Bridgeport’s State Recreation Area comprised a sprinkling of chemical toilets, stand pipes and picnic tables set round a cluster of artificial lakes in a bulge of the flood plain just north of Jail and Courthouse Rocks. In a state which is the length of Britain away from anything approaching a sea, it attracts Cornhuskers like wildebeest to a savannah watering hole. I bathed my swollen knee in the soothing waters, shaded beneath Russian olives, and watched Nebraska dig in for the Memorial Day Weekend. Campers and caravanners staked their claim to the lakeside with barbies, sun shades and boat trailers ready for a lazy three days of honing the melanoma. It was Friday, May 28th, and one of America’s rare bank holidays had begun.
On her way back from fetching water, a vivacious young lass with blond bouncy hair and a spring in her step called out, “Yow! How y’doin’? Whatcha doin’? Why don’tcha come over and have a drink with us?”
By their ruby faces, Lori Borchert, husband Mike and their two daughters had been at the lakes for several days entertaining boyfriends and family friend Rob. Parked beside their small and noticeably down-market encampment, a 1976 Ford Bronco caught my attention. Whoever owned it was either broke, retro or knew style when they saw it. I hoped for the latter. Mum and dad didn’t look old enough to be parents of teenagers, though both were on their second marriage. Stephanie was Lori’s by her first marriage and Lindsay was Mike’s from his false start. Fortunately, when the parents came together, the girls gelled. There were step and illegitimate daughters in Mike’s past, but the relationships were already complicated enough.
During Memorial Day Saturday, I dipped in and out of their company and the lake. They drove me into town to do a spot of shopping at a supermarket which actually sold fresh vegetables, and introduced me to the taste bud tremor of Terrioki beef jerky. Sympathetic to the severity of my limp, they encouraged me to spend a couple of days recuperating at their pad outside Sidney, forty miles to the south. I assembled my gear and joined them as they were being booked by a Ranger packing a side arm.
Rob and Lori had been drinking beer indiscreetly from cans, a finable offence in a State Park. Had the cans been in brown paper bags, there would have been no problem. The Ranger was lenient, issuing only one ticket to cover the two misdemeanours. The on-the-spot fine was $123, but the problem was the publicity. In Nebraska they operate a name-and-shame system, publishing a list of offenders in the local rag. Rob was a village school teacher and Lori worked for the City of Sidney. The impending smear was bad news, though likely to lead to little more than malicious tittle-tattle. But Lori was annoyed. The Borcherts were a powerful dynasty in Cheyenne County, though Mike and Lori had disassociated themselves from the family and tried their best to maintain a low profile. They even pronounced their last name differently.
Mike Borchert looked like a young Martin Sheen, except he walked with a gamy leg and had a limp right arm. One of six brothers, he was the black sheep of the family, whose empire encompassed oil, real estate, construction and golf courses. The pressure to tow the line and join the corporate clan was intense. Mike believed it caused one of his brothers to commit suicide, though father and despot R.V. Borchert refused to accept the inquiry’s verdict. Mike left home early to work in a lumber yard, desperate to gain his independence and retain his sanity, but he married a woman who received R.V.’s seal of approval. Eventually coaxed into the family oil business by his wife, he earned big bucks that went straight up his nose or into the till of a liquor store. Mike drank himself into a seizure whilst still in his twenties. Returning from the dead a cripple, he blamed no one but himself.
“I was young, dumb and full of come, man. I gotta take a whole heap of pills now and there’s days I feel like the fuckin’ livin’ dead, but I’m real glad to be alive. Hell, I’m a walking time bomb. Bang my head and I’m one dead dude.”
After his divorce from the “wicked witch,” Mike entered Alcoholics Anonymous’s twelve step programme. Lori was somebody he vaguely knew from his youth who, as far as the dynasty were concerned, came from the wrong side of the tracks. She was detoxing from a drinking habit picked up from a barn-storming youth and hardened during a bitter marriage. They were made for each other. Two years later, they were dried out and married. Lori was now head of accounts for city utilities, and Mike worked as little as possible, keeping his hand in with a few of his own oil wells. “Nothing big,” he said, “About thirty barrels a day on reserves of three million.” He employed one hand, Rob’s father.
I stashed my gear at Starvation Acres, a ramshackle joint at the entrance to the State Park, offering showers, bait, tackle and anything else the owner could make a buck or two out of campers from, and jumped into Lori’s Cherokee Jeep. Mike and the others brought up the rear in the cute little Bronco. Twenty-eight miles due south of Bridgeport, as we entered the village of Gurley, Lori asked if I would mind our calling in at the graveyard. Paul Ernest, the young son of a friend of hers, had recently been interred and she wanted to see the headstone.
“It was a real tragedy,” Lori told me. “He was sat on the back of his grandpa’s ATV when it hit a dip and turned over, killing little Paul. Riding on the back of the four-wheeler was one of his favourite things. His death has destroyed the family. You can’t imagine how his grandpa feels. My friend is now separated from her husband and doesn’t look like getting over Paul’s death.”
We hung a left at the cross roads and drove past the school where their friend Rob taught. Two blocks later we were back in the countryside bouncing up a dirt road to a quiet resting place surrounded by corn fields. Paul’s gravestone was the only one decorated with flowers. He was five years old when he died. On the plinth stood a toy tractor. Set in the stone was an oval photograph of the youngster wearing a cowboy outfit and a proud smile. It was genuinely moving and I could see the tears welling up in Lori. I gave her space, and thought about the cruelty of one so loved and loving being taken before his life had really begun. Beyond the headstone, the sea of corn stretched to the horizon and rippled in the breeze. It could have been a graveyard in the Lincolnshire Wolds, where we buried my mother-in-law. At sixty-nine and with still much to give, Pauline had likewise been taken before her life had justly run its course. A day early, Lori and I commemorated our own Memorial Day.
The ugly ducklings of the Borchert dynasty lived six miles east of Sidney and a couple less from where the western leg of the Oregon-California Trail turned north to cross the benches to Jail and Courthouse Rocks. Mike and Lori had bought the town of Colton, much to the chagrin of R.V. Borchert. The town was a dead end and no bigger than a farmstead, but it used to be a throbbing little place with a store, garages, a couple of houses and a grain elevator beside the main line to Ogallala. Mike’s father owned land on three sides of it originally belonging to grandpa Kruger, R.V.’s father-in-law. The Kruger farm house was a hundred yards back down the track from Mike and Lori’s place and was now a home for children at risk.
“In a rash moment, R.V. donated the building to the City of Sidney,” Lori told us as Rob and myself were shown round the grounds. “But for his uncharacteristic generosity, these kids would’ve been shipped out to Gering, over seventy miles from home.”
Despite cars in the driveway, the house looked empty. Whatever activities staff engaged the youngsters in during the national holiday were silent and didn’t extend beyond the front porch. The grounds had fallen into terrible disrepair and felt damp and creepy. Weeds and rotting branches suffocated what was once a smart lawn, and round the back of the house, Kruger’s Lake was now a muddy pond choked with algae and fallen trees.
“In the old days the waters were deep and used to freeze solid in winter,” Lori expounded from her perch on a three-bar fence. “Grandpa K. would chop the ice into blocks, haul ’em out using horses, and slide ’em down these channels to the ice house over there near the tracks. The railroad was his biggest customer.”
The channels and remains of the underground limestone cooler were still in place. It was an impressive production line which guaranteed the rail company supplies of straw wrapped ice from late winter right through to September. To one side of the lake there were further indications of the sort of imaginative enterprises prairie farmers dreamed up to survive the Depression. A long low barn sagging under the weight of damp timber looked like it had grown out of mangrove swamps. During the prohibition era it was a speakeasy, catering for customers who drove out from Sidney to take refuge from a crazy law. The Kruger family served home brewed rotgut and bootleg whiskey, and laid on slot machines, gaming tables and touring dance bands. Mike and Lori had a soft spot for the maverick from Mike’s mother’s side of the family, and had named their Labrador after him.
My knee had frozen solid. When Mike and I hobbled around the spread together, we were mirror images. While he wheeled out the tractor-mower and set to work on a lawn the size of a paddock, Lori drove me up to visit Cabela’s, a retail legend in its own profit margin. Perched on a hill between Sidney and Interstate 80, the store claims to be the ‘World’s Foremost Outdoor Outfitters’ and is Nebraska’s most popular destination. No bigger than an average Ikea, the car parking occupied a plot equivalent to a small industrial estate. There were separate bays for truckers travelling I-80 with orders to pick up gear for folks from all over the States. The goods were no different from any other well stocked outdoors store but, where tents would occupy a large proportion of a European shop floor, it was the means to kill which dominated one full side of Cabela’s. I had never seen so many guns, rifles, shotguns, flintlocks, duelling pistols, sabres, knives, cross-bows and bows — none of them reproductions simply for show. Watching a boy of fifteen getting the feel for a rifle (and I don’t mean an air rifle), it was freaky to realise the kid was a mind warp and bullet away from his fifteen minutes of fame.
The ease with which the American male destroys life was emphasised by the other aspect of the store — the ‘Free Wildlife Display’ or, more accurately, the ‘Bagged Wildlife Display’. The moment I entered I was confronted by the stuffed carcasses of majestically poised wapiti. Every pillar was adorned with the head of a dead stag. Running the full length of both sides of the store were hundreds of trophies of beheaded quadrupeds, in some places two rows deep. Flocks of stuffed geese were strung from the ceiling. Amongst the clothing and camping equipment, separate displays featured elephants, tigers, wildebeests and polar bears. I was in taxidermy heaven and the worst was yet to come.
Dominating the store was a mountain setting which reached to the roof and stretched forwards from a skyscape for maybe twenty yards. Among the species featured were moufflons, wolves, moose, pronghorns, grizzlies, big horns and on and on. But it had to be said, it was a magnificent display. These weren’t rigid corpses. There was animation in every creature. The pronghorns galloped, the mountain goats jumped and the kid licked the mule deer mother. Some bastard had killed Bambi!
According to Lori, every animal was a trophy of hunting expeditions undertaken by Dick and Jim Cabela, owners and founders of the firm. Weeks later, mouths were to drop when I told people I had shopped at Cabela’s, but I had seen enough.
Against the run of predictions, the weather was miserable on Memorial Day Monday, the day I was supposed to set off again. A buddy of Mike’s dropped by, and the three of us disappeared into his den to play. A sailfish Mike had caught off the coast of Mexico graced one wall, though apparently only the sword was real. It was his one and only trip outside of the country, and he hated it. He didn’t know the language and thought the locals were talking about him behind his back. While the friends smacked pool balls around, I practised on a shuttle board and lapped up the loud driving Texas blues. Through the shop windows, rain dribbling down the grain elevator sparkled in a thin shaft of sunlight which projected reflections across dark puddles in the yard. The rail lines were fluorescent lighting tubes, stretching away to someplace where they fused with the glistening spider’s trail of telegraph lines. I watched the Panther race across the corn, delighted I couldn’t feel or hear it. Over the sound system, Stevie Ray Vaughan ripped through The House is Rockin’ and a Union Pacific freighter rumbled by with a blast of the horn. The moment I first clocked the Bronco back at Bridgeport, I knew Mike had class. I was in a goddamn Wim Wenders movie!
With the weather showing no signs of improving, Mike decided to run Lori and myself up to see Carhenge, a round trip of nearly 150 miles. He was amazed anybody from Europe had heard of the sculpture, let alone could hobble for joy at the prospect of visiting it. He ignored my polite protestations that it was surely too far. By their standards it was just down the road. They had difficulty getting their heads round the idea that, from my doorstep in England, they would pass a handful of cities, a basket full of towns and maybe thirty villages in the equivalent distance to Alliance. We passed through two small towns and four hamlets.
Locked on cruise control, the black SUV purred over the empty prairie like a yacht riding a swell. From Sidney up to Bridgeport we followed the western link of the Oregon-California Trail, across draws and benches which had barely altered since. On the skyline, artificial humps similar to one I had seen on my way into Hastings located bunkers for nuclear weapons. A couple of pump jacks nodded like restless mules in the distance and a herd of buffalo were laying down. Another band of rain was moving in.
As we turned into the car park at Carhenge, the shadow from a mat of clouds slid across the prairie and the sun broke through, spotlighting a grey pile of scrap Chevys, Caddys and Plymouths. Close enough for pop art to the size of the real sarsen blocks, the ‘carstones’ were impressive. Unlike the English original, we could wander around the pillars and beneath the lintels. In the stark environment of the windswept sand hills, Carhenge was imbued with a serenity Stonehenge hasn’t possessed since it was pinned between two main roads and fenced off from the public. Here the steel carcasses of the modern conveyances which zip either side of the sacred site had become the henge itself. It was a wonderful homage to motormania but it’s appearance had offended the Nebraska Department of Roads and a number of Christian fundamentalist groups, who sincerely believed it was a pagan temple. Fortunately the Friends of Carhenge successfully combated calls for it to be torn down and the installation is now almost as big a tourist attraction as Cabela’s.
Built by geologist Jim Reinders and family in 1982 as a memorial to his father, Carhenge was another example of the unexpected streak of artiness I discovered running through Nebraska. In no other state had I seen such an abundance of murals, sculptures and screwball folk art like the garden in Lisco packed with mobiles made from horseshoes, cartwheels and cowboy boots. The first paper I picked up in Nebraska was a free sheet stuffed with arts listings. Then there were the lavishly decorated towns like Friend and the hundreds of boots on the Ash Hollow fence posts. Maybe it was the boundless horizons and limitless skies which inspired creativity. Rodin’s these works might not have been, but J.M.W. Turner would have had a field day with Nebraska’s skyscapes and subtleties of light.
On our way back from the steel henge, Mike pulled over on the edge of the high benches for me to survey the western aspect of the North Platte Valley. The pink and orange wash of the evening sky was swilling into a bowl with a ragged lip. It was the first angular profile I had seen on an horizon since entering America. Like the Forty-Niners before me, I was convinced the Rockies were barely a day away, and for a change looked forward to returning to the road. Mountains meant shelter from Ga-oh the Panther.
The Wildcat Hills emerged with a stern face from the high prairies south of the river and veered west to run parallel with Route 26. The most striking of buttes stood bolt upright in the valley floor. Originally called Elk Penis by the natives, the stack stood 110 metres above the plain during the Gold Rush years. Erosion has since whittled it down but the tip still reaches over 1,200 metres above sea level. Looking like a Victorian smoke stack thrusting out of an enormous mound of ash, Chimney Rock was another milestone for the migratory trails, and probably the most misleading. Sighting the Brule clay steeple, the argonauts became excited. They believed it marked the end of their haul across the Great American Desert. Whips cracked and wagons accelerated as the teams playfully raced each other to the landmark. Considering the top speed of a team of oxen is a brisk walk, they didn’t reach the foot of the rock until three days after clapping eyes on it. Once camp was established, many climbed the chimney and carved their monickers in the top rim. In no fit state to follow their example, I defaulted to the Visitor Center.
After three days of molly-coddling by the Bercherts, my body felt much improved. Riding west into another infernal headwind, the knee flexed without pain or the sound of crunching but was still stiff, hopefully more from lack of use than continuing complications. Taking every opportunity not to use it, I sat through the AV show at the Chimney Rock Visitor Center twice. The packaging of America’s heritage was taking on a familiar format — first the light entertainment then the hard work of the exhibition. If there was ever a question about low levels of literacy in this country, park authorities were in no doubt Americans would happily read galleys of text amounting to the word count of Moby Dick. To their credit, all the historical sites I had visited to date were remarkably free from crass commercialisation. I expected at least a Fort Kearny McDonalds or a Pizza Pony Express Hut. You couldn’t get a cup of coffee at any of them for love or money.
And now historical sites were appearing more frequently than pit stops. Twenty-four miles further on, beyond the town of Gering, a finger of the Wildcats sidled up to meet me at Me-a-pa-te — Sioux for ‘hill that is hard to get around’. Now called Scotts Bluff, road and trail climbed through a broad cleft between Sentinel and Cap Rocks. The sun was low in the west, playing hide and seek behind curtains of clouds. Leaping out to animate the dazzling yellows and greens of the sandstone rock face, it threw shock waves of amber across the tops of the corn. To the north, Cap Rock was a 240 metre slice through prehistoric highlands and a godsend to geologists. Its sedimentary layers were a unique chest of fossil trays chronicling the last fourteen million years. For the over-landers, it was simply another promontory they could climb, peer into the future and carve their initials in. For the modern day pilgrim, Scotts Bluff National Monument was another tramp through a Visitor Center I could do without.
I climbed the pass in the company of a middle-aged woman riding a pinto, pausing on the grade to check out the wheel ruts of the estimated 350,000 migrants who eventually trudged this way. To Americans, the wheel ruts of the pioneers are what the ridgeways of the Neolithics are to the British — the first marks in the landscape left by the first civilisation. They have survived the ages better than almost everything which might remind Americans of earlier indigenous civilisations, and are now treated with great respect. Horses and vehicles are not allowed on what remains of the Oregon-California Trail, but the ruts looked very rounded, as if smoothed by tyres.
“I used to ride along that track all the time,” the woman on horseback told me. “The farmers really carved it up. It ain’t what its made out to be, y’know.”
I had already ascended several thousand metres since leaving the Missouri and the incline up to the pass was nothing exceptional, except that I could only see blue beyond it. As we approached the brow, the overlanders and I expected the Rockies to rear up before us. Reaching it, I paused. To the south, the edge of the Wildcat Hills continued westwards, now a striking Black Forest gateau of volcanic ash layered with seams of rich yellow sandstone. Crumbs of ponderosa pines were piled at its base and sprinkled across the flood plain, a cake board spread in an arc round to the north. The road bounded down to the floor and kinked right across a flat checker board of little farmsteads and tight fields. I could feel the disappointment welling up from my toes. In the distance were more hills and more plains, but the Rockies were nowhere to be seen. The thought of spending more days grinding through the Great American Desert did not fill me with joy.
I crossed the state line. A sign assured me Wyoming was ‘Like Nowhere on Earth’. Wyoming looked exactly like Nebraska except for the herd of ostriches, llamas and camels which raced me down a field, . The bike still went Ba-Dum Ba-Dum and the landscape kept its quiet roll, but there were subtle differences. Stetsons replaced baseball caps and guys walked with a John Wayne lope, a condition brought on by the satellite dish buckling their belt.
Another day, another town, another grain elevator later, the low grey mass obliterating the horizon shed its load, lifted and revealed a mountain beneath the cloud base. It was an archetypal pyramid peak dominating a long sawtooth range. My heart leapt, but they were the Laramies not the Rockies. After twenty days and twenty nights in the prairies, I was grateful for anything which got in the way of the wind, but it took me two full days to reach their foothills. I was moving into a part of America where the discrepancy between perceived and actual distances played evil tricks on tired travellers.
Aside from tracking the Great Platte River Road, I was also linking the line of forts established to protect migrants. Conjuring CinemaScope images of Jimmy Stewart out to catch gun-runners, none was better known than Fort Laramie, though the town I rode into was a thousand miles from where the movie was set. In the log cabin which served as the tourist information centre, I tried squeezing sense out of a biddy who reminded me of Old Mother Reilly. Twenty or so miles ahead, Route 26 stopped dead at the toes of the Laramies and a T-junction with Interstate 25. There I would turn north and head for Casper, paralleling the course of the North Platte River. According to my map, the only artery between the junction and Casper was I-25 and off-limits to cyclists. I was trying to ascertain if there was a county road which the interstate had replaced but not smothered.
“Have you a map?” Old Mother Reilly asked. “This is a good map.”
She handed me the same one I was holding.
“Casper, you’re going to Casper, right? How about this leaflet? Oh, and here’s one on the Medicine Bow National Forest. That’ll be useful. Douglas,” she pulled out another leaflet, “You’ll be going through Douglas. Ah, yes, there’s a really good map in the Cheyenne leaflet and what about a ‘Highway Guide to the Mormon Pioneer Trail’?”
Cheyenne was in exactly the opposite direction to Casper and the map of the Mormon Trail was 152 years out of date, but I could have walked into a recycling plant and made a tidy profit from the leaflets she gave me.
Down the main road came a police car. “Ooh, ooh, he’ll know!” The old dear was stood on tip toe at the entrance to the log cabin, pointing at the cop car and flicking her hand up and down. “Ask the nice policeman.”
The officer got out, listened attentively and rubbed the side of his face.
“I think you gotta ride up the interstate,” he said. “Y’asked James?”
“Ooh, James’ll know for sure,” Mother Reilly gushed. “He’s English, you know.”
James ran the Fort Laramie Trading Post, a log cabin full of souvenirs and trinkets and walls decked in ‘ethnic’ posters, paintings and blankets. James Stewart didn’t get a look in, but James the Englishman was dressed for the role of fort sutler and was about as English as Dick van Dyke. He hadn’t a clue what happened to the old two-lane blacktop running north. I left him arguing with the cop over a recent bet. As I made to ride away, Old Mother Reilly came trotting up and breathlessly said, “Here’s a couple of leaflets for Fort Laramie. You’ll be going there, of course.”
I thought I was there, but this was the village of Fort Laramie, consisting of ‘250 good people and 6 sore heads’ according to the town sign. As with Fort Kearny, the original settlement was relocated to the north bank of the river when the railroad came through. The Fort Laramie Mother Reilly meant was the heritage site on the other side of the tracks and a couple of miles down Jim Bridger Avenue. In 1849 the fort was an American Fur Company trading post. The military garrison was several years off, by when its role had become more about ‘dealing’ with the Plains Indians than supporting the wagon trains.
Two years after the Gold Rush started, around 10,000 natives from eleven different tribes assembled in all their finery near Horse Creek, a few miles back down the North Platte. It was the largest gathering of aborigines in the history of the West, organised by the Department of Indian Affairs to settle their growing hostility to white immigration. The Horse Creek Treaty mapped out ‘colonies’ where the Plains Indians would be safe from encroachment and might be coaxed into becoming good Christian farmers. Jim Bridger was the key negotiator for the government. Jim, a famous trapper, guide and scout, probably knew more about the geography and peoples of the Wild West than any whiteman alive. He was as close as the frontier got to somebody who had ‘gone native’ and knew efforts to pen in nomadic tribes were doomed before the ink had dried. But the United States had a different agenda.
The treaty lasted two years before a calf from a Mormon wagon train strayed into a Brulé Lacota encampment and was shot. Chief Conquering Bear apologised and offered to pay for the animal. Brushing him aside, a platoon of twenty-five U.S. soldiers marched into the camp to arrest the culprit. After a forty-five minute stand-off, the troops cracked and opened fire. Only one survived long enough to crawl back to Fort Laramie and raise the alarm. The revenge exacted was devastating and marked the beginning of the Indian Wars, the ‘final solution’ the army had been itching to get stuck into for years. Of over 200 treaties federal representatives made with the Native Americans, not one was honoured.
I crossed the old army bridge over the North Platte, crested the hill before Fort Laramie and was immediately drenched by a wet wind. In the heavens, a black bubbling cauldron was suspended over a firey dance of yellows and oranges. Thunder rumbled like it was ready to belch. Beyond the entrance kiosk, the famous fort looked more Legoland than Western frontier. Weighed against what was coming at me from the south-west, I took a rain check on military history, turned and pedalled like a man on a mission. Whether I could cover the thirteen miles to the next large town before the heavens rent asunder was debatable but I needed a bar. The Forty-Niners broke out the rum to celebrate completing the prairie crossing. With the Laramies in sight, I was prepared to put a lot of effort into maintaining that fine tradition.
A couple of miles before Guernsey, I noticed aircraft circling over the town practising ‘circuits and bumps’. They were military aircraft — C-130 Hercules troop carriers. Beyond the tanks, trucks, half-tracks and helicopters lined up in the National Guard compound on the edge of town, Crazy Tony’s looked like a bar the military would frequent. Decorated with a montage of cattle brands, the decor inside turned out to be strictly cowboy and the two dudes holding up the bar aimed their sights squarely at game rather than enemies of the state. I gulped down a couple of swift Buds, the second complementary of Crazy Tony with the comment, “Anybody insane enough to do what you’re doing deserves to find gold in California.” He pushed a tray of breaded elk in front of me, killed on Memorial Sunday.
On my fourth can, one of the bar-flies thought it wise to clue me in on the local police situation. “We got more cop cars in this town than road space,” the one with the bushy white sideburns and frayed Stetson told me. “They sit outside, waiting for the bar to empty at night, and reel in anybody who happens to trip over the doorstep. They catch you drunk on a bicycle, you’ll be parting with 700 bucks before you leave this fucking town.”
A couple of hours later, I slew out of Crazy Tony’s, crashed into the door frame, and tripped over the doorstep. Low and behold, there was a cop car in the car park. Wheeling my bike in a broad arc up to the driver’s side, I again inquired about the logistics and legality of riding up I-25 to Casper.
“You’re not going to cycle it tonight? Not in your condition?”
I wasn’t sure if he was asking or telling.
“Nope!” I blurted out, “I’m gonna walk it, like a good boy.”
Singing Home on the Range to an empty main street, I pushed as far as the bridge at the western edge of Guernsey. There I mounted, pressed down on the left pedal, slipped and found myself slumped at an angle against the handrail staring down at the dark waters of the North Platte. I reminded myself of Lee Marvin and his cross-legged horse leaning against the wall in Cat Ballou. I chuckled and promptly threw up.