Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America (13 page)

After thirty miles, we stopped in Goodrich and prepared lunch on the lawn of a graying church. While fixing sandwiches and beer-can cooking some soup, we blubbered—both of us, Rachel just as excited as I was—about the wind. By now I was feeling guilty about having left her behind. I asked if she minded me taking some stretches at my own pace.

“Brian,” she said, “I would be thrilled if you did that more often.”

I nearly spat out my soup.

“You think I can’t see you checking the rearview every three seconds?”

I raised an I-have-no-idea-what-you’re-talking-about eyebrow.

She replied with a give-me-a-fucking-break snort.

“You’re like fifteen feet taller than me. Which makes you faster. I get it. It’s fine.”

I blinked.

“And I appreciate that you try to ride my speed. But sometimes I just want to ride how I want to ride and not worry about slowing you down.”

I blinked.

“How about this? If you want to ride ahead, you don’t need to stop and hug me and tell me you love me. Just go. Maybe try to stay within sight. But really, if you wanna go, go.”

I nodded and, unsure of what to say, took a jaw-distending bite from my sandwich.

Rachel smiled and squeezed my arm. “I’m glad we had this talk.”

 • • • 

B
ack on 200 the wind was still tumbling westward, and within seconds, I was floating along at eighteen miles an hour. I dropped a hand from the bars, grabbed the top tube, and suddenly felt like a cowboy racing across the open plain, one hand on my saddle horn, the other working the reins. I took a deep pull of prairie air and swept my eyes up from the road to the distant hills to the big open sky. Blue-gray clouds lay over me like blankets, and I felt tucked in. Cozy and contained. Alone.

I found myself thinking of Galen, wondering if this was his every day—if he always felt so free, so powerful, so . . .

I shook off the thought. This was
my
moment. I wasn’t going to spend it worrying over Galen or Rachel or anyone else, wasn’t going to pay attention to that rhythmic click in my pedal or the gritty whine of my unoiled chain, wasn’t going to question Wisconsin behind or Portland beyond. No, I was just going to be here, alone, doing what I was doing because I wanted to do it.

And so I rode, aware only of the pavement below and the hills ahead and those wind-tickled wheat stalks that were so pretty when pointed not at my face but at my horizon. For four miles, or maybe forty, I moved through this landscape, utterly alone, floating far ahead of Rachel and into a sort of trance. My legs kept a steady beat and my breath slowed and I felt like I was focusing not on any one thing but on all of it at once. I took in the plentiful-if-polluted ponds and the distant tractors and the grayscale skyscape and the charcoal tongue of the highway, and they became one thing. They became where I am.

 • • • 

L
ate afternoon we rolled up to Turtle Lake. Population 510. A Dakotan metropolis. The town sat to the north, tucked behind a grove of oak, and its main street, which looked more like a farmhouse driveway, cut through the trees to meet 200. At the intersection was a skyscraping pole that displayed the American flag I’d seen from a mile away, and beneath it a bus-size, solid-bronze turtle. “Rusty the Turtle,” according to the plaque. I climbed atop his shell, hugged his head, rode him like a stallion. Rachel snapped a photo of me straddling his neck, waving an imaginary lasso. It was a great shot, this ridiculous reptile sitting in the prairie, and me on top of it, the wind whipping my hair so hard it actually appeared that Rusty and I were moving.

And that’s exactly what I wanted to do. Keep moving. We’d already covered seventy-eight miles that day, but with the tailwind, I felt like we’d just started. I could ride all night, and I told Rachel as much. She nodded but said nothing.

“It’s only twenty-eight more miles to Riverdale,” I said.

No response.

“We can probably make it there by dusk,” I continued. “What do you think?”

She looked past Rusty, toward town. “I don’t know. I’m kind of ready to be done.”

Something like anger rose to my throat. I was feeling invincible, and now I was going to have to sit around and twiddle my thumbs during the prettiest part of the day, all because Rachel didn’t want to push herself? I took a breath, managed to remind myself that I had no idea whether she had, in fact, been pushing herself all day; that I was, as she’d put it, like fifteen feet taller; that she’d given me the green light to cowboy up all afternoon; and that since I’d done exactly that, maybe a little compromise was in order.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I could stop too. This does look like a cute town.”

We set up in the tiny, tree-lined park and cooked up some couscous and veggies, then strolled downtown and headed into Betty Boops, the local watering hole. As we sipped pints of watery pilsner, the bartender, Tina, a pretty blonde with a gravelly voice and a seen-it-all-thirteen-times perma-smirk, told us all about Rusty. Apparently, a few years before, the town had optioned a cash reserve and given residents the choice between a community pool and Rusty. Families wanted the pool. Old folks wanted Rusty. The old folks won, and now, on ninety-degree summer days, Tina found herself wanting to murder an inanimate reptile.

She invited us to join in the nine o’clock bingo game. Rachel and I went in together on four cards and lost terribly. When the game wrapped up, some old-timers shuffled over to a table in the corner, and I asked Tina what was happening. “Blackjack,” she replied. “Blackjack?” I asked. “Blackjack,” she repeated. Apparently, gambling in bars, not just video poker but actual card games, was legal in North Dakota. Rachel wasn’t into it, but I sat down, rationalizing that I’d been really good about sticking to my ten-dollar daily budget and could afford to have some fun, and that playing cards for money in a bar was a fleeting experience, to be seized and savored.

To my surprise, I’d won thirty bucks by the end of the first shoe. And to my deeper surprise, I actually stood up and left, rather than gambling my winnings away.

It was almost midnight when we left Betty Boops. Rachel grabbed my hand, and as we strode through side streets, back toward the park, I felt like the king of North Dakota. Like I was being rewarded, over and again. The gods had discovered where I was, and what I was doing, and why, and how, and they had been pleased, had showered me
with tailwinds and table winnings and the admiration of this strong, proud, ass-kicking woman, and now we were standing together at the gates to a magical new world, a world where life was and would always be getting better, where each new mile would build upon the one before it, would be richer and sweeter and simpler, until the final mile was not a mile but an answer to all my—

Rachel squeezed my hand. “Hey,” she said. “What are you thinking?”

I wasn’t sure I could get all that to come out right, so I squeezed back and nodded up at the night sky and said, “Just that I’m so happy we’re here.”

“Me too,” she said. “This is always my favorite part of the day.”

“And which part is that?”

“The not-riding part. Being in these small towns. Being done.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, yeah, you know I love small towns, but I more meant the whole—”

“I know.” She traced her fingers up my arm, around my back, and kept walking.

I opened my mouth to say more, to try to convince her that
every
part was the best part, that mine was the right kind of happiness. But I thought better of it. Happiness was happiness, and we’d both found it in this moment, and that, I thought, was enough.

A
t half past dawn in a well-treed park in a town called Hazen, I sat up and yawned and nudged Rachel awake. With sleep-swollen eyes and rumbling tummies, we dragged ourselves out of the tent and over to the Cenex station, where we holed up at one of the faux-fir booth tables by the window, and for the better part of an hour, we sat and sipped coffee and ate oatmeal and read the paper and pocketed butter packets and, whenever the clerk was distracted, which was often—the place was teeming with carpenters and ranchers and truck drivers, few of them paying for gas, most just nursing coffee and talking about the weather, the jobs they’d lined up for the week, the fish they’d caught that weekend—we tiptoed over to the airpots and topped off our cups.

After her third refill, Rachel slid back into the booth and crossed her arms on the table and said, “So, don’t get me wrong, I love cooking over a beer can and having ants in my sandwich and all . . . but how the hell have we never done this before?”

I spooned the last bit of oatmeal from my tin bowl. “I don’t know. But I say we plan to sleep within sight of a Cenex from here on out.”

“Why don’t we just sleep
at
Cenex? We won’t even have to set up the tent, what with the canopies, and we can huff gas right from our sleeping bags.”

I laughed, and shook my head, and said, “You’re ridiculous.”

Whenever I found myself unable to keep up with Rachel—with her wit, her intellect, her decisive clarity—I’d say those words. I didn’t, of course, find her the least bit ridiculous. But it was a way less vulnerable thing to say than “I am in awe of you.”

Now she stood and announced her plan to have a sponge bath in the gas station bathroom. I decided to follow suit. My skin hadn’t seen soap since Sykeston, but it had seen a whole lot of dirt and sun and grain dust. My torso in particular felt like it was covered in Velcro. I headed to the bathroom and locked the door and pulled off my shirt, and as I washed away the stink, I considered myself in the mirror. Weeks ago, in Duluth, I’d trimmed my beard back using a pair of kitchen shears, and now that it had grown out, I could see I’d done a particularly shitty job. The beard was bushy in a very literal sense: there were several little hair shrubs with their own shape and structure, and they only appeared to be one composite thing—one beard—when viewed from afar. The oldest shrubs, the ones I must have missed in Duluth, had taken on a rusty red that, I thought, contrasted nicely with the ruddy bronze of my cheeks. Add in the bloodshot eyes and Kramer hair and candy-cane-contrast farmer’s tan, and I looked like a hardened bike tourist. Or maybe a militia member. Either way, I was proud of myself.

I put on my shirt, slipped a roll of toilet paper inside it, and walked out to the lot, where Rachel was loading butter packets and jam tubs into our spice kit. I smiled, and she smiled back as I flashed the toilet paper, and then, in plain sight of a half-dozen men shooting gas into their tanks, we applied our sunscreen and our palmfuls of Chamois Butt’r. I was not embarrassed. Nor, it seemed, was Rachel, who was staring off at the western horizon, one hand on her hip, the other in her shorts. We were both just doing what we needed to do to be where we belonged. And if it bothered the bystanders, well, that couldn’t be helped.

I stuffed the Butt’r back into the bag. I put on my helmet and swung my leg over the bike and clipped into the pedals, and Rachel did the same, and I followed her out of the parking lot and onto the highway and into whatever came next.

 • • • 

H
azen was a border town, the gateway from farmland to ranchland. It was an instant shift, just like the forest-to-plains transition in Minnesota, and as we rode west, I marveled at our new surroundings: craggy buttes peeking through prairie grass, beef cattle behind barbed wire. Also, hills. I could see why people always called this place rugged. The earth before us seemed to have been riven and raised up like some kind of ranchland drawbridge. Rocks and livestock stood in for manhole covers and streetlamps, jutting toward us at gravity-defying angles.

Rachel and I looked at each other, took dramatic deep breaths, and hit the hill. The grade was initially modest, in the neighborhood of your average ADA-accessible ramp, but slowly it steepened, until pedaling felt less like spinning than like weight training. By my thirtieth rep, the speedometer told me I was moving at 3.2 mph, and for a minute there I thought I might have to—God forbid
—
get off the bike and walk. But I kept at it, one pedal stroke at a time, and as I chugged along, I found I actually kind of enjoyed this pace. It forced me to pick my head up and inhale the cow-dung hay-dust breeze and feel this rugged new world.

We were in the West, all right. Weathered rocks were everywhere: here, sprawled out under a frayed blanket of high grass; there, stacked four high, a giant’s cairn. And the grass, which through some trick of lighting or sentiment appeared gold and green and blue all at once, was speckled with what must have been a hundred tar-black steer. A hundred rigidly attentive steer. Every last one of them, I realized, was staring at us with dopey intensity.

“Do you see this?” I asked, pointing toward the cattle. Some were standing, some lying down. One was spraying piss with the pressure of a fire hose, and another had frozen midmeal, a mouthful of grass hanging from its face. All of them were possessed by our presence.

“Makes me feel self-conscious,” I said. “Do I have a cold sore or something?”

Rachel didn’t respond. She was breathing hard, and her cheeks were flushed, and she seemed to be deliberately avoiding eye contact. And, well, what the hell? She’d been downright effusive back at the Cenex, not twenty minutes earlier. What had I done?

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

She kept riding for a moment, then turned and said, “I’m just getting tired of this.”

I nodded, relieved. “Yeah. This is quite a hill, right? But I think we’re almost to the top.”

She gave me a well-you-just-missed-the-entire-fucking-point stare.

I looked down at the pavement, trying to find the I-do-too-get-the-point words. But I did not get the point, did not quite grasp what she was tired of, and so finally I just pulled back in front of her and shrugged at my bovine spectators and rode.

Soon the grade flattened out, and we began picking up speed, riding what I swore was a faint tailwind. At the Cenex, a pleasant fifty-something woman had told us to expect “a really tough day” of hills and headwinds, and the local paper had similarly predicted westerlies gusting up to thirty-some miles per hour, but now I set to rewriting the forecast. The winds would shift, and the hills would lay prostrate before us, and we’d have ourselves another glorious tailwind romp.

About that. For ten miles, or perhaps six—okay, maybe it was only four, but definitely
no less than four—the air stayed gentle, and I stayed silent, and Rachel stayed right on my tail. But then we came around a little bend in the road and—surprise!
—
here was that west wind. At first it was playful, tickling my ribs and whispering in my ear, but soon the whispers became curses, and the rib tickles gave way to cheek slaps and eyeball pokes, and finally the wind just planted its feet and gave me a yes-I’m-picking-a-fight-with-you shoulder shove.

I swore under my breath and hunched over the bars and pushed, my attention split between the grasses, which telegraphed nothing I couldn’t feel, and the rearview, where I could see Rachel’s head bobbing, her eyes like ticking time bombs. I decided to ignore both, just dropped my eyes to the speedometer and fought for double digits. It was a slog, but I held strong at nine or ten miles an hour, for nearly an hour, and just when I felt like we were getting used to the wind, like we’d established something approaching momentum, we came up over a little hump in the road and the wind just fucking ambushed us.

The air attacked so suddenly, and with such force, that I honestly wondered if it might be a prank, the most elaborate
Candid Camera
gag of all time. Maybe the horizon was actually a mile-long canvas, and said canvas would now roll up to reveal a wall of industrial-strength fans, an array of cameras, a gaggle of friends laughing and backslapping. But this was no gag. It was a humorless, soulless wind. It knocked my rearview out of position, burned my eyeballs, burrowed into my nostrils. And that howl. Never had a landscape sounded so angry.

I was now going four miles an hour. Barely. I was amazed at how difficult it was to keep myself moving—not moving quickly,
merely moving
—
but I was not about to be defeated by a bunch of bullshit molecules, and so I sunk as low as I could and squeezed the bars and just plain Godzilla-stomped the pedals, and, well, now we were getting somewhere. I even hit seven miles per hour for a couple of seconds. I pushed harder and harder, until I could almost feel the veins worming out from my forehead, could almost taste the sweat soaking my shirt, and soon I was feeling pretty triumphant, because here I was, in the unforgiving West, and the world was assaulting me with the worst it had, and (cue strings) I wasn’t backing down.

At a certain point I remembered I had a girlfriend. Who was riding her bike cross-country. With me. Since my mirror was now aimed at a power line, I couldn’t see her, and I had to actually spin around and look over my shoulder, and, of course, just as I did, the jerk-off wind surged and sent me swerving into the lane. I righted myself, and looked again, and saw that I’d left Rachel a good fifty yards back, so I slowed up and tried hard to hold a draftable speed. But the wind kept launching sucker punches every time I glanced back, and it was hard enough just to keep moving, so I looked less and less, outpaced her more and more.

Nine miles of this nonsense. Nine miles that took almost two hours. By the time we arrived in the not-quite-a-town of Halliday, my eyeballs were acid soaked, my entire body was aching, and I wanted nothing more than to drink a liter of corn syrup and pass out on a picnic table. I said so to Rachel. She nodded and said—her voice just above a whisper, her eyes all but empty—that she was just going to head to the park. A few minutes later, I found her there, slumped against an oak, speaking with quiet intensity into her phone. I started to lean my bike beside hers, but she put a hand over the receiver and looked up and said, “I’m on the phone.” She kept looking until I got the hint and wheeled my bike to the other side of the park.

An hour passed. Then two. I kept expecting Rachel to come over and talk, but every time I looked up, she was still in her corner, leaned against the tree, one hand holding the phone, the other ripping up patches of grass. I wanted to join her over there, but I didn’t know what I’d say. And so I kept myself busy—wrote in my journal, scribbled out a couple of postcards, even pulled out the ukulele. I’d barely played it thus far, but now I studied the chord chart, got comfortable with a few progressions, and set to figuring out a uke version of a song I’d written in Xela. As I played, I found myself thinking about the months we’d spent there. I thought about
el lago
, and the beachside path where this whole thing had begun, and it all seemed very far away.

 • • • 

T
he sun was kissing the horizon when Rachel at last came out of her corner.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“For what?”

“For being such a brat.”

“You’re not being a brat.”

“Yes. I am. And I wanted to tell you that it’s not about you.”

“Everything is about me.”

She gave my shoulder a shove. “I’m serious, okay?”

“Okay.”

She pushed her hair out of her eyes and looked down at the grass and said, “It’s just hard. I guess I knew I’d be tired and dirty. But I thought I’d like it. And sometimes, most of the time, I do. But there are days, like today, when I just feel totally bored and discouraged. And then I ask myself why I’m even out here. You know?”

I did not know. But I nodded.

“And it’s not even about my butt being sore or my fingers being numb or whatever. Really, it’s just that sometimes—and, again, today especially—I just get caught on the thought that I really don’t want to do this. That I could be doing
anything
else right now.”

What I said was, “I know what you mean.”

What I did not
say was that what she meant was the opposite of what I felt: that I loved this trip precisely because it closed off anything—everything—else, and I thought this thing we were doing was pure and true and glorious, and I felt like I could—

“Hey.”

I looked up. “Sorry. I was just thinking about what you said.”

“Well, I was saying I’m done talking now. I just wanted you to know that I do want to finish this trip, and I know this is all in my head, and I’m going to try to be more positive.”

“And I’m going to try to be more supportive,” I said. “But can you help me out a little? I’m having trouble finding that sweet spot between ignoring you and annoying you.”

She said she’d try to do that, and I grabbed her hands and said, “Help me help you,” and then she kicked me in the shins, and I came right back with a Lycra wedgie, and we agreed that it was maybe time to get back on the road.

 • • • 

T
hat night we rode twenty-five miles. The wind sank with the sun, a deep quiet settled with the night sky, and by the time we saw the distant twinkle of civilization, from the town of Killdeer, it was past ten and the temperature had dipped into the forties. Even I, the winter-loving northerner, was shivering as we rolled into the town park, which meant that Rachel, who wore multiple layers in seventy-degree apartments, was freezing. When we learned the park had heated bathrooms, with
showers
, Rachel was jumping-up-and-down ecstatic. I offered to set up the tent on my own, and my offer seemed to land right in that sweet spot we’d been talking about. She headed to the showers, and after some tent erecting and self-congratulating, I did the same. For some time, I lingered under steaming water, my skin tingling, my mind sweeping over all the miles that had made this cramped, funky shower stall feel downright posh.