Tim Quietly Conquers Idaho
Reminisces of an amazing bicycling savant
In 1998, Tim visited me here in Idaho
This was Tim’s third visit to
It only occurred to me later, that Tim was defending himself, because, now in his forties, he still lived with his mother and that when she got wind of this newest paper trap, that she might still say, “Tim what was it that you and Jim meant to do by constructing small baffling mazes in class?” Especially now that Tim had struggled at Virginia Tech, withdrawing from school there the year after his fathers agonizing defeat by cancer.
Upon Tim’s non-victorious return from college, it was easy to see the burden manifest in his pinkish face -and now with his dad not around for emotional and financial support. Out of our high school group, Tim and I were the only stragglers left, apparently destined to scrabble through life with a series of underpaid janitorial and maintenance man jobs.
And I with my own far-fetched emotional trauma recovery plan from Plutonian , Idaho
Perhaps we became closer friends through default. Nonetheless, our friendship grew and besides often working together, we begin training for elaborate athletic events. Together we would construct intricate bike routes traveling through the hilly labyrinths of Virginia Mount Vernon
When I first moved to Idaho Virginia Boston Rhode Island
He looked good too. Healthier than I had ever seen him. This bicycling Zen of his had even allowed him to break whatever barrier it was that was locking in his shyness and people discovered that once you scratched the surface with Tim that he was filled with unlimited intelligence and richly humorous insights.
Compared to conditions back east, chugging up the 44 miles to Galena Summit from Hailey was a cakewalk for Tim, with its elements of good road surface, steady grade and sparse traffic.
The second week of his trip, he decided to go for broke and do the fabled Dollarhide Summit loop on an old mountain bike. Exactly, what some people might consider ninety-eight miles of agony was something Tim embraced. The bike he rode didn’t even have shocks. He started out from Hailey around ten. I was hoisting rocks with Gene Olson for some chimneys in Lane Ranch and told Tim that I would drive out Warm Springs around seven –until I could find him. 
Tim had gone straight out Croy Canyon Fairfield
A sign that every spring some Fairfield
Tim pedaled steadily. He startled an occasional fox or superquiet rabbit into the sagebrush. While chugging up that long rocky dirt grade, he passed some sparse campers. Being the middle of the week and not yet hunting season, there weren’t many folks around yet. He noticed the ninety-foot tall Indian face chiseled in stone by mother nature, which guards over one of Idaho’s perpetually best hot springs, but even though nobody was soaking today he didn’t take time to temporarily sooth his legs.
The steeper grade leading to Dollarhide summit remained to rise over as Tim continued pumping and grinding furiously to defeat everything that stood in his path. As he weighed up the hill, he wrestled with bumpy ‘warshboards’ and rocks that could throw you, which twinged his arms to sleep with their constant pounding. Dust filled the chain rings, but the little two hundred-dollar bike held up amazingly with only one flat.
Tim flew like Steve Miller's eagle past Carrietown, a ghost town I had been haunted by enough to write about.
He made it to the summit around 5:30 . To loosen up he took a few victory hops. Later on, I took a photograph of him standing there with his bike and believe that this depiction deserves placement on a pedestal next to a shimmering waterfall birdbath.
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At 7:30 I came around Frenchman’s bend, discovering Tim halfway between there and Rook’s Creek. His arms were sore, he was a mite dusty and the headlamp burned out from the rattling bumps. But he was in high spirits. I duct taped a fresh flashlight to his handlebars and insisted -nay forced him to sip a cool Budweiser for 'loosening up'. He started to speak about the trip and some of its tedium, but insisted that he would try to complete the full loop. I went back to Baldy View Apts., where in darkness, around ten o’clock -exactly twelve hours after he had begun, Tim, in his oft-silent manner, returned victoriously from his mighty Herculean effort.
Heh, Jim, was sort of worried about you, since there was a big gap in getting any e-mails from you. But then, I know it's a two-way hiking trail, and I went through a dry e-mail period about the same time as well. But now I see that you are still alive and kicking. Maybe you took a trip and left the Valley for awhile? Thanks for the current link.
ReplyDeleteEnjoyed your blog of Tim, your childhood-based buddy who later really accelerated the biking that originally helped to unshelled your early personalities, and then weld your friendship.
I liked your account of the ride he took on while you were still work-obligated, and of course I smiled at the image of Warswick hot springs, a place he had passed by in '98 (maybe not knowing that the waters were deliciously soothing to skin and sore muscle.)
I enjoyed many weekends there, sipping "margaritas by Katy", watching my young boys frolic around in the waters, complete with the company of another outdoor-oriented dating couple, Keith Besst and Sue Farhney, and her daughter Stacey. I have many pictures of those summer days, from a period of 1988 through about 1993. Each year we'd come back and see a another variation of the state of affairs at Warswick.
Nature provided the variation of water flow level yearly, depending on the nature of the winter just passed. Man provided variations to discover each year, based on how frequently he changed the chess pieces of the little hot spring ecosystem:
Including myself, the cumulative changes were brought about by the various hot water "soak-seeking" carbon units behavior. They would re-arrange the rocks for optimum hot and cold water mix, (in a way, just like adjusting an unfamiliar shower temperature in a motel). The more industrious of them, sometimes including me, would adjust the dam by fortifying it, to gain depth in the prized pool, and then to stabilize H20 temperature to the weather conditions..
Others would ad foreign objects, such as using an old blue tarp, to better seal the river rock forming the dam. Keith and I would sometimes build tunneled spillways to release geothermal water through the dam that was too hot some years. Or, we'd position another spillway to gather and release the cooler spring run-off when the consensus was to raise the pool temperature a few degrees more, as the sun lowered.
Other people left little signature monuments there, an artistic array of sticks and pebbles, or simply items spaced out: like a chrome and turquoise Bic lighter case, or a little pouch that maybe once held 4 pinches of a certain sweet-smelling leafy substance. Once, at Frenchman's bend with my first son, age 8, we both discovered a little wooden pot pipe. I had to explain to Nic in the best ad-libbed terms I could come up with: "why, it's an old fashioned wacky-baccy pipe." He returned to me a "quizzled" expression.
Each late spring we'd return to Warswick to discover new footpaths, little tiny rockpile monuments created by the creative minds of children, (or maybe just well-buzzed adults). Sometimes what appeared to be a makeshift waterside bar platform would remain from another gathering of soakers. Like the, we'd often soak into the dusky evening, climbing out with just enough light to locate our scattered "mountain beach" sundry items, (boombox with tired batteries, tube of sunblock, a Teenage Mutant Ninja turtle figure rubberbanded to a flat piece of wood, etc). All the items needed to be collected and returned to our dusty trucks for a return via Fairfield (or just a move to an overnight camp in the meadows on the over side of the road culvert.
A Warswick Saturday evening soak would often be followed by a Saturday evening campfire and then a Sunday morning hike up into the treed ridge rising to the south along the road. Warswick Hotspring was a great little mecca, a triad junction of dusty roads that the southern county 5Bers and Camas County locals knew and traversed.The Warswick area is a little dusty pocket ever so removed from the territory typically traveresed by dapper Sun Valleyites with caterer-prepared gourmet picnic lunches in showroom-detailed Tahoes, 4Runners and Land Rovers.
I hope the little geothermal rupture called Warswick still survives in recognizable fashion to this day. When I return, I might take time to make sure to check on it's state of repair or disrepair. (The "repair" being nature's way, the disrepair coming from the bi-peds).
On to Tim and the evolution of the bicycle as a friendship bond. I have that same old connection with a junior high friend, Theo Hettinga. He was brought to Canada in childhood by his Dutch parents, and we both set out on long bike rides up rural roads, and then down mountain foottrails leading out from the suburbs of Calgary along the Bow River. It was a great way to celebrate the first available warm Saturday bicycle day and an excellent way to mentally "86" the typically long Alberta winter.
Into our bike baskets went sack lunches that included things like a pare, a carton of juice or milk, and a couple of beat-up peanut butter and honey sandwiches, or my salami and mustard variant.
We'd ride and make the necessary repairs called for during an unpredictable daylong ride. I'd carry my usual Kodak Instamatic (often loaded with the more affordable black and white film). How odd in this digital age, that the ubiquitous everyman's camera born out of the 60s was called the "Instamatic." There really was nothing "matic" about it, other than the comparative ease of loading the cartridge versus the 35mm spool.
I am so glad my childhood did not include Nintendo, cell phones, and 57 channels of cable-bound shit. I would not remember the Nintendo games or the content of TV that I might have watched in lieu of turning my spokes, but Theo and I both sure won't forget our bicycle adventures. Back then, if you drug in a bike with either a limp tire, flaky hub bolt, or floppy bike seat, a rural gas station was more apt to actually have a usable air hose, or even a mechanic who could assist with a wrench, so that you could be on your way.
The best bicycle moments were based upon accidental discoveries of nature that would be fascinating to the pre-teen: a dead chipmunk, an ant pile, a little opening revealing a little overlook to a previously unseen creek, or two species of birds squabbling in a bush. We would sometimes find a collectible piece of rock that glistens in the sun, but looks rather unremarkable to your mom and dad when displaying it with a big grin under the fluorescent lights over the kitchen.
To be outside, using your body to generate bicycle wheel torque along the uneven, and sometimes challenging Terra firma surfaces I believe formed the basis of friendships of boys in those pre-electronic halcyon days of the 1960s and 70s. It was perfect for boys who were considered introverted and uncool, and wanted to experience the world independently before we were old enough to be trained in the operation of our first fossil burning transportation device. And what's the rush in mastering that device? When you think about it, we'd become eventual slaves to using those vehicles the rest of our lives, clogging our way along the asphalt arteries, funded by taxes endlessly sucked out and itemized on our paystubs of fiscal responsibility.
But because of those early rides, decades later as full adults, perhaps we're more apt to shut off the car or truck on a leisure cruise, and maybe climb down to the edge of some river or meadow. These inclinations may never enter the frontal lobes of drivers who never experienced extended bicycled rides fuzzily remembered through the blurr of those blissful, Schwinnfull days of innocence.
Well, Jim, slap me into the blog with this, if you'd like, I haven't figured out how to do that yet.
I've attached a memory picture from the Warswick era.....
Brad
(Black and Chrome 1966 3-speed Schwinn with wheel-generated head and tail light).