Doug Clark: Cheesy Riders road trip wraps up the hard way

Cheesy Riders, my cross- country summer adventure on motor scooters with Scott Cooper, ended with a whimper Tuesday afternoon.

As I explained in my previous column, Cooper and I set out on his tiny 49cc Honda Ruckus scooters with ambitious plans. We intended to ride the Eastern Washington backroads to Moses Lake and beyond.

Here’s what we actually accomplished:

•Seven hours of Ruckus riding, much of it over spine-compressing, innards-twisting goat paths.

•Eighty-nine miles logged.

•I lost feeling in my fanny somewhere in Lincoln County.

And where did this effort get us?

Ritzville.

That’s right. We turned a 50-minute freeway jaunt into Homer Simpson’s Odyssey.

We knew we had limitations. The law says you can’t drive a Ruckus on roads posted above 35 mph.

What we didn’t know is that most of the secondary farm roads Cooper had mapped out before we left Spokane turned out to be 45 mph and higher.

That meant we had to be, well, creative.

Outside Cheney, for example, we located a crude railroad-access road. It looked perfect for Ruckus riding except for an ominous “No Trespassing” sign.

Cooper approached an orange-vested guy working near the track and asked him if we could use the road.

“I didn’t see anything,” he growled.

We took that as a mandate.

A slog through the crushed black basalt led us to a farm road that we could legally use. For 15 magical miles, we experienced the liberating joy of smooth and unencumbered Ruckusing.

Birds were twittering. Cows were blankly staring. The air smelled farmland fresh …

Ah, what bliss.

Soon, however, we came to another test of moral equivalency.

It was the entrance to another crushed-rock thoroughfare.

“No unauthorized vehicles,” read a sign.

“What do you think they mean by unauthorized?” I asked Cooper.

“Well,” he said, “I bought tabs for both of the scooters. So I hereby authorize you.”

Good enough.

On we Ruckused, keeping a wary eye out for railroad bulls, spy planes and black helicopters.

Eventually we arrived in the snoozy hamlet of Sprague. There we asked a local woman if she knew of any backroads that would take us west.

The directions she gave sounded as easy as heating soup.

Soon, however, we were surrounded by grasshopper-infested wheat fields, heading north on a road with a long German name.

Cooper pulled over. He got out his wrinkled road atlas for about the 90th time and, after an examination, muttered, “We went the wrong way.”

Some serious backtracking found us on a dirt road that was rutted like a washboard from grain truck traffic.

Riding a jackhammer would be less jarring. I think I lost a kidney.

Cooper, traveling ahead of me, kicked up so much dust that I’m sure I inhaled half of Adams County.

It got worse. Suddenly, I was hit by one of those mini-tornados we affectionately call dust devils.

This was more like Satan’s sphincter.

Cooper said he looked in his mirror and saw me disappear in a swirling brown cyclone of doom.

“I was so glad it wasn’t me,” he later observed.

The fear of knowing I’d have to pay Cooper Ruckus damages was the only thing that kept me from toppling over. As winds spun around me, I’m pretty sure I saw Auntie Em and Toto and flying monkeys.

Ten miles later we limped into Ritzville, two sunburned, wind-chafed and sandblasted Cheesy Riders.

We booked motel rooms and hatched a new plan.

“What time does the bus to Spokane come through?” Cooper asked, adding that we could get his truck and then motor back to Ritzville to get the Ruckus bikes.

Our fuel-efficient scooter journey was about to leave a carbon footprint the size of a lead smelter.

And it was the best idea I’d heard since we left Spokane.