Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 93

Bicycling Across History to Oregon

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for those whose history we were following. This overland corridor west followed
the Platte River Valley of Nebraska, across the high plains of Wyoming and into
the Rockies. It then tracked the Sweetwater River to the continental divide at South
Pass. Beyond South Pass the Oregonians faced the high desert of Wyoming to the
Green River and then the harsh and often unforgiving environment of the long, hot
arc of the Snake River Plain across all of southern Idado. Then we headed over the
Blue Mountains of Oregon to the Columbia, where emigrants then followed the
river, often in rafts and sometimes in wagons, to the fertile Willamette Valley —
the trail’s end for many of them. We then hiked on another 100 miles to the Pacific
coast and Astoria — where Lewis and Clark, in 1805, first saw the Pacific Ocean.
Today one can scoot across this distance by car on good roads in a handful of
long days. Although you will be seeing it at 70 mph, there remain the endless and
empty rolling plains, the sage-covered range-land, the tilted hills, the wind-sculpted
formations, the rugged gorges and, of course, the mountains — the Rockies, the
Blues, the Cascades, the Pacific coastal range. But in a car you cannot gain a sense
of the anxiety engendered by the long, slow, tedious and weary pace of travel that
thousands experienced in the nineteenth century, or see parts of the original Or
egon Trail that survive today. In a car you feel little uncertainty about what each
day will bring you. On a bicycle on the high plains it is very scary when a blue sky
almost instantly turns black and storm clouds dressed with lightning bolts appear
on either side of the road and close in on you, the highest point on the horizon, as
you thread the needle and race 10 miles on to shelter. In a car, you are unlikely to
recall that 20,000 earlier travelers left their bones along the route. On a bicycle you
are exposed to the elements — rain, sun, heat, hail and cold — and you are vulner
able to both wind sheer and the whims of those who are friendly on foot but often
nasty or careless when they have a steering wheel in their hands and are surrounded
by a ton or more of steel and glass. Out of a car and on a bicycle you can listen to
the chatter of fussy prairie dogs, hear wind whistling, wave off a dive-bombing
red-winged blackbird and feel the numbing fatigue of ever so slowly moving across
the miles — a fatigue which earlier travelers wrote about.
In a car you miss the smell of the land — the sweeping scent of wildtlowers,
the musky odor of an approaching storm, even the sickly perfume of alfalfa fields
in Idaho or the awful smell of Nebraska feed lots. And you miss the stench of
death. From a bicycle seat at 10 mph the smell of rotting flesh can overpower you.
And as you move west, the “road-kill” odor of raccoons, skunks, squirrels and
small domestic animals gives way to the stench of a long dead deer or antelope.
Often one starts to sniff from a quarter of a mile away before pedaling past the
large four-legged corpse alongside the road. The smell of life long-gone was com
monplace to most emigrants, especially when passers-by encountered the remains
of dead oxen or the hastily buried bodies which had been unearthed by wolves.