87 miles

I’ve gotten pretty used to not showering. You can get pretty far with a microfiber washcloth and a gas station sink. Some of the gas station bathrooms are actually quite nice around here, which is great, because there isn’t much else.

This morning was overcast. I can’t get enough of this huge Montana sky. Before we left Lewistown, we stopped at a post office to mail some things. We were “blessed” with a head wind today, which robbed us of some of the usual joy of riding downhill for most of the day. 

I found myself working out an analogy about society, thinking about the wind, which is a force that becomes impossible to ignore on a bike. I’ve found that when I’m riding, I’m least likely to notice when I have a tailwind. I don’t feel it pushing me nearly as much as I do when it’s coming from any other direction, because it doesn’t add resistance, it adds thrust, and I also can’t hear it rushing in my ears, so it’s almost as though it’s not even there. If I’m really paying attention, the best evidence that it’s there at all is that I might notice feeling a little faster or stronger, which I might just as easily attribute to some other factor, like being well-rested.

So I started to think of wind as an analogue to culture. You don’t personally get to control where it comes from or where it goes, and you have no choice but to exist within it in some capacity. It’s nearly impossible to contain or predict its movement, but your presence within it does have an effect on its course, ever so slightly, as it flows around you. When you’re totally aligned with it, it’s incredibly easy to not even notice it’s there, helping you along, but when it hits you from an angle, or you’re opposed to its direction, heading straight into it, you can’t help but feel the resistance. It creates a conflict. You have to work harder to get where you’re trying to go. 

I thought about how effortfully changing a culture (or trying to control wind patterns) must require tremendous effort, cooperation, investment, resources, and time, the impact of which can probably still only hope to be felt on a very small scale. Locally. And, to the degree that those efforts do succeed, those who used to enjoy a tailwind without ever noticing they had one might suddenly find themselves experiencing an unwelcome change in how much effort it takes for them to get where they wanted to go. 

We stopped in the town of Winnett to kill some time—our plan was to stay at an RV park, which we didn’t feel particularly eager to get to. We met some other cyclists, traveling west on the Northern Tier, roughly. We hid under a shelter at the park with them and watched a big storm roll in and pass us, and then we headed on to Mosby. The RV park looked pretty dumpy, so we camped at a rest stop instead.