Bike Odyssey 2014 – Day 35 (June 20) – Pend Oreille

Heavenly peace overlooking Lake Pend Oreille, the fifth largest body of freshwater – so our host, Darwin, was recently told – on the planet. The shock of this! – after the ghastly tri-cities of eastern Washington where we spent the previous night, a conurbation of mile after mile after mile of identical food outlets and gas stations as if belched out by some stadium-sized 3-D printer – at night I got lost in its entrails and rode 63 miles around Kennewick and Pasco, a brightly lit vision of hell. Only the liquor stores and the gun shops retain a faint, seedy human quality. The rest service the great dis-acculturated mass of Americans, in this strange country where the rich are thin, by choice, and the poor obscenely fat, wobbling from outlet to outlet.

Susan and Darwin farm their acres – they make hundreds of bales of meadow hay for local goatkeepers and owners of a few cattle or horses. Much of the hay made around here is shipped to China and Japan – as strange an export as I could ever have imagined. Otherwise the ships from the Far East would return home empty; so they prefer to haul hay, and from West Coast grassland farmers’ point of view, provide a market easier to ship to than it is to send the hay east across America. Most of Darwin’s 200 acres, inherited from his father, are forest; with a beautiful lake shoreline; a walnut tree his father planted, now huge and majestic; a broken-down barn and an abandoned house and a new, glorious house resplendent with glass.

I’ve known Susan since we were college students and, later, colleagues when Susan was Chair of the Comparative Literature Department at UC San Diego, and she employed me. Strangely, I’d turned down a job there many years earlier when my Cambridge Ph.D supervisor, Raymond Williams, recommended me to Herbert Marcuse, then in residence at UCSD. The strange part is how I ever could have decided to stay in Britain, teaching at Essex University, over California and Marcuse; but I was newly married, and… and somehow unconvinced that California would provide a track to a settled future. Which it would have. But I wound up at San Diego all the same, in the end, thanks to Susan. (In Portland, Kara Grail reminded me that I always told her that things work out the same, in the end, regardless of the choices you make.) There I met Susan’s partner (now her husband) Darwin, a scientist who protests that he isn’t about to win the Nobel but I believe otherwise, 30 years ago – I knew of his Idaho summer paradise, but never thought I’d see it.

Lake Pend Oreille was so named by a Canadian fur trader 200 years ago, in honor of the ear pendants worn by the indigenous population. This is the northernmost point of our journey, and reaching here, only a few miles from Canada, has allowed us to feel that we are still on an outward trajectory, although in fact we’re already on the way home – which we’ll become of aware of as we now journey south and east into Montana. Much wonderful country still to see!