Dave rides his bike to school

Above: I can’t remember where I took this photo, but I thought it was good.

Above: My ascent into the Blue Mountains.  Winchester, Idaho, is situated at about 4,000 ft elevation.

 

Above: Winchester Lake State Park.

Above: Things could be worse…

Monday, 6/19 10pm
Location: Winchester, ID
Coordinates:
46.2350 N
116.6255 W

Today’s mileage: about 40 
Tomorrow’s destination: Lowell, ID

My stop in Winchester, Idaho, today was carefully thought out.  There were 3 primary reasons for stopping in Winchester.  First, even though I only traveled 40 miles, I rose  3,500 ft vertically.  The bulk of the ascent was at the end of the day, so I figured I wouldn’t want to go much farther than Winchester anyway.  Second, Winchester is located at about 4,200 ft elevation, so I thought that maybe sleeping at higher altitude would prepare me for climbing up to the Lolo pass on Thursday.  Third, with a name like Winchester, I figured that it had to be an interesting town.  As it turned out, I was right.

Before I get into that, lemme just mention that the Winchester Lake State Park is a nice little spot.  The campsites are right on the lake, motorboats are prohibited so it’s quiet, and there are few mosquitos.

OK, back to why Winchester is an interesting town…  Basically, it’s just how you’d imagine a town in Idaho named Winchester would be.   

I stopped into a restaurant/bar at about 5pm for dinner.  A veil of cigarette smoke greeted me at the door, but I reasoned that the experience would be worth a few carcinogens and toxic fumes.  Even by 5pm, the small place was fairly busy, so it seemed like a good spot to soak up the local atmosphere, so to speak.  I bellied up to the bar and ordered a French Dip sandwich and the soup of the day.  To my right sat two men in their early 50’s.  One was wearing a camoflage baseball cap, a filthy denim shirt, and jeans.  Someone later referred to him as “Hair-azz-ment”, but I never caught his real name.  I soon gathered that he was a farmhand who lived about a quarter of a mile away.  Next to him at the bar sat Mike, who had a full beard and was wearing a beatup brown hat, much like the one that the father in Beverly Hillbillies wore.  The bartender, a rotund blond lady in her mid-thirties, asked me what kind of beer I drink.  I thought for a moment and answered, “Guiness, please.”  Hair-azz-ment leaned over with a struggling look on his face and said, “Guiness.  I think I heard of that before.  Hmmm.  Is that like Mickey’s?”  Mike broke in and said, “No, no, Guiness is one of them goddamned dark beer.  You like dark beers?  I can’t drink that shit.  I like light beers.  You should try a local beer.  We’ve got some good fuckin’ local beers here.” 

Ah yes, I forgot to mention that every other word in Winchester is a cuss word.  

The wisdom of Mike’s suggestion was apparent, so I ordered a “Moose Drool”, which is an amber ale out of Missoula.  Mike informed us that his favorite beer is Pacifico, only he referred to it as “Pa-CEE-fico”.  He explained that in Mexico, an ‘i’ is pronounced like an ‘e’.  As a result, the correct way to pronounce “Pacifico” was “Pa-CEE-fico”.  He enunciated “Pa-CEE-fico” several times clearly to make sure we understood.  I was tempted to point out that according to Mike’s explanation, “Pacifico” would be pronounced “Pa-CEE-FEE-co”, on account of the second ‘i’.  Given that Mike and I were such new friends, I decided not to push the point.  Meanwhile, Hair-azz-ment muttered “Pa-CEE-fico” to himself several times amid sips of his Keystone Light.

Mike and Hair-azz-ment went on talking with each other as I tasted my first Montanan beer.  Within seconds, they were chatting about one of Mike’s bulls, who had gone missing for several days.  Recently, the bull turned up in a nearby rancher’s plot.  “I’m glad that son-of-a-bitch didn’t head towards Washington, like that one did some years back.”

To my left, sitting silently, was “Scary Larry”.  Or at least, that’s what the bartender called him.  Scary Larry stood about 6’3”, was rail thin, and only had about half of his teeth left.  He was pushing about 75 years of age, and shook whenever he took a sip of his Pepsi.  I decided that the weather seemed to be a safe conversation topic, especially in this farming area.  I asked Scary Larry if this year had been wetter than normal, since all of the rivers that I’d ridden past seemed to be flowing pretty high.  Well, not only is weather a safe conversation topic, it’s a popular one.  For the next 15 minutes, Scary Larry went into a a full profile of the region’s different seasons, including the timing and quantity of various meteorlogical events, such as wind, rain, snow and hail, as well as which crops were suitable for planting here.  I asked Larry if he grew up around Winchester.  His reply was something to the effect of “Yes. Anyway, back in the 60’s it used to snow much more than now.  There was this one time when it took us fuckin’ six DC-4 Cat’s about 12 hours to pull a goddamn plow but two miles!”  Then he went on about certain snowstorm in which he was sent out to rescue either two cows or two people (Scary Larry mumbled A LOT, so I didn’t know which he was talking about), and it took them until one in the morning to get them “assholes” rescued.  The story involved hitting the cows/humans with “swetches” (also known as sticks or “switches”), but somehow that still didn’t  clear up whether he was talking about cows or humans. 

At the other end of the bar, a man who looked no younger than a hundred and twenty smoked on his cigarette.  Every few puffs, he’d haunch over in fit of coughing that sounded as if he were gargling mouthwash.  As soon as he was able to breath again, he’d suck on his cigarette some more. 

Behind the bar there was a large open room which was used on the weekends to house a live band.  Tonight, around 10 people, roughly eight men and two women, were using the room to play a poker tournament.  The apparent organizer was a potbellied bald man with a moustache and glasses.  I think his name was Bill.  Within thirty seconds of opening his mouth, Bill mentioned about four times that he had been in the Marines and that his family contained a member of every branch of the military.  He cited every war that his family has fought in.  He paused to make sure he included every one: “World War I, then Korea, then World War II, then Vietnam, and Iraq”.  Quite an impressive list, despite not being in chronological order.

I don’t remember what set him off, but before long, he began preaching to the entire bar “And you see, that’s why we’re safer having a Republican president.  But we need to stop paying for the fuckin’ United Nations and just turn Iraq into glass.”  The lady playing poker broke in an said, “Well, come on Bill, what about the children?”  He responded, “Well, them kids just grow up to be like their parents!  That’s why I’m a strong believer in ‘Kill em all and let God sort em out.'”  Strange, I think the president of Iran said just the same thing about us the other day.

Finally, sitting between Scary Larry and the gargling smoker was a trucker wearing a white Stetson, a black leather vest over a Western-patterned button down shirt, and black cowboy boots.  His moustache was twisted in a corkscrew on both sides of his mouth.  After I put Willie Nelson on the jukebox, he told me, “You’ve got good fuckin’ taste in fuckin’ music, son.”  He seemed like a nice guy, although his conversation topic of choice seemed to be the various bar fights he’d been in.  From the look of his gnarled fingers and fat knuckles, I took him at his word.  In one such dispute, he related how he was about to throw a guy through the door.  He paused and emphasized “through” the door, not “out” the door.  The bartender chuckled in agreement.  Apparently she had convinced him to reconsider, so he just let the guy go.  Another of his stories involved the ‘asshole police’ who arrested the kid (“well, I guess he ain’t exactly a kid.  He’s 45 years old”) across the street, who allegedly shot a bullet through his ex-girlfriend’s hair during an argument.  “It’s bullshit, ’cause I know he wuddn’t do nothing like that.  He’s not a mean-spirited guy, he’s just a drunk Indian,” the trucker reported.

The last thing I heard as I left the bar was the bartender telling the trucker, “The cat attacked Grandpa, so he made me go outside and shoot it…”

As I was saying, Winchester, Idaho, is an interesting place.  A goddamned interesting place indeed.
 

Tags: Travel

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