High-Wheelin' Around Bend

I try to get out for a "jogging tour" of whatever town I happen to be visiting while doing author visits. It's a good way to see the area and helps get you over jet lag, but I'm notorious for getting lost.

In Bakersfield, CA I wound up climbing a fence and getting snagged on top. Stuck snagged. (Yeah, I was channeling Marissa.)

In Fargo, ND I got so turned around and hopelessly disoriented...and couldn't remember the name of the hotel I was staying in. Or the street it was on. All I knew was it was across the street from a Hooters.

I should probably have waited for a female pedestrian to inquire directions, but there was one pedestrian as far as I could see and so I just asked, "Is there a Hooters around here?"

I was desperate and tired and cold (even though I'd been running for an hour and a half), and yeah, he knew which direction to point me.

There was also that spooky bridge to nowhere in some desolate park in Atlanta, and confusion in the vicinity of the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. (Lesson: Never enter the Tabernacle or any of its extensive side buildings in shorts, even to beg directions. People in white will evict you.)

What contributes to my repeated lostedness is that there is no address on a hotel room key card.

There's also no room number.

All for safety, granted, but when you're in a different room / hotel each night the locations and room numbers become a blur. So even when I promise myself I'll remember, even when I say the number aloud, even when I take a mental snapshot of my hallway and its relative position to the EXIT signs, I wind up in tabernacles getting evicted by men in white.

I tried the strategy of a straight line. Go out for, say, twenty minutes, turn around and go back.

But sometimes a road doesn't go along for twenty minutes. Sometimes freeways pop up. Or roads T. Or there's a really cool park with drakes and herons and squirrels just over there.

Squirrel!!

So directions change, roads meander, tabernacles appear (and go on forever), and men in white rebuff my desperate plea for their knowledge.

Being someone who tries to learn from past experience, last week while doing school visits  in Bend, Oregon, I tried a new strategy.

I took a map!

Please. A runner with a map? How embarrassing is that?

Well, obviously you've never asked a man for directions to Hooters or you'd understand--not very!

I didn't have it out and open while running, come on. I had torn it down to the bare necessities, then folded and stashed it in my Race-Ready shorts' pocket.

Unfortunately, after I set out it started snowing. So I really should have been wearing SWEATS, but as bright as I am about all this I went out there in bare legs and froze (because my last pair of sweats was left at the beginning of the last marathon I did for ETRTR).

I did, however, have mittens and a beanie and a fat headband for my ears.

And a map!

I'd intended to go on an out and back with a straight(ish) shot through a park, but I did end up taking two detours. One took me through some scary ice by a river and required me to slip-slide through big 'n' nasty patches of goose poop to get back to being simply snowed upon. The other took me past the High Wheel.

I had no idea what a high wheeler was. And since the snow had, at this point, turned into a weird drizzle of ice-rain, and since I knew where I was and how to get back to my hotel, I could just have blasted past this wheeled wonder, but I actually stopped and read the plaque because I couldn't imagine what this giant thing was or had been used for and wanted to know!

Turns out it was used as logging equipment (before the invention of the diesel engine). A "buncherman" would bunch together felled trees, the "high wheel log skidder" would be placed over the logs, a "gopherman" would dig a tunnel under the logs and snake a chain beneath the logs, and then the front end of the logs would be chained to the long post of the high wheel, so a team of four horses or oxen could pull the high wheel (with the back of the logs skidding) through the forest to a collection area.



This is a picture of it in the springtime!



Okay. Normally I wouldn't stand around in an icy drizzle reading about antique logging equipment, but they had me at Buncherman.

Buncherman!

And then there was Gopherman! How could I not read a plaque that had Buncherman and Gopherman as key characters? They sound like they belong in a Sammy Keyes book, and I spent the rest of my run back to the hotel chuckling to myself about Buncherman and Gopherman. (Well, except for a little break in that mental action when I saw a cool Beatles shirt in a store window and had to check it out.) (Squirrel!) Anyway, what's a little icy rain and goose poop when you've got superhero loggers in capes flying around in your brain? It was a good run, really, all things considered.

And you can bet I'll remember Bend.