The wails of a distressed child woke me this morning well before the sun began to warm the high hills we were camped in. I groaned and turned over, determined to sleep for another two hours.
Our campsite at Yellowstone's Grant Village was situated beautifully among dwarfish pine trees, with snow-capped mountains set alluringly in the distance and the great dome of sky above. Perfect, with one exception.
The wailing. Now, I love kids. I spend the better half of my waking hours with them, when I'm not on a bike trip like this. I thought I could handle noise. Hellbent on testing my limits, two small children belonging to the families across the road had not ceased shrieking at the top of their lungs from the moment their families' vehicles pulled up around 10 pm until, I venture, midnight when they must have reluctantly lost consciousness and silence permitted me to finally sleep.
I suppose the nice way to describe these families is that "they have a different parenting style" than Brock and I would ever adopt. More "laissez-faire" than "savoir faire". To be prudent, I will not disclose the country that I guessed them to be from so as not to incriminate an entire race.
At any rate, I couldn't wait to hit the road again. After a breakfast of Hostess raisin danishes and coffee from the Grant general store, and a chat with a grizzled motorcyclist from Texas, Brock and I coasted south towards the rocky spires of the Grand Tetons.
Immense Yellowstone Lake shimmered under the cloudless sky as we slipped past. While on the map everything in Yellowstone looks fairly compact, the scale here is far grander than I'd imagined. Maybe it's because we're traveling at 12 miles per hour, but we've spent 3 days here and only covered less than 1/4 of the park's roads.
Yesterday's consistent climbs now yield us miles and miles of breezy downhill coasting. The grade never drops so steeply as to really scare me, which is good because I need all my wits about me to align my bulky steed to the shoulder's white line as traffic whips round. I try to dismiss the possibility of a bison, bear, or moose loping casually across my path, sending me to my doom. This may sound extreme, but it's on these long downhill runs that I start imagining what songs I want played at my funeral.
So far so good. We fly alongside the Lewis River, pausing to watch it tumble and froth over an abrupt ledge. Finally, we leave the park and cross the Snake River. We pedal up the John Rockefeller Jr. Parkway, a no-man's land between Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. As I lever my chain into a lower gear, I scan the surrounding slopes for black bear and grizzlies, half hoping and half dreading to see one; I've heard they're quite common here.
Common or not, I see nothing but squirrels and birds.
Rounding a bend, we encounter a sight I would only have before imagined: breathtaking white-capped peaks rise above an ocean of a lake, punctuating the cornflower blue sky.
The Grand Tetons.
We're swept away by the grandeur of our surroundings until reality hits: we've eaten nothing by saccharine Hostesses, potato chips and fake cheesy salsa all day, and it's 3:30 pm. We stop at a gas station convenience store, and I run in to buy egg noodles, pop tarts, and more chili.
When I emerge, I encounter Brock sitting on a bench, listlessly staring into space. Scarcely a moment after I yank out the trail mix and we commence to munch, a lone touring cyclist pulls up next to us, hungry for conversation.
As he animatedly regales me on cycling the Alaskan highway beneath the midnight sun, I glance anxiously at Brock who sits there silently and mechanically shoving trail mix into his mouth. Is he mad about something? I wonder. Brock's usually game for conversation.
It isn't until the loquacious cyclist heads into the store that Brock tells me he had hit a wall and was experiencing the proverbial "bonk", wherein insufficient body fuel results in sensations of utter incapacitation.
We decide to end our day's journey right then and there at Colter Bay campground. After scoping out the resort's lake setting and views of the mountain range, it only takes us a few more minutes of deliberation to settle down for a two nights' stay and a much-needed rest day.
As Brock rests in the tent, I bike down to the pebbly beach to take a swim in Jackson Lake. Floating in the cool deep water, the blue sky and green slopes mirrored in the water's surface seem to swirl and flow around me. I gaze up at the glaciers and steeply carved valleys riddling the maze of gray stone, savoring the sensation of weightlessness and freedom.
Later in the evening, we meet a self proclaimed beat poet named Seamus who is camping in a nearby site. On learning that we're from Portland, he informs us that he has a poem about our town, and we accept his invitation to eat some steak (once we've assured him that we're not vegetarians) and listen to his poetry by his campfire.
Two hours elapse as the night deepens and Seamus speaks of his months in Occupy Monterey, where he ran the library, his Grateful Dead days, his time in California prison for drug abuse, and his now-clean life as a street poet making decent money. While there are plenty of other touring cyclists camped out nearby whom we could chat with, I find Seamus' stories immensely more interesting than what I predict theirs to be. I suppose this is because his experience is so vastly foreign to mine, and yet his poetry and thoughts resonate on a raw and profound note that cuts through superficial acquaintanceship.
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