3 Rides, 3 Days

Three rides in three days in the desert and mountains.

Waylon, my companion and conveyance for the day.

This past Thursday, Renee and I got out pretty early on horseback meaning to bring all the way into the ranch the lost cow that we had found the day before in Crane Creek and brought out onto the desert. I am not usually that into horseback riding (long hours in the saddle when I was a kid spoiled me of that), but it was a perfect morning leaving the ranch. The dogs love to go along and the horses were glad to be out of their muddy corral. I didn't originally spot the cow with my little scope and we did a large circuit of the desert valley to the west of our alfalfa fields. The seemingly empty plain is anything but when explored, and expands as it is crossed, so that the mountains appear to remain fixed in place and all motion is an illusion except for the living, charging animal underneath who is very much more concerned with the physical than the metaphysical.

Frog pond and the 4-wheeler track.

On Friday, my brother Glynn rode the 4-wheeler up to the bunkhouse (where Renee and I are staying here) and told me he needed us to go up and close the gates around the seeding, the big fire from a few year's ago, and our main drift fence separating the ranch's high country from the foothills. So we took the machine and made the long route, climbing through the muddy foothills and hard-packed snow all the way up to Frog Pond, the highest of the drift fence gates. It was the first time I had been back on the burn since the summer after it happened. The changes were immense, especially down along Leonard Creek where I used to have to walk through sagebrush taller than me to get to the gate but now is swept bare and coming back in thistles and wild rose it appears.

Closing gates on the 4-wheeler is a video game.

Then on Saturday we hopped on the bikes and hooked up the Doggy Ride for the first time since my Reno-ranch ride in January and headed out along Leonard Creek Road toward Paiute Ranch, the end of the line (although the old owner let me go through a few years ago on the old Paiute-Soldier Meadows road, see Gone Away, but it is officially closed). Another fantastic day, the clear of the past few days giving way to some cloud cover alternating with sun. We left a little late to make it all the way to Paiute and back in time to milk the mother goat and feed Bodie, but we stopped and ate at the turn-off for the Pinto Mountain Hot Springs in a small patch of tufa and watched the cloud shadows and light on the layered bands of the mountain. Riding through the landscape on a day like that seems like riding through a masterpiece so masterful it is nearly painful.

Diving figure cloud over Bartlett Peak and the Black Rock Range.

Riding home on Saturday I started to think about the previous three days, the different kinds of rides I'd been on, how they affected me, my ethics and the planet. Three rides, three categories of power: animal power, gas power and human power. (Without forgetting of course that in today's society they are all ultimately gas powered: the horse's food energy and mine steeped in gasoline nearly as much as the ATVs gas tank.)

Animal powered: Coco regathering energy in the desert dunes.

Animal power is natural, and the point of connection between horse and rider a valuable reminder of the connection we have to living things, how they respond to our most subtle (and not so subtle) actions, feelings and reactions. Animal power feels as though it is from a different somehow more primal history, which is what I think makes it so popular. Unfortunately, however, it isn't. The drastic overreliance of animal power on gas power makes it somehow also virtual, virtual primal history, a whiff of the saddle leather and sweat of old time buckaroos swept away by the overpowering stench of gasoline. Gas power is entirely one-dimensional and relies on adrenaline. Riding a four-wheeler on muddy, frozen, rocky uneven roads is fun, but also disconnects the rider from his or her elements. In the confines of the 4-wheeler ride there is nothing more than person and machine, the roar of the engine drowns out even thought or the loudest creatures along the road. One is riding in a bubble of sound and exhaust, and I had the distinct impression that I wasn't really riding on those snowy roads, but that it was a virtual event, a video game I played from somewhere outside of myself. In effect, the machine has taken much of the control from the rider, and the rider is left with an illusion of freedom and power.

From here I can really see: Pinto Mountain with the Jackson Mountains in the background by bike.

The human-powered ride blends the animal and the machine. The rider is the animal, the engine needing food. The machine is of the rider, not the other way around, and the machine does not create an artifical barrier between rider and surroundings. In fact, under human power the poetic effect of the landscape one passes through is multiplied by the human pace and peacefulness. The sky literally becomes brighter. The sensation of being in a video game disappears, there is no video game, no human contrivance at all that could replace the sensation of being in the natural world, not astride it, nor overpowering it. It may seem paradoxical that it is a machine (or machines: skate boards, inline skates, unicycles, kayaks, etc.) that allows us this connection. Human power, however, is about the future, about a future understanding of the role of machines and the ways that humans control machines, not the other way around.

At the end of the day, the pups are tired out either way.