Solitude
and
Solace

The first people I saw in Idaho were a couple riding a Harley Davidson. Their fine, corn silk hair blew loose behind them as they flew along the edge of a field of brown-gold wheat. But my companion was my shadow, following along in perfect profile as I headed south in the late afternoon sun.

At a corner with a cafe and a gas station, an old man in a John Deere hat stared from behind a smoky glass window while I changed the clip setting in the carbs. Since I'd come down from the mountains, the bike had been running too rich. The guys hanging around outside watched me. They all wore cowboy boots and jeans, and silver belt buckles etched with rodeo scenes.

I finished the adjustment and put the left cylinder back into the carburetor. When I kicked over the engine, my pride in getting a first-start response deteriorated to embarrassment when the engine wound up. And up, and up, and up ....

It sounded like a jet screaming down a runway. It sounded like a bomb dropping. It sounded like I had done something really, really wrong.

After I hit the kill switch I stepped back to think about what I had done.

A large bearded man who had been gassing up an old Monte Carlo drove over and asked if he could help, and without waiting for an answer, started to. He handed me a business card and knelt down to examine the carbs. A middle-aged Mexican woman sat in the passenger seat, a cake box in her lap, smiling sympathetically.

The man bragged that he knew all about mechanics and carbs, then insisted that I needed a new throttle cable for the left side because the one I had was too long. He pulled at it and messed with the adjustment screw. I hated that. It was adjusted just fine, I thought.

He wrote down the address of a nearby motorcycle shop, then drove away. I looked at the card. "Preacher Mike" it said, and underneath: "Fear Not, the Lord is with You."

I called dad.

"SOUNDS LIKE YOUR only problem is that one of the throttle cables is stuck," he said. "Take the carbs apart and work the throttle lever to make sure the cables slide smoothly inside the sleeve."

"Where are you?" asked my mom. She was on the other line. "You sound like you have a southern accent again. Who have you been talking to?"

"People wearing belt buckles depicting rodeo scenes," I said. She giggled.

"Maybe there's a kink in the cable," my dad continued. "They're delicate things, you know. You haven't been rough with them have you?"

I thought about the three times I'd yanked them out impatiently, looked at them, and jammed them back in.

"No, dad, I've been really careful."

"Do they have Southern accents in Idaho?" my mom asked.

"Yeah, I guess so," I told her. Preacher Mike did, anyway.

"Work the cable through using the throttle handle," dad continued. "And make sure there's no kinks, and that the holding bead on the end isn't stuck. If there's kinks, your screwed."

"What town are you in?" my mom asked.

"No idea," I said. "Somewhere near the Yaak River." I heard her wrestling with a map. They like to keep track.

"Now if the cable is kinked, you'll have to get another one. It's a precision instrument, you know. You can't just yank it apart all the time. You're going to wear those things out if you're not careful."

Dad was right. The throttle cable on the left side had gotten stuck. Just as I capped it up a young couple on a Harley stopped by. They wore matching Harley baseball caps, new running shoes, and Wrangler jeans.

"We just wanted to take a look at your bike up close," the man said. The woman's long blond hair was pulled through the space at the back of her baseball cap, falling into neat, straight strands down her back. "We were just saying that that is the coolest bike we've ever seen." The woman smiled and nodded.

I thought so too. If I didn't wear it out.

IT DIDN'T TAKE LONG to cross Idaho and enter Montana, where I headed toward Glacier National Park. My grandparents passed through Glacier on their honeymoon in 1927, when they toured the country in their Model T Ford. They described it as "primitive," and commented in a letter that it was "not yet ready for visiting in the manner of most parks. With guides and pack trains it could be marvelous," they wrote in a letter home.

They hadn't dreamed of today's luxurious lodges and campsites, paved roads, internal bus transportation system, and the maintained trails. They had simply set their tent up in a clearing on the side of the dirt track that was roughly cut through the park.

It was at the camp store at the base of Glacier that I met Jeff. He was riding a bicycle from Seattle to New York. After about five minutes we felt like old friends, so we decided to meet later at a campsite eight miles up and go for a hike.

There were no showers at the campground, so after we set up our tents, we took our towels and soap and hiked for more than an hour up to a lake, talking about how good it would be to get clean. The stream we followed came from the lake. The water had an eerie, thick texture to it, and was an opaque white-blue color that made it look as if it might suddenly freeze.

WHEN WE GOT to the lake we decided that it was, in fact, on the verge of freezing. But we chose separate sides of a large rock and started in. I put one bare foot in the water and it immediately cramped, all my toes curling painfully to the balls of my feet. By the time I had massaged it out, Jeff had plunged in. I couldn't back out now, and besides, I was filthy, so I plunged in too, washing quickly before my inner organs could realize what was happening to the outer ones.

Every cell in my body was doing jumping jacks in an attempt to thwart hypothermia. My mind jumped to warm subjects -- hot tubs, steam rooms, coffee, Hawaii.

Jeff and I remained silent as our lips changed from blue to their natural color again, and watched the waterfalls coming down from the snowcapped mountain.

The water fell in thin cascades near the top, but their paths connected with one another until there were three major cascades halfway down the gray rock face. A pair of loons howled from the middle of the lake.

"They mate for life," Jeff said. "Aren't they gorgeous?"

I'd never seen a loon until I'd reached Canada a few weeks before. They are black with white rings around their necks. These two glided across the water together. One of them dove, then the other. Then they were gone.

We turned our attention to a duck family, and then a tiny chipmunk who scurried boldly to within an inch of my feet, sat up, and begged for a handout.

On our way back down to camp, Jeff and I talked incessantly. "Tell me to shut up if I'm talking too much," he told me. "I haven't really talked to anyone in a couple of weeks." I hadn't either, so we talked -- and listened -- in turn.

AT AGE 34, Jeff had quit his job as a computer programmer and found a life he thought he could deal with: challenging work as a consultant, and a house in the woods near Seattle.

"I was really freaked out when I quit my permanent job, and immediately started looking for another one," he told me. "I interviewed with a contract agency and they offered me a job the next day. It was only then that I felt confident enough to leave for a couple of months."

Back at camp we cooked a luxurious meal from our supplies. Pasta, fresh vegetables, bread, and a bottle of wine I'd bought on impulse at the camp store.

We talked after dark at the picnic table, and when it started to rain we moved under the canvas and kept talking until we fell asleep. It was the wine and the altitude, and the comfort of two lonely travelers in temporary company. I suppose we'd already covered a lot of ground toward being friends by the time we'd met, just by being travelers, and traveling. In the morning I woke on his shoulder.

It rained most of the day. The rangers let me hook up to get email at the ranger station, and then we read books and wrote until the rain let up a little. We hiked back to the lake. The smooth ice-blue stream we'd hiked along the day before had become a raging river. At the top of the mountain, the waterfalls tore more violently at the rock, and the water, when I put my toes in to cross a stream, felt even colder.

We continued to talk, with only a few silent moments to enjoy the sound of water or the call of a loon, and though I'd know him for only a day and a half, I felt closer to Jeff than to some of my friends at home. This has happened to me before, on other trips, with other travelers. Sometimes these short meetings have developed into permanent friendships. Other times these people have disappeared from my life altogether. But at the time, we provided each other with very necessary human contact during our solitary voyages.

When it stopped raining that night we talked about leaving the next morning. It was a reluctant parting, and we delayed it by meeting at the top of the Rising to the Sun road. He left an hour earlier than I, and I caught up with him before he reached the top. There, I videotaped him climbing the final snow-covered hill.

Carla and Jeff at the top of the Rising Sun Road

I CONTINUED DOWN the road, probably one of the most impressive engineering feats of its kind in the world, with some of the most beautiful scenery to be found in the world, but it was only a backdrop for what meeting Jeff had meant to me. I felt like we still had so much more to say to each other. But instead we had said good-bye. As I headed for Alberta, the mountains of Glacier National Park were in my rearview mirrors, but at the front of my mind was Jeff, cycling a parallel route just a little to the south.

Then the bike quit. I pulled into an old side road and walked around it, gravel crunching under my feet. I checked the wires, the gas, and the plugs, which I couldn't make spark. I switched out the electronic ignition box and the voltage regulator. Still no spark.

Glacier was two miles behind me. I took my backpack and my Powerbook to the road and put out my thumb.

THE MECHANIC at the garage got me set up in a nearby campground, and we went to work on the bike. Clarence is a car mechanic, but was more than willing to take a shot at fixing the Ural.

But first we called Randy, who briefed Clarence on the electrical workings of the Ural's electronic ignition. It is one of the few changes that have been made to the motorcycle since the beginning of its manufacture in 1942. Bob and Tom at Ural America have been improving on it in other ways, too, like replacing the rough Russian carburetors with more precise Japanese models.

Clarence grimaced and scratched his head a lot, studied my Ural manuals, and figured out how it all worked. We looked at the coil, the timing assembly, the generator, and the battery, and finally he narrowed it down to the ignition switch. I guess it had gone bad in the rainstorm. So Clarence replaced it with an American switch, and I was on my way.

Clarence at work on the Ural

IT WAS ALL plains and prairie through eastern Montana and into Alberta, which was only about 10 miles from the east entrance to Glacier National Park. The border guard was a pretty, perky blond with bright blue eyes and a nonstop smile.

"Turn off your engine, please," she asked sweetly.

"Take off your glasses, please," again sweetly.

Then the nationality questions, the alcohol, tobacco, and weapons questions. Then she asked a familiar question in a strange way.

"Do you have to travel alone?"

"Have to?" I said. Had I heard her correctly?

"Well," she said, tilting her head slightly, "it just seems sad --"

I interrupted, just then realizing that the question was personal, not one requiring an explanation in order for me to pass.

"I like to sometimes."

She seemed a little embarrassed. "Oh, okay. Well, have a nice stay in Alberta." Syrupy sweet smile.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN you cross a border that makes one side different from the place on the other side?

The road, for instance, was empty. Lonely. Flat. Straight. And very, very clean. I passed nothing for miles. There were no intersections, and plenty of time to think.

I thought about the border guard's perception that I somehow "have to" travel alone, and it got to me. After leaving Jeff, I did feel the lack of company, and the desire for it, and wondered how I came to that sad state of being. And after I worried about that, I worried about gas, though I had enough for another 120 kilometers.

But I sure was alone. The road stretched on, and the Montana mountains grew smaller in my rearview mirrors. My stomach had a knot in it. Ahead of me the terrain was flatter.

I turned east on highway 501 and passed more flat terrain. Under the great expanses of goldenrod and unripened grain, ducks congregated in large puddles of blue water studded with stiff green grass. Over the Canadian plains the sky was overcast and the wind whirled in my ears. I could see beyond the border to the States, where the sun shone on the distant mountains.

I arrived at an intersection in a town called Del Bonita. There was a dilapidated general store with no gas pump, and a crossroads sign stating that it was only three kilometers to the U.S. border. I sat there a long time with the engine running. No traffic came by. I looked right, to the States, where the sun was shining, the roads were populated, and where gas stations sprung up whenever you needed them.

I turned off the engine and sat there. The silence was overwhelming. I made a deal with myself that if a car came by within five minutes, I'd zoom straight ahead and continue into Canada. If not, I'd turn right and head back to the border.

The wind whistled past the Del Bonita General Store. Beyond the buildings on the corner, which seemed abandoned, I could see nothing for miles. Still, no cars passed.

Don't be a wimp, I thought.

When I kick started the beast I still didn't know which direction to take. I glanced down at the odometer. A hundred kilometers to go before I'd have to use the gas in the spare can that Randy had given me. That was 60 miles. There was a campground at Milk River. I could make it there.

I rode straight across the intersection, deliberately not looking to the right. I passed a farmhouse about ten miles later. It was a neat read and white farmhouse with silos out back. It looked uninhabited. Like a giant model of a farmhouse where nobody really lived.

As I craned my neck for signs of life I hit a pothole full of rocks that flung me and the Ural into the air.

WHEN I WAS a teenager, I used to love this feeling. I had a little Enduro, and when I saw a hole in the road I'd aim for it, accelerating. There would be the swift dive of the front wheel, the squeeze-down of suspension, and then the hurl upward. The rear wheel would hit, bump, and fly out to boost the upward movement of me and the dirt bike. If I fell, which was often, I would merely dust myself off, bend the bike back into shape if necessary, and do it again.

I wasn't ready for this pothole, but there are times when the Ural really comes through. As I hit the hole, I instinctively raised myself up from the saddle, my knees and elbows flexible. The front wheel went down, and up again. A split second later the sidecar wheel followed, then the rear wheel. It was kind of like riding my cousin's ATV. No worries.

After that I came upon more of these holes, and I started to enjoy them. The sidecar floated along nicely as we became airborne a couple more times when I let myself get distracted by the wheat fields and goldenrod and the occasional burst of purple thistle.

The scene reminded me of Scotland, with its gently rolling green hills and vast expanses of nothing under skies that always threaten to rain. But when I visited Scotland, I was in a car with a radio and a boyfriend and plenty of gas in the tank. Here I was exposed to the elements, and almost out of gas, and I wanted to get to a Place. But the only signs of human settlement were neat, uninhabited-looking farmhouses every ten miles or so, backed with silos and barns with grain harvesting equipment.

Each mile seemed ten miles long, and when I finally spotted a town in the distance I was suspicious. It could have been a mass of silos. Or a mirage. I'd been fooled before. But it did seem to be a town, perhaps one with a gas station.

Then the beast choked and died of starvation. She'd guzzled all her gas. Without bothering to pull over (there wasn't another vehicle for miles, anyway), I emptied the spare gas into the tank.

What I'd seen was, in fact, a town -- Milk River. The town even had a gas station, in front of which four teenage boys were working with such enthusiasm on a car engine that they barely glanced at my bike. Milk River is one of those places where teenagers enthusiastically work on car engines, because with functional car engines, they can leave.

After filling the Ural's tank and the spare gas can, I followed signs toward the Writing on Stone Provincial Park and campground, 50 kilometers away. It was probably somewhere around that tiny mountain that rose from the ocean of prairie ahead of me. I just hoped it offered some kind of shelter from the winds, and had showers, or at least a reasonably warm river.

First thing in the morning I would ride right out of here, heading back to the States, satisfied that I hadn't wimped out.