Snow, Old Faithful and Lost in Rattlesnake Hills
Aug. 18
30,523 miles on the odometer
The mountain air was cold when we woke up. Moving fast to get the blood moving, the four of us packed up our gear and were about to take off when an old man, introducing himself as "Dude" from Yakima, Wash., approached and offered to get us a job picking apples if we got out that way.
Bet and I were indeed planning to stop in that area to see my Uncle Pete, my mother's brother who moved from New Jersey out to his wife's home state after their retirement. They were now living in a mobile home park in Yakima, and we had left word before we left that we might be out to see them _ if they didn't mind having motorcyclists staying for a day or two.
Bet took down the man's name and phone number, not knowing what was ahead and whether we might want or need the work in order to have enough money to finish our trip. The old fellow wished us luck and was on his way.
The odd interlude reminded Bet of her grandfather's story from when he and his friend Elmer headed out West in 1929.
No one really knew how much money the two had between them when they left Pennsylvania, but everyone in the family agreed it couldn't have been much, since they had to wire back for money now and again. When they did make it to California, where Elmer had an uncle, the two found themselves flat broke and found work in the vineyards picking grapes and tending the vines.
Elmer's uncle encouraged the young men to stay, advising them there wasn't much work back East because the Depression was just settling in. But being young and eager to move on _ and perhaps a little homesick _ they opted to finish up and drive back.
At one point on their trip, Bet thought it was near Grand Canyon in Arizona, Jake and Elmer had run clean out of food _ with the exception of a single lemon. They were hungry and decided to cut the fruit in half.
Elmer started to eat his half, but the strong sour flavor got to him and he threw it away.
"I don't know if Jake ate his half," said Bet. "He was so cheap, I don't think he ever threw half of anything away."
I wondered how a motorcycle back then would have fared on a cross-country trip. Mine was acting a little cranky this cool morning as I turned the engine over. I figured the 40-weight oil I was told is so good in airplane engines could get a little gummy in a motorcycle engine without the lighter oil mixed in to loosen the parts up. But finally it cranked on and the four of us were back on the road, taking turns leading and following. You could always tell when Don was passing, as the little tassels draped from his brown leather jacked danced in the wind. We followed Route 16 from the dead-smack middle of northern Wyoming across range interspersed with woodlands. We passed a dilapidated sign for the town of Emblem, which boasted "Population 12."
It was a cool ride and we were grateful for the sun, which began to warm us up as we rolled into Cody. There was quite a collection travelers there, in what we took to be something of a tourist town given its name. We found a diner and ate breakfast, and then ducked into the Silver Dollar saloon, a big attraction on the main drag.
We were soon back on the road, steadily climbing the mountains across open range. By mid-afternoon, we had reached the high mountain plateau that was our next destination, Yellowstone National Park.
We slowed the bikes down as we entered, following signs to the main lodge. We parked in front and stretched our legs while Don took off his helmet and replaced it with a floppy leather hat. Inside we asked whether there were any cabins available, and to our surprise and great relief, were told there was one left, with room for four. Three dollars a night per person.
"Great, we'll take it!" we all seemed to say it once.
"It has two beds, each a double. You're, uh, still interested?" said the smiling desk attendant. After only a second-log pause, Bet made the deal final: "Where do we sign?"
That said, we headed into the dining room for coffee to warm up. There were a few jokes and good-natured mutterings about the sleeping arrangements, but the main thing was we had a roof over our heads for a night that promised to be one of the coldest of the trip. We stowed our great at the cabin and the four of us hiked a few miles before making our way to Old Faithful in time to see one of the most-celebrated geyser's blasts.
Before night fell with a sharp chill, we made a run for some food and beer and then settled into our cabin. Bet and I immediately claimed one of the beds and Don and Dana, two perfect strangers until a couple of days ago, somehow arranged their sleeping bags on the other bed so they were comfortable. After a few beers, the whole thing didn't seem such a big deal and after a few laughs we were all asleep.
Aug. 19
31,120 miles on the odometer
Our motorcycles were covered with frost when looked out from the cabin door in the morning. We had slept late, until 9:15 or so, taking full advantage of the warmth inside the cabin, and took our time with breakfast to give the sun time to rise higher and get that frost off my windscreen.
We packed up and Dana and Don told us they had different routes to follow, so we'd be splitting up here. We exchanged phone numbers and addresses and said our goodbyes, and were off again, heading north toward Mammoth Hot Springs in the northwest corner of this remarkably beautiful corner of the Earth. By now, we had crossed the Continental Divide.
Taking our time, we stopped frequently, to see elk grazing and buffalo in breathtaking mountain vistas. At first, the cold stopped Bet's camera from working, but we sat it on the cylinder head for a minute or two and were finally able to shoot.
The cool seemed to wear off at the hot springs, where bright limes, oranges and pinks glowed as water worked its course over rimstone pools. Leaving the park, we followed U.S. Route 89 into Montana. We were on the lookout for a gas station, having declined to pay to exorbitant 69 cents a gallon price charged in a park station. Fifty-eight cents was about the best we could do, given that I was now on reserve. We filled up in Livingston and changed course west, following U.S. 10-191 (with a brief hop on I-90 near Bozeman) to Butte.
It was getting toward late afternoon as we hit town, which offered no particularly noteworthy sites along our route of entry except for the sudden proliferation of bars and cafes. That's probably why it reminded me of Bangor, Maine, whose endless haunts and sleazy remainders of saloons left over from its booming logging era I once knew intimately.
Butte, in fact, had been known for its own extensive network of bars and saloons, many doing business all day and night slacking the thirsts of cowboys, copper miners and card sharps. Eight years before I ever set foot in town, beat poet Jack Kerouac lauded Butte's M & M Cafe as "the end of my quest for an ideal bar," writing of its array of characters that "old prospectors, gamblers, whores, miners, Indians, cowboys, tobacco-chewing businessmen!"
Had I known of the M & M, I would have found it the day I drove into town. And maybe, however unwittingly, I did. I paid no attention to the name on the sign when I spotted a tavern that looked like the right place to stop. It was busy, maybe with an after-work crowd. I parked the bike and soon, Bet and I were standing at the bar, ordering a couple of beers and arranging our antennas in hopes of getting a line on where we might crash for the night.
A noisy local called Bill seemed to be the life of the joint, once proclaiming to the crowd, "I'm the best motor-sickle mechanic around." Before long, the bar phone rang and Bill took the call over the bar. It was his wife and Bill kept the conversation short. No sooner had he hung up before he was reaching over the bar, his fingers menacingly outstretched like the claws of a Maryland crab, toward the orange-sized breasts held loosely inside the barmaid's halter top. This he accompanied by a leering growl and clicking of his chops.
With no show of emotion, the woman backed off and asked Bill if he needed another birthday drink.
"Sure."
Now he turned his attention to us, and asked where the hell we'd come from. We filled him in and, as if we hadn't heard it before, told us he was the best motor-sickle mechanic around. I said that's good and again asked where we might camp. The phone rang again; it was his wife. Won't you please come home Bill, it's your birthday. Yah, yah.He was off the phone again and, between leers and another fruitless swipe at the bartender, asked why we weren't going to the other way, to Sturgis for the big bike fest. I said I wasn't crazy about big crowds, besides, we had other places to go. He talked about all the big bikes he worked on, the Harleys, Moto-Geezys (as he called them) and _ what did you say you were riding? A Gold Wing?
"No, BMW. No Gold Pig for me."
Them seemed to be fighting words, and Bill started defending Honda's big road bike, the Gold Wing. For a moment I thought I was in trouble but I managed to get the conversation back to where someone could stay for the night. Any good places around? The bar phone rang again.
"C'mon," he said. "I got my Jeep right out here."
Bet was having none of it, plainly distrusting the drunken birthday Bill and evidently taking the side of Bill's angry wife, or taking a stand against stupid men, in either case probably the correct course. I thought we had a shot at finding a place to stay, but Bet decided to vote with her feet, got off the bar stool, stomped out and started walking up the street. I didn't know where she was going to go in bar-studded Butte, Montana, so I followed her up the street.
Now it may seem like Bet didn't say much on this trip, and in fact while we rode neither of us did. But she isn't the type to hold back, and in this case she let the angry words fly. After some slurred rebuttals, I coaxed her back to the BMW, which had barely cooled down, and we were off.
As it turned out, it was one of the most beautiful rides ever. The Beemer seemed on autopilot following the curves of U.S. 10 and 10-A as the sun slipped through purple strips of gold-lined clouds over the mountains to our west. I had upped the throttle to 70-75 mph, much faster than we customarily moved, and once had to slow down in a hurry to let a big bull cross the manure-splattered highway just ahead of us. We passed through a place called Southern Cross and Porters Cors, then Philipsburg. Somewhere along the line, we stopped to get a meal and beer in a ramshackle barnwood bar just by the side of the road.
A couple of young men lolled around inside, their feet up on chairs as they stared into a wood-burning stove, its black cast iron door wide open, with a warm fire crackling inside. The blaze cast an orange glow about the shadowy room and I wouldn't have minded sitting down with the other guys and just hanging there for a while.
One of the men, with long, dark stringy hair, finally got up and took our order. No one seemed much interested when I asked about a camping, but one said we might find something in Drummond just up the road.
It was dark and getting cold by the time we reached that crossroads of a town, and followed a neon glow to a motel. We decided the 16 bucks was too much but got directions to a town camping area _ $1 for the night. We followed a dirt road to the site, quickly set up the tent and collapsed for the night. We were speaking again _ but only in very short sentences.
Aug. 20
31,449 miles on the odometer
The morning chill got us moving as soon as we woke up. Bet and I were talking again, and starting to get anxious to reach our next destination: Washington.
Gear packed, we headed northwest on I-90 to Missoula, a bright, clean town where we walked around a bit before finding a nice diner where we had breakfast. The morning sun started to give way to clouds as we hooked on to a smaller highway, U.S. 12, which took us through Lolo Hot Springs and Lolo Pass. The vistas were the most beautiful yet as we followed curves etched into the mountains. We barely saw a car, house or store _ and no gas station _ for 100 miles as we made our way into Idaho, carving a southwesterly route between the Clearwater National Forest on the north and Nez Perce National Forest on the south.
Now a bit anxious about my fuel supply, we hoped to reach a town soon. And for the first time in what seemed like ages, rain was a concern. We encountered a light drizzle as we made our way to Kooksia, just where the road makes an arc toward the northwest. Since my windscreen didn't cover my hands, I was glad to have a pair of gloves I had bought back in South Dakota or someplace to keep my fingers warm. Well, slightly warm; they were only 99-cent gloves. And Bet thought Jake was cheap. Anyway, we gassed up there and made our way north, still on 12, to Kamiah, right at the edge of the Nez Perce Indian Reservation.
The weather didn't seem like it was going to clear up anytime soon, and I was recalling a trip Bet and I had made to the mountains in Pennsylvania maybe a year earlier. The ride to Danville was great, but it poured buckets the whole way back to Chester County near Philly. I still remember the rain pelting me like bullets, stinging my knuckles and half-filling my goggles, water dripping from my helmet down my back. Before long Bet and I were soaked to the bone. We stopped at a laundromat and literally stripped down to our underwear, taking turns holding up a poncho for privacy while our clothes tumbled in the dryer. One or two people were in the place, and they respected our privacy more or less, keeping their eyes to themselves other than an odd glance or two and a smirk here and there. Finally, the dryer stopped, we dressed, got back on the bike, and about a half mile later were soaked again.
I don't know if there were any laundromats in Kamiah, but I did spot a lighted bar sign, a lucky thing on a Sunday, so I stopped, thinking we could wait out the weather for a bit and see what happened. Besides, I had to take a leak, real bad.
A hush seemed to come over the place as we walked in and took a couple of stools at the bar. I scanned the place and it was all Indians. We ordered up, and soon a young Indian wearing a black, wide-brimmed felt hat was sitting next to me. We chatted a few minutes, I can't remember about what, and I finally said I had to go to the men's room. I felt a bit reluctant leaving Bet alone, but I really had to go. I was washing my hands when the Indian appeared in the men's room. He seemed to be trying to delay me, and then told me he wanted to tell a joke. This seemed like trouble, a delaying tactc of some sort, so I told him to hurry up with his story so I could get back out into the bar room.
The story he told didn't make any sense. Bet and I talked for a few minutes more and finished our beers. I stepped outside while she went to the ladies' room and waited. I noticed that the light rain had eased up, though the skies were still blanketed by a solid gray cloud, and took stock of my gear. The black gloves I had left on the tank bag were gone. I poked around and checked further, and everything else seemed to be in place.
Finally Bet showed up at the door. We climbed on the bike and began our departure from Kamiah. As I drove off, I noticed the Indian I had been talking to.
"Look," I said to Bet. "Look what he's got." He was holding my black 99-cent gloves as he sauntered across a lot on front of the bar. I smiled, then hit the throttle and we were off.
We stayed on Route 12, skimming across the top of the Nez Perce reservation to Lewiston, where we crossed the Snake River into Clarkston, Wash. I smiled at Bet through my side-view mirror and said something about taking a cutoff around a place called Marengo that would save us some time. I angled off the highway onto Route 126.
Everything from the Washington border, it seemed, was called Lewis and Clark this and Lewis and Clark that, since the road followed the explorers' route to the Northwest. We would soon have a Lewis and Clark experience of our own.
Back on Route 12, I called Aunt Lee from a pay phone in the small town of Dayton and told her we were on our way. She wasn't much for directions, so she put Uncle Pete on the phone. We tried to decipher his directions, but I opted for another cutoff that would save us from heading almost straight south into Walla Walla, much as I liked the name and would like to have found out what they call their bars in a city with a name like that.
I poked due west on a little highway, Route 124. It turned out to be one of those roads where the center line suddenly stops, the surface gets narrower and narrower, and smooth asphalt turns into bumps and potholes. We were soon following s-curves that turned into hairpin zigzags, and at length the tar stopped and we were on a dirt cow path in some rancher's green, mountainside pasture.
I slowed the bike to a stop and we listened over the idle to the cow bells making their dull clangs off in the distance. There was no more road.
"We're lost, aren't we?" she said. I'm sure Lewis, or Clark, said that at least once along their trek.
I turned the bike around and we made our way back to a bona fide highway, U.S. 12, which took us into the Rattlesnake Hills. On the north was the government's Hanford atomic waste reservation and the Yakima military firing range, and on the south was the expanse of the Lost Horse Plateau Indian reservation. We stopped at a little bar in a place called Sunnyside for a couple of beers. The clientele was mostly Latinos, migrant workers likely there to pick apples. They seemed friendly enough, but there was no time to chat and we were soon gone.
We made it to Yakima at about 8:30 p.m. and without too much trouble found Pete and Lee's place, a double-wide in a neat community of prefabs. We were at the eastern edge of the Cascade Mountains, which was to be our destination the next day _ with Pete driving.
While serving in the Army during World War II, Uncle Pete had been a driver for generals and other brass, a job he took quite seriously and which, from all appearances, had a lasting effect on him. The surprising thing about it is that he was one of the worst drivers ever born.
One story that passed through the family had it that Pete was driving through Camden, N.J., one day in the late '40s or early '50s when another driver committed some indiscretion to which Pete took exception. He followed the other guy until he stopped, and Pete, who was not a large man, jumped out of his Rambler and started rolling up his sleeves. As he approached the other car, the driver got out. He was big _ very big _ with bulging muscles wrapped around bazooka arms and fists the size of Clydesdale hoof. It turned out to be a wrestler who was known as Dutch Schultz. Pete came up to Dutch's shoulders.
Pete may have been a hothead, but he was not stupid. He rolled down his sleeves and backed off, wished the man a good day and got into his Rambler and drove home.
Pete was also a bit on the eccentric side, spelled frugal, yet in his own way quite generous.
He was a reverse image of his younger brother, Vic, who was a happy-go-lucky sort who always had a joke which ended with a deep "Hyuk, hyuk" laugh. Vic owned an Esso station on the main drag in Oaklyn, where he put Pete's sons, my cousins Rich and Bob, to work pumping gas after school.
Vic always drove a Cadillac, which kind of dressed up the neighborhood of whichever relative was hosting a holiday dinner. While the grownups drank inside, we would sneak into his car, take turns sitting behind the big steering wheel and behold the numerous knobs and push buttons that weren't present in our own parents' cheaper station wagons and family sedans.
The holidays at Vic's, usually Easter, were always the best. The party would always drift to the cellar, where Vic had a built-in and well-stocked bar. If a kid sprouted up on one of the tall bar stools, Vic was right there: "What a Coke? Hyuk."
He always had a fresh supply of peanuts in the bar-top dispenser that gushed forth a payload when you lifted the handle just as a one-armed bandit dumps cash after a three-cherry hit. He had a cigarete dispenser in the shape of a jackass. When you lifted the tail, a Lucky appeared out of his ass.
A French friend of Vic's had painted dancing nudes on the turquoise masonry walls of Vic's cellar. Next to the big, soft chairs around the room were tables where Vic's Playboys were neatly stacked. When our parents were in the room, they sort of pretended not to see us leafing through the pages with our hungry eyes devouring the saucy images. Lucky we had cold Cokes to cool us off.
Funny thing was, we never got in trouble, because it was Vic's house after all.
One way Pete and Vic were similar: Both played sports in high school. Vic starred in football and tennis, until his playing days were cut short by polio. His right arm was weakened and he didn't go into the service, but he was still able to work and married an elegant blonde, Muriel, whose prodigious applications of perfume always filled their house and left their guests' nostrils anaesthetized for days.
Pete, who had been a pretty fair baseball player, quit high school during the Depression so he could work and help put food on the family's table. He had put in 40-plus years at Bell Telephone in Philadelphia before retiring and finally earning his high school equivalency.
Pete always had a hobby, for a time building an extensive Lionel model railroad network that ultimately took over nearly all of the upper floor of his house in Oaklyn. Then he went on to bicycles, buying, fixing and selling them from his basement shop. Somewhere along the line Pete got into buying and selling a string of offbeat _ they weren't yet antique _ cars, such as a semiautomatic '54 Ford and a 1953 ruby red Packard convertible, with sky-blue leather seats, wire-rim wheels and Continental wheel on the back, a true gem.
In his retirement, Pete bought a summer home on the New Jersey coast for cash, but Aunt Lee wanted to return to her home state of Washington. Lee headed west first, and Pete visited later, riding a Greyhound bus all the way from his beloved New Jersey, which he reverently referred to as "New God's Country."
Soon Pete and Lee's cottage in Mystic Islands and house in Oaklyn were sold, lock, stock and barrel and they resettled in Yakima, not far from Lee's hometown of Selah.
It was in their double-wide at the edge of Yakima where they welcomed us from the dusty road that evening. Pete and Lee insisted that we sleep in their double bed, no roll-away couch for us. As he showed us the bedroom, Pete went to the closet and removed his Army-issued boots, stuffed with newspaper and neatly polished, from the closet. Some things, he admitted, he just can't throw away.
