“Well, you heard what the man in Smith River said. If we decide to sit it out we could be stuck here for a week waiting for it to clear. I figure we’ve got to plow through it. Otherwise we’ll never get through the state,” Larry reasoned.
I was still for waiting out the storm. I couldn’t imagine it would rain this hard during the summertime for longer than a day. But eventually Larry convinced me that we should go on. We packed everything that went into the main compartment of our panniers in large plastic garbage bags and pulled another bag around the outside of each pannier to keep our extra clothes and valuables dry. Then we donned our rain jackets and climbed outside.
It took almost two hours to cook and eat breakfast, clean up our dishes, take down the tent, and pack up our gear. We had absolutely no idea how to cope with the rain. The eggs we managed to cook were one-third water by the time we ate them. I packed the wet cookset in with my dry clothes by mistake. And by the time we collapsed our tent and stuffed it into its sack, the inside of it was just as saturated as the outside. When we finally started pedaling, clad in our sweat shirts, shorts, wool knee socks, and rain jackets, we were already drenched and shivering.
It rained on and off—mostly on—for the next five days, straight through to the Washington border. And since no rain jacket is completely waterproof, Larry and I spent the good portion of those five days cold, wet, and miserable. Even when it was only drizzling, we stayed soaked, because the nylon jackets prevented our sweat from evaporating. Our shoes never dried out, even when we threw them into a dryer for two hours at the laundromat in Garibaldi. Often our hands felt as if they might freeze to our handlebars. And at the end of our second day in the rain, I noted in my journal, “Today, the only warm place on my body was the snot in my nose.”
What helped us through the ordeal of bicycling and camping in the cold, saturated gloominess were Oregon’s friendly people and its beautiful scenery, which we caught glimpses of whenever the skies cleared. Just when we’d think the rain was never going to end, the clouds would lift, and there, in place of the gray walls of rain, would be either a forest thick with trees, ferns, and moss, or a rugged stretch of cliffs and coves edged by the stormy Pacific.
On our third day in the rain, a hailstorm chased us into Tillamook. It was lunchtime when we splashed into the city, and in an attempt to thaw out our icy bodies, we took refuge in the Fern Cafe at the center of town. We scarfed down two piping hot, open-face roast beef sandwiches with mashed potatoes and gravy. Before our meal arrived, we walked into the restrooms, pulled off our shoes, wrung out our socks, and ran hot water over our feet and hands. Then we slipped back to our booth barefoot, buried our feet in the dry carpeting, and inhaled a couple of pots of hot tea. Gradually a feeling of warmth and contentment crept over us, and it was a long time before we were able to pry ourselves loose from the protective womb of the Fern Cafe and take on the rain and cold again.
The rain turned into a light drizzle an hour after we left the cafe. But when another downpour hit us the next morning, I decided it was time to rig up a way to keep the flood of frigid water out of my shoes. In a grocery store north of Garibaldi I bought a package of small plastic garbage bags and a box of rubber bands, jammed my feet into two of the bags, and pulled the rubber bands around the plastic at my ankles.
Except that the bags had a tendency to catch in the chain and the chain ring of my bike, picking up a thick coat of black grease, they did help to keep my feet dry. I must have been quite a sight, though, tramping through stores from then on: two beady eyes peering from a hooded rain jacket hanging nearly to my knees, and a pair of bare, muddy legs with two greasy trash bags for feet. The bags brushed noisily against one another while I shuffled up and down the aisles dripping a trail of muddy water.
It rained our last night in Oregon. We were camped in a forest just north of Cannon Beach, and rather than cook dinner in the downpour, we climbed into our tent, peeled off our wet clothes, pulled our sleeping bags around us, and polished off the supply of cookies, potato salad, and chocolate milk we’d picked up in town. After our meal, Larry poked his legs out of his sleeping bag and studied his feet.
“Look at those things,” he muttered. “Have you ever seen a more shriveled pair of feet? You know, if this rain keeps up much longer they may never look normal again. Hell, they already look like they’re pushing a hundred. Guess I shouldn’t complain though. At least we haven’t gotten sick. You’d think we’d have developed pneumonia by now, being as wet and cold as we’ve been for the last week. But I guess we’re in good enough shape now to fight off almost anything. That’s good. . . . Too bad about the feet though. Well, anyway, maybe the sun’ll shine on us in Washington.”
WE CROSSED THE BRIDGE OVER the Columbia River from Astoria, Oregon, into Washington on June 14. We headed northeast through South Bend, Montesano, and Shelton, and around the east side of the Olympic Peninsula to Port Angeles, where we caught the ferry to Vancouver Island, British Columbia. It rained our first two days and our last day in Washington, but Washingtonians were even friendlier than the people in Oregon, and their hospitality kept our spirits up. At the one campground we stayed at to get a hot shower—near Chinook, next to the Columbia—the ranger let us camp free—“Because anyone who’s bicycling through Washington deserves a free campsite and shower.” After we thawed our rain-soaked bodies in the camp’s hot showers, I hung our wet clothes and towels inside the restroom to dry over night. In the morning, to my surprise, they were gone. For the last month Larry and I had left our bikes unlocked outside of stores while we shopped and along back roads and highways while we hiked. No one ever touched them or any of our gear. So why, I wondered, had someone bothered to steal our dirty towel and wet smelly clothes?
I walked back to our tent scolding myself for being too trusting, but just as I started to climb inside, a hand tapped me on the shoulder. It was the middle-aged woman who was camped in the site across the park. Her arms cradled our belongings, clean, dry, and neatly folded.
“I saw these hanging in the restroom last night when I went in to take my shower, and I knew they had to be yours,” she smiled. “I was going to the laundromat in town last night, anyway; so I grabbed ’em up and took ’em with me. I’m really sorry about the rain. Hope it clears up soon so you can enjoy our state.”
Washingtonians were also the most considerate drivers we would encounter on our trip. They never honked at us, and when they pulled up behind us, they were so quiet we usually didn’t know they were there. On winding roads they drove calmly behind us, sometimes for miles, until it was perfectly safe to pass; then they eased by slowly and cautiously, waving and smiling. Pedaling in Washington was a relaxing experience.
The ferry from Port Angeles across the Strait of Juan de Fuca dropped us off in Victoria, at the southern tip of Vancouver Island. The whole way up the US coast from Morro Bay, we’d made a point of avoiding cities. It was nearly a month since we pedaled through San Francisco—a month free of smog and traffic jams. But as soon as we pedaled into downtown Victoria, we could taste its foul air. It burned our eyes and nostrils. Brakes screeched, horns honked, and dark clouds of car exhaust spewed everywhere. The pollution and noise were suffocating.
We raced through Victoria and pedaled north through the island’s fairyland of bays, long sandy beaches with views of the snowcapped coastal mountains across the straits, waterfalls, lakes, and glaciers, to the end of the road at Kelsey Bay. From Kelsey Bay we caught the ferry along the west coast of British Columbia, where there were no roads, to Prince Rupert, just below the southern tip of Alaska.
Now that we’d pedaled some 1,600 miles northwest from Morro Bay, it was time to turn east. The Yellowhead Highway, the two-lane road that travels east across central British Columbia, covers 685 miles from Prince Rupert to Jasper in the Canadian Rockies. It took us ten days to pedal it. In that time we learned a lot about Canada’s bears and infamous man-eating mosquitoes, about bicycling in a flood, and about pedaling over one hundred miles without passing a single settlement.
From the small frontier town of Prince Rupert, where