damonjustisntfunny.com

Bend is a neat a little town but it is the only neat little town between Frog Lake and Crater Lake. There are other towns, such as Redmond and Opal City and Terrebonne and Sunriver and La Pine, but without Bend, there is absolutely nothing worth looking at. The entire stretch of highway is god awful, ugly, hot, flat, terrible, and altogether depressing. I would not recommend driving, riding, walking, or flying over Highway 97 unless you, like us, needed to get from Point A to Point B immediately. Or unless you, like the waitress from Madras, needed to get funky with the Baby Jesus and the only place to do it was at the Lutheran Church in Bend.

We broke camp in Joe and Christina’s front yard on June 30th, avoiding the dog poop as much as possible, and started out again before seven-thirty. As we pulled back onto US-97, just outside of Bend, I slammed headlong into a haze of leaden fog. The elation from our new found friendship and our meal and our slumber faded and it was replaced with a new realization: my legs were beaten. My marathon had been run. Twelve hours was not enough time for them to recover from a ninety-five mile jaunt — the lactic acid hadn’t even had a chance to stiffen the muscles of my legs yet — and I was afraid that they might stop pedaling at any moment.

Our greatest concern that morning was not that we were tired, but that at its highest point Crater Lake (the reason we were doing all this and where we had to be twenty-four hours from then) crested 8,100 feet, higher than any point on the entire East Coast. Ben and I were currently pedaling through the desert. Even Frog Lake Campground, on Mount Hood, was at no more than 4,000 feet and we had traveled down a considerable distance since then. This meant we were to be in a world of vertical climbing in order to make it to our destination — for the desert was not at 6,000 feet and it was not at 7,000 feet and it was most definitely not at 8,000 feet; it was, we thought, just a desert and most likely at a very low elevation, as most deserts are.

As I trudged along that first miserable hour Ben pulled far in front and I was accompanied only by a little voice in my head that was saying:

“How are you going to climb to eight thousand feet? You can’t even climb this little hill in front of you? I don’t even think we’re going uphill, as a matter of fact, and you can’t break ten miles an hour. We’ve practically stopped moving. Why don’t you just put down the kickstand already? You’re doomed. You’re never going to see her again. You’re never going to see anyone again. You can’t even see Ben.”

I came upon Ben near an advertisement for the High Desert Museum. We were both miserable and we had both seen signs like this all morning and I didn’t understand why he had stopped to look at this one but I had to pee so I didn’t complain. I pulled up alongside him, limped over to a rock pile, blessed it with more liquid than it had seen in a good long while, and walked back to the roadside and it was there that I saw what it was that had made Ben stop. It was an elevation marker and it was in the middle of the desert. This, in and of itself, was odd for an elevation marker usually marked high points on a vehicular journey, most often found at the top of a mountain. What was odder still was that the number that this elevation marker purported was so ridiculously high I can’t even bring myself to recall the details.

Things weren’t at all as bad as they seemed.

It turns out, Bend is at elevation of 3,625 feet and not sea level, as Ben and I had expected. So when we departed that morning, we immediately climbed another 1,000 vertical feet, unexpected and unbeknownst to us. Which was why it was slow and why it was so painful and why I wanted to cry. Then we got to the High Desert Museum which is just where it says it is: in the high desert. Not the low desert, not the sea level desert, the high desert, which is another reason that Oregon is terrific because it doesn’t fool around with elevations: everything is up high and that is the way we like it. This brought us much joy and carried us all the way to Crescent.

DAMON: June 30th, 12:20 in the afternoon. We have ridden for three hours and twenty minutes averaging 13.7 miles an hour we’ve traveled forty-five miles, we’re in Crescent which is a tiny little town. We passed, actually, Gilcrist thinking we would move onto to the bigger town but: Crescent’s not very big. And we’ve picked up some of the bare essentials for our livelihood and it looks like over the next 24 to 48 hours Ben and I are going to be eating like campers.

BEN: [not without disdain] Because, it turns out, we are campers — not people who eat out three meals a day at restaurants like Damon would prefer.

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