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Outside Magazine March 2002

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A Modest Proposal (Cont.)

THE WAITRESS IN ALBANY slid our hamburgers onto the bar. "There's enough grease to keep you going," she said.

Buzz and I ate as if we'd just pedaled 50 miles over terrain as rugged as the Gobi Desert into a teeth-gritting headwind. Which we had. Several times I'd look down at the speedometer to find us moving at a humble seven mph.

"Saddle sore?" I asked Buzz. He was wearing plaid cotton shorts in lieu of padded Lycra, a wool cap instead of a helmet. He shook his head.

We were the only guys in the bar not wearing fluorescent orange, the fall-fashion color of choice for hunters everywhere.

We'd just finished our burgers when Reed strolled in, his face flushed and eyes jumpy. "What in the hell happened?" Buzz asked.

"I about got myself ventilated!" replied Reed, and proceeded to tell, or rather to act out, the story.

The rancher must have seen him coming. After weaving past the usual assortment of clutter—cars sunk in sagebrush, a rusted bailer, tilted outbuildings—Reed dismounted and started walking toward the front door. That's when the rancher stepped out from around a shed, with a shotgun.

Reed tried to ignore the weapon and asked permission to cross his land. The rancher grimaced, lowered one hand to shift his balls, and brought his hand back to the gun. "No," he said.

Reed politely explained that we were simply following the pipeline trail and would be off his property in a matter of minutes.

"No," he repeated. "You'd hurt the grass."

Reed looked out at the rancher's land. A century of overgrazing had transformed this short-grass prairie into tumbleweeds and red dirt.

He tried charming the man with the details of our youthful outing. We were like cowboys, really—riding the range, traveling light, searching for a saloon to wet our whistle. But of course cowboys haven't ridden anywhere for ages. Cowboys drive big American pickups, four-wheelers, snowmobiles.

"You're an environmentalist!" the man sputtered, a label that, for certain ranchers, means someone more evil than murderers and rapists.

"I am not!" Reed emphatically replied—his lie an act of apostasy so outrageous that Buzz and I almost fell off our stools laughing. As a lawsuit-slinging lawyer, Reed has forced utility companies across the nation to spend millions on clean-air equipment.

"You are too!" the rancher insisted astutely. "You're one a them goddamn environmentalists!" He brandished the shotgun. "Git! Git off my property!" So Reed got, as fast as he could.

Buzz and I were snorting so hard we began to risk raising the ire of the men in the bar, all of whom had their own shotguns and rifles in the trucks outside. Time to hit the trail.

WE DOGLEGGED NORTH along Highway 11, riding single file through a valley of hay fields and irrigation ditches, alone with our thoughts. I found myself smiling. We weren't more than an hour's drive from home, and already it felt as if we'd entered another country. We were strangers in a strange land.

A corollary to the adventure-equals-expedition fallacy is that adventure only exists someplace else: Namibia, Nepal, New Zealand, New Hebrides. To experience the exotic, to meet memorable characters seemingly from another epoch, to expect and ultimately find the unexpected, you must fly halfway around the world. Don't buy it.

It was late afternoon and a cold wind was churning dirt in the air when we rode into Centennial, population 100.

There were three extraordinary motels in this one-street town. It could have been Mongolia. The first, a squat cinder-block bunker, had beds so swaybacked and tiny that when we tested them, our butts hit the floor and our feet stuck out in midair. The second had its door wide open, but no one was around. The gas-station attendant told us to check at the bar for Suzy.

Suzy, a vision in Tammy Faye Baker eyelashes and a gaudy Western shirt, offered us a discount because none of the motel's bedsheets had been changed in recent memory.

We ended up spending the night at the last-chance motel in a room with two beds whose log frames could have been used to support a mine shaft. We ate in the attached restaurant, a prohibitionist establishment packed wall-to-wall with country kitsch. Outside, the wind was carrying off sheep and small cows and trying to uproot a sign that said WYOMING: LIKE NO PLACE ON EARTH.

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