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Day 50 - June 13 - Hills Alive With the Sound of Music

"Drip, drip drop,
Little April shower
Beating a tune
As you fall all around"

Hi, and welcome back to my bike blog.

Music

I enjoy music, especially while biking. I think of music as adding an overtoned mood to the ride, and to complement the views and experience. Sometimes the music also helps to pass the time, or provide benchmarks. I often find myself thinking that I'll get somewhere in a certain number of songs, or that I'll take a break at the end of a song.

Sometimes the music demands the ride, and other times, the ride demands the music. There are hills that I would simply not be able to climb without some guilty pleasures playing at full volume. Though more often than not, a hill requires consistency more than a big burst of energy, and in those cases, the rhythm, beat, and familiarity of music helps a lot. On the other hand, there are songs that I would not enjoy unless I was at the peak of a mountain, in the middle of nowhere, with the first derivative about to change, and a big slide downhill incoming.

Music is a mood enhancer. When I have fun, I want fun music. At the end of the day, I want soft music to calm down. When I am tired and get a flat, I turn off the music. When I change a tire in high moods, I put music on the speaker, and dance like no one is watching, which is oftentimes the case.

Sometimes, the best music is the empty music. On big hills, I sometimes enjoy listening to the bike creak, and my heavy breathing keeping rhythm. Other times, I feel like music would just spoil the purity of where I am. Especially when the birds are chirping, or a river is weaving along the road.

Today I heard live music twice. While changing a tire in silence right outside of Baker City, I heard a guitar and a voice singing in the bushes beside the railroad near the road. It was folk songs, and country songs, and songs I've never heard before. I changed the tire, and walked to the tracks to see who it was. It was a woman in a tent. Homeless, though maybe not homeless, considering the tent. She sung, and played guitar, and told me something incoherent about west coast and east coast music coming together. I went back to my bike to discover that my tire was still flat. The patch didn't work. And so, I replaced the inner tube to the music of her singing.

I biked into Baker City, hoping to find a decent place to eat, when I heard live music coming from a place on Main St. They had good vegetarian options, and Ragged Coyote playing on the guitar and singing psychedelic folk country blues. I bought him a drink, and he told me that he used to be a bike mechanic until his Achilles tendon gave out. Now he's back on the bike after 18 months, and recently did a 25 mile ride. No ride is too short to be fun.

Romancing the Town - A Guest Post by Sarah Usick

Quiet and unassuming, they sink into chairs around an assortment of tables in the grey room, seed companies embroidered across their baseball caps, faded blue jeans and plaid shirts, wrinkled hands seemingly permanently oil stained from fixing their machinery, stirring cream into ceramic cups, faces weathered by a good fifty or sixty years squinting at the horizon trying to predict rain. It's 8:30 am at the local hotel for the ritual coffee, and the retired farmers are cycling topics of finances, their cancer diagnoses, the hopeless next generation, and some very distant world affairs. Conservative, never showing their feelings, but in the hazy room the sentiment is loud and clear: their way of life is fading. But you are only a visiting anthropologist, and you're romanticizing a past that never was: technology has always been changing these towns, and the caricatures you're drawing do no justice to the individuals who have forged uncertain futures and knit this community together for better or worse.

I have been enjoying Assaf's impressions of rural communities on this blog. But what is it actually like to live in one?

If urban communities form by a common interest, rural communities form by the common industry: farming, fishing, forestry, even a strategic spot on the railway. Though every community member may not be directly working in the industry, they share its reality. The nurse is sewing the farmer's thumb back on from a farming accident, the grade 4 teacher is taking his class to Ag Days, the credit union teller is explaining to a farmer the terms of her operating loan. Because the community is dependent on the industry, threats to the industry, or to the way of life, are commonly commiserated. When there's not enough rain, or not enough warmth, or a late frost is coming in, or worse yet, a big corporation, everyone is worried.

This single mindedness sometimes makes rural life difficult. It's harder for these communities to accept someone with different views or culture. Nepotism is a huge problem, often holding back development, innovation, and fair chances at employment. The closeness and solidarity can be unbearable at times. There is no choice in the matter. You must get along with everyone, because they are all you have. When an employee is fired, a church splits, a teacher leaves for another school division, or a divorce occurs, everyone knows about it, and it is quite dramatic. When there is only one or two versions of every necessary building: grocery, post office, restaurant, bank, gas station, and church, it's hard avoiding a person. The counter at the hardware store is graced with paper cards announcing wedding socials and funerals of familiar family names. You ice cakes at the local bakery so you know about every retirement, 80th birthday, and graduation that month. Be prepared to chat with the nurse about your sister's graduation dress, because she's gonna ask you. Oh, and the doctor's son is on your kid's baseball team and you can't look them in the eye after that rash treatment you got from them. You may choose to drive to the city for a sensitive medical issue just to avoid the gossip of the town.

Returning to a rural town means a hundred curious inquiries into what you do now. If, heaven forbid, you return without a nursing degree, teaching certificate, or intent to inherit the family farm, you're drawn into a caricature too: flighty, Liberal millennial with too much education, too few job prospects, and loyalty to nothing. They say a prophet has no honour in their hometown. So you return to the city to think big thoughts or make big bucks. You may try to communicate to your peers about these places, to defend their attitudes and their politics. But you'll just fall into clichés and caricatures, while the acrid smell of canola in your nose and the rumble of thunderclouds in your ears are drowned out by the fumes and drones of urban fever, the boundless quest for knowledge, efficiency and money. You'll notice how your mind shifts. Forever hovering, oscillating between these two realities, two faces of a coin, two shades of a colour, flickering, creating a shimmer. A shimmering reality.

The Image Gallery

Ontario - open for business.

The first sign I've seen mentioning Portland.

The first half of my ride today was through the hills, and was very pretty. I took some pictures of valleys I passed through.


I then went down from the mountains to bike along the Snake River for a bit.

Just as I left the comfortable flatness of the Snake River towards the crazy hill before Huntington, I finally snapped a picture of a timezone change!

I was hoping to stop by the Huntington post office, figuring that I'd be missing their lunch break, as I was arriving at around 2:00pm. I forgot about the timezone shift, and the post office was closed.

Huntington was followed by a very very long uphill trek. It was beautiful, slightly rainy, and I enjoyed every moment of it.




Here's the peak:

And the way down:

Finally I got to Baker City, and listened to live music by Ragged Coyote.

The Map

Today I biked for 120km over the course of seven hours. My total uphill was 1,140m, which I think is my record! I also have a new algorithm for computing expected time (and I think that this is what Google does when providing time estimates): Total time = (distance in km/20) hours + (vertical uphill in meters)/10 minutes. So by this estimate, today I went pretty fast. Your homework is to go back and see how accurate this has been over the trip.

Thanks for reading! See you tomorrow!

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