51 miles

A lot happened today. Danielle’s bike is still not quite right…maybe. She’s feeling a bumping from the front wheel. I rode it for a moment and couldn’t feel it, but she knows her bike better than I do. There’s a chance it’s just feeling spooky because it literally blew up yesterday while idling, and then wasn’t fixed right the first time. There’s also a chance it’s a big problem. I guess we’ll see.

I have been trying to remind myself that slowing down presents new opportunities. I have also been growing frustrated with all of Danielle’s bike problems. Just when I had started to imagine leaving them behind at the bike shop in Libby and riding ahead to Glacier solo, the gods of rubber blessed me with a flat tire of my very own. 

Luckily, we had just come to a small pulloff area for boats along the river, and we were less than half a mile to a gas station where I could get some air. I have a small pump for emergencies, but it’s a lot of work to completely fill a tire with it. The flat was caused by a sharp pebble. I adjusted my derailleur and cleaned my chain while the bike was flipped over and then we were on our way.

It was extremely hot today. We rode into Montana, over some beautiful sweeping hills. The colors were insane. The grass was backlit by the sun in a lot of places, bringing out the most vibrant electric green I’ve seen so far—an incredible foreground to the dramatic blue of the mountains and sky. We saw red, yellow, blue, purple, and pink wildflowers. Lots of daisies too. We saw a brown (grizzly?) bear cross the road some distance in front of us, and lots of motorcycles. My own color is growing more vibrant, too, despite my sunscreen. There was hardly any shade all day.

We stopped to rest on a boat launch and met a man named Stan who, upon hearing we were from Detroit, said immediately with a wave: “I could never stand living there with all those inner city thugs…I don’t know what YOU call them.” 

I didn’t know what to say to this, so I abruptly defected from the conversation and just stared at the lake while he finished securing his boat. I’ve heard people say ugly, racist things like this right to my face before, and I always feel caught in the headlights. My first impulse is to recoil, and then the debate team that lives inside me wants to leap into clever challenges to their assumptions, but the realist in me knows it’s very rare (if not impossible) to move the needle in the right direction with a total stranger. I think the best response is to somehow try to find a way to stand on what I believe and invite them to question what they said without somehow driving them further into their delusions, but there isn’t always an in-road for that with someone twice your age who you’ve known for 8 seconds on a dock in the middle of nowhere 3,000 miles from your home. He handed us each a Bud Light and left with his boat. 

After that we were joined by a couple from Helena who were celebrating their birthdays, which are a day apart. I don’t remember their names. I talked to the woman about her job. She teaches biomimicry, which is something I’ve never heard of before, but she talked about how it involves designing the built landscape to include elements from the natural world so that human impacts can be minimized. One example: there are a ton of birds that die just from colliding into windows, because birds can’t see glass like we do. So someone developed some type of filament to add to window glass that is invisible to us but mimics spiderweb strands or something, which are visible to birds. Apparently it saves a ton of bird lives. I would love to learn more about this stuff. 

They talked about Canada and Europe and healthcare and socialism in such a glowing way, telegraphing their political leanings in hilarious contrast to the last guy. Now I’m just listening to the birds high in the canopy, and the loons on the water, and feeling grateful for them. It’s going to be even hotter tomorrow.