In Idaho I not only changed my opinion of ranchers and cowboys but also of health food. I don’t remember exactly why I decided, in northern Idaho, to try out yogurt, that rotten-tasting fermented-milk concoction, which most true junk-food aficionados detest more than anything else. I was shocked to find that I actually liked the stuff; after a week I even developed a craving for it.
My addiction to yogurt proved to be the first step on the road to a major change in my diet. Pretty soon I was creating all sorts of healthy and hideous mixtures. I stirred granola into my yogurt. I sliced bananas onto my peanut butter sandwiches, then sprinkled on sunflower seeds and raisins. I opted for fruit instead of chocolate bars, and I switched from soft drinks and chocolate milk to fresh-squeezed orange juice. The only drawback was that the sudden change in diet gave me a monumental case of the runs. My stomach didn’t know quite what to do with all the new, strange foods I was feeding it, and for the first ten miles after I’d eaten, the meals would churn and gurgle inside my belly, then dive for the escape hatch. But even so, I stuck to my new diet, and after a few weeks my stomach agreed to accept it.
At first Larry was repulsed by what he viewed as my “sudden, unfathomable fetish for the inedible.” Eventually, though, he too began to change over, and we started to eat other things besides canned foods for dinner. We steamed vegetables, melted cheese over them, and mixed in sunflower seeds; we cooked vegetable stews and simmered thick spaghetti sauces. Canned meals were still the most convenient and the easiest to carry and prepare, but the more nutritious the foods we ate, the better we felt and the fewer stomachaches we had. By the time we reached Florida we were no longer belting down daily fixes of candy bars, pound cakes, donuts, and ice cream, although we did continue to indulge in an occasional junk-food pork-out every now and then.
UNCLE BILL AND AUNT MARGE, my father’s brother and his wife, owned a cabin at Cascade Reservoir near the town of McCall, in central Idaho. Larry and I arrived there on July 29, and planned to stay a week to give our seats a much needed rest.
About midnight on our second night at the cabin, Aunt Marge barged into our room yelling for us to wake up. Then I heard a second familiar voice say something to me, and I parted my eyes a crack, just wide enough to recognize my father standing at the foot of the bed.
“Wake up! You’re having a bad dream!” he laughed.
Seeing Dad standing there with a gigantic, mischievous grin splattered across his face was a wonderful surprise. He’d decided on the spur of the moment to fly up from San Diego to spend the week with us. Mom had stayed home to run their gift store, but in May she and Dad planned on joining us in Spain.
For the first few days, Larry and I bent Dad’s ears with our stories while we sat on the front porch of the lakeside cabin, cleaning and adjusting our bikes. Three times a day Aunt Marge cooked up a colossal feast, and by the end of the week, I’d put on ten pounds. On the weekend, sixteen of my aunts, uncles, and cousins rendezvoused at the cabin for two days of swimming, waterskiing, canoeing, sailing, hiking, and endless talking.
Monday morning Larry and I awoke to a lonely silence inside the cabin and inside ourselves. The festive, secure feeling was gone. Everyone else had gone home. After breakfast we packed our gear, but we were so homesick we couldn’t force ourselves to climb on our bikes. Instead, we walked down to the lake and sat on the shore and wondered if maybe it wasn’t time for us to go home, too. We sat and watched the empty canoe bob in the water, listening to the echoes of the voices of our family. Now, once again, it was just the two of us, and that day proved to be a long, lonely one.
We left the cabin early the next morning. Within a couple of hours, our homesickness subsided, and we were content to be back on the road again, meandering through the mountains, past waterfalls and meadows, headed southeast toward the Sawtooths, the Grand Tetons, and Yellowstone.
In the late afternoon of August 10, Larry and I found ourselves in a desolate stretch of central Idaho, just south of the town of Challis. By now, after nearly three months of pedaling and camping, we’d learned a few things about the ways of nature, including how to smell a rainstorm approaching and how to spot a distant stream by its surrounding vegetation. This afternoon we were especially dirty and sweaty and in need of a bath; while we pedaled, we scanned the barren landscape for a telltale row of trees or bushes that indicates the presence of a stream.
The creek I found was in a shallow ravine about fifty yards from the road, and there was a plateau nearby large enough to hold our tent. To get to the plateau we had to climb over a six-foot-high wooden fence, hop the little creek, and hike uphill some fifteen yards. We carried the tent, mats, sleeping bags, and our handlebar packs to our campsite. Then, while Larry pitched the tent, I began to haul over our bikes and the rest of our gear. I was retracing my route between the road and tent for the third time, carrying a rear pannier in each hand, when, a couple yards from the creek, a sudden noise at my feet halted me. No one had to tell me what it was I’d heard. Dad was right; I knew there was a rattlesnake at my feet.
I knew it was a rattlesnake. But I couldn’t make myself accept that fact; so instead, I decided to believe that what was slithering next to my feet was a harmless garden snake. This was an unreasonable decision based on what I’d just heard; but it was a comforting one, and it calmed me enough so that I could force myself to look down. Six inches from my right foot lay a rattlesnake. It looked to be about three feet long and had thick brown scales, dark markings, and a mean, arrowhead-shaped head. While it watched me, I had the distinct sensation that snakes were slithering up the backs of my legs.
Finally, I bolted into the air. I heaved the panniers out of my hands and ran for the road. When I got to the fence, I grabbed the top rung and flipped myself over. Larry had looked up from his work just in time to see the panniers soar through the air and me fly over the fence. He ran to the edge of the plateau, and as he started down the incline toward the creek, I screamed a warning from the road, “Don’t go down there! There’s a snake!”
“You and snakes,” he laughed. “As many as we’ve run into these last few months, you’d think you’d be used to them by now.”
“This one’s a rattler!”
“Rattlesnake, huh?” Larry hesitated for a moment then continued moving down the slope. When it came to snakes, I usually blew things way out of proportion, so he figured he was perfectly safe. At the bottom of the hill, he calmly stepped across the creek.
Larry spotted the rattler—it was now partially hidden beneath a shrub—a moment before it coiled. When the ugly hissing sound cut through the air, he screamed something unintelligible, grabbed up a rock, and fired it. The rock hit its mark, and the serpent shot out from under the shrub. Next, Larry ripped a limb off a tree beside the creek, and when the snake coiled again, he let out another high-pitched wail and swung the branch. The limb missed the snake. The serpent slithered to the right a few feet and prepared to strike. And again Larry cried out and brought down the branch. On his fourth swing he connected with the rattler’s head. He lifted the dead snake with one end of the branch and carried it well away from the path and the tent.
Convincing myself to walk back down the path took some doing. Larry brought me a branch of my own, and as I made my way toward the tent, I swatted at the bushes with it while my feet did a fast jig.
After dinner, Larry went off to take a picture of the snake, but when he came to the spot where he’d left it, it was gone.
“When I saw it was missing,” he explained afterward, “for a fleeting moment, I thought maybe it’d come back to life and was coiled up right behind me ready to strike. That was an awful scary experience. But then I found it not too far from where I’d set it down. It was dead all right. I guess it had crawled over there by some sort of reflex movement.”
For