Adaptive Curmudgeon

I intended to do a short ride before breaking camp and heading home. However, I was just too happy sitting on my ass brewing coffee. Everything had been perfect, there was no need to do more.

I listened to people in adjacent campsites packing up. First the ones without kids; slipping out of camp quietly and efficiently. Then the ones with kids; in a flurry of helter skelter commotion. I didn’t mind the hubbub. I’d been silent the whole trip. Speaking hardly a word, hearing little but nature. Solitude is grand, loneliness is not. The sounds of domestic chaos was human interaction without interaction at all. Perfect! Also, it was distantly amusing. I sat in peace, cradling my coffee and watching the squirrels organize raiding parties against my breakfast food. The noise of people half my age struggling to pack rugrats in a Subaru reminded me to appreciate my idyllic morning.

It started getting cloudy so I finally levered my ass out of my chair. I packed up in a flash. My tent and cot were as efficient as usual but the bike got messy. I’d been topping off the gas tank from a little two gallon can every night (plus I had a one gallon Rotopax). I like to keep it always full, but I’d forgotten the previous night. Predictably, the “California compliant” can spilled gas all over the place; which seems to be their purpose. Then I used a new brand of chain lube I’d never tried and what a fiasco! I slimed sticky messy goo all over the place. Whoops!

A squirrel made a run at the chain lube (which looked like Cheese Whiz from hell). I let him learn. When its target turned out to be petroleum rather than sugar it glared angrily at me. Sorry buddy.

I rolled the bike on the trailer, strapped it down, and headed out. It started raining. For once, I’d had good timing!

I was pretty far north so my AM radio picked up Canadian stations. I thought I’d evade the propaganda of American NPR. Wrong! If anything, Canada has it worse! They’ve gone down the rabbit hole and started pulling in dirt after themselves. The radio was like this: Covid, covid, covid, a few words about sports, covid, covid, covid, ninety seconds about weather, covid, covid, covid, the government knows best and Trudeau loves you, covid, covid, covid, and… wait for it… stay tuned… back to covid. As far as I can tell, literally nothing exists in Canada but Trudeau’s novelty socks and dead bodies. No wonder people have lost it!

I turned the radio off.

Rather than wind through swamps and forests, I cut at right angles into a vast region of farmland. This gained me easy rolling on smooth pavement. I also got to gawk at the ongoing harvest. Crops are pretty shitty this year because of the drought. I’m sure I could turn on the radio and find out how it’s a direct result of covid… and possibly global warming… which causes covid because covid covids the covid. However, I’m perfectly happy with my deplorable misinformation that crops grow shitty when they don’t have water. Call it “the Idiocracy theorem”. Harvesters were racing against the rain; doing what they could. Feeding the world and all that. Good for them!

Suddenly, in the middle of a vast, recently harvested field, I spied a bear. Awesome! I’d been wanting a bear photo! The poor bastard was in the middle of a huge empty field; about a quarter mile distant and exposed in broad daylight. He was aware of this and hauling ass for cover.

I whipped Dodge and trailer through an unwieldy U-Turn, floored it back to the nearest cross road, and skidded to a halt. Smokey was going to have to cross the road! I didn’t have time to drive down the road (and didn’t want to hassle an already running bear) so I grabbed my camera and steadied it over the truck’s hood.

He approached the road at a dead run and then trotted across… right in front of my camera! Yahoo!

I played it back. I had a nice full color video of a huge grain field bisected by a muddy road. A raisin sized speck scooted across it. Hardly the work of Marty Stouffer. Oh well.

I returned home happy, smelling like pine, and rested. When the spastics of cloud cuckoo land get you down with their black death fantasies and epic failures of the Jews in the attic test, go play in the dirt. You’ll thank yourself.

The road ended and I was happy to be there. I shut down and looked around. If a fire did come, I’d be spending the night somewhere on this road. But there was an open-ish clearcut not far away. A hundred acres easy. So, I had a backup plan and that’s all I need to be at ease.

I had a nice lunch. Sitting on the dirt under the shade of a tree. Hawks wheeled overhead in great number. I hadn’t seen a grouse. Maybe the hawks savage ‘em? It seemed like anything hawks eat would be doomed out here.

How far was I from… anywhere? I reformulated that as “how far from anyone” and started doing numbers in my head. I still can’t quite believe how it came out. Y’all are reading this far in the future. If my math was wrong, someone tell me.

I was more or less 15 miles straight out. That’s 15 miles since I’d been on Ridge Highway (which wasn’t a highway of course). Ridge Highway had been empty but I’d seen fresh UTV tracks. I assume there was a UTV somewhere along that road and where there’s a UTV there’s a person (or pack of them). That would be the closest person. The road was the closest route to that hypothetical person. If, by some improbable hypothetical, say if I had a magic carpet or hovercraft, I pressed on from my current location in any direction but the road, it would take more than 15 miles to emerge on any side of the emptiness.

What’s the area of a circle? I remember it as pi times r squared. Take a conservative 15 miles to assume there was a person sitting just at the tangent of my imaginary circle where Ridge Highway met the road I’d just traveled… that’d be 15 squared. So 225. Multiply by pi which, since I wasn’t going to muck about with calculators, I rounded to 3.14. I scratched in the dirt. Carry the one…

706. Not too shabby. A sizable chunk for an old guy on a cheap bike.

If there’s 640 acres in a square mile… brush the dirt clear and start multiplying… 450,000 or so.

I figured I was the sole living homo sapiens within a 706 square mile chunk of planet earth. A little under a half million acres with nothing but me.

I don’t know if that was exact, I’d taken a few turns on the road. Maybe I was less that 15 miles out by air?

700 square miles sure seems unbelievable. Especially since I was only here on a whim.

Maybe there’s unseen people in that nothingness? Some crazy moonshiner reliving the whiskey rebellion? A trophy poacher who’s absolutely badass? Some industrious/paranoid lunatic with the world’s most inconvenient pot grow? Improbable, but who knows?

It seems weird to be that far from the nearest human… but math is math. Is 15 miles simply a bigger space than one usually ponders?

I listened hard; no motors in the distance. No airplanes overhead. I hadn’t seen tracks on the road. Nobody had been here at least since the thunderstorm several days ago swept it clean.

It was deathly quiet. Just the whispering of the winds on the endless reeds and a few trembling aspen leaves here and there. I heard a hawk cry. Nothing else. Even the insects were quiet (possibly reduced by the drought).

I closed my eyes and enjoyed it. Our planet has so much peace. You just need to cup your hands and drink of it.

I pinged my SpotX “Safe in the middle of 700 square miles. Location = XYZ.” Then, because I didn’t want to hear the electronic chirp if it received anything, I turned it off.

I waited a good long time, just sitting in the dust; listening to the sound of forever.

Time passed. Eventually the sun began to approach the horizon. Wistfully, I rode back out. I hopped the same tree with the same result. Later, I spooked a turtle and a little snake… but other than that.. it was all hawks and reeds.

I still can’t get over the scales involved. A silly little dirtbike and a dead end empty road got me to a place that would have taken a week, or maybe two, if I’d tried bushwhacking. I got to see that place and still return to camp with time to cook dinner before dark. What a fine day I’d had!

That night, I slept like a baby.

My trip was already a success. I had no right to expect it to continue to be amazing. Yet it was!

As next day’s exploration began I was still glowing. The spiritual bliss of the preceding afternoon had me positively chipper. However, I avoided the ghost town / church locale of the day before. You cannot live a day twice. Nor did I swing by my new homeland of Mud Ditch or search out twice deferred Antler.

Instead I looked at a big fat blob on the map that basically said “don’t even try it”. Brave homesteaders had settled much of the area, but they’d taken a look at this section and said “nope”. It is, was, and will always be a flat, wet, swampy, impassible nothing. It has attracted virtually no attention from anyone with a lick of sense. So, of course, I was fascinated.

As is common with land that’s precious in it’s uselessness, it’s managed for wildlife. My problem was that it’s trackless. That’s a word that we don’t use in common language but it applies here. Generally someone’s been everywhere and they’ve often left a path for me to follow. But I stared at the satellite image and there was just nothing that even hinted at access. Same for the map. I looked for the usual network of logging roads, ATV shortcuts, water works, power lines, old mines, hunting trails, old railroad grades… nope. Nothing at all.

The lack of snowmobile trails surprised me. Swamps are a snowmobile’s bitch! Snowmobiles (in season of course) can pass over shit that’s a quagmire in summer; some snowmobile trails are basically GPS points. I’m sure a snowmobiler could traverse much of what I looked at… assuming he had a long wide track and was fearless… but maybe not. Snowmobiles were probably banned but also it looked like no sane snowmobiler cares. All the designated snowmobile trails (which often echo older historic trails) just sorta’ went around… as if to say… “we’re crazy but not that crazy”.

None of the topology added up to anything either. There were ridges you couldn’t quite follow. Draws that didn’t quite lead anywhere. Just enough water to be impassible to a canoe. Just enough mud to sink a dozer. It was like God himself said “fuck it, just add some filler so the planetary sphere doesn’t have gaps”.

Being me, I sniffed around anyway. I skirted along roads and trails around the periphery of this area. Probably some trappers and hunters venture into it. They’d probably have little access points. They’d slip in here and there. Snowshoeing I guess. (Trapping and hunting is legal, the land is available for use… provided you can teleport to get there.)

I explored a few nooks and crannies. I thought maybe I’d find some trapper’s staging area, park my bike, and hike in a short mile or two. Just to say I’d done it. (It’s legal to walk directly across the whole thing but the terrain was pure hell. Hiking across would be a death slog.) I expected any trail would self limit; going about as far as a reasonably motivated man will chase a mink pelt. I didn’t even find that.

I found a few good grouse hunting spots so that kept me entertained. As I poked along one edge of this piece of vastness, I bumped into a main forest system road that formed a boundary. Ridge Highway* (*which isn’t called Ridge Highway) was neither a highway nor on a ridge but it did feel luxurious. Compared to the scruffy trails and fading traces I’d been following, it was well maintained, graded, easy, and uniform gravel… practically a runway!

I’d gained some confidence on Honey Badger and happily tested myself in a completely unwise manner. I wound up the little Yamaha to not quite but approaching its max speed. I was flying along soft dirt at about the speed I’d do on pavement. Foolish, since the gravel was soft and drifty, but the bike didn’t care. It floated on the surface like it was all that and a bag of chips. Delightful!

No matter what the cowering herds of Covid beaten half-men whimper from their suburban prisons, sometimes the right thing to do is open the throttle ands see what you can do. I played a bit closer to the edge than my habit. Was I immediately fucked by fate? Nah!

Hours later and after several pleasant detours, I passed East Elk*. (*Also not the actual name.) I checked my electronic gadgetry and sussed out that East Elk Road went straight into that big impassible place. I’d somehow remembered it as inserting from the south boundary, but here it was on the north boundary. I knew it didn’t traverse the whole thing and I’d ignored it before because it’s a dead end that started (I thought) on the wrong side.

But here it was and here I was. I had food, water, fuel, and time. Why the hell not?

East Elk Road began unremarkably; merely logging access into the area. Some parts of the area are forest; others hadn’t seen a tree since before the last glaciation. The road looked and felt very old. Meanwhile, some aspen stands looked like grouse central. Sweet! This would be a good place to hunt during grouse season! (However, I didn’t see any grouse.)

After a few miles, the road shifted and changed its nature. Now it blasted straight through something that was no longer forest. Trees thinned out and became uncommon. Sedges and reeds became an ocean. It reminded me of the Florida Everglades. If I didn’t know that this place will become an icebox soon, I’d be looking for gators.

A unique concern popped up. The drought this year means everything is crackling dry; but what about this particular swamp? I hopped off the bike and walked out into the mess to see for myself. Where I expected moist, wet, slimy normalcy it just screamed “flammable edge of the bell curve”. This year the vegetation might carry flame very well… possibly faster than a man can run. Also, it was hard to see. It would be easy to lose sight of the bike and walk in circles for the rest of a short miserably truncated lifetime. I stayed close to the road and within sight of trees from which to mark my position. Swamp vegetation was chest high and often more. Walking sucked. Some spots were dry footing. Some weren’t. I’m not sure what defines quicksand, but if there’s a place that would have quicksand, this was it. Meanwhile, everything not actively tangling my ankles, from thigh high and above… was a tinderbox. It spread from horizon to horizon like this. Unbroken. Vast. Endless.

If a forest fire ignition hit that mess, it wouldn’t stop for nothing, no way, no how. The road, my umbilical to the outside world, might be nothing but a rounding error to a wall of flame. Little old me and his tiny bike had best not be there if it happened!

I wasn’t worried about me starting anything. My bike’s muffler has a spark arrestor, it runs reasonably cool, and I was keeping it on the dirt track; nowhere near weeds. Also, I wouldn’t so much as look at a match in this powder keg. But a lightning strike 20 miles away could unleash hell that would break over my little road like a tidal wave. Of course, this didn’t deter me. Risk is just risk. I planned around the possibility and kept enjoying life.

Occasionally there was a break in the vegetation, either higher ground with trees or lower ground with water. These could be decent safe zones. Places where fuel would be less uniformly fine. If shit got real, I’d be OK. Also, the road itself was narrow enough that a fire might burn straight across but conversely, I might use it to zip into the black if I needed to. None of this was likely, but it wasn’t impossible. Head on a swivel and all that.

You might think I’m being dour. Quite the opposite, the scenery was epic, the weather was fine, and the road surface was glorious! More or less unused, the road hadn’t been rutted in wet conditions or graded when dry. Unlike trees, which litter a road with branches, the reeds left it relatively clear. There was some light vegetation in the middle and two tracks packed hard. Very fun to ride! I found myself flying down the road with the bike nearly pinned to max RPM. I’d skip back and forth from track to track like a waterskier playing in the wake.

The little TW isn’t a speed demon but 45 mph is like Mach 2 in a place like that. If a deer or a bear or something similar jumped out, all that speed would have nowhere to go. I’d have no warning. The deer would have no warning. The road had no room to swerve. Things would go sideways fast when we met in the middle. I’d give the deer a Yamaha enema and a deer would surely send me over the bars. But… I did it anyway.

Speaking of critters, there was precious little animal life with the notable exception of raptors. Hawks were everywhere. I don’t know my raptor identification. (Ironically, I saw no eagles.) All I knew is that I spooked one or two hawks per mile and probably many more. I learned that if I rocketed as fast as I could go; I could jump them. My shrieking little lawnmower engine would be upon the hawk almost before they could take flight. At the risk of riding like a lunatic I got a good look at many desperately retreating hawks. I pretty much scared the shit out of a few of them.

I slowed down before anything stupid happened… I’m not as dumb as I sound. Regardless, I have no regrets over a few moment’s shenanigans.

In a patch of forest, I encountered a smallish downed tree. I pushed my front tire right up to it. I used the TW’s low gearing to walk the front tire right up and over the log. When the tire dropped to the other side, I clunked onto my very solid aftermarket skidplate. Then I revved and see-sawed like a bucking bronco to get the rear to hop over. I never even got off the bike. I was rather proud of myself.

I stopped at one spot to take a leak and a beaver wandered by; utterly unconcerned by a pants down bearded sweating fool. It waddled along the left wheel track while my bike and I were in the right. It got about 3 feet away, eyed me like it had zero fucks to give, and then kept walking. I assume it’s seen humans before but who knows? It didn’t seem perturbed. Maybe this year’s dry conditions had him pissed off?

Eventually I came to the end. The dead end. The road stopped. Nobody, not Paul Bunyan himself, could go further.

The next day I didn’t feel like investigating Antler. Why? Ironically, because it was an original intention of this trip. It had started to feel like a job assignment. I headed in the exact opposite direction, specifically to not go to Antler. This turned out well!

I went into an area that looked pretty dull on the map. To my surprise, it rocked! Roads that looked tame on the map were wily and challenging. Trails that looked impassible were clear enough and within my abilities. I rode and rode and rode and rode.

All this time I saw nobody. What I did see was the passage of time.

We are all children of the 21^st century. I don’t mean that in terms of a calendar but in terms of a societal experience that held sway until… lets say sometime after Christmas in 2019. All of us, especially those who’ve had more years on this earth, have seen so many new and marvelous things that it makes the future sound impossibly bright. If you’re old enough, you’ve seen miracles.

So many things have “improved”. Color TV with 50 channels of pointless shit. Instantaneous communication. Performance in a generic Honda Civic that would make a 1960’s Porsche blush. Air conditioning in every car! Cheap stuff by the truckload for every house in America. Average lifespans well into the 70’s. Fresh strawberries in January. I have broadband on a dirt road.

For most of our lives… everything has grown and most of it is for the better. So far…

“So far” is the key phrase. If you have a generic American public school (lack!) of education, perhaps enhanced by a half dozen years marinating in University, you might think it’s is always so. Always more and always better.

Wrong!

Sometimes progress fails. Sometimes humanity loses. That which is gained can be lost. There’s no magic force that invariably pushes humanity upward. Societies ebb and flow and not infrequently commit suicide. Old stories and legends of Europe often speak of magic pasts and lost cities of wonder. These tales were formed on the moldering ruins of Rome. The Republic was forever, until it wasn’t. The Empire was powerful, until the Barbarians dismembered it. Europe spent the next millennia holding on but scarcely growing. Fighting over turnips and desperately trying to preserve literacy; a sad epilogue to the greatest Empire of its time.

Why do I mention this? Because I rode through an area that had been settled and is now uninhabited. Uninhabited. Let that word roll through your head. Say it aloud. Taste it in your mind.

Most people have never truly been where it’s uninhabited. They think it’s limited to SciFi stories and professors whining about global warming. It’s not. Uninhabited exists right here on earth. I’ve seen it. I go there all the time. If you have not been where it is uninhabited, you should go. So much theory that makes sense if you’ve forever lived in Manhattan or Miami will slide from your mind; shown to be the falsehood it always was.

Such was the place I explored on my ride. My thanks go out to someone (or many of them) who’d done a good job as historian(s). They’d marked abandoned homesteads with names. Not just entries in a book; they’d gone out into the forest and marked the actual places. ATV routes and decrepit roads and logging skid trails brought me through, past, and around places that had been peopled.

Here, the sign says, was the Smith homestead. There, another sign mentioned, was the Johnson farm. Most were just basements and rotten logs. The traces are small. I rode carefully, lest I fall in a well!

Sometimes several homesteads were marked in close proximity. The skeleton of a small village; buried underneath the brambles.

I passed several tiny cemeteries. Most were in good repair; maintained by living relatives (or perhaps some sort of grant). Lives had been lived there. People had carved out a place to be. It didn’t hold. Regression is a possibility we all need to understand.

I passed a stone pile that had been a granary. A hole in the ground that had been a school.

I passed a sign that said there had been a post office… about a mile away. I turned toward it but the path was too overgrown and I was pushed back. Mail had once been delivered where a dirtbike couldn’t pass!

It’s a good lesson. We all should trod where there had once been so much hope and know it is gone. The forest has returned to rule all. They’d tried; those names on the signposts. Clearing forests, planting crops, and digging wells. They built civilization, but their works didn’t hold. They’re gone.

It is a mirror. Reflect and look upon our times. It is the 21st month of 2020 in what is still called the United States of America.

Lunar landings and supersonic flight were already fading when I was a child. Our Universities teach nothing; choosing to indoctrinate courtiers for the modern aristocracy rather than foster intelligence. The electronic cloud that replaced our libraries was hopelessly censored almost from its inception. Each election is sketchier than the last. Our president talks of F-15s and nukes. Not against cold war enemies but against his own people. A few weeks ago we fled a losing war against sheepherders… preferring, I guess, to wage war against ourselves.

I stopped to breathe in the smell of pine. It had no falsehood, merely the scent of a tree. How unlike our convulsing society where nothing is as it presented. Judges detect penumbras. Politicians say we will die if we do not obey. Then they say we will die if we do not obey the opposite. Truth is shocking and called misinformation. Misinformation is prosecuted or promoted according to whom benefits.

Like the Soviets of a generation ago, nobody really knows who’s running things. Words written on paper are now just words. Some laws don’t apply to the elite. Other laws don’t apply to the underclass. The remnant that obeys all laws is hunted. Great swaths of the citizenry are “those for whom we’re losing patience”. Cities are vote farms. Rural citizens have become subjects; expenses to be managed instead of people to be left alone.

Sycophants slice and dice those who are worthy from those who are contemptible. “Basket of deplorables”, “clinging to guns and religion”, “vaccine hesitant”… the phrases that lead to cattle cars. Those who’ve read history know where this leads. Those who haven’t live in childish wonder, until they too are swept away.

I am here in the forest because I retreat from cities. They burn frequently enough that I don’t even care why. If there’s a riot in Portland or Detroit does it mean something new? Don’t they burn every summer? Are the residents truly oppressed or merely bored? The students of Mao began with books and statues. Eventually they killed people who wore prescription glasses… and then starved. A green haired revolutionary can stop the wheels, but not maintain them. When will the grid go down? During a cold snap in Texas? During a heat wave in California?

I’ve read history. I see empty shelves and angry chants. I know where it leads.

There is no guarantee to anything. There never was.

Lest you think my ride was sad, it was not. It was beautiful. Death has it’s own beauty. We are torn apart from the inside by people that cannot build… and here I can see a lost world in repose. That incorrigible hippie Neil Young captured the feeling: “Every junkie is a setting sun”. Societies only last if they can. If they cannot… they won’t. But the trees do come back. Always.

At one fine spot I parked and hiked about; looking for squirrel hunting grounds. I found three small graves. I paid my respects. They’d built. It was gone but they’d built anyway. Good for them! I read the dates. One had died at 15, one I couldn’t read, one died at 40. Did the 40 year old know it was fading?

I rolled out. A path. A trail. A logging operation. An old ditch.

I pulled over and munched on a snack. I drank water. I rested.

Then, unexpectedly, a UTV zoomed by. The first one I’d seen all day. Humans travel in packs so I waited. Sure enough two more followed. They didn’t see me, parked as I was 80 feet away from the trail.

I decided to follow. UTV tracks are easy to follow. They turned left and right and so forth; the path became less overgrown. I started seeing more UTV tracks. I heard them in the distance. A few miles later I pulled up… to a church.

Nestled beneath tall pines, was a crude little church. It was in an area that had clearly been flattened in an old forest fire. These pines must have grown after the fire, and most of that happened after the homesteads and villages were gone? The little church was older than the trees around it. It was shady there and sweet smelling. I counted seven UTVs and one ATV. There was a smattering of picnic tables. Some were unused, some had UTVs and people picnicking there. A bit further off, a group had started a fire in a steel ring. They were cooking over the fire and lounging in chairs. (I was a bit jealous, I can’t carry a chair on my tiny bike.)

Everyone was happy, though more reserved than at Mud Ditch. This was holy ground. No stereos here. It was a place of the spirit. You could feel it.

The church’s steeple was off kilter. I walked inside. There was a historic display. The steeple belonged to the church which predated this one. It had burned. I assume it burned with the forest around it. But the steeple remained. When a new church was built on the ashes of the old, the surviving steeple was perched on top. The “new church” is now old too. It had pews and a wood stove. Everything was wood and strong and smelled nice but nothing gleamed with freshness. This is a harsh place and the building cannot thrive without its people. Time is an enemy here.

The forest circles hungrily.

So remote. Bittersweet and lovely. Just barely clinging to existence. Far from the power grid. It has never known the whirlwind of social media. It is rooted in soil, not electrons.

Yet the UTV people had known it was here. They came here to eat turkey sandwiches in the shadow of God’s house… amid the cool pines. Good for them.

There was an outhouse. There was a water supply that flowed continually, under pressure of the earth itself; an artesian well. There were a few graves. I suppose you could camp here… though I might not feel worthy to do so.

This was unexpected. A still living remnant of the society that is gone. I ate lunch there. When I left, I did so quietly. This was not a place to roar about in a motorcycle, it was a place of peace. I am glad I found it.