Author: Matt Keene

Over the past week and a half, Jodi and I have crossed the Northern Cascades. We’ve crossed the Pacific Crest, we’ve climbed our highest pass in Washington, and we’ve cycled through valleys blazing under 90-plus degree heat.

We have traveled by bicycle a little more than 300 miles through Washington and are now looking east to the Rocky Mountains.

In this time and across this place, we have followed the movement of water, up and down mountains and through valleys. It has been our one constant. Water has determined where we would camp, where we would rest. The mist spraying off dark mountain stone has cooled us as we ascended steep mountain roads. We’ve kept pace with water tumbling downhill towards the valleys. We’ve washed off sweat and grime in cool mountain streams, let aching muscles and soreness slip away in shallow pools, and quickened our heartbeat plunging into snowmelt waters.

Never once, alongside these streams, have we thought to ask “whose water am I taking?” The water moves so quick here, it seems an endless supply pours out of the rocks. It seems a quick splash, a cool drink, could do no harm.

However, for those who live here, on the west side of the mountains, on the east side of the mountains, these cool streams and flowing waters affect their every moment, and to that end, we have become witness to the manipulation of movement, the focused direction of this shedding water, the casual indifference and careless waste.

We are travelers, passing through, our pace just slow enough to begin to observe this relationship to the land, to the water.

Several days ago, we camped at a small motel. We arrived in the middle of the afternoon and the proprietor told us we could camp anywhere, just away from the sprinkler. The sprinkler ran–tick, tick, tick–all afternoon. It ran after the sun went down, it was still running the following morning when we woke up. All night long, this water ran, from its cool headwaters down along wildflowers and Douglas Fir, along paper birch and past deer, down it ran into a concrete wall, a flooded pool, down it ran into a pipe, into a hose, into a sprinkler.

The east side of the mountains are dry and desertlike. It is so easy to see the effects of water use. To see the drought-tolerant landscapes butt up next to rich, soft green lawns and patchwork farms. It is so easy to cast blame on these farmers, on these residents, as we cycle past, to question the rationale in farming on volcanic ash, and dry, arid land. It is not so easy to forgo that apple, that pear.

And Moses lifted up his hand, and with his rod he struck the rock twice: and the water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their animals also.
– Numbers 20:11

In the 1930s, with lands ravaged by the Dust Bowl, farmers starving and families suffering, development was focused on the Pacific Northwest, a land that promised bountiful harvest, if only the waters could be caught. If only the waters could be manipulated, redirected, focused.

The Civilian Conservation Corps, I believe, is one of the finest and most successful programs to ever come out of the United States. So many of our public lands, our bridges, our roadways, can be attributed to the work of 17-25 year-old young, single men (and later, women and married couples). It is not without its complications, but so many of the structures built by this program still stand strong, a lasting testament–and perhaps one of the few legitimate indicators–to the will and determination of the so-called American ideologue, the young, hard-worker putting in long, full days, doing meaningful work, sending home wages to his family.

In the late 1930s, the CCC were in full force, focused on projects throughout the country. Of those projects, the most notable are dams.

Dams have a profound effect on the rivers, watersheds and communities around them. They can reshape entire regions, and in the 1930s, dams were seen as our way forward, out of depression, an elixir for growth and development, a symbol of our ingenuity and strength, and a recreational wonderland. To that end, dams were constructed across the nation and only now are we beginning to question the long-term effects of these impoundments.

Two days ago, we crossed the Columbia River at Franklin D. Roosevelt Lake. The Columbia and its tributaries produce more than 44 percent of total U.S. hydroelectric generation. It is the fourth largest river,  by volume, in the United States.

How can we, traveling so briefly through this area, question the validity of damming this river? Of creating lakes where salmon should push? Of necessitating dependence on altered lands?

I salivate, pedaling beside fig trees that shouldn’t be there.

I fill my water bottles with dammed water.

On the western side of the mountains, the effects of these dams aren’t apparent. They’re hidden deep inside the moisture-rich lands. The effects flicker in the lights of downtown Seattle, they course through the warm showers of the bed and breakfast in that quaint little town. They add freshness to that microbrew. The rain coming off of the Pacific blankets the truth of damming these mighty rivers, of altering these lands and denying the many benefits of free-flowing water.

There are many studies on why rivers should remain free. The economic cost of maintaining dams, the environmental cost of maintaining dams, is wearily high. The effects upon indigenous people whose survival has been dependent on swift, free flowing water, whose cultural stories have been developed around mighty rivers. Western opinions on dams are changing; they are being removed at a rapid rate and rivers are being restored. But how can we not recognize perseverance and fortitude in such past times of depression and suffering? How can feelings of loss not be tempered by memories of starvation?

Before we came down to the Columbia, we passed Sherman Creek, a heritage site tucked in a small pocket on the side of the mountain. The creek ran quietly, like the lightest windchime, through a grassy field. Small conifers poked through the grasses. Wildflowers bloomed along the waters edge. There we sat, on a concrete bench, overlooking this winding stream.

The bench we sat on was a former spillway where a dam had stood. Sherman Creek had at one time been Sherman Lake, built in the late 1930s by the CCC. A small, log bathhouse still stood, the only structure besides the bench that still remained on the site.

Sitting there, my thoughts ran from the water up high on the hillside, down through the grasses and over the bench. They ran through the whispered memories of young men, writing home about the beauty of the Cascades, filled with pride in their work, work that would be there long after they were gone. Work that would memorialize them, that would connect them across the landscape and across the country, work that would allow for young children to swim in new lakes, for families to drive the Blue Ridge Parkway, and for motel hosts to run sprinklers all night.

Daily, we value water. Its proximity to us is at the forefront of every pedal stroke. Its weight on our bikes is ever-constant. Its coolness on a hot day, its threat of rain under cloudy skies, remains.

I always wonder, on these trips, how much of this will carry through when the journey is over. How will I feel water when I associate it with a tap again, and not a cool, clear stream? What relationship will I have with the watershed where my fruits and vegetables come from? What memories will be scattered, what struggles will be felt, what countries will be built, what ideologies will be changed with every drink, with every swallow?

 

In the mountains, it is difficult to think.

Your mind is focused on one thing: forward.

Your thoughts can’t swell inside you, budding and blossoming the way they can in the valley.

In the valley, your thoughts can wander through the hillside, sift through the grass and meander with wildflowers. They can swell in the troughs and roam among the spine.

It is much easier to think in the valley.

—

I saw the purplest lavender, the largest dandelion, the coldest snowmelt stream and the driest stone. The valley shows you all of these, as you descend.

—

A few years ago, we took Callie through the White Mountains in New Hampshire. We stopped with her at a small trailhead along the side of the highway, a trailhead I had crossed many years back hiking the Appalachian Trail. South of us lay Mt. Moosilauke, with a steep ascent—think climbing up boulders using rebar pounded and bent into the stone as a ladder. We took Callie into the woods and followed the spongy path with its white blazes lighting up trees south through the low and wet foot of the mountain. The trail wove along a rushing stream, water rolling over smooth stones. After a mile or so, the boulders started to burst through the ground and the trail became steep. All the while, it followed the water’s edge. Sometimes, the rushing stream fell down just beside the path, so close that it made the trail wet from splashes.

Callie bounded up each rock, getting closer to the rushing stream and falling water then we liked. She would pause, looking down at us as we heaved our way up the steep boulders. Then, when we had come just close enough, she would bound forward, leaving wet paw prints on the stone.

We’ll be riding that same highway on our bikes this fall. We’ll be passing the same trailhead. I wonder, will we stop? Will we go for a hike southbound, beneath those brilliant, white blazes? Will we see her there, at the top of a boulder, waiting for us to get just close enough? Will the stone still be wet with the print of her paw?

—

In the valley, I’ve teared up twice. My thoughts begin to breathe down here. They respond to the bird calls, they roll with the dust trails.

There are spots, though, where the mountains close in on each side, where the rock faces stare across at each other, squeezing the lavender and grass and wild flower, squeezing the thoughts clenched deep inside of me.

—

Sometimes, I think she’s laying in my back trailer. She was about the right weight as what I’m carrying. 49 pounds, up to the end. I think she’s laying back there, curled up, cleaning her left front paw. If I look back real fast, she’ll look up at me with those brown eyes, her ears slightly perked.

I want to look back.

—

If I tilt my head just right, and look back through the rearview mirror attached to my helmet, I can see the clouds behind me.

Sometimes, in the afternoon, the sun reflects through that same mirror, blinding my left eye.

With that same mirror, I shout “Truck,” letting Jodi know there’s one approaching.

We can always hear the courteous ones, crossing the rumble strip to the far side of the road, giving us space in the valley.

 

Yesterday morning, climbing to Loup Loup Pass, I was dying. I was on the kind of uphill even your car hesitates before climbing. My thighs were on fire. My lungs were screaming. I was struggling to move far enough forward that my bike wouldn’t roll backwards beneath me.

Every meter of pavement was a hard win, a conquest of earth and space and rocks and sweat. I cranked on the pedals, this strange and simple mechanization of circles on air, of a dream to move forward, repeated and repeated. I began to round a curve and, there, just off the pavement and nestled in rocks I saw the small tombstone. It was no larger than a bottle and read one word: Peace. A small motorcycle headlight lay beside it, intently refracting light onto this small patch of space. I wavered there, in between pedal strokes. My lungs burned, firing away a million tiny fireworks, quivering like the quaking Aspen. For longer than gravity seems to allow I hung there, in this space, on this earth, before pressing down and moving uphill.

I have begun to have a very acute perception of space. The space beside be, the space below me. The space between this car and me, the space between me and the guardrail. The mountains have a different space. Their space adds definition to the sky, it slices through and rounds out the different shades of blue, the different textures of clouds. As we have moved through the river valleys and into the mountains, we’ve clung to this new space, ruffling its sheets to release the fresh scents of pine, overturning its rocks to see if its hollow inside.

At first, the mountains were a white tear in the sky. The snow-shrouded peaks were all that existed against the blue skies of our first days. They were like a glacier, only revealing the very top, hiding the large mass beneath. As we began to approach them, cycling through the low hills of western Washington, the blue below began to take shape, began to differ from the blue above. The blue below began to fill up like a balloon. It was as though the snow-packed peaks were taking deep, full breaths, revealing lungs of depth and shape and shadows. Soon, their space swelled into our world, adding nooks and folds, glacial memories and spikes of Douglas Fir. Soon, their space became all we could know, all we could learn.

—

Sometimes, it can be difficult to tell if you’re going uphill.

Everything inside you sees a downhill. Or, at the very least, a flat slab of pavement up ahead. But, despite what you see, you keep slowing down. It is as though your bike was braking.

“It is as though my bike is braking,” you think. And so, you check. You check your brakes, you check your tires, you check that you’re not dragging a conifer-branch, having become an untrained and underpaid sidewalk sweeper recruited into service by some mountain troll wreaking high jinks on weary travelers.

But, nothing is stuck, nothing is dragging, not one of your tires is flat. You are just going uphill.

Your perspective is wrong and gravity doesn’t care. It just keeps pulling you back, pulling you down.

Those uphills are the worst.

—

Two days ago, I saw two dead songbirds. They lay in the grass, slightly covered, wearing a yellow the color of newborn spring. They looked like porcelain ornaments, placed lightly in their grassy nests, undisturbed beside a world moving too fast to hear their song.

—

Our first major descent tasted like cheap whiskey.

Having reached the top, we pedaled forward, a sign reducing the mountain to a triangle. STEEP GRADE, it welcomed us. We rolled forward and the space in front of us opened up. The mountain had folded in on itself, like a cat curled up beneath the hot sun. Our descent was immediate. A guard rail was opposite us. The road curved to the right and at the bottom, there was another guardrail where the curve began. But directly in front of us, there was no guardrail at all. There was just emptiness. The space that we clung to disappeared at this curve and there was no hidden glacier beneath the snow-packed peak. There was no shadows of blue below the tear in the sky. There was just air, sharp and hot. We rolled down towards this curve, our entire world reduced to the space between our brakes and our handlebars, the millimeter of difference a little more pressure would make.

Stepping away from the saddle, it must have looked comical. Such tiny wheels, such tiny people, on such a large road, on such a large mountain, rolling down white-knuckled and in uncloaked fear. But the taste of that absence had a sharp bite. It had saturated our lungs, had extinguished the million tiny fireworks bursting inside, had shown us a space so large, we could slip into its absence and vanish completely. There were no songbirds on this exposed rock. There was no mountain troll, playing harmless high jinks. There was only a small motorcycle headlight, refracting a single beam of possibility into our eyes, filling our lungs with intended purpose, shining a show of shadows against a blank wall.

 

Over the last four days, Jodi and I have biked from Anacortes, Washington on the Pacific edge of North America, to Winthrop, Washington, a small, rustic town tucked into the shadow of the Pacific Crest. We’ve traveled 167 miles, with long, steep climbs up to Rainy and Washington passes in the North Cascades. The roads have been lightly traveled; along several, it would be 15 or more minutes before a car would pass. A heat wave has passed through, and the days have been in the mid-90s with cloudless blue skies. Luckily, we are both familiar with being outdoors on hot, sunny days, so we made good progress into the mountains.

The internet has been spotty at best; photos have been difficult to upload. We’ll provide a longer recap at the earliest convenience. Look through the portfolio photos for a recap of the last several days!