Cow Wrangling and Bike Wrestling

I have to jostle my brain around every time I sit down to write one of these blogs. I left off in Medora. I felt a bit displaced, so far from the Missouri River, a bit like I was missing out on what there was to see. Throughout this whole bike trip I’d been taking notes on descriptions, but I had a stint of about two weeks in country Lewis and Clark hadn’t even visited. I got out of the habit of taking notes. I only had a day or so to go before I was close to something moderately related. That Saturday I biked past the North Dakota-Montana border, to a town called Wibaux. I had a lot of fun saying that out loud. When I left Medora, I got to bike through badlands for the first time. I was fascinated by the idea of doing it, and I was tempted to bike in Theodore Roosevelt National Park on my day off, but I knew I needed to rest. Besides, it was blazing hot outside. Why deal with that if it wasn’t a necessity?

I’m glad I waited. I biked over a pleasant undulation of hills. The buttes shrank and diminished into farmland, then further along would pile up again in different variations of color red, yellow, and black striations.

I met up with my mom in Beach, ND, right on the border with Montana. My mom was fascinated by the fact that they sold work jeans and cowboy boots in the coffeeshop along with other gift items. I saw a scarf with a cattle brand print that I was fascinated by. I liked the idea of having an obscure patterned scarf that had a story behind it. When got to Wibaux my mom was on the phone with a friend. We had a bike rack attached to the trunk so I could throw my bike up and go to the campground at the end of the day. It had turned out to be a danger to both of us. We’d each hit our head on it at one point or another when closing the trunk. There was a learning curve. I made a point of organizing the car so we wouldn’t need to go into the trunk during the day, but evidently my mom needed something from in there, because she hit her head on the bike rack so hard while closing the trunk that it knocked her to the ground. I spent the evening monitoring her for signs of concussion. Fortunately, we dodged that bullet. We grabbed dinner at a nearby restaurant. Mom needed food so she could take ibuprofen. Unsurprisingly, she hurt all over.

I had made a reservation at a campground in Wibaux, but there wasn’t much shade and they didn’t even give us a picnic table to cook dinner on. We spent a long while in the air-conditioned car. My mom does this lot over sitting outside in camp chairs. In this particular instance, I got it. There wasn’t a whole lot of shade and we were wedged between RVs, which is always a bit claustrophobic. Finally, I suggested we weren’t far off from Glendive. Maybe there was something to do there. I decided to check LewisandClark.Travel. We’d been to Glendive before on the cross-country trip that inspired my Lewis and Clark obsession. Makoshika State Park made quite an impression on me. It’s known for paleontological digs. A few large-scale dinosaurs have been found there, and the place reminded me of Jurassic Park. When we visited in 2018 we were in a rush to get back Minneapolis for our flight, so we didn’t explore the town much. I knew there was a dinosaur museum, but it was probably closed. I found on LewisandClark.Travel that there was a bronze sculptor in Glendive who had what was called a “sculpture walk” in town. We went to the location specified and it was highly suspect. I’m pretty sure we found her forge, not the sculpture garden I expected. We wound up giving up and going to Subway to get dinner. We found a war memorial park to eat in right by a giant cut-out of a t-rex (evidently there was supposed to be a giant dinosaur in town too. I was hoping for something kitschy, but I deduce the dinosaur was a skeleton in the dinosaur museum. At the park in the middle of town, right next to the train tracks, I chased down two white-tailed deer, trying to get a picture of them. I had middling success.

We went back to our campground and the next morning I began my ride back. There wasn’t a whole lot between Wibeaux and Glendive. I don’t think there was even a town. Fortunately, that meant not a lot of cars on the road. I left early and arrived in Glendive before lunch. I solved the mystery of the sculpture walk, sculptures by the artist in question were all over town. We went on a search for coffee, but it was a Sunday, and it seemed like absolutely everything was closed. A few places said they were “at the fair.” The Rodeo was in town! I had been saying for probably a month that if I was in a town where a rodeo was happening, I was going to that rodeo. I’d never been before, and it seemed an exciting cultural experience. We were there pretty darn early too. Early enough to grab lunch at a food truck before the events started, early enough to look at animals in a petting zoo, and to wander the exhibit hall to look at children’s art and craft competitions.

We grabbed a shady seat on the bleachers. I told my mom I’d be good after an hour, but an hour in barely anything had happened. A whole lot of nationalistic business with a flag, and God Bless America, not even the national anthem! We wound up staying til nearly the end. The events were much shorter than we imagined. Highlights were Mutton-Bustin’, watching toddlers ride sheep like you might see a cowboy ride a bull. Then there was “wild milking” which all went so quickly I can’t recall what the steps were—tying up a cow in a certain way, milking it enough for the judge’s specifications? I particularly enjoyed event where they had to get a cow and two horses into a trailer. They competed in groups. One group, The Misfits, seemed to be there for the fun of the competition than for the chance to win. Another, gosh if I can remember their name…Something Diesel? High Octane? Something car related, was a group of all women, so I rooted for them the whole time. We didn’t stay to see who won, but they did well or passable in just about every competition.

After another day of empty, quiet plains and comfortable rolling hills, I made it to Circle, MT. On a whim we decided to take a detour to Fort Peck, about 70 miles. Fort Peck was one of the seemingly infinite number of recreation areas on the Missouri River, almost always at a lake created by damming. We drove through miles and miles of badlands. I was thrilled to be getting back to my precious river, and optimistic that we’d find a campground with adequate shade and a breeze off the water. Plus there was a visitor center that might talk about Lewis and Clark! I think my mom regretted the detour about half way through the drive, but I coaxed her on with the presence of a shower at the campground. She certainly regretted it when we got there a few minutes after the visitor center closed when it wouldn’t be open the next morning either. When we got there we read Dracula, our nightly campground ritual, and I highlighted everything I had biked so far on my mom’s paper maps.

At this point, my mom was experiencing all the aches and pains one might imagine from sleeping in a Toyota Corolla for over a week. I felt we were spending too much money on hotels. I had a camping hammock, so I offered to attempt to sleep in that so my mom could sleep in a tent and see if that treated her any better. I put my sleeping pad in the hammock, got into my sleeping bag and delicately placed myself on top of it. My mom had to tuck me in. I had tulle with me from when my dad was with me. I’d recommended it as a makeshift mosquito net so he could sleep with the windows of his rental car open at night. My mom tucked it over me like a burial shawl. I didn’t sleep great. Just because of where the trees were convenient, I was woken up every time a car came down the road to blaring headlights in my eyes. I was also conscious that I might wake up to a deer sniffing me. I knew this solution wouldn’t work forever. As soon as we got into bear country I wouldn’t be safe in a hammock, but we discussed that maybe investing in a tent that would fit both of us would be worthwhile.

My mom had as good a night sleep as one can in a tent, so it seemed purchasing a tent would be in our future. We drove the 70+ miles back to Circle, took some pictures in front of some cement dinosaurs, cuz why not? And I started biking towards Jordan. For some reason biking down this highway felt like an endless loop of the same scenery. Not to mention there was no shoulder on this highway and so much 18-wheeler traffic I was vibrating I was so stressed. By lunchtime I was frustrated with how few miles I had gone. My cables were acting up again. I assumed because of my recent bike repair in Medora. I kept on having to tweak them. So often in fact that I wound up converting my handlebar bag into a backpack and wearing it slung across my shoulder, so I’d have easier access to the barrel adjusters. It had become a common occurrence that I’d plunk my bike onto the bike rack and fiddle with the adjusters til they functioned enough to shift again. But no matter how much I tried to resolve the problem, it always wound-up being trouble again.

I usually track my mileage so I have a concept of how close my next rendez-vous point was, but that day I paused it on a break and forgot to start it up again. With all of the stopping and fiddling, the struggling on hills because I couldn’t get up hills in a comfortable gear and I couldn’t gain momentum downhill. I stopped at a visitor center to eat lunch with my mom and found out there was intense roadwork for the next eight miles involving a pilot car. We decided to strap my bike to the car and get me through the roadwork, since there was no way I was keeping up with a pilot car and a pretty consistent line of traffic.

Before I got biking again, I refilled my water bottle and shut the car door. I hadn’t put the lid back on and the water bottle fell over, ice water everywhere. The inside of it got lined with mud. I began to realize how stressed the truck traffic had made me. I’d felt like I was going to be run over by a very large vehicle all day. I snapped at my mom for no reason about  how messy her stuff was in the back seat. I’d been having subtle shifting troubles all day, but when we got to the other end and I attempted to start biking again, my chain derailed. I was frustrated with it. I’d been tweaking the tightness of the cables for days. I fixed it, adjusted it, thought it would work again! I tried to pedal, and the chain came off the other way. I screamed I was so frustrated. Trucks were barreling by me as I tried to repair it. By this point I was in tears. I didn’t think I could, at least not on the side of a highway. Somehow the derailer had gotten so low it was touching the teeth of the chainring. With these trucks, I couldn’t think straight. So my mom drove me the next few miles into Jordan. We got a motel room and I attempted to fix it in the parking lot. I worked on it for at least three hours. I would get it working on the rack, feel I was making positive progress, and then the moment I tried to ride it, it wouldn’t shift.

I watched multiple Youtube videos trying to problem solve it, called my dad and asked for his advice. He was convinced I could fix it for myself, but the more I tried and failed the more I was convinced I was a failure for not being able to do it. I hit the four-hour mark when my mom convinced me to stop. We were likely going to have to drive to Lewistown the next day to bring it to a bike shop. I took my dad’s advice first and slept on it. The next morning, I fiddled with it for an hour or more to the same effect. It felt like with the angle and the fact that I was working on my bike while it was attached to my mom’s car trunk, I couldn’t possibly get enough strength to keep the derailleur from slipping down. That morning we wound up driving to Lewistown.