Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America (16 page)

“Pretty much a ghost town,” he said. “Can’t sleep there.”

“Well, maybe farther, then,” I replied.

“Not tonight.” He was swaying a bit, listing toward port. “It ain’t safe out here.”

“I don’t know. We’ve ridden at night a bunch and it’s been fine. I mean, we’ve got lights.” I pressed the button on the red orb that hung from my saddle. It pulsed weakly.

He grunted. “That little blinky thing? I’ll tell you what that is. A fuckin’ target. It’ll just make it easier for the drunks to aim for you.”

I had no idea how to respond to that. I glanced at Rachel. Usually, with strangers, she was doing just as much of the talking, often more. But now she was just staring at me.

“I know a place you could sleep,” the guy continued. He gave a sharp nod to the west. “Safe spot. Just a few miles up the road. Hop in the car, I’ll take you up there. Your girlfriend can wait here. If it looks all right, we’ll come back, pick her up.”

“We’re fine,” Rachel said. We both turned toward her. She held the poker face, but her eyes were screaming.

“Yeah,” I seconded, still looking at her. “We’ll be all right. Thanks, though.”

The guy bored into me with those bloodshot, black-hole, devil-Muppet eyes. And then he did this kind of jittery shrug, like he’d just caught a chill. Without another word, he turned heel and headed to his car. Slammed the door and leaned out the window. “It’s a couple of miles up, on the left,” he said. “You should stop there. You
don’t
wanna be out here once the sun drops.” And then he hit the gas, spun a U-turn, and sped away. Back toward wherever he’d come from.

Rachel spoke first. “What . . . the . . . fuck?”

“I know.” I strained to sound more amused than terrified. “
That
guy was warning us about drunks on the road?”

She didn’t seem to hear me. She’d turned her back, was staring off to the east, watching his car climb a distant hill. “Why did he turn around? Did you notice that? He came up behind us, and now he’s . . .” She trailed off, nodded at the receding taillights.

Somehow, this hadn’t struck me as odd. But she was right. It was very fucking odd.

We needed to get to wherever we were sleeping. Soon. Because maybe the road would indeed be teeming with rodeo drunks. And either way, that guy was out there, and he could at any point turn around and find us and . . . We stopped hypothesizing and just rode. Chattering nervously, checking rearview mirrors. After a couple of miles we came upon a cluster of buildings sitting just south of the road. Collapsing roofs. Busted windows. Grayed, rotten siding. It looked like a set for a horror film. I kept riding, unable to face Rachel, to say what we were both thinking. Not a meth addict. A fucking serial killer.

Now she pulled up beside me. “Holy shit. He was going to bring you here.”

I wanted to say something reassuring. There was nothing reassuring to say. So I just nodded, hunched over the bars, and pushed harder, until my legs were burning, my breath deepening. Rachel stayed right with me. Every time I looked to the rearview, she was there, so close she appeared to be riding my back. I scanned ditches and ravines, hoping to find a spot to throw up the tent, but this was bleak, exposed country. Boulders and shrubs, none big enough to hide behind. And anyway it was barbwire everywhere, hugging the highway, fencing us in.

The light was no longer soft or sexy. Just disappearing, stretching fence-post shadows, sucking warmth from the air. And as the sun receded, traffic began to pick up, the distant headlights like death threats. I could feel it. He was coming for us. Adrenaline surged, and I found myself sliding into the lane, mumbling to Rachel that maybe she should set pace. She nodded, and I tucked behind her, drunk on testosterone. I’d protect us, somehow, back here. At the very least I’d get mowed down
first
, which seemed vaguely heroic.

Darkness sunk in. The headlights kept coming, rising sharp and torturous in the rearview, inching closer and closer, their piss-yellow glare spilling onto the pavement, climbing Rachel’s back, reflecting from her helmet. A roaring engine, a rush of air,
a terrible moment of knowing
this was it. Of course the truck would just whoosh on by, and I’d feel a sweet melt of relief, but then I’d see, in the distance, another pair of probing headlights.

Ten miles of this. Ten hilly, black miles. Muscles tensing and releasing, jaw clenched so tight my teeth would be tender for days. I had no idea if Rachel was thinking the same thing. I just knew she was riding hard, and that I was staying as close as I could.

Now we crested a long hill, and Rachel pointed ahead, toward a distant cluster of lamplit buildings—Sand Springs. My relief lasted a half second. Because as we hit the top of the hill, a fierce, gusting wind blasted into us. I looked up. Stars twinkled above, but off to the west the sky was smudged. Clouds, maybe a storm front. So much for the meteor shower.

We pulled into the lot of Sand Springs’ dingy little post office. The wind was now making this truly awful noise. Like the note you get from blowing across the lip of a glass bottle, but amplified through a bullhorn. I walked around the lot, which was lit by a single lamp. There was a small apartment adjacent to the post office, but nobody seemed to be home, and the only other building in “town” was this big house just to the east. All the lights were off, but its driveway was packed with cars. The one nearest us, a dented black Suburban, sported a bumper sticker with the words “Border Control, Not Gun Control.”

We walked behind the post office. Beyond a small, unkempt lawn was what appeared to be pasture land. If we set up the tent right behind the building, it looked like we’d be hidden from the highway. This would have to work.

“We should check with the neighbors,” Rachel said. “See if they mind.”

I did not want to check with the neighbors. I wanted to dig a hole and crawl inside and tell no one. “Yeah,” I replied, “we probably should.”

We walked up to the house, stopped and stood before it. I was hoping Rachel might take the lead. She was good at this stuff. Rachel did not take the lead. So I climbed the concrete steps, up toward a door that led to a sort of screened-in mudroom. The wind was whipping the door open, slamming it shut. I looked over my shoulder at Rachel, who had stopped on the bottom step. She looked like she was going to puke, which was about how I felt. I turned back, pulled the handle, and the door creaked on its hinges. I forced out a little laugh.

I walked through the porch, to the main door. Took a breath, raised my hand, knocked. A stained, lacy drapelike thing covered most of the door’s small, rectangular window, and where I could see inside, it was pitch-black. I knocked again, swore I heard something moving in there. I imagined sunken eyes under soaking-wet, jet-black hair. Or, worse yet, googly eyes under a receding hairline. Maybe he’d driven right past us, had been waiting for—

“Fuck this.” I power walked through the porch, down the steps. “Nobody’s home.”

Rachel nodded, and we both pretended to believe my words.

We pulled the bikes behind the post office, set the tent up in record time. To make sure it was hidden, we walked 200, scoped it out from every angle, scampered out of sight whenever we saw headlights. Finally we crawled inside. We left the fly off, despite the clouds, because I wanted to be able to see through the mesh walls, and into one of the tent’s pockets I stuffed my Cub Scout pocketknife. I wasn’t sure what I’d do with this knife if our tormenter did show up—butter his bread? file his toenails?—but it made me feel safer, and I wasn’t going to question that.

That night, the gaps between the Therm-a-Rests didn’t matter. We cuddled. I lapped my bag over Rachel’s and tucked up behind her. Neither of us said a word about the guy from the highway, or the maybe-vacant, maybe-not house I could still see, through the mesh, bathed in flickering light. We didn’t have to. I could feel Rachel’s fear, just as I’m sure she could feel mine. Both our bodies shuddered at every wind-slammed door, every snapped twig, every approaching car, and when we did speak, it was to murmur about how and when we’d leave this place, about waking before dawn and riding hard, for a hundred miles, clear to Lewistown. About tomorrow.

I
bolted from the pillow like a little boy on Christmas morning, two perfect words in my head: it’s tomorrow! But this wasn’t Christmas morning. I wasn’t tucked next to my sister in a room softened by string lights, wasn’t thinking of Mommy and Daddy and ribbons and wrapping paper, wasn’t thinking of the things I wanted. No, I was in a tent behind the Amityville house, lying beside a woman I recognized less every day, thinking only of the things I wanted to escape. The googly-eyed motorists and gun-toting neighbors. The barbwire fences and relentless winds. The ugliness that was seemingly everywhere, around and inside me.

And so now I was rubbing Rachel’s shoulder, and she was blinking her eyes open and murmuring, “Well, I guess we’re not dead,” and I was nodding, was skipping “good morning” and “how did you sleep?” and simply talking about Lewistown.

Lewistown, Montana. The promised land. Back in Sidney, Forest and Kelly had said it would be a sort of milestone for us. It was a proper city, a five-thousand-person city, about four times bigger than anything we’d seen since Fargo, and we were both ready for a dose of urbanity, particularly Rachel, who had been talking for days, with real passion, about a sixteen-ounce latte, a cozy armchair, and a book. To me,
what
was far less important than
where
. Lewistown seemed like the gateway to western splendor. Yeah, we’d still face a bit more high desert after leaving town, but basically this was the line between the Plains and the Rockies, between the in-between and the uncomplicated place where everything would be fine.

We decided we’d try to make Lewiston by nightfall. This would be no small feat. The city sat 102 miles west of Sand Springs, and we had never ridden that far in a single day.

“So,” Rachel said, “if we make it there tonight, we should probably get a hotel room.”

“You think so?”

“I do.”

I stopped packing and looked up at her, considering whether this violated my moral code.

“Also,” Rachel said, “haven’t we been on the road for exactly a month?”

I continued staring, did some math. Shit. We had.

“Kind of calls for an anniversary party, don’t you think?”

Rachel smiled. She’d just laid a trump card. We both knew my integrity didn’t stand a chance against my raging sentimentality.

By seven we were on the road, riding through sagebrush flats, the sun warming our backs. For a few miles, we talked about our big plans for the big city, but soon enough we fell silent. This was becoming the norm. Rachel wasn’t yelling CB or BFTB, I wasn’t updating her on the latest news from the speedometer, and neither of us was mentioning Portland, which now felt so far away I doubted whether it even existed. I mean, I still wanted to talk, but there wasn’t a whole lot to say. We were rarely encountering anything new, around us or between us, and, of late, the few breaks in the monotony had only pushed us apart or made us feel weak and small.

This was what novelty now looked like. Arguing over a hitched ride or huddling together in terror. I shuddered just thinking of that guy. That house. The raw fear had subsided, but there was a lingering queasiness in my gut. A fear hangover.

We’d ridden almost twenty miles when some fuzzy little warts appeared on the horizon. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have said they were trees. We kept riding. They were trees. Real trees. For weeks, we’d seen little more than windbreak rows of oak, but now there was this sea of luscious evergreen cascading into a river basin. I hadn’t quite realized how much I’d been missing trees, but seeing them now, I felt this warm buzz, as if I’d just opened an old journal.

At the lip of the basin was a big modern building behind a sprawling parking lot. This was what remained of Mosby, an oil boomtown turned highway rest stop, one of the two spots of civilization between Sand Springs and Lewistown. We pulled in, paired vending-machine soda with beer-can-heated oatmeal and called it breakfast. And then we each holed up in a bathroom. I scrubbed away the two-day-old grease stamp on my right calf, washed the salt and dirt from my tacky skin. Aside from the beard, which was now a bit Unabombery, I thought I looked respectable. Clean. But I still felt filthy.

Rachel emerged a few minutes after me. Her hair, free of its omnipresent ponytail, was wavy and wild, bright against her ruddy cheeks. Watching her walk toward the table, I felt this twinge. Not an ache or a longing. Nothing tender like that. Just a twinge. I’d felt it before, enough to know that its domain was not the candlelit dinner but the job interview. The funeral. It was something to be ignored in the moment, examined in retrospect, acted on never.

I acted on it. Stood and tugged Rachel toward me. Kissed her. Grabbed her hips and pulled. She hesitated for a moment, then pressed back into me. I was already tugging at her shorts, and she was helping with one hand, reaching for me with the other. We were in plain view of the highway, but before I knew it I was bare assed on a lacquered bench, my back pressed against a glass-encased map of Montana. My hands were ripping at her shirt, searching for skin, my head banging against glass, and I squeezed my eyes shut and held my breath and disappeared.

I slumped against the glass and opened my eyes. Rachel was looking at me with this kind of bewildered smile. “Where the hell,” she asked, “did that come from?”

I’d already sunk far enough into crystal-clear humiliation—more commonly known as the refractory period—to have a pretty good idea of where “that” had come from, to know that it had something to do with trees and high desert, nostalgia and shame. I decided not to share this. Instead I just ran my fingers up her back and said, “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

We sat like that for a little while, until a truck barreled past. We both hid our faces, like little kids playing our first game of hide-and-seek.
If I can’t see you, you can’t see me.
Then we got up, cleaned up, and returned to the road.

 • • • 

W
est of the Musselshell—a parched river, a barely moving river, but a river nonetheless—Highway 200 refused to stay flat for more than a few feet. This was the sort of topography you might miss in a car, but on the bikes we felt every bit of it. By the time we pulled up to Winnett, forty-four miles into our ride, my legs were pumping magma, my eyelids heavy. I was feeling like a few hours of restless sleep and a midmorning orgasm might not have been the best prep for this century ride. And Rachel wasn’t exactly killing it either. A few miles back, when I checked the rearview, she appeared to be falling asleep in the saddle.

But now we’d made it to Winnett, which, for the moment, was all that mattered. This was one of the best things, I thought, about bike touring. No matter how long and awful the day, we could break it up into manageable chunks. Sand Springs to Mosby.
Breathe
. Mosby to Winnett.
Breathe
. Winnett to . . . Well, we’d see about that in an hour or two.

Winnett was the sole town on this hundred-mile stretch and, we’d later learn, in the entire county. Petroleum County. Had we passed through a century earlier, we’d have also encountered Cat Creek, Roy, Teigen, and Flatwillow, but they’d disappeared long ago, in the way that towns tended to disappear in places with names like Petroleum County. Winnett itself was barely hanging on. Back in the twenties, the town had boasted a population of three thousand plus, but now it was down to a few hundred residents. As we pulled up, we were greeted by a wooden sign erected by the Lions Club. “
GO
AHEAD
AND
BLINK
,” it said, in black caps. “
WE
’
RE
STILL HERE.
”

Winnett appeared to have a one-to-one person-to-building ratio. Years back, I imagined, we’d have found rowdy saloons, bustling wool shops. Now it was just shuttered windows. The only fresh paint I could see was this crude anti-meth mural on the side of an empty building. We were both exhausted and hungry, so we visited the general store, bought sandwich fixings and candy and chips, and more candy. We feasted in the park, wrote postcards, explored a bit, and discovered that Winnett had a community pool. It was closed, but a woman who was sweeping and mopping told us to help ourselves to the showers. We did. And, on her suggestion, we headed over to a church turned thrift shop, which had a book exchange on a corner shelf. I swapped
White Noise
for Tom Wolfe’s
A Man in Full
, and Rachel left the Robbins novel and picked up Allende’s
House of the Spirits
. Then we were back on the road, well fed and smelling of lavender Dr. Bronner’s and saying, “Well, that was a nice little town, wasn’t it?”

 • • • 

T
he rest of the day bleeds together. A fifty-eight-mile montage of exhausting tedium. The soundtrack: first verse of “Home on the Range,” running on loop. The scene: two slouching figures backdropped by absolutely nothing. The action: me getting on the bike after a two-minute snack break, wincing stoically; Rachel failing to hide behind a bush while peeing; several spirited conversations about what kind of ice cream might be purchased in Lewistown; and a montage within a montage of Rachel and me standing, then sitting, then standing, then sitting, unable to find a position that relieved both throbbing crotches and screaming quads.

Somewhere around mile ninety-two, a wall of evergreen-peppered earth rose up before us. The Judith Mountains. This was a proper range, one deserving of a silver splotch on our Montana map, and we’d have to climb it to reach Lewistown, which sat a thousand feet above Winnett. At the end of a hundred-mile day, this should have been excruciating. But I barely remember it. All I recall is being surrounded by pine and pasture and long-forgotten shades of green. Before I knew it, we were descending, fast, thirty-five-miles-an-hour fast, for one, two, six miles. The road was leveling out, and a big, beautiful “100” was appearing on the odometer, and Rachel was saying, “I can’t believe we actually rode this far,” and we were coasting into Lewistown.

We rode down Main Street, slack-jawed. Neon-lit saloons and Mexican restaurants and functioning stoplights and adorable diners and ornate brickwork and a used bookstore and people, so many people, everywhere: in their cars, behind the glass of every store, strolling the sidewalks. It was like watching that movie in Watford City, but now we were in it, were amid the flashing lights and bright colors, and our weeks of work had made this city more sacred than I’d believed a city could be. While Rachel began pointing out the places she’d visit the next day—we’d not yet discussed staying a second night, but clearly, yes, we would—I schemed about what we’d do now. It was only six, so I figured if we got a room right away, we could still go to a steak house and make out under streetlamps and get canned at a tavern and buy four-scoop ice cream cones and stay up all night having it’s-our-anniversary-and-we’re-superheroes sex.

Here’s what actually happened. It took us an hour to find a hotel, and during the search we had to climb some nasty hills, which pretty much gobbled up all our available blood sugar, so that when we did decide on the Calvert Hotel—a handsome, brick-walled mansion run by Jehovah’s Witnesses who could have charged much more than thirty dollars if the place weren’t in such a state of disrepair—we were both too exhausted to do more than head to a grocery store for premade sandwiches and boxed wine and a tub of (mint chocolate chip) ice cream, which we ate in bed just before falling asleep to a few lazy kisses and face-in-pillow mumbles about let’s-do-this-tomorrow.

 • • • 

I
was hugging a tree: rubbing my nose into ridges in the bark, horseshoeing my arms around the trunk. And why not? Nobody was around. I was on a dead-end road, searching for a ghost town deep in the pine-drenched Judith Mountains, drunk on a cocktail of vitamin D and adrenaline and nostalgia and a mischievous awareness that nobody in the entire world had any idea where I was or what I was doing. So I was hugging a tree, because I fucking wanted to.

Rachel and I had woken that morning with different ideas about the day. She wanted to check out a museum, make calls, laze around at a coffee shop, and I wanted to do the same things, wanted to do everything that could be done by anyone anywhere, but from the moment I’d looked out the window and seen the mountains towering over town, I’d known I needed to dive in and submerge myself in pine. So I’d suggested we split up for the day, had said it like it was no big deal, though it had been a month since we’d spent over an hour apart.

The ride up was perfect. No panniers, no rearview mirror. Just me and the Fuji, the blacktop and blue sky and foothills so eye pleasing they appeared computer generated. The grade was steep, but I charged up it, feeling sleek and powerful, even after the previous day’s hundred-mile ride. Ten miles north of town, I turned onto a dirt road, bound for the ruins of Maiden, an abandoned mining town I’d read about in a brochure. Halfway there, I decided I didn’t care about seeing Maiden. I just wanted to be in the woods. I stopped, dropped the bike, and made my way toward a stand of pine.

So here I was, wrapped around a tree, laughing aloud. I hadn’t, I realized, felt such pure joy for quite some time, maybe not since that tailwind ride to Turtle Lake, when I’d let myself forget life outside the mile, when I’d been free to enjoy the moments as I wanted, without the perverse conviction that Rachel and I had to enjoy the same things, the same way, always. And so now I found myself thinking of Galen. His trip, I imagined, was just one big orgy of freedom. Every day he and he alone got to decide how far to ride, where to take breaks, when to hug a tree. He got to wake up every morning and think, “This is mine.” I mean, I had no idea if he really did or thought any of this. I’d only talked to him within earshot of Rachel, so I couldn’t exactly ask, “Hey, could you tell me how awesome it is to not have to compromise with your girlfriend?” And even if I’d had the chance, I’d never have asked. I didn’t really want to know.