we always have. To take my mind off the pain, I chant lines from a poem by our friend Alex Caldiero:
he wonders if it was worth while making a good impression on the beautiful lifeguard who invited him out to where the waves were tall and the undertow unforgiving.
The red rocks where we finally sit in the sun are accented blue, orange, and yellow by tiny penstemons, a paintbrush and a daisy. Higher on the Wasatch Crest, five or six deep snowbanks cross the trail. Slogging through the last one, knee deep in melting snow on the Park City side, we find glacier lilies (Erythronium grandiflorum) in a small fellfield. A couple of hundred plants, yellow petals turned back on themselves, rise from the wet soil at the edge of the snow.
A young golden eagle lifts off a cliff beneath us and rises to our height. He circles us and stands still in the air, occasionally adjusting a wing. With a quick turn of his body, the eagle becomes a diagonal line against the sky and is instantly a half-mile across the ridge.
Main Street in Park City is surreal after three hours of isolation on the trail. We feel like country boys misplaced to fashion city. We stop in Swede’s Alley for a half-hour of shade and a half-gallon of rehydration. We can’t help but notice the steady flow of folks walking past us into the local liquor store. Thinking about his childhood Sunday school lessons on the evils of alcohol, Sam opines that “they don’t look like murderers, fornicators, and coffee drinkers to me.”
Muddy, bloody, wet and tired, we climb past the silver mine, cross over Guardsman Pass, and drag back to Brighton. Twenty-eight miles round trip, several thousand feet total climb. Nancy has fixed us what Alex calls “food to fit the hunger.”
1 July, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
Ninety degrees Fahrenheit when we start riding in the late afternoon. This south-facing hillside has changed dramatically in just two weeks. The yellow sweet clover, for instance, bursting with new growth ten days ago, is spindly and shrunken—at least those stems that haven’t been stripped by voracious grasshoppers. The yellow, spurred flowers of the Dalmatian toadflax hang limp and shriveled. The vigorous new penstemons look tired. The grasshoppers don’t have it easy either. We see a big brown hopper, upright and seemingly intact, caught in a web. Beneath the insect, upside down, its bright red hourglass catching the sun, hangs a black widow spider (Latrodectus mactans). Its shiny black abdomen is taut with the grasshopper’s life.
Higher on the hill, with the big green aqueduct acting as a fence on one side, we come face to face with a doe. She wheels around and jumps off the road, straight into a barbed-wire fence. She thrashes, falls onto her back, kicks and pulls, and breaks free. She jumps up and has another go at the fence. Her front legs clear it this time, and her body and hind legs crash over. She disappears into the thick oak brush.
“I was rooting for her,” Sam says. “She would have kicked our heads off if we had had to help her.”
Everything is new and fresh and hopeful and fecund in the spring. By this time of year, everything is simply eating everything else. As if to drive the point home, we find the last row of trees cut down in the orchard.
3 July, from the Great Western Trail to Mad Dog Cycles
This is going to be a hot one—that’s evident the minute the morning sun breaks from behind Cascade Mountain at seven a.m. When we finally stand in the meadow at the top of Frank, trembling from heat-exacerbated exertion, I exclaim, “Well, that’s the worst of it.” Two hundred yards down, riding swiftly on a smooth trail, I find that that wasn’t the worst of it at all. I catapult over the front wheel and skid on my back across ground that looks grassy but feels like a gravel pit. Sam rounds the corner to find me apparently taking a rest. I remount and bounce my way down a rocky trail. At some point, I realize that my front wheel has lost its true and is banging against the brakes with every turn. The wheel has split, thinned by hundreds of miles of brake pressure. I nurse my way down the remainder of the trail, getting off to walk down the last steep stretch. When Sam pulls up beside me, I step aside to let him pass. He is dusty and sports a deep red scratch from elbow to armpit and down the side of his chest to his waist. “Just a little trouble getting over those rocks at the top,” he explains.
My next stop is Mad Dog Cycles. I have no hankering to die of equipment failure. Besides, a guy can go only so long without new gear. “Hardtail or double-sprung?” Randy asks.
From the bike shop, I limp over to Utah Valley State College where I sign a contract. I’ll be an Associate Professor of Integrated Studies and Philosophy, which will expand my work from the more narrowly focused discipline of German language and literature that has been my academic home. And, at a state school protected by laws a private religious school can ignore, I’ll enjoy the full fruits of academic freedom and a wider range of colleagues and students. That’s the theory, at least.
5 July, Orem
How do you like that? Scott falls off his bike on Friday, tacos his front wheel a little bit, and goes right out and buys a new bike. Hell, if I bought a new bike for every little fall I took, I would have a house full of bikes. (Nancy says I already have a house full.)
“I could have structural stress throughout my bike,” Scott says. “Can’t take chances with old gear.”
Such a deal, this new bike. A Specialized Stumpjumper FSR XC Comp with sapphire Superlight A1 welded frame, FSR XC suspension and sealed bearing main pivot, STOUT hubs, Mavic 222 rims, ForeArm Elite crankset, alloy HeadFirst headset, XT/XTR 0sp transmission, Avid 25 v-brakes, Kevlar-bead Dirt Control/Master Comp tires, not to mention the TPC-cartridge Manitou SX-R fore and Fox Air Vanilla FLOAT aft.
This is a shock. But if it is any consolation for me, Scott is now riding the best gear on the trail and he can’t hide it. That means every bike jock we see expects him to be a hell-of-a-rider just to be the equal of his gear. That’s no small burden for an old guy. I guess I’m looking for a new bike myself. With my proceeds from this column, I am onto one after 120 more months.
10 July, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
Dry and hot. We ride listlessly, not paying much attention to anything but our overheated bodies. The trail is littered with smashed grasshoppers, corpses alive with hungry fellow grasshoppers sucking out the juices, recycling scarce moisture. “It’s reasonable,” Sam says, “but repugnant nonetheless. Why does it seem so macabre?”
“Because of how we feel about cannibalism?” I wonder.
“Or because we know it is our ultimate end as well?” Sam offers.
The grasshoppers that aren’t dead or feeding on the dead hug bare stems of sweet clover in stacked pairs, hundreds of thousands of conjoined couples. Chewing, sucking, copulating insects. “I hope I don’t fall,” Sam says, “I wouldn’t want to go down among those ravenous, fucking bastards.”
We pick up our pace and for the first time since last year we both ride Frank from bottom to top without touching down. We stand in the high meadow sweating and puffing and try to analyze our unexpected success. The luck of the bounce, we decide, lacking any other possible explanation. Near the mouth of the canyon, large and
