heat. In those areas, I needed to seek water to cool my body temperature. I stopped once to soak myself in a cattle trough. Another time, I found a meager trickle of a stream where I could get wet and cool down. It was along this stretch, when I was exhausted and dehydrated, that Forrest Roberts of Los Angeles was assisting me by allowing me to draft him. At one weary time, I stopped concentrating on my cycling, and in that brief nanosecond, I rolled up on to Forrest’s wheel and was thrust over my handlebars. On the way through the air, in my tumble, my ribs rammed into the right break hood of my handlebars. Ohhhh, the pain. I had not broken ribs, but the pain was intense – for weeks. Have sympathy for anyone who bruises his or her ribs. It truly hurts to breathe. And do not make them laugh – that hurts even more. Do not expect a speedy recovery either. It takes many weeks to begin to feel any relief of that pain. Yet with the marvel of modern painkillers, I continued to ride and treasure the sights and experiences of Washington, Idaho, and Montana.
Having worked in a start-up company developing products enabling high-speed Internet access over the electric power lines, I was thrilled to see the monument to our modern development when we bicycled into Grand Coulee, Washington. The Grand Coulee Dam, the largest concrete structure ever built, is the largest producer of hydroelectric power in the United States and is the third largest hydroelectric facility in the world. Built on the Columbia River, its construction began in 1933 for purposes of controlling irrigation to the otherwise arid, high desert, for eliminating flooding, and also for generating power. In 1942, power generation became its top priority, supplying electricity to the Northwest aluminum industry for the nation’s needs in support of the Second World War. Upstream, the dam forms Lake Roosevelt, which extends 150 miles to the Canadian border. We bicycled by massive electric power distribution switchyards as we approached from the hills west of the dam. The
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