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Oregon is a pretty amazing state. We went from nose-freezing, nipple-tweaking cold to boil your balls, tongue-roasting hot all in the same morning and all on a bicycle and all before lunch. Not an hour passed during our entire time in the state without Ben blurting out his desire to make sweet passionate love to it. The question we asked, without being prompted, on a regular basis was:

“Why don’t we live here?”

Oregon is made up of so many distinct and differing parts that if you’ve only been to one place in the state you know it only as well as a blind man knows an elephant he has grasped by the tail. A quick guide for the uneducated: up north there is the Columbia River Gorge and all the surfers who want to be yuppies hanging out with the yuppies who want to be surfers; come slightly south and east of Portland and you are at Mount Hood and the start of Oregon’s Cascade Mountain Range where you’ll find absolutely no one because they are all lost in the mountains somewhere; to the west you have the ocean and the Coastal Range and in-between you have the Willamette Valley and Portland and all the people I care not to meet or discuss further; move east of all that is familiar and known, into the largest and most scarcely populated part of the state, and you find the desert and the desert people who wish they were Native Americans and the Native Americans who wish all of us would just go away.

I don’t feel bad that enough attention is not given to the desert and all its quiet and unsuspecting charm. It was nice to find a place that felt like a scene out of the deep mid-west long forgotten; a place where no one ever traveled to attempt touristy things; a place where you could fill your Prozac prescription and get a gun at the same counter; a place where if you found yourself on the wrong side of a fence you just might end up being brought to supper as the main course.

Madras was different than anywhere we had been before on our trip. Whereas the diners in the hillbilly towns of Washington were filled with the sort of people one might find in the deep woods and wilderness of New Hampshire or Northern Vermont, Madras was filled with the kind of people you didn’t expect to see anywhere. It was a field of plaid, fringed with country music and a white so bright I had to shield my eyes. We tethered our bicycles to the horses’ watering pole, walked past a line of pickup trucks and strolled into the diner with our bicycle shorts and helmets.

Conversation didn’t come to a halt like it does in a movie, but everyone got a good glimpse at the boys in blue and red with the spandex shorts and funny shoes grasping at their ball sacks in an effort to relieve the ache from the past three hours ride.

“Where you headed?” the hostess asked as she brought us, at an arm’s length, to our table far in the corner.

“San Francisco.”

That was what I always said when someone asked where we were headed. It usually drew a moment’s pause which I enjoyed because, Lord knows, I hate answering such meaningless, useless, and otherwise tedious questions. If you ever meet anyone traveling or touring never ask them where they are headed because no matter how wonderful an experience it may be, they have already answered the question a thousand times before you and are likely to fabricate an answer. Instead, ask them more random questions, such as: “How many electrons are found in the Barium atom?”

When she stared at me silently for a moment longer than necessary, I added, “But we’re just going to Bend today,” because she lived in Madras and I felt bad for her. She probably didn’t get to talk to people from outside of town very often. I offered her conversation: “About how far is that, do you know?”

“Well,” she began, obviously happy to be given the opportunity, “it’s only about forty-five minutes to an hour; I go to Bend every Sunday for worship because that’s where the Lutheran Church is down there in Bend — you know which one I mean in Bend it’s the only one — or the only one worth going to anyhow but that’s where you could always find me in Bend on Sunday because that’s where I am, right there at the Lutheran Church just there in Bend. But anyway what was I saying, oh, yea, it should only take you about an hour to get there or maybe just forty-five minutes. Take the highway.”

I nodded. She glanced down at my tight black bicycle shorts and up at my forehead, which was covered in white salt that had been expired in the heat, and over at Ben, who was sporting the exact same look and standing behind me cleaning his sunglasses intently. I realized then that she probably would have assumed that we were bicycle tourists if I hadn’t said we was headed to San Francisco. I suspect the idea of two men, traveling together, in tight spandex shorts with matching tops, on their way to San Francisco, probably evoked a certain response that, say, the same two men traveling to Springfield, Illinois would not.

“About an hour drive,” she added again, and then left.

I find very little wrong with Oregon except the people — there are too many of them and they are always where I want to be. If it was just a large uninhabited wilderness I would be much more keen on moving there. That, and Oregon won’t let you pump your own gas. I don’t understand fully the Socialist influences of the Oregonian legislature, but it isn’t right to not let a man pump his own gas — even my Communist Companion Ben “There is No Left Far Enough for Me” M.D. was shocked.

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