Where Water Buffalo Roam

Cattle Drive *photo by Yitka Winn Most all recreation was east of the crest when I was a kid. Suburban loaded with a week’s worth of food, a hardly functional boat in tow full of camping and fishing gear. Years later it’s a Subaru instead of Suburban, bicycles replaced the motor-boat—‘same same but different’—heading to eWA still creates the same Disney-like feeling; warm, relaxed, and smiling.  ***  “Hammer on, that’s him up on the ridge.”  I’m chasing a greyhound in the high country. It’s wearing a red hat, moves fast on the ridge-lines but stubbles up and down the hills. A tormenting beacon I can’t seem to catch. It’s a Montana sky—plain to see where a person is going; up then down, then up again. Grabbing sage brush as an e-brake around the corners, we’ll descend more than two thousand feet in just over two miles, run through a marsh, duck under a low rail-road bridge, cross a river and finish in the Umtanum Ridge parking lot in the Yakima River Canyon. 

“He died that day because his body had served its purpose. His soul had done what it came to do, learned what it came to learn, and then was free to leave.” ― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain DAY 1: It’s a bear. Quarter inch sticks snapping, clumsy and thrashing it sounded big and awkward and heading right at me. It was a dry heat in mid-August; you eat lunch and it cooks in your stomach. We were spread out all across the beach, Al had his book and flotation, mom had her towel and dad was asleep. Just long enough to get nervous, the mind races—too big to be a rattlesnake, too small to be a bear, "holy shit, is it a cougar?" “what the hell is that noise?” Fifty yards down the beach there is a sand ramp, it drops strait into Lake Roosevelt at about forty five degrees. Near the top of the ramp there is a short vertical face and on top of the face is a ledge, and on top of the ledge is Rusty—our dog. He was doing the Supine-Golden-Retreiver-Backdan

“Careful, the bike is pretty... Heavy.” The eighty pound bike dangling weigtless above his head, gripped by the nose and tail of Tuktuk’s frame. Gear and aluminium dangled above his head just long enough to cast his statue in my memory. “What?” “Oh, no worries.” I felt awkward and out of place, stumbling numb, snotty, and shivering on the soft shoulder of the highway. The temperature dropped with the sun an hour ago, about the same time I pulled off into the soft gravel shoulder of a long strait highway with a nasty crosswind; I’d been riding since first light, navigated downtown phoenix, and its' striat-a-way outskirts lined with junk car lots and barking dogs. Just outside Phoenix is a land of circa 1980 muscle cars and amatour NASCAR drivers; not cycling friendly roads. It was about one hundred and twenty miles or so until I’d had enough. Hitch hiking and touring go hand in hand—if you’re tired of riding or the riding gets tough, stop, put out your thumb—and th