Bike Odyssey 2014 – Day 34 (June 20) – Caution, Centaurs at play

Setting off this morning with a wonderful bodily flashback to younger years of biking – to that centaur-feeling of oneness with the motorcycle… then off in the wrong direction (my navigational skills failed us utterly today, thanks also to failure to study the map properly, leading to 3 misroutings which caused us 80 miles and more of unnecessary travel), but which brought us to a very nice breakfast nook inside a filling station, which we’d never otherwise have discovered. Lovely eggs, marmelade, and an old-timer who recommended some good routes through Montana next week. Soon we were back on the right road, towards Spokane across 150 miles of vast, empty, sunlit plains (much of it uncultivated) under a gigantic sky, land yellowy grey in color – perhaps what the poet had in mind when he wrote of the ‘fallows grey / where the nibbling sheep do stray.’ (He really did, in characteristically foolish verses.) A few cows, a few horses, but no sheep. A propos Milton’s poem, and its setting by Handel, a year or two back I was amazed to meet – and in a parking lot – a lady named Euphrosyne; so she announced; hardly able to believe my luck, I immediately serenaded her: ‘Come, come, thou goddess fair and free, fair and free, in heaven yclept Eu-eu-phro-o-o-syne, i-in heaven yclept Eu-eu-phro-o-o-syne…’, something I had been waiting to do for 50 years. Was she impressed? Charmed? Not a bit. Faintly vexed. She either knew nothing of the origins of her name, or wasn’t used to anyone having a comeback to it.

My next, even more costly mistake, was to suppose that Route 2 going due north, the road I wanted, was more likely to be ‘Route 2 West’ than ‘Route 2 East.’ Wrong. In fairness, it could have been either. What in Britain is a prejudice in favor of a North-South axis, in America is a prejudice in favor of an East-West one. Any road heading NNE will be declared ‘East,’ and correspondingly with ‘West.’ Circular or beltway roads will be declared ‘East’ and ‘West’ regardless of those quadrants in which they are patently going North or South. This may be a practical solution – except when joining a northerly or southerly stretch and trying to figure out which way to head. Does this arise because east and west are axes of progress (railway, expansion, exploration) and north and south axes of war? In Britain it’s simply hard to cross the country laterally (especially by rail), except in the South; everywhere else is to or from London, a north-south journey.

My error cost 20 miles before I realized it, and 20 miles back, to Spokane now in the rush hour. North of Spokane, gorgeous mountains, forest and lakes opened out at once and gave us hours of wonderful biking, until I missed the turning to cross a bridge before the town of Priest River and wound up going the long way round, through Sandpoint and over the long, 2-mile bridge south. In return we gained many beautiful views and an easier route to Susan and Darwin’s spectacular house on the water. I’ll try to capture it on film tomorrow, but the views are once more probably just too vast to capture. We were greeted with a glorious meal and eventually fell into bed. 6000 miles now completed.