There is nothing like a drunk woman…

Another cycle Oregon has passed and I already miss it.   Last night my sleep was not disturbed by fellow bicyclists chatting, snoring, and un-zipping their tents or coyotes howling.    This morning I did not have to put layers of clothing on to protect against the early morning chill and walk a quarter mile to stand in line to use a bathroom that another cyclist has already left a malodorous deposit.   

I miss meeting people like Mary Otley, who says she is a nicer person now than she was ten years ago.   Mary is 92 years old and still hays the fields and orders the cattle and does the books on her fourteen thousand acre ranch in Diamond, Oregon.  She hates it when Quicken comes out with new software.   She was born in Independence, Oregon on a dairy farm and went to University of Oregon to escape farm life.  After college she joined the WAVES in 1943 and was appointment barrack supervisor based on her stellar test results.  Mary Otley said of the women who signed up for this specially created branch of the US Navy:“Many joined just to be close to the sailors.”  She said she had to carry many a WAVE  to her bed at night so she would make curfew.  “Let me tell you, there is nothing like a drunk woman” After the war ended, she was assigned a teaching job in Burns and fell in love with Harold Otley.

I miss the boy riding by on his horse as we pull up in Frenchglen.   Our bus driver, Connie, tell us that is Colton.   Connie teaches science at the Oregon’s only public boarding high school in Crane, which is an hour away from Frenchglen. Colton is one of her 60 students this year.  Connie also drives the bus for tours up the Steens Mountain and is an archeology technician in the summer helping to record and collect Native American artifacts on BLM lands before they disappear.

I miss seeing Cassiopeia in the Milky Way on my way to the Port-a-potty at 2 AM.  I miss the smell of sagebrush and juniper as I am trying to make it up a hill on the hottest time of the day, 3 PM

I even miss my fellow cyclists asking me as they pass me up the hill: “Sweetpea… was that bike named after you?”   After the tenth time, I came up with the perfect answer for this rhetorical question: “No, because then it would be called Royal Bitch.”

I miss thinking there is no way I can make it up one more hill in this heat and doing it any way.  I miss dreaming of sitting in the shade of a tree and thinking I will never see another tree and then finding a tree..

I even miss the well-endowed gentleman of a certain age, who we have dubbed ‘Tan Man’.  He is a participant of Cycle Oregon every year and struts around in his Speedo without a shirt like a peacock looking from side to side making sure everyone is noticing him without his shirt.

I miss my brother educating us all at the dinner table about Jared Diamond’s theory on Homo Sapiens’ penile size.  Diamond believes there is no evolutionary advantage to having a large penis other than competing with other men.   At which point all the men at the table said it was because women preferred men with larger penises and the women at the table said that penile size was not an important factor in choosing a mate, thereby proving Diamond’s point. 

Maybe Tan Man needs to read Jared Diamond’s ‘The Third Chimpazee.’