Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America (15 page)

Building the stove felt great, and when it was finished, I suggested to Rachel that we give the Fujis some long-overdue attention. Lubing the chains, for starters. Mechanic Jeff had told us to do so every hundred miles, and until Fargo we had, mainly because my blown spokes had forced me to think about maintenance every freaking day. But since Fargo, we’d traveled over four hundred miles and hadn’t yet pulled out the lube. Not once. Day after day, I’d listened to the squeaks and gnashes, the telltale cries of a thirsty chain. Had worried, but had done nothing. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how. Lubing a chain was easy, even for a novice. I’d avoided the task because I was afraid that if I looked close I’d find something worse than a dry chain. Something I couldn’t fix. And Rachel, maybe with the same self-sabotaging rationale, had been just as negligent.

So now we were side by side, kneeling in the gravel, shaking our heads. Both chains were dirt choked and grimy. Same for the cogs and derailleurs. Also the rims and brake pads and cables and hubs and, well, every other part that was responsible for propelling us forward or keeping us from crashing. And the myriad bolts, the ones that held on the racks and fenders and water bottle cages, the ones we’d been advised to tighten regularly, were all loose. All of them.

Rachel sat back and rested her arms on her knees. “Whoops,” she said.

I shook my head. “I can’t believe these things are still running. We’re morons.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, we are.”

It took us quite a while to wipe off the gunk, snug the bolts, oil and polish and pump. Somehow nothing seemed broken or overly worn. We realized we were lucky, and we both made promises, to the Fujis and each other, that from here on out we’d be more attentive. We’d be better. We said these things while sitting in a private driveway, in front of a cozy home, our bellies full and our bodies rested. And we believed them.

After washing up, Rachel and I headed to the bedroom, telling Forest and Kelly that we needed naps, but just intending to lie down together. To cuddle. Out on the road, we didn’t get to do a whole lot of cuddling. We were always filthy or hot or caged in Lycra, and since neither of us was inclined to lie in the grass in a town park, limbs intertwined, fingers in each other’s hair, while a family of four played on a nearby swing set, the tent was our sole source of privacy. But the tent was stinky and cramped, and when we tried to lie together, one of us would inevitably slide between the two Therm-a-Rests and onto the cold, hard ground. Not exactly cuddle-time central. Sure, we had our fair share of sex in there, but sex didn’t require comfort. Cuddling did.

Now we sunk into the bed. Limbs intertwined. Fingers in each other’s hair. We murmured things like “this is nice” and “I wish we could stay here all day.” Rachel took my hand, rolled toward the wall, tucked my palm to her chest, and for an hour we lay like that, drifting in and out of sleep, my face in her hair, her warm skin on mine. Eventually she moved to get up. I grabbed her arm, and we did exactly what you hope to do when you pull someone back to bed. We could hear our hosts in the kitchen, talking about vegetables and where-are-the-measuring-cups, so we burrowed under the blankets, made hardly a sound, moved slowly, finished quickly. Maybe that doesn’t sound sexy. But understand, we’d been together, incessantly, for four weeks. We’d just finished a nine-day Dakotan odyssey, an experience by turns deafening and disorienting, tedious and endless. At the moment, sexy was not a Hollywood blockbuster. Sexy was a single whisper.

When we left that room to join Forest in the kitchen, we were smiling secret smiles. And as I stood beside Rachel, chopping onions and garlic for another sure-to-be-spectacular meal, I felt something that had been missing of late. Tenderness. Overwhelming tenderness. I shook my head, let out a little snort-laugh. Forest looked at me, so I blinked and grimaced and said something about spicy onions. Rachel looked too, and she smiled, as if she knew what I was thinking, as if she was thinking the same thing.

 • • • 

J
ust past Sidney, 200 broke due west, into another expanse of drab, dry grassland. A brutal crosswind tumbled over the northern horizon and assaulted us at an angle of exactly ninety degrees.
I had to lean hard into the current just to stay upright. It was an odd sensation, spinning my legs forward while pressing my shoulders sideways. Kind of like the rubbing-tummy-while-patting-head game, except that in this game, messing up wouldn’t lead to a fit of giggles—it would lead to getting pancaked by a big fucking truck.

Soon enough, I was enjoying myself in the same masochistic way I’d enjoyed our battle with that
Candid Camera
headwind. These miles were so perfectly difficult, so uncomplicated, so very much mine.

I looked back to the rearview. Rachel was clenching the bars, and I could practically see the numbness settling into her fingers. The wind was shoving her, sending her into mini-swerves and not-so-mini-swerves, and her eyes were squinted against the rushing air, focused on the pavement. For the hundredth time, I reminded myself that I wasn’t alone out here. These miles weren’t mine to own. They were ours.

For thirty miles I pushed into the wind, hard enough to keep us moving but not so hard that I’d accidentally open a gap between us, until at last we came upon some hay bales sitting just off the shoulder. Rachel suggested we pull over, and for some time we huddled behind the hay, our noses buried in books. She was in the final pages of
Still Life With Woodpecker
, and I’d made it halfway through DeLillo’s
White Noise
.
I wasn’t really getting it, the big message buried in the prose, nor was I getting the irony that my poor comprehension likely had more than a little to do with the ever-distracting, not-so-white noise of roaring winds and whining engines.

Soon I dropped my book and walked to the shoulder. The wind had been blowing from due north, but now I could swear it was shifting, was becoming more northeasterly. I turned to mention this to Rachel, then caught myself. Days earlier, she had forbidden me to talk about the wind. It was her opinion that while I did have great enthusiasm for the work I performed in my capacity as self-appointed crew meteorologist, I did not have access to current weather reports or knowledge of locally prevailing winds or anything beyond the most basic understanding of meteorology. She had, as delicately as possible, said it would be easier for her to endure the wind if I’d stop repeatedly, and baselessly, trying to raise her expectations.

I wanted to honor this simple rule. No wind talk. But I also wanted to make her, and myself, and us, feel happy, and I’d studied the map enough to know that four miles up the road, just before Richey, Highway 200 would bend forty-five degrees to the southwest. Once we made that turn, the crosswind would transform into something tailwindish, whereupon life would become just swell. And when you know something like that, even if you’ve been specifically asked not to share it, aren’t you kind of obligated to share it?

I shared it.

Rachel looked up from her book, sunk her eyes into me, said a single word. “Brian.” Through some magic of vocal tone and body language, she had turned my name into a weapon.

I left it alone and, unsure what else to say, suggested we get back on the bikes. We fought through four violent miles, reached that bend in the road and followed its southwestern arc, at which point, lo and fucking behold, the wind was with us. It wasn’t precisely a tailwind—was more of a right-haunch wind—but it was clearly doing more good than harm. Rachel, quite gracefully, acknowledged that I’d gotten it right for once. And I, quite shamelessly, celebrated my clairvoyance. We rode the haunch wind to Richey, stopped to buy and inhale some foodlike products, and then we eased into the day’s final miles.

 • • • 

S
outhwest of Richey, we descended into a valley, moving from yawn-inducing plains into a mess of blue-brown badlands, and these badlands, unlike the ones we’d encountered in North Dakota, didn’t seem to surrender their magic when viewed up close, or, rather, they did but it didn’t matter, because for every foregrounded dirt pile, there was another hump on the horizon, still distant enough to appear inviting, forgiving, uncomplicated. And then there was the asphalt itself—tucking between buttes, rolling over rises in the earth, whispering words of encouragement. “You can go here,” it told me. “Matter of fact, you have to.”

A few miles on, the asphalt disappeared, then reappeared, shooting skyward for what appeared to be a solid quarter mile. So much for gentle rollers. I could see that for miles and miles to come, we’d be rising, falling, rising, falling. A Wild West roller-coaster ride. I looked back at Rachel, trying to affect a grimace that said, “Jeez, this looks rough,” in the hopes that it might distract her from my eyes, which were clearly gushing, “Ohboyohboyohboyohboy.”

I hit the hill hard, driving the cranks, and then I tucked under the wind, cackling and wild-eyed. I was flying, didn’t need the speedometer to tell me I was going thirty, forty, fifty, ninety-nine miles an hour. The road flattened and arced upward, and I was ready, pedaling again, keeping my momentum. The haunch wind gave me some help, and I made it halfway up the grade without even shifting, and when I did need to gear down, I did so downright expertly, not breaking my cadence for a second, storming to the crest. Then I did it all over again. By the time I finished the second climb, I was breathless, choking on adrenaline, and so I stopped and looked over my shoulder. I couldn’t see Rachel. Anywhere.

I waited. After a few seconds, she appeared atop the initial hill, descended at a downright reasonable speed, coasted through the flats. She slowed to a near stop on the uphill, then began pushing herself up the slope. When she reached the top, I puffed up my cheeks and blew out a cartoonish breath. “It’s like a roller coaster out here, huh?”

She gave a tight-lipped nod, kept right on riding.

Which, I guess, was not so surprising. These hills weren’t much different from the crosswind—meaning this was harder for her, meaning I needed to be good. So for the next few miles, I took advantage of the low traffic and rode beside her. I kept bombing the downhills, but then I’d coast until she’d caught up, so we could climb together. Still a silence grew between us. My vocabulary had been reduced to rhapsody, Rachel’s to updates on how much more tired she was than the last time I’d asked how tired she was. We were struggling to speak the same language. And soon enough, as the sun dropped to blister the horizon, we just stopped trying.

D
ay twenty-nine. I hunched over a picnic table, chin on crossed arms, eyes on my journal. I’d filled half its pages by this point—hadn’t missed a day—but hadn’t reread any entries since we’d left Fargo, ten days before. This was just massively out of character. I’d always spent more time poring over journals than writing in them, operating on the belief that within, say, twelve hours, I’d have gained perspective on the previous day’s naïveté. But on the road every day had felt so full. I’d barely had the energy to produce new content, much less peruse the archives.

I glanced up at Rachel. She was standing where the tent had been, until I’d pulled it down, thirty-six minutes before. She was finally packing her sleeping bag. Most mornings, I’d have been pacing circles around her by now, muttering about beating the heat and how the early bird gets the tailwind. But at the moment, I was fine with the delay. I was reading a good book.

Thus far, I’d filled thirty-eight pages, in teeny handwriting. Each entry began with a boxed-out header that included, left to right: the date, a list of towns visited, and an accounting of miles traveled, average miles per hour, and total time in saddle. Now I skimmed the entries, comparing numbers, looking for trends. There was something comforting about this quantitative account of daily life, something comforting about stats. Because the moments weren’t adding up to anything obvious.

And there were so many moments. Every entry packed with headwinds and tornado threats and sex and blown spokes and selfless strangers and stunning scenery and sex. I’d done a good job recording these moments—and, inevitably, burying them in masturbatory adjectives and shitty landscape metaphors—but the play-by-play had left me too spent to write about much else. About, for example, my anxiety over the horizon. Or my frustrations with Rachel.

I flipped back to Fargo, skimmed forward. Wow. Over that ten-day stretch, I’d managed a grand total of
three
sentences about said frustrations. All of them vague as hell. Example: “I have been finding myself more irritated with Rach than I would like.” No analysis, no reflection. Just a banal platitude sandwiched between big accomplishments. My entries, I thought, were not unlike presidential press releases: self-congratulatory, baselessly optimistic, relentlessly on-message. Propaganda pieces aimed at maintaining the lie that Rachel and I were still living our big romantic story. And this didn’t have a thing to do with exhaustion. I’d simply been avoiding the subject, hoping it’d go away, so I could pick up the journal in two days or ten weeks or thirty years and understand it all as steady progress toward Dream Life with Rachel.

But not this morning. No. It was time for some honesty. I picked up the pen, lined out the day’s header, and got started. Warmed up with the previous day’s events—by the time we’d pulled into Circle, I truly had been too tired to write much more than stats—and then I dove in:

If this seems out of nowhere, I just haven’t had time or energy to write it. But I’ve been thinking about it for awhile. It’s hard, being with her 24/7, riding long days every day, trying (w/o success) to not be frustrated with her for riding slower and in general moving a bit slower, and in turn, feeling less attracted to her. I don’t want this at all, and feel selfish & inflexible for being annoyed about things that are simple, obvious products of the way our bodies are built. And I know I still love her, definitely, it’s just that I currently lack the patience to always see that feeling through the current haze of exhaustion/stress . . .

I stared back at the last sentence, wished I’d written it in pencil. Because, first off, “see that feeling”? Yep. That was there to stay. Also, I’d basically just written that I was questioning whether I still loved Rachel. And because of what? Wind? Differential in average speed? I shook this off as a poor choice of words and launched Operation Backpedal. I qualified the living shit out of my words and cheesed it all up with this triumphant closing:

At any rate, I’m still overwhelmingly happy with what we’re doing, and for the ever-approaching day we hit the Rockies!

Right.

I distinctly remember sitting at that table, scribbling every word. I remember looking up to make sure Rachel was still packing or flossing or quad stretching—wasn’t peering over my shoulder, into my thoughts. And I remember shutting the journal, staring at its cover, asking myself if, in finally admitting these feelings, I’d just stepped closer to some kind of reckoning. If this
was
the reckoning. I didn’t know.

 • • • 

I
licked my finger and held it aloft. I wasn’t really sure if or how a moistened fingertip improved one’s ability to assess weather, but I knew this was what people did right before they turned to their girlfriend and said, “I think we’re gonna have a tailwind.”

Rachel smiled but didn’t reply, just grabbed her bike, started walking across the park, toward the road.

We were aiming for Jordan, sixty miles west. The night before, we’d loaded up on food and water, because between Circle and Jordan there would be no towns, no shelter, no water. Just white space. According to our Montana map, this would be the case for the foreseeable future. Over on the map’s left-hand side, clinging to the Idaho border, was an artful mess of sea green and powder blue, mustard and periwinkle—the Montana I’d always imagined, a land of forests and lakes and parks and mountain towns. But that Montana was no wider than my palm, and the rest of the state, which stretched from elbow pit to dirty fingernail, was white space. Sure, there were a few splashes of color—a wildlife refuge (purple) here, a mountain range (silver) there—but 200 skirted them all. And so for several hundred miles, it would be sagebrush and barbwire. Flatbed pickups and gusting wind.

We set off, and pretty much instantly I was forced to admit (silently) that we didn’t have a tailwind. Not even close. This was pure, uncut crosswind. Angry air whipped across the flats, sending sheets of dust over convulsing grass. Its grabby hands were all over me, shoving and poking, blowing my shirt up to my armpits, packing my nostrils with handfuls of high desert.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something darting around fence posts and shrubs. A tumbleweed. Till then, I’d only seen tumbleweeds in crappy westerns. I’d assumed they always moved in lazy hops. But this tumbleweed was flying. It skipped across the pavement, hurdled an embankment, and shot toward the northern horizon, as if fleeing some kind of awful monster. I watched it grow smaller and smaller, so mesmerized that I stopped looking at the road and didn’t notice the oncoming semi until it was nearly upon us.

The semi’s wind shear joined forces with the already-hellish crosswind, creating this sort of mutant super wind, and said mutant super wind hit me head-on, hit me so confusingly hard that I had the urge to hit back. And maybe I would have, if the blast hadn’t sent me swerving to the shoulder. I jammed the brakes, fishtailed to a stop, and before I could even turn around, Rachel was beside me, shaking her head, saying, “I don’t think we should be out here right now.”

In retrospect, I can say she was 100 percent right. But in the moment, I couldn’t conceive of being anywhere but “out here.” Going anywhere but forward. So I shrugged and suggested, “I don’t know. I bet it’ll be easier up around that bend.”

Rachel blinked.

“Really,” I said, nodding toward that bend. Up ahead of us, the road did arc northward. Windward. Just as it had back by Richey. “I bet it’ll be just like yesterday. How about you hang out here, and I’ll go and check? If it’s still awful, we’ll head back to Circle. Cool?”

Rachel didn’t answer. Or maybe she did and I didn’t hear, because I’d already pushed off and headed into the wind. It took me ten breath-stealing minutes to reach that bend, and when the road began to curve, I leaned, craned my head, twisted my torso, eager for the sweet hush, the gentle fingers on my back. But when I finished the turn, the howl was louder than ever, the air a swirling mess. It was coming from everywhere, converging on my forehead. The wind’s version of a personal rain cloud. I pulled to a stop and felt the first hazy symptoms of an adrenaline hangover. There was no point in fighting this. We’d have to head back to Circle.

I looked to the east. Rachel was awfully far away, but I could see she was now off her bike, standing near two other ant-size figures. Behind them, a boxy little Micro Machine, some kind of SUV. Shit. What was wrong with me? What if they were bad people? Even worse, what if they were good people? People who had greeted Rachel, heard her reasonable words about wanting to stop, then looked to the horizon, where her dumbfuck boyfriend was pushing onward and . . . well . . . what, exactly, was he doing? I saddled up and pushed off and rode as hard as I could, hoping all the while they were neither bad people nor good people. Just dumb, unobservant people.

They were good people. In fact, they were good Wisconsin people. A woodworker and a teacher headed out for a week of hiking and biking in the Beartooths. And these disarmingly sweet, obviously experienced outdoorspeople were clearly baffled by our being out on such a violent day. “We’ll give you a ride to Jordan,” said Rick, the woodworker, who had a movie-star jawline and kind eyes and bulging calves and this general aura of competence. A hard guy to disagree with. Toni, a brunette who appeared as ripped as her husband, was already popping the trunk, rearranging gear, making space for the bikes.

I stared down at my bike, considering. It didn’t feel right, catching this ride. We didn’t really need
the help, not like we had when I’d blown all those spokes. This was just cheating. I mean, there was no way in hell Galen would take this ride, right? No, he’d wait it out in Circle and ride by night, or he’d just push into the wind, or . . .

I blinked, took in a lungful of sage-scented air. I was being an ass. I was not Galen. And I was not alone. I was with Rachel, and Rachel was saying, at least with her eyes, “I need this.”

I helped strip the bikes and fit them into the trunk, and once the bikes were loaded, we slid into the backseat, got situated just in time to see a hellish gust of wind slam the driver’s side door on a kneecap belonging to Rick, who had been reattaching a bungee on the roof rack. Like a proper
slam
. Metal on bone. Horrendous. He cursed and clutched, hobbled from the car, and Rachel and I, after a few “are you okays,” sunk into that special silence that arises when a stranger hurts themselves not quite badly enough to require your help.

Rick slid into the passenger seat, wincing and rubbing his knee, and Toni took the wheel. She wasn’t kidding around. By the time we reached the spot I’d ridden to, we were going seventy and still accelerating. Seventy felt absurd. Impossibly fast. Out the window, my life was flashing before my eyes. Ice-cream-scoop hills and weather-beaten barns, appearing and disappearing.

Forty-five minutes. Fifty-five miles. We had time-traveled to Jordan. The pair dropped us in the town park, helped us unload, handed me a business card with their contact info. “Just send a postcard,” Rick said, for the tenth time. “That’s all we ask in return. To hear how it ends.”

We watched them drive away, and I turned and started walking toward a corner of the park, and when Rachel made to follow me, I said, “I think I’m gonna hang out alone for a bit, if that’s okay.” She held my gaze for a moment, then wheeled her bike away. I headed the other direction, pulled on my fleece, and climbed onto a picnic table. I hadn’t realized how tired I was, but now I felt the windburn on my eyeballs, the melt in my muscles. I slept for some time, and when I woke, I walked to Rachel’s table. She pulled out some granola bars, and I pulled out the map, and we ate our food and talked about the coming miles, and then we went and rode them.

 • • • 

E
ight o’clock. The golden hour. Low light washed over the world, softening edges, turning glare into glow. Even the barbwire was looking sexy.

The wind had died down around six, and we’d pushed on, had ridden twenty-five hilly miles before stopping for a snack, at which point Rachel had surprised the hell out of me by saying, “I’d be up for riding awhile past dark.” I’d been very much on board with that idea, especially because my mom, when I’d called her from Jordan, had reminded me that this mid-August night was to be the peak of the annual meteor shower, the one I’d watched from dock chairs and beach blankets in my youth. Perfect. We’d ride deep into the night, would take in the stars from our saddles and eventually slink into a secret campsite, just as we had on those charmed nights in eastern North Dakota. A brilliant end to a disappointing day.

But now there was this. A yellowing, rust-scarred beater, kind of skidding onto the shoulder before us. The driver door was opening, and a guy was getting out and muttering and holding up his hand like to signal “stop,” and we were stopping. Now the guy walked up, stepped uncomfortably close. He looked at me, then Rachel, then back at me. There was something going on with his eyes. Blood bolts and dime-size pupils. They were sort of doing that googly Muppet thing, but in a decidedly bad way. Cookie Monster on methamphetamine.

“You two,” he said, “best get off the road.”

So much for hello, I thought. I didn’t know how to respond, so I just cocked my head and asked, “Yeah?”

“Yeah. You know there’s a rodeo tonight? Done anytime now. There’s about to be a bunch of drunks on the road.”

“Huh.” Pretty reasonable advice, I had to admit. Back home I’d have never dreamed of riding busy roads in the wake of, say, a Monday-night Packers game. Still, this guy didn’t seem like a super reliable messenger.

“Where you headed?” he asked. He was speaking only to me, had barely acknowledged Rachel. Now I looked at her. Total poker face, but there was alarm in her eyes.

I turned back to the guy. “West,” I said.

He snorted. “Nothing west of here, not for miles.”

“There’s Sand Springs,” I replied, instantly regretting it. Rachel and I had talked about maybe bandit-camping in Sand Springs, which was some fifteen miles away and which we’d heard was basically a smattering of shuttered buildings. And now I’d just told this asshole.