The campground at Waterfowl Lake nestled in a forest beside a clear turquoise lake, which reflected the surrounding glaciers. Because we arrived on bicycles, the ranger let us camp free. She gave us a campsite near another couple who were bicycling through the Rockies. She warned us that bears sometimes wandered into the campground looking for food, so before we went to bed, Larry gathered all our food, put it into a pannier, and hung the pannier from the middle of a cord he’d tied about ten feet off the ground between two trees.
At three o’clock in the morning I awoke out of a sound sleep, startled. While my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I listened for the noise that might have awakened me. At first I thought I heard a rustling sound, but then everything was still. I rolled over and looked at Larry. He was sitting up. His body was tensed and rigid, and his eyes were the widest I’d ever seen them. He was straining to listen to something.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Shh,” he answered in a barely audible whisper. “Listen.”
I did, but I couldn’t make out any peculiar sounds. Larry sat motionless for several minutes, listening, then he leaned forward and put his face up against one of the windows. He carefully surveyed the outside world before he sat upright again and listened intently for another few minutes. Still there was no noise.
“A little before you woke up, I heard something moving beside the tent,” he whispered. “Then it sounded like something brushed the tent, so I rolled over and looked out that window. I put my face up against the mosquito netting, and right there at the very tip of my nose, staring right back at me, was a bear. I could feel him breathing on me! I half jumped out of my skin, and my heart started pounding in my throat so hard I thought I was going to choke. Well, thank God the sight of me scared him as much as he scared me. He jumped away from the window and took off running. He made a lot of noise when he went, too, and that’s what woke you up.”
Larry stopped talking, listened to the stillness, and looked through each of the tent’s four windows. I was too nervous to move.
“The food,” I whispered. “Are you sure you put all the food in the pannier outside? What if there’s a candy bar or some fruit still stashed in one of the packs in here?”
“I think I got it all, but we’d better check everything to make sure. If another bear comes by that’s not as skittish as the last one and smells something in here, we’ll be in real trouble.”
Our search turned up nothing, but even so it was an hour before either of us fell back asleep. We lay in our sleeping bags, our ears straining to pick up the slightest movement outside, our bodies tensed and ready to bolt out the door.
In the morning Larry checked over the tent. He was convinced he’d felt the bear swat it last night, and sure enough, he found a cluster of holes in the rain fly above one of the windows.
“Looks like he was getting ready to claw his way in,” I winced. “It’s a good thing you sat up and looked through the window when you did.”
While Larry started breakfast, I pulled the plastic water bottles off our bikes and walked to the nearest faucet to fill them with water for tea. When I turned on the water into the first bottle, it became a sprinkler head; as fast as the water flowed into the bottle, it came shooting out through a half dozen holes near its base and splattered over my legs and shoes. The bear had sunk his claws into our bottles as well as our tent.
Larry was talking with Karen and Dave, the bicyclers from San Diego who were camped near us, when I got back to the campsite. Dave was doing most of the talking, and he was jumping around a lot, waving his hands in the air. Karen stood next to him staring at the ground, mumbling long nervous groans.
“I’m finding out what happened after the bear left us last night,” Larry explained to me. “Turns out my ugly mug scared him so bad that, when he took off, he didn’t even take the time to look where he was going.”
“You bet,” Dave nodded. “He was makin’ for home for all’s worth, and I guess our tent was dead center between yours and home. When he came flyin’ by us, he tripped over one of our guy lines and crashlanded into the top of the tent.
“I’ll tell you something, wakin’ up inside of a collapsed tent and feelin’ a bear on top of you is one horrifyin’ experience. I knew it was a bear right off, ’cause one of its paws was spread out over my face, and I knew that only a bear could have a paw that big. It was a soft paw—no claws. But I knew they were comin’. I lay there frozen in sweat waitin’ for those damn claws to pop out. ‘It’s just a matter of seconds now,’ I kept sayin’ to myself. ‘A few more seconds, Dave, and those claws’ll be slicing your face apart.’
“Then all of a sudden I hear Karen whisperin’ something to me. She wasn’t movin’, but she kept whisperin’, ‘Dave, there’s a bear on us. We’ve got to do somethin’, Dave. Dave there’s a bear on us!’ Do somethin’! What the hell were we supposed to do? I couldn’t talk; not with a paw in my face. It felt so soft and harmless when its claws weren’t out. Like the calm before the storm, I figured.
“You know, it seemed like half the night went by before that paw finally moved to more stable ground. Then the bear’s mass started to rise up off of us. And once he got himself up, he lumbered off into the forest.”
Dave paused here long enough to spread his right hand apart and cover his face with it. He rolled his eyes and lowered his head.
CHAPTER FOUR
Route 212: The Endless Road
From the Canadian Rockies we pedaled south through southeastern British Columbia and into Idaho at the end of July. Both of my parents were raised in Idaho, and many of my relatives still lived there. All my life Dad had told Idaho huntin’ and fishin’ stories and had talked a lot about the wilderness—and a little about rattlesnakes. As Dad put it, “The first time you hear a rattlesnake cut loose, you know exactly what it is. No one has to tell you it’s a rattler.”
But Larry and I entered Idaho with more fear of its ranchers, cowboys, and farmers—the fabled western rednecks—than of its rattlesnakes. We’d agreed never to tell anyone in Idaho or Wyoming that we were from California—that decadent, overpopulated strip of America, teeming with drug addicts, perverts, hot tubs, and super-slick real-estate agents. And we prayed that the hair hanging over Larry’s ears might pass unnoticed.
The first time one of Idaho’s countless two-ton American-made pickups with a gun rack mounted in its rear window eased past, then pulled off the road in front of us, I was sure the man inside wearing a cowboy hat had decided to personally decrease the traveling California freak population by two, or at the very least blast a few holes through their panniers just for the hell of it. I died a thousand deaths before we came up to the truck, and its burly, tough-looking driver stepped out.
“There’s a steep climb comin’ up,” the rancher smiled when we slowed to a stop. “Need a lift?”
“Thanks a lot,” I smiled back, “but we ought to be able to make it all right.”
“Well, it’s good to meet some tough, adventurous sorts. Have a good ride!”
After a few more encounters with the Idaho rednecks, we realized our preconception was totally false. They didn’t seem to care where we were from or that Larry’s hair was a lot longer than theirs; they were more interested in what we were doing than what we looked like. Wherever we went in Idaho, people pulled us over to offer a ride or food. One woman, Mrs. Thurber from Sun Valley, threw her shiny new van into a sideways skid across the gravel shoulder of the road when she spotted us resting at the top of a pass in eastern Idaho.