoming a day of unattachment, detachment, and difficult to grasp the meaning of, punctuated with dread. Not unlike the feeling of being in a elevator that suddenly drops... weightless and shocked. Again. Life has been too full of this. And too often. Technology taken for granted, and failed. Lifes consumed but sacricifed honorably, and willingly. We all should be so determined and frank. So, I shuffled along, weightlessly. Into the Belly of the Cathedral Of Cheap Plastic Crap and out again... driving home with the sunset in the windscreen. Just remembering that when my time comes, the skies will continue to do the same. As it should be. Like it is so often when terrible things happen, I couldn't keep my eyes open when we returned home... dropping onto the bed with my sweaters still on. A few brief winks, and I rose to dig for treasure in the livingroom closet... stacked to the rafters with things forgotten, finding, finally, the box of slides that I'll be transferring for this bike trip thing. Rembrance of things past. But Not Forgotten. ....................................................................... Hostel Environment Day Eleven: McKenzie Bridge to Sisters Waking in the Cascades is more than a little surreal... the intense clarity of the atmosphere, the electric rush of the river yards away, the other-worldly contrast of light, dark and hue more fantasy than not. Until this day, most of our climbs had been arduous, but brief. This would be the first real test of challenge and endurance. We would start the day at a thousand feet above sea level... by the time it ended we would have ascended to five thousand, and back down again. Just the week before, McKenzie Pass was still closed from the winter snows... and this, the twenty-sixth of June. All signs pointed to a safe "run," and not long after setting out on 126, the road forked to the entrance of the climb. At first, the ascent was tough, but not inhuman... rising perceptably in the thick of Olympic rainforest. Everything, everywhere was tinted shades of dark green... the firs and lodgepoles, the dense fern floor, and anything not growing leaves, blanketed with moss. A Green Scene. A few bikers on their way down voiced warnings about what was to come, insignificant with the exertion needed to keep standing on the cranks. When it was time for a breather, one of the most inspiring sights was made apparent at Proxy Falls. Taking foot on the trail beside the road, I soon approached the lower falls... impossibly tall, cleft halfway down by a massive black rock outcropping. Camera shutter a-flying. Thinking that I'd witnessed a one-of-a-kind wonder, I continued towards the upper set, even taller than the first... a thin, silvery ribbon of water disintegrating over several hundred feet, silhouetted by green walls turning to black. Inspiration, accepted. Back in the toeclips, the terrain became ever precipitous, and the road began to uncoil up the side of an obscured ridge like a snake with a yellow stripe up its back. Looking down, at one point, I could see the road I'd just travelled below... further downward, yet another patch of highway nestled alongside. If I'd thrown a rock to the lowest, it would have been almost a mile by road. Switchbacks multiplied... soon, I learned to creep the bike up the high shoulder of the road, instead of diving into the corner to get speed up. From occasional openings in the canopy, looming above were glimpses of the massive peaks of the Three Sisters... volcanic incisors of rock, laced with snow, a storm brewing behind. An hour or so of exertion, and the road leveled somewhat, eight-foot high metal poles on either side like poles from a giant slalom course (the better for plows to know where the road is when covered with feet of drifts). Fittingly, since snow was still fast under the trees and on the shoulders, though the sun burned hot. The landscape was like an ebony disaster area, gritty boulders of lava by the hundreds of thousands denying vegetation the chance to take root after hundreds of year. On all sides, peaks of every description bordered the horizon: broken teeth of rock, perfect snowcapped domes... including Mount St. Helens (this, the year before the cataclysm). Around another bend, and there was the rest of the crew in various stages of horizontality. As a group. Victorious. An extra bonus at the stop was Dee Wright Observatory... a 1930's project built from the stone of the lava flows. Windows at all points of the compass, framing a peak in each, and so labeled. I use the word "awesome" only because none other will do. Gathering our wits, and empty stomachs, we began the descent: ten miles down, and no need to pedal. A glide among giants. After finding the KOA, and wolfing down dinner, we gravitated to the lone watering hole at Sisters, the B-Bar-B, to down some well-earned intoxication. To go with the day's monster rush. |
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