Two Wheels on my Wagon

by Paul Howard

  It had a bar and, as the route maps might put it, ‘non-full-service’ grocery.

  ‘We see you guys coming through on bikes and think “Is there anything you’d like or need?”,’ said the proprietor.

  Looking at the barren shelves, the temptation was to reply ‘something, anything’. I tried in vain to be more constructive. There was also Wild Bill’s Gun Shop – ‘Guns. Ammo. Gunsmithing. Customised Knives’ – and the genuine Wild West feeling was confirmed by the only other commercial venture in town, the Atlantic City Mercantile – ‘Steak house. Saloon. Cabins’. There were no drunken, brawling cowboys spilling onto the dirt high street as we leant our bikes against rails built originally for horses, but it seemed only a matter of time.

  Inside, apart from a gregarious Italian family of tourists, this was the real deal. The timber-framed walls were clad in garish wallpaper and black and white photos; the stuffed moose head on the wall had a cigarette hanging from its mouth; there were bulls’ balls, also variously known as Rocky Mountain oysters, cowboy caviar, Montana tendergroins and swinging beef, on the menu.

  Our food choice was more conventional, varying the routine only by the additional request for four bowls of warming noodle soup. We were ready for such comfort. In spite of the flatness of the terrain, it had taken us nearly ten hours to cover 90 miles.

  The soup arrived with some unexpected news.

  ‘Do you guys know a woman cyclist? I can’t remember her name,’ asked the waitress.

  ‘Do you mean Cricket?’ asked Trevor.

  ‘Yes, that was it. She only left a short while before you came in. She said she was planning on camping in the Basin somewhere . . .’

  Apparently she had been deterred from leaving earlier by the rain. At just gone 6 p.m., after eating our fill, we set off in hot pursuit. Actually, the pursuit was far from hot. We grunted our way up an exceptionally steep but mercifully short climb out of town. There was intermittent sunshine between the bruised clouds. Only once the climb had been crested did we begin to pick up speed. As we did so, the map encouraged us to bid farewell to the last trees we were likely to encounter until Rawlins, 135 miles away. Shortly afterwards, while still riding through puddles from earlier downpours, we were alerted to the fact that the next potable water source close to the route was 69 miles away.

  With the gradient and wind in our favour, we made good progress to our intended camp spot for the night. The water at Diagnus Well was not recommended for untreated consumption, but it would at least ensure that we embarked on the next day’s riding with replenished bottles.

  As we approached the well, we also became aware that the waning sun behind us was rapidly becoming obscured by an immense black wall of cloud with orange below and deepening purple above. Just in case such a visible storm warning wasn’t enough, the wind began to rage in destabilising gusts. We arrived at the same time as the first raindrops; their companions could be seen sweeping across the plain to join them. It was eerily like the arrival of a plague of hungry locusts.

  Trevor and I raced to pitch our tents before the storm became fully fledged. We were not entirely successful. The sandy soil refused to hold onto my pegs, while Trevor lost a pole, blown away into the gathering gloom. The only way to be sure they would stay in place was to lie in them.

  Per and Stephen had bivvy bags, rather than tents, so were reluctant to bed down in the deluge that the wind brought. Instead, they sought shelter in the unlikely company not of Cricket, who had apparently been through but decided to continue, but of another bona fide cowboy who was also calling the well home for the night. In fact, as I discovered after the tempest had passed and it was finally safe to deprive the tent of my services as a counterweight, he was calling the well home for the best part of two months.

  ‘I’ve been here since May and I’ll be staying until the 4th of July. After that I’ll move to another spot.’

  He offered some of his whiskey. The evident loneliness of his job hadn’t dampened his social skills. A thousand reasons to say no flashed instantly across my mind. What if the whiskey were really illicit moonshine and I ended up blinded, or worse, by alcohol poisoning? What if, by accepting, I rekindled the latent alcoholism that I unfairly assumed to be a prerequisite for all those with such isolated lives? Or what if it was I who descended into inebriated discombobulation after three weeks of abstinence and considerable expenditure of effort? Drunken men and guns did not seem like a healthy combination.

  Per and Stephen declined and took the opportunity of a break in the rain to retire for the night. I found myself saying yes. Chances to drink bourbon with cowboys come along only rarely. A bottle purporting to contain Jim Beam was passed my way. It looked like whiskey. It smelt like whiskey. I took a swig. To my considerable relief, it was whiskey.

  The bottle owner’s name was Jason and, like the Mercantile in Atlantic City, he was the real deal. He had a large gun, a broad knife and two horses – Joe and Tucker.

  ‘Joe’s the stayer, I could go all day on him, and Tucker’s the strong one. Look at the width of his haunches. He’s only small but he can pull a cow out of a ditch.’

  I asked how many cows he looked after.

  ‘I’ve got 1,500 head of cattle to look after in an area the size of Yellowstone.’

  He said ‘yeller’ in the same way John Wayne would have said it to describe a coward.

  ‘Why are they so much flightier than the cows in the UK? At home they’re all really docile.’

  The explanation was as simple as it was obvious.

  ‘Well, they’re prey animals, ain’t they. I guess you ain’t got too many bears and wolves and mountain lions over in England?’

  The rain came again, so we took refuge inside his wagon. It had the classic, round-arched shape of wagons from the movies. The only concession to modernity was solid wheels and pneumatic tyres.

  ‘They put them on last year but they still load it onto a truck for travelling or it would fall apart,’ said Jason, somewhat wistfully.

  Basic it might have been, but inside it was the height of domesticity. There was a bed across the end away from the door, under a little window on which was suspended a Native American dream catcher. There was a table and a chair, while Jason had added his own home comforts including several books and a guitar. Most important of all, given the current inclement conditions, was a solid fuel stove.

  ‘I burn dried cow dung,’ he pointed out with enthusiasm.

  It worked a treat. It was as warming as the whiskey. As the wind continued to howl outside we compared notes about the merits of riding horses and mountain bikes. Jason was impressed by the distance we could cover, but reckoned a horse would have the edge in the mud. I was happy to agree. He also expressed a surprising desire to travel to the UK to see red deer.

  ‘But you’re surrounded by elk, which seem much more impressive to me,’ I said.

  The pile of antlers he used as extra currency on his return to civilisation proved the point. But even in Wyoming, the grass was always greener on the other side.

  ‘That’s why I’d like to see something different.’

  It was properly dark when I returned to my tent. The clouds had disappeared to reveal a desert sky replete with diamonds. Jason picked up his guitar and sang a self-penned lament. The strumming was charming; the lyrics were tender; the tune was pursued with admirable enthusiasm if not always great accuracy.

  CHAPTER 19

  ACROSS THE BASIN

  DAY 16

  The sky was still clear as day dawned. The wind had abated, and the absence of clouds suggested the weather had changed definitively for the better. Indeed, things in general were looking up. Per and Stephen had not been attacked by snakes or insects in the night; neither Trevor’s tent nor mine had been blown away. To complete the cheering picture, Jason popped his head out of his wagon and offered us fresh coffee. It seemed preferable to whiskey.

  The coffee, brewed on the dried cow dung-powered stove, was excellent. It complement
ed very satisfactorily my factory-fresh Danish pastry and packet of crisps. We struck camp. Jason bade us farewell and repeated an earlier warning about the animals we would likely encounter once we hit New Mexico (he had already said we should not give too much credence to the assertion that grizzly bears didn’t roam south of Pinedale – ‘I seen ’em come across the Basin, and I seen ’em in the mountains in Colorado.’ Whether he was right or not was impossible to tell, but he certainly had a point. How would a grizzly know if he was south of Pinedale?).

  ‘I been all over the country and I worked two years down in New Mexico. You be careful of those tarantulas. And you might think rattlers are the problem. But they’re not. It’s the western diamond backs you want to be careful of. There’s no negotiating with them.’

  Then, almost apropos of nothing, he added, ‘I’m through with sleeping rough in a camp blanket.’

  Per and Stephen tried to look unconcerned. Trevor and I tried to disguise our smiles.

  The first part of the day’s riding began to take us into the desert and away from the Oregon Trail. It was something of a mixed blessing. We were heading into a vast unknown, but we were leaving behind what has been labelled the longest graveyard in the US. Over the same four decades that saw half a million travellers pass this way, an estimated 16,000 of them perished en route to the west coast. That equated to between 3 and 4 per cent of the total, or one in every 25–33 travellers. It was pretty certain every wagon train contained someone who didn’t make it.

  Diseases, particularly those associated with contaminated water such as cholera, typhoid and dysentery, accounted for more than half of those deaths, perhaps explaining the practical legacy of descriptive river names around the basin: West Alkali Creek, Sulphur Creek and, more promisingly, Sweetwater River.

  Storms were another factor. Late last night, just before our own minor scrape with the wilder forces of nature, we had passed within a mile or two of the site of the Willie Handcart Company’s disastrous encounter with an October snowstorm. The company of Mormon Pioneers, named after the carts on which they hauled their meagre belongings and the leader of the trip, was fresh from England that year, explaining their late crossing of such exposed terrain. Estimates of those who died as a direct result of the storm vary from 15 to 27. That was clearly neither the beginning nor the end of their tribulations: 68 of the original party of 404 failed to make it to Salt Lake City. It gave considerable pause for thought.

  The terrain ahead was not entirely flat, but nor could it be described as undulating. No part of the Basin was more than 200 metres different in altitude from any other, a remarkable statistic for an area roughly 100 miles by 50 miles. It resembled a slightly rumpled tablecloth. We were the ants crawling among the crumbs.

  The day’s agenda consisted of the apparently straightforward task of covering the 112 miles to Rawlins. Initially it was as simple as it appeared. We rode around the edge of the Basin and the dusty road wormed its way along the contours, making for easy riding. It was a pleasant change. As was the presence of a strange, warming, gold-coloured object which rose inexorably into the cobalt sky.

  ‘It’s the sun,’ Trevor reminded us.

  All around was a sea of nothing. As the heat of the day began to grow, so did consumption of our precious water supplies. I told myself that five and a half litres of increasingly tepid water would be quite sufficient, but it didn’t stop me feeling like the Ancient Mariner. I racked my brain for barbarous portents of doom akin to killing an albatross. I was reassured to find none.

  The marine metaphor was reinforced by the sighting of an oil rig a mile or so to the south of the road. It was not just in and around Pinedale that the story of our seemingly insatiable appetite for the earth’s mineral wealth was being repeated.

  The rig aside, the likelihood of encountering anybody else in this sagebrush wilderness seemed vanishingly small. The route had already taken us to remote places. Yet there, the mountains that caused our solitude had also tempered it by restricting us to valleys and passes. These were the natural conduits for any human movement. With few alternatives, anybody else passing through such areas would likely be on the same trail.

  Here, there were no topographical barriers to progress in any direction. Possibilities for travel, if you were so inclined, abounded through 360 degrees. It came as something of a surprise, then, to cycle past a man seemingly asleep in the scrub at the side of the dirt road. It was clearly not Cricket, yet it was surely a Tour Divide cyclist. Who else in their right mind would be sleeping on their own in the middle of the desert?

  But there was no bike. Indeed, the strange figure seemed to be bereft of all useful belongings for such a tenuous existence, apart from a thin sleeping bag. The mystery man, clearly no longer asleep, sat up at the side of the road. He looked as surprised to see me as I was to see him. In fact, surprise seemed to have rendered both of us speechless. I didn’t have the presence of mind to stop or say anything, but I freewheeled gently down the trail, looking over my shoulder. I waited expectantly for him to request assistance. I didn’t know what I would be able to do, or what he might ask for, but he couldn’t possibly be there by design. Nevertheless, after staring straight back at me for what seemed like an age, he shook his head and lay back down. He looked for all the world as if I had just had the temerity to cycle through his garden and disturb his siesta.

  I caught up with the others.

  ‘Did you see the guy in the sleeping bag?’ I asked in astonishment.

  ‘Yeah. He didn’t say anything to us either.’

  It was late morning and the heat was intensifying rapidly. As far as the weather was concerned it was either feast or famine. The sense of desiccation was exacerbated by the wind. According to the guidebook, Wyoming has a reputation for wind (and not one associated with baked bean-eating cowboys). Headwinds in the state are generally described as ‘infamous’, a widely recognised euphemism among cyclists for ‘hideous’ or ‘purgatorial’.

  We had been fortunate so far that the wind had been generally gentle and favourable. Now, however, it became stronger and more constant. What’s more, the route began to ignore its curvy, symbiotic relationship with the minor differences in terrain and embarked instead on a series of large zigzags; a straight line to Rawlins would have halved the distance we had to cover.

  The result was vexing. On any one zig the wind would be largely unfavourable. It followed, according to our logic at least, that the subsequent zag should provide us with wind-induced respite. It didn’t work like that. The only relief came from the diverting presence of pronghorn antelope dashing hither and thither in considerable numbers. The absence of a natural predator seemed to inspire them to provoke whatever passed their way in a perverse bid to get their adrenalin flowing. They were an impressive sight, reaching speeds of up to 60 mph in short bursts, and maintaining 30–40 mph for several miles. There was also the less appealing scar of a distant uranium mine on Green Mountain at the Basin’s edge.

  For want of any more significant landmark, we stopped for lunch at a junction between a zig and a zag. It hardly needs saying, but it was an exposed spot. This time, however, we were exposed not to rain and cold but sun and heat. It was not a furnace, but it did a passable impression of a fan oven. Lunch itself was a feast. I washed down rubberised cheese wrapped in flaccid tortillas with as much of my lukewarm water as I dared consume. Per tried manfully to make his sweaty salami seem appetising. I decided to skip the sweet course.

  Back on the bike, the slow-roasting continued. All that was missing was being basted. It was less than 24 hours after our brush with hypothermia yet I was now becoming anxious about overheating.

  Stephen, on the other hand, was going from strength to strength. Surprisingly, he also seemed to be wearing more now than he had the previous day. From somewhere deep in his luggage he pulled an Arab or Bedouin-style shawl that he wrapped over his shoulders and around his head to keep the sun off. Apart from creating the disconcerting impression that we
were now accompanied by Yasser Arafat on a bike, it seemed effective. By comparison, my gleaming, balding pate and green and black cycling outfit were considerably less so. In fact, the more I fidgeted and squirmed in the sun and wind, the more Stephen seemed conspicuously comfortable. It crossed my mind that he could now be in exactly the same position as I felt I had been the previous day, though extending my own uncharitable attitude to others might have been unfair.

  Whether due to the effectiveness of his protective measures against the sun and wind, or simply because he was intent on making up for our slow progress yesterday, Stephen once again rode off into the distance. He was accompanied by Trevor, who seemed equally unperturbed by cold or heat, rain or sun. Per and I maintained our own lonely vigils.

  Then I noticed Per having to rectify another minor mechanical mishap. Misanthropy abandoned, I decided to wait. It was a lonely place for any serious breakdown. It was also the perfect opportunity to administer some more suncream and self-pity. I stared aghast at the vastness of the panorama. Some horses chewed disconsolately at the scrub in the middle distance. For want of anybody to contradict me, I decided they were wild horses. It was a timely fillip.

  Per caught up. It had been his front rack this time.

  ‘I’m gonna get rid of it,’ he said.

  We rode together, talking little. The Basin’s fan oven thermostat had kicked in and the temperature seemed to have stopped rising. I now no longer felt like I was cooking. I felt more like a joint left to ‘rest’ after cooking but before carving. I started looking for vultures.

  An hour after lunch we turned left off the dirt onto a paved road. It was the most incongruous strip of tarmac we had yet come across. The map’s description – ‘more or less void of vehicle traffic’ – was an understatement. Only the tumbleweed was missing from the classic image of desolation.

  Still, it was an important landmark for us. A mere 26 miles along this road would bring us to the charms of US Highway 287, from where it was only another 16 miles to Rawlins. Neither section had much to recommend it. Eventually, both were completed and we entered the outskirts of Rawlins, a town with something of a reputation.