Bend, OR

Getting to Bend

I touched down in Seattle for a minute to see my friend who is the reason I'm willing and capable of this trip. Had she not bullied me into raw dogging camping in six national parks and a Walmart parking lot nine years ago, the stick that was lodged so far up my ass never would have begun its pilgrimage down to Flexibleville where I now own a timeshare. I could never live full time in Flexibleville but spending a month or so a year there is refreshing.

When I told Kim that Illinois has my road rage at an all time high, she shuffled me out the soon-to-be-painted-purple front door and told me I best get a move on then. An hour and a half out of Seattle at a Chicago standstill: "WHERE DO I HAVE TO GO TO GET AWAY FROM ALL THIS TRAFFIC?!" I yodel as a tourist directly contributing to the problem. For five and a half more hours me and my self-stopping car battled with each other through the Pacific Northwest; the only thing worse than a backseat driver is a car that can control its own brakes.

Often I will say the company of people is taxing to me, usually while sitting across from a poor, sweet friend that, against their instincts, agreed to eat dinner with me at some subpar restaurant that I think is incredible because my usual dinner is canned beans. Maybe it was a road rage hallucination, but I see myself in the seas of sagebrush - amongst the sprawling pricklies there are a few saying the same thing: one day I'm going to get away from all these stupid plants. And that's what tumbleweeds are.

I was a little worried as night neared that I'd be careening around corners in my murdered out Toyota Corolla and maybe BE murdered by the roads of Yakama, but nature's street light (that's what an amateur poet calls THE MOON) lit the way.

So, bundled up in my horse jacket that my mom gave to me because she thought she was too fat to wear it (she's not), me and my Corolla cantered windows down across Oregon. In the early night, Kacey Musgraves crooned and the fields of windmills lit up their red pulsing lights like lighters, begging planes not to annihilate them, and their white arms danced in unison. For most of the three minute tune it was a harmonious, dare I say *~* magical *~* High Desert production. But they would get off beat every so often, and in those moments I saw myself in seas of windmills and our unrhythmic souls collided when I sang the wrong lyrics. I wish I had gotten a video because I don't think I've described this private performance with due justice, but you know, homicidal highways.

Zach Top, as good as sitting in my passenger seat, and I arrived in Bend about an hour before Friday clocked out for the night. (Yes, Zach, that IS the moon! In your next song you can call it nature's streetlight and I won't even make you give me credit for it.)

Bend Proper

I intend to experience these cities as if I lived there; so, I will live the life I am accustomed, 2000-ish miles to the left. Saturday began like it does in Chicago.

Similarities

1. My hair was unbrushed 2. I stumbled out of bed 3. I walked to the local bakery and devoured a pastry

Differences

1. My pastry was marionberry, not chocolate.

2. Cars stopped and waited for me, a pedestrian. The drivers smiled while waving me along the crosswalk parade featuring a singular bedraggled tourist. You could stroll around Bend like you're an only child and the traffic is your parents and they revolve around you and only you. In Chicago every day is a battlefield where I am fully prepared to be blasted to smithereens by cars who couldn't care less if I was a piece of trash or a human (in their defense sometimes we are similar).

3. I waited outside the shop with a lady, description: gray crimpy hair and cinnamon-colored lip gloss, who reported "a bunch of good-smelling young men just went in there and Nancy doesn't like it when you prop the door open." I struck up a conversation with her by lying (the best way to start any conversation), saying I just moved to Bend. A regular, she gave me a run down of every croissant, scone, and fruit wrap Nancy P's Cafe & Bakery offers. We both realized we are attending the same farmers market today (wow!) -- she suggested I get flowers from the flower man to make my new (fake) apartment feel more like home. We were interrupted by April, description: maybe 46 but skin like she's 25 and long, thick, gray hair featuring singular glitter strands. She gave her a hug and said I don't mean to interrupt you and your friend (friend!!) but I hear congratulations are in order... you won bingo! Reciting the local bakehouse menu; keeping bystanders in check; and demolishing lame low stakes games, well this lady IS me, just 2,000 miles to the left.

I saw one pile of garbage in all of Bend. It was a congregation of aluminum cans and a jumbo Perrier bottle on an electrical transformer kitty-corner to my Airbnb. They probably just heard I was in town and figured a relative may like some company.

I walked to the aforementioned farmers market and its second cousin, the craft market. On the way I mistook four pinecones for chipmunks because I didn't have my glasses on. Specs-less, I also overshot the McHomegrown Family Reunion and ended up looking for fresh cucumbers and dreamcatchers in an apartment complex lobby. A fit man in his 80s rolled in with his bike and asked how I am... I responded in kind and he said "Now that this is over, much better." Finally! I love a biker that can be honest about a big ride. Enough of this "I rode 110 miles today and the sun was shining out of my own butthole the entire time" garbage. The middle 55 miles sucked, it was tough, and you cried a little, but you did it you spandex-pantsed dog, you.

Re-oriented, I peruse the market to a saxophonist playing the chorus of Teenage Dirtbag on repeat. This is not the same musician but will give you the idea. A child, maybe eight, came up and gifted me an anti-aging eye cream sample. I didn't take this personally. I too, have yet to see someone in their thirties in Bend, and I'm sure this young salesman was just confused as to what this unidentifiable life form was and what she needed. (Literally I just need to drink more than 28 drops of water a day like a thirsty gerbil.) I am a bit concerned that the only people who appear to be my age have a child in tow; the few unattached ones gave me way too engaging of smiles for a stranger to offer, unless our species is so near extinction in Bend that when you see one roaming you have to engage, deeply, for the sake of survival. Or, are they just nice?

The attitude in Bend is what Americans expect in Canada. I can confirm after biking 220 miles through the country, urban and rural, that Canadians are not go-out-of-their-way nice. They are in Bend. They are so genuine and so earnest that I think it would be easy for me to be the most comical person here. The faintest La Croix lemon flavor bit of wit has them laughing. Though my rise to Bend fame will at first be sensationalized, it will not be forever. Like Columbus was cherished for discovering the New World but besmirched by the reality of clearing out a civilization and afflicting them with smallpox, so will I be applauded for spreading the Good Word of Humor to Bend, but also contaminating its pure people with sarcasm and eventually the self deprecation that will do them all in. Oh and jay walking. I brought that too.

I carried my rabbit spoils, carrots and raspberries, back to my lair, the carrots first like I was going to shank someone. Bend feared me. I flipped them right side up like a bindle, the ends tickling the back of my arm, and I hoped every time I turned around to investigate the tickle that it would be a chipmunk. Only pinecones. On the way home I spun a game show wheel outside someone's house. The prize: to do whatever the wheel instructed for the corresponding number on which it landed. Thankfully I stopped on paying for the person in front of me at a coffee shop (#2) and not forgiving someone (#12), God forbid.

I ate my finds for lunch and afterwards completed my evolution into a bunny, hopping about town on the FREE bus. I rode this dang bus like Jasmine did the magic carpet, and a 70-year-old lady with dark maroon lipstick who likes snow was my Aladdin.

Most of my time in the Old Mill District was spent watching people float -- in tubes down the Deschutes River, and on surfboards in Whitewater Park. I made the mistake of engaging with a man who was trying to change directions on a bridge by commenting on the shockingly tight turn radius of his electric scooter. I will call him Felipe because I'm 100% confident that's not his name, but that is what I heard, and your best defense for privacy is spending your time with someone that has a hearing loss. He asked if I wanted to ride it and I said no I will steal it. He asked me where my boyfriend was because he doesn't want to get punched and I said all of the twenty men on this bridge are my boyfriends. He told me about his two residences in California and Bend and his favorite mountain bike trail that doesn't have a name. He was easy enough to shake off and I'm glad to have met him, as he confirmed that my dimples are unrivaled even in the pacific northwest.

I had the pleasure of meeting up with my parents' friends from 40 years ago at a wine bar hosting live music that I found on Eventbrite. They bought me a Chardonnay and imbibed themselves. We caught up on my parents' lives since I was born, and all my 32 years. The conversation lulled a few times; in those moments they looked intently into my dehydrated face and yearningly into my half John/half Linda-colored eyes like they were watching 90s home movies from their own memories of their 30s in Milwaukee and Cedarburg. They intimated that the influx of people moving to Bend has congested downtown and pushed out the natives, every loveable city's plight since COVID, and yet they were begging me to move there. See? Nice. Or, they want to keep playing back video tapes on the VCR.

Since the beginning of the day, I have refined my lie to say I moved here from Wisconsin. It is received more kindly. My lie was immediately blown up Sunday at the bike shop when they needed the address on file for my credit card. Damn you, Chicago!! Let me go! I took off on my Trek Roscoe en route to Phil's Trailhead. Truly the entire ride from leaving the shop, to the trailhead, to the top of the trail, was an embarrassment. Like mountain goat hybrids, the people of Bend clip clopped up the inclines while I, a Budweiser Clydesdale, lumbered. At the godforsaken turn around point where inclines became declines, I had the option to ride down what I just took up, a blue, or a step down, a green, back to the start. Flashbacks surfaced of spread eagling down a black diamond offshoot in Colorado on my ugly eggshell-colored toothpick skis that probably retailed for $27 and my dad belting "RRRAAAAACHhhhheellllll" as his 9-year-old hit terminal velocity and then final form as a 3.5-foot ball of hail when the snow accumulating in my tumultuous helmetless-head over ski boot-heels descent mixed with my tears into ice.

I chose green. I had tried out the rollers in the skills park before riding the trails and was pleased to feel that it wasn't unlike jumping horses where your hips hinge to keep neutral while the horse is leaping. Though, a little girl watching me said "what are you doing" so maybe I'm not right. Or maybe she's a tiny IDIOT! Me and my trail horse screamed down the beginner trail all the way back to the trailhead. It was as fun as TikTok makes it look, I just didn't know how hard I'd have to work to earn it on the uphill.

The rest of the day continued the same, though I did buck myself into a pine tree when I hit the front brake too hard... flashbacks... surfaced of my dad coming up behind me while skiing and then navigating us both into a tree. Regardless, I've flown over the head of many a stopped horse, so I say hello to my old friend, the ground. I hit a downhill on the way back to the shop; the ruckus these knobby tires kicked up on fresh blacktop drew crowds. People looked around, murmuring "well we didn't know there was an F1 race in town, how come no one told us?" Not an F1 race folks, just a 175-pound lady at full tilt on a mountain bike coming down Galveston Road.

That night I had a conversation with a cat on the way to get froyo (175 strong). I wish they'd had a bouncer outside of Cuppa Yo carding for people older than 16 and turning them away because the establishment was overrun with juveniles and I also wish I had my free anti-aging eye cream, and maybe some hand wipes; they all looked like their wrinkle-free faces were covered in peanut butter and jelly.

I saw the cat again Monday morning on the way to get coffee. Now two days in, I have yet to see anyone on their phones. I think they navigate with the sun, moon, and stars; communicate only verbally in person; and use their hippocampus as a photo album. For what it's worth, the enchantment did seem to fade Monday. Fewer cars stopped and I saw more collared shirts. I guess weekend highs aren't exclusive to big cities. But Nancy liked my reusable coffee cup and I got the rundown on a well-behaved Labrador Retriever sitting next to me outside the café.

In some ways, Bend feels like one big self-imposed HOA. People take pride in their residences and in their city, very obviously. Both private and public property are impeccably maintained and the outward neighborliness implies that the board may hear about it if anyone is disrespectful, where the HOA bylaws define disrespectful as, though not limited to, not saying good morning to someone on the other side of the street or nearer (seriously what is up with these people in Bend?!).

Monday afternoon brings Boise. Twice now I've heard Boise referred to as a big city. First by a friend that used to live in Chicago and second from the bike shop man who spent a lot of time there because his ex-girlfriend (emphasis on the ex... or was I reading into that...?) lived there. My expectations are high!