Monday, July 25, 2011

This morning we put on our suits, cheerfully ignoring our aching backs and sides. A puncture in our air mattress had forced us to climb out in the middle of the night to dig out our thin sleeping pads. The unbelievable hardness of the packed and crushed granite is made bearable, but the aches remain. My allergies attack and I do everything with a sloppy kind of urgency. As we climb the hill to the tub I see some spots of color: caps and t-shirts draped over a privacy screen. I immediately recant and make noises of protest– I'm really not in the mood to socialize– but it's too late, we're already there. So we walk around the screen and join the three men already there. Celeste says something about radium springs and a grey-haired man from Lewiston tells us they're in Canada. This seems to break the ice and he and Celeste talk of Oregon's full-service filling stations with a second man, a solid hunter with spiky hair, chiming in occasionally. The third man, another solid hunter/fisher type with his tot, had already left.

The two men leave and we stay behind a few minutes, wrinkling up. Then we walk back down the hill and have our breakfast: oatmeal and coffee. Today there's no hoisting the shower tent and hot water bag, as we've had our soak.

Pretty soon everything's in the truck and we're climbing a dirt road out of the South Fork Boise River valley. The road goes on and on. But all we have is a little less than a quarter tank. Shortly the needle is at "E" but no matter, we have ten gallons in jerry cans.

We listen to Gary Numan through the green fields of eastern Idaho.

In Wyoming we descend again into the plains, into the land of half-finished, grandiose log cabins and truck stop billboards. We skirt the western border and turn off the highway at Cottonwood Lake. A few gravel miles later we come to a tee and a sign: "Road Closed Ahead." The road has been washed out. We drive down another 20 miles or so, and turn off again; this time we drive into a stand of aspens and cottonwoods and around a corner, like a character from a tall tale or nursery rhyme, steps a stocky man with a young, open face and beard. He smiles and waves. We pass under vibrating aspens to a private site with a grassy, uneven tent pad. It's the first site we see and I stop there just to get out of the truck. But we find another twice as large, whose tent pad is wide and flat. Down below the river winds through a tall meadow screened by young pines. In a fir sapling I find a large, beautiful cicada patiently waiting for his turn to sing. The next morning Celeste reports he is still there. He did move a bit. A couple pulls in a few spaces down and runs a generator for a while, but apart from this mechanical noise the place is quiet, scored only by the sound of the stream and the high buzz of cicadas.