Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (62 page)

Only a hundred yards from our start was the first trestle — not one of the little, straight and quaint ones but a long and curving and banked monster sixty feet above the rocks, and on it was not an inch of guardrailing. Elevated steel on an elevated railroad.
Well, Stanley, here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten yourself into.

I began adjusting my leveler to match the canted tracks, giving it an extra turn or two to make sure a derailment would toss me not over the edge but to the centerline of the bridge, and that’s just what it did. I managed to land on my feet on the ties — those blessed ties — but I let slip a loud utterance more blasphemous than prudent, should it prove to be one’s last words.

In my head was this: if I’d nearly gone over the side of a trestle in the first three minutes, what did the rest of the day hold? Q rode up and calmly asked, “What happened?” I explained with further graphic embellishment. Here was a fellow who once was going to bike three-thousand miles of trackage across America, a plan as feasible as his earlier one to bicycle from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. No guts, no story — sometimes better rendered as no brains, no story.

On foot, Dick came back across the bridge to check on the situation. “Overcorrected?” he said. Then, gently, “A lot of beginners aren’t ashamed to walk the bike over trestles.” It’s nothing, I lied. Dick said, “The first time I rode my first Railcycle, I didn’t make it more than a hundred feet.” Were you on a trestle? “No, but the early bikes were even harder to get the hang of.”

I set the cycle again atop the tracks, and just before we rolled on, Dick added, “It’s good that happened early so you can see derailing isn’t all that bad.” (He was out of earshot when I mumbled that going over the edge of a six-storey building seemed to me a little bad.)

We continued, I making a mental note to remind Honored Reader that western Kansas is a good place to learn railbiking. Then another long, curving, banking, high trestle, and again came an overcorrection of the leveler, followed once more by a blurt of billingsgate. (The phrase “straight as a rail” may describe a fence but it surely doesn’t fit the Camas Prairie tracks through the Clearwater Mountains.) Q, rolling up calmly if not cocksurely, commented, “Did it again?” I vowed, on the next trestle, I would kiss the boulders before giving that damned knob one cautious turn too many.

Doc, ever solicitous, came back again, and I asked him how Q was able to stay atop the steel. “She’s on a London Underground model,” he said. “It’s heavier and more stable.” Q volunteered to switch machines. As have we all, I’ve met a few people I’d gladly have swapped bikes with as a public service (not all of them legislators), but to put Q on my wheels of death — now, that would have been wrong.

Forward once more to another set of stilts, but that time I made a successful if uneasy crossing. Between the trestles, I was enjoying the silent rolling through the national forest; the movement was that in a dream where gravity doesn’t exist.

To reduce apprehension and enhance the ride further, on the next trestle I forced myself to lift my arms from the handlebars and coast across (the old stratagem — 
Do what you fear
), and Q, who had not seen the photograph of the fallen locomotive, did likewise but with bravado, as if she were on a boulevard. (The retentive reader will recall she once practiced flying with her mother’s kitchen-broom.)

Where the tracks entered a deep rock cut high above the creek, we stopped and unpacked lunch from a tiny single-wheel trailer Dick towed behind his cycle. I got my camera from a backpack tied to the poles of my outrigger which served as both counterbalance and a means to get the burden of camping gear off one’s spine.

While we ate sandwiches, I mentioned the news article I’d seen in 1975 and the washing-machine motors propelling those railbikes, and Dick said, “Sooner or later, everyone we meet asks why I don’t put a motor on a Railcycle, and I explain how engines would destroy the serenity we go into the backcountry to find.” Ken said, “Anyone who doesn’t mind motors and uproar and fumes would be happier in a speeder club.” Speeders are small four-wheeled vehicles with gasoline engines once used by track crews; they’re a motorized version of a handcar. (Today it’s more usual for crews to ride in “high railers,” a pickup with an undercarriage allowing it to clip along atop the steel.)

In the United States, there were some seven-hundred speeders and a couple-of-dozen railbikers. Happily for the HPV corps, speeders require a well-maintained line where the heavy, cumbersome machines have assured passage. A Railcycle can go wherever a bicycle can go, but a speeder travels only where a locomotive can. Ken said, “In a speeder, you might as well be in a car with a bad muffler.”

“On one trip,” Dick said, “we came upon apples hanging right over the tracks, so we picked a few on the fly. Never got off the bikes. Experiences like that — that’s what we hope to find. And wildlife. I’ve encountered wolves, cougars, black bears, weasels, badgers, marmots, skunks, elk, deer, beaver, moose, coyotes, mustangs. I can’t recall all of them.”

On tracks not completely abandoned, Doc and the Prof had also occasionally encountered trainmen and laborers. “They’re curious about a Railcycle and some even want to give it a try,” Wright said. “They don’t have any interest in running us off. That comes from a corporate office, the leaders, guys who haven’t set foot between the rails in years, if ever.”

When he and Smart rode a seldom-used or closed-on-Sunday line, they reported any track damage they saw, picked up litter, and considered themselves not threats or impediments to the rail industry but contributors. Yet getting permission to ride any route was difficult. “Even on defunct lines with bridges out and telegraph poles fallen across the rails, lines where no train could run anymore,” Ken said, “we’ve been denied permission by somebody eight-hundred miles away who’s never seen the tracks we’re talking about. To tell you the truth, on lines like that, it’s easier to seek forgiveness than seek permission. After all, we know better than anyone else you’d be crazy to ride live steel.”

I said that the federal government granted railroads most of the land their trains run on, especially in the West, and when that ground is abandoned or used only seasonally — as on an agricultural short line moving a wheat harvest — it ought to be open other times to the public granting the right-of-way. Railbanking, the preservation of defunct rail corridors for possible later use, is a sound economic idea, especially in a nation already in need of increased efficiency in transporting things and people, and steel-on-steel is as efficient as transport gets. To surrender shuttered rail-corridors or tear out infrastructure is manifestly shortsighted.

If Smart had a million dollars, he didn’t think he could improve his Railcycle except to make it smaller, lighter, and more portable. How about putting the leveler, I said, up where I can see it? He smiled. “Ken and I have been over the handlebars more times than we can remember. Riding two wheels of any kind means you’re going to eat dust now and then. Ken even did it once off a trestle. Not a high one, but still a trestle.”

“The jar of pickles, Boss,” Wright said. Dick nodded: “When I was three or four, my mother accidentally dropped a jar of pickles at the top of the stair above where I was sitting. She screamed, and I saw the pickles coming down at my head, and I reached up and caught the jar. My point is, I’ve been lucky so far, even on bridges.”

We packed up and turned the bikes around for the climb eastward. Going up the grade, I was relieved to discover, felt less like a high-wire act because pedaling against gravity held the bike to the rails. On some trestles, I even closed my eyes for a few yards as part of my therapy.

Along we rode, quietly, usually talking only when stopped to look at something — a view, a marmot, or a spread of syringa, also called mock orange or arrowwood (Indians made shafts from the stems). Syringa thrives near the Bitterroots and is the Idaho state flower partly because of its lovely white blossoms and partly, so I’d guess, because a healthy patch of it can send out a sweet fragrance a considerable distance. We weren’t far from where Meriwether Lewis, who first recorded the species for science, gathered a couple of sprigs, pressed them, and eventually sent them on to Philadelphia. Against probabilities, those frangible, brittle, ephemeral blossoms are two of the very few things any expedition member actually touched still with us today.

Dick spent his first years in the remote corners of the Bitterroots where his father worked for the U.S. Forest Service. The family’s major link with the world beyond was the Milwaukee Road, and along its tracks Dick watched pass through “fancy people” seated in dining cars with white tablecloths and cut flowers. A Christmas present, no matter how fine, was even more enticingly exotic because it came to him not by a reindeer-drawn sleigh but by a baggage car behind a locomotive. He could only dream of places along the tracks then, places where gifts came from. He said, “Right from the start, I always wanted to go someplace, especially if I could do it on a railroad. To reach the far end. That hasn’t changed at all.”

It was the Milwaukee line that also brought in another exotic for him: hoboes. “Except for being short of money,” he said, “hoboes seemed to an eleven-year-old to live a dream life — camping out, fishing, traveling to far places. We thought they had complete freedom, and riding the rails, that’s how they did it.”

On westward we climbed, the steady ascent requiring only modest pedaling. The route passed through wooded hills, many of them recovering from prior logging, and signs of the old timber camps were overgrown or gone altogether, except one at a former lumber depot called Haley (not to be confused with the Idaho ski-area town of Hailey) where a squatter had taken up residence only a few feet from the rails in a shack hanging to the edge of a cliff above Orofino Creek. Junked machinery cluttered the weedy clearing. Dick and Ken knew the man from other rides and had brought him a few packets of food. He, a long-term trespasser, had put up a sign:
WARNING! TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT. SURVIVORS WILL BE SHOT AGAIN.
The alert was intended not for us but for any Seventh-Day Adventist in search of converts or any federal employee in search of anything.

The squatter was Ed. Coming out to greet us, he talked and talked as isolates may do when human ears happen along, and he delighted in any question I asked. I could have inquired about his gender denominator, and he would have joyfully discoursed on that topic. Ed was almost seventy-years old, and his eyes were bright and his manner lively, and his movement spry if not nimble. He showed us around the overgrown clearing, offered to trade me a rusty saw blade from the old timber yard for my cap, all the while explaining he was living there only until he could get to another place more defensible. Who was he defending himself against? Surprised I wouldn’t know about such an apparent enemy, he grumbled, “Why, the feds!” and he explained how he’d seen black helicopters, and he spoke about the federally mandated reintroduction of wolves intended “to drive people away so the government could take the land.” Wasn’t he living in a national forest? “Well,” he countered, “you’ve got them Seventh-Day Adventists too. I’ve driven them off a couple of times.” Whatever could they want with somebody so far from everything? “They know about the gold in here. They know I’ve found the original Pierce mine. I should’ve kept my mouth shut. But I guarantee, they ain’t nobody going to get me.” While he talked, he interjected frequent biblical citations, each attached with chapter and verse.

Ed had been an alcoholic. None of that “recovering” stuff for him. “I did it,” he said. “I am
recovered.
” He was a conscientious objector during the war in Vietnam. If he was willing to shoot somebody for trespassing on land not his, on what grounds did he refuse induction? “That’s all bygones,” he said, and invited us inside.

The floor of his shanty had a decided bias toward the edge of the cliff, and it may have been the stacks of faded
National Geographic
magazines older than Q that furnished the counterweight to keep the place from tumbling down into the creek. He knew their contents well and quoted details from half-century-old articles almost as often as biblical passages. It was “the wisdom of the good book” and “several hundred yellow books” holding him steady in the vicissitudes of existence — not to mention on the top of the cliff.

Ed was eager to show his larder of organic oats, wheat, flax, dates, nuts, raisins, cranberries, and five gallons of fresh raspberries, and an equivalent amount of honey. “Bears are the strongest animals in the forest — that’s why I eat what they eat, except I drink better water. I treat mine with an electrolytic solution I cook up from colloidal silver. You ought to be on it too.”

His health, given much attention, he additionally aided by mixing into his hand-rolled cigarettes crushed mullein-leaves picked from the clearing, although he would have preferred menthol, had it grown there. “Indians used to smoke mullein,” he said, “and look how strong they were.”

How did he manage to pay for his food? “Social Security checks,” he said. Isn’t that from the feds? “Look,” he said, “I worked as an auto-body mechanic for a lot of years, and I paid my taxes.” Then, touching my arm lightly so I wouldn’t miss his insider’s tip, he said, “The best car ever built was the fifty-nine Cadillac. If you see one for sale, snap it up.” And where was his?

“Hellfire,” he said. “Look at me. Do I need one? I got no debt, no credit cards, my clothes got holes in them, but I own them free and clear. I ain’t wearing any undershorts owned by a credit-card company.” He stopped for me to respond, and I vowed that my shorts too were without a lien. “I’ll tell you what I do have,” he said, “and that’s gold in the ground.”

When we got ready to pedal on up the line, he asked us to come see him again. “You know,” he said, “I ain’t went into that Big Back Room yet.” Off we went, I in hopes ahead were no trestles leading to that Big Back Room. When we were some distance along, I asked Doc about Ed’s gold, and he said, almost sadly, “I’ve flushed more gold down the drain in putting a crown on a tooth than Ed’s ever found.”