8 Days in on the second chapter, 22 days overall: Overnight in Hope Valley

I first met James back in 2009. He was working as the parts manager at High Country Harley Davidson. We got to talking about sharpening up my garden-variety Harley Sportster and started riding together soon after that.

James and I have had many experiences around motorcycles, riding in every weather, camping, and adventuring. I’ve never met a more confident rider in my life. The way James rides is the true to who is his—confident, fearless, and intuitive. I learn things from James by just standing around him.

I met Adela some years later. Adela posses a strength similar to James’, tempered with an empathetic generosity. Famously, on a long ride through Montana in the furiously driving rain we had all stopped to ruminate on our miseries, and Adela said to me, “Just trust the process.” It was a good line—reassuring. “Of course! Why would I ever second guess the process?” I asked myself.

We headed down a five degree grade, torrents of water driving streams in the middle of the highway, into a dark tunnel where the water appeared to be pooling.

“I’m really not very sure this is governed by any process at all,” I said to myself in my helmet.

Adela is an unflappable rider.

I’ve always found motorcycling to be an experience in which you can grow. Sure you can motor around with a group of people easily enough, like-minded individuals on similar bikes riding in staggered formation to the next bar.

But to really get out in the heat and the hail is to test one’s mettle and to test one’s spirit. It is to discover who you are, or who you might be if you pushed yourself. It’s risky to go through that with another person. James, Adela, and I have been there together. Rather than pushing us apart, it pushed us together. James and Adela are really the only motorcyclists I ride with at this point in my life.

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James and Adela recently moved to Missoula and bought some land about two hours northwest. We put the bikes up, and James, Blu, and I headed northwest in his FJ Cruiser.

Blu is a Cane Corso, an Italian Mastiff of about 150lbs and roughly the size of a pony. Blu is, what my father would term, a “Champ-eee-on”—a level of praise he reserved only for dogs with profound personality.

Blu is protective, thoughtful, sensitive, and true partner. He always takes the lead on a walk—first to face the unknown—and relaxes with you by putting one massive paw on your foot and leaning his rump against your side. It’s comforting but a little uncomfortable at the same time.

The property is forty-five acres in the midst of a valley cross-cut by clear streams that flow into a large, fast-flowing creek. It’s centered by a 3/4-scale Victorian cottage built by the original owner but not quite finished.

Radiating out from that centerpiece is a series of outbuildings—a massive chicken coop, a woodshed, a tool shed, a greenhouse, a fenced vegetable garden, more. Further out from these are small fields cut into the wood. James and Adela are setting these up as separate rooms—some with fire pits, one with an Airstream Globtrotter, another a hunter’s cabin—for future guests.

Down a little way from the house, over a series of streams, is a cold spring, which a beaver has dammed, creating a pond in the middle of which is his massy den. It reminded me of Gawain and the Green Knight’s barrow.

When James and Adela met the beaver, he stared at them, swam into the middle of the pond, and with the crack akin to an M80 and a huge splash slammed his tail against the water, and then swam around in a rage.

They named the beaver “Dr. Brown,” because it would certainly take a PhD in Engineering for a forty-pound creature to entirely change the environment, turning a low-lying spring into a pond and focusing the flow of water into a rapid stream.

James and I set up in a little field down below Dr. Brown’s dam, stripped down to our shorts and took a “cold plunge” into the forty-degree water. Blu, was very concerned, bellowing his enormous bark and carrying off sticks from the dam as if to save us by draining it.

Afterwards we played tug-of-war with Blu, giving it our all against his enormous strength.

We built a fire and grilled steaks. The night stayed late until ten. We made our way back to he house at about one.

The next morning we walked the property, tracing out the streams, and playing “git that sumbitch” with Blu, which involved us throwing a rock in the water and him splashing around. Think of a cat and a laser pointer, and you get the idea.

It was a lot of fun.

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I am less than 900 miles to home. It feels like the trip is coming to an end. James is going to ride with me tomorrow. I plan to get home Tuesday.

I’m in a reflective mode. The trip has turned out to be many things—a return to motorcycling, a bit of a challenge, a time to think about creativity in the arts and in myself, and also a peek in on my friend’s lives.

Brian, Senon and Beth, Justin, Gary and Su, JP and Susan, Julia and Joel, James and Adela—they are all doing beautifully, living lives that allow them a sense of artistic expression and an appreciation of story and beauty in the world.

It has been wonderful to experience.

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Let’s make time for chickens: