Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America (18 page)

 • • • 

W
e sat with our hosts, Leanne and John, eating homemade granola and picked-from-the-property berries over a lacquered slab of hardwood, listening in rapt adoration as Leanne talked about yarn spinning and sheep farming while John quietly took his breakfast. I was picturing these two double-dating with Kelly and Forest, smiling at the thought, and wishing we had more time. We’d spoken little with them the previous evening, having arrived so late, but now, after just a half hour in their company, I wanted to stay a full day and learn how to spin wool and see all the cool shit they’d built on their property. Rachel, too, was enthralled by the pair. She was an on-and-off knitter—had never really diversified her work but could make a mean fucking scarf—and seemed to have a legitimate crush on Leanne.

But we couldn’t stay. We’d seen the Rockies. Glacier beckoned.

Before we left, Leanne brought out a huge, multicolored mound of yarn, and Rachel bought a few skeins to stuff into her pannier. She wanted to knit a (wait for it) scarf by the end of the trip. While they talked knitting, I took a peek into Leanne’s office, and hanging above her adorably huge computer was a sheet of paper with these words:

Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body. But rather, to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, “Wow! What a ride.”

At the time, I didn’t have any idea where that quote had come from. I only knew that this woman—who I’d respected from the moment she shook my hand, who had tethered herself to property and committed to a singular pursuit, and who in all ways appeared to be a capital-A Adult—had this quote on the wall, in her office, in the place she’d be most likely to see it. This quote that pretty much encapsulated my whole philosophy. And, silly or not, it felt like an affirmation of what I was and wasn’t doing. An affirmation that wherever I was headed was less important than how I was getting there.

 • • • 

T
urned out my “this is the end of something” prognosis was off by one day. One smoke-drenched, agonizing, spirit-crushing motherfucker of a day.

It started well enough. The moment we left the driveway, we plunged into a valley, then dragged ourselves up and over the first of a great many foot-mountains. The terrain was now like a two-to-one enlargement of that roller-coaster hillscape we’d found in eastern Montana. The domes here were comically huge. Some seemed on the verge of popping. But we’d both had a good- night’s sleep and a hearty breakfast, so we attacked the hills like Wheaties-box superstars. For about twenty miles. Then it was twenty more to Browning, the next town, and the hills kept coming, and the hearty breakfast worked its way through my bloodstream and bladder, and this funny thing happened. I started to feel like shit, and I just said so, verbatim, to Rachel.

“I feel like shit.”

“Me too.”

“Let’s stop.”

“Okay.”

We stopped in a valley, had a snack, and while Rachel started casting on some yarn, I sprawled out and napped. Twenty minutes later, we were riding. And there was zero tension. It was that easy. Misery, when shared, became something less than misery. Of course. I knew the tired little aphorism. And it had only taken me 1,642 miles to remember it.

 • • • 

W
est of Browning, it was a ninja wind. I took two jabs to the right kidney, an uppercut square on the chin, a series of roundhouses and leg sweeps, striking from all directions. I tried to stay vigilant and figure out where the attacks were coming from, but the air was hazy from so many smoke bombs, and I could see nothing but short grasses dancing every which way, feigning northwest but darting east, betraying nothing but the capriciousness of their tormenter.

By the time we stopped for a break, at a closed-down building that was the spitting image of the snack depot at a summer camp I’d once attended, the ninja wind had pulled off its mask and revealed itself as a freight train barreling down from the northern horizon. A mile back, Route 89 had turned ninety degrees, so we were now heading due north, which was unfortunate. And from our perch at the snack shack, I could see the pavement snaking up a ragged heap of earth, then disappearing into the thicker-than-ever smoke. Somehow I’d believed the mountains wouldn’t start until Glacier. I’d been so very wrong.

You know how, in old-school side-scrollers, the ultimate megabosses always ended up being a constellation of every evil you’d faced over the course of the game? The final 18.9 miles were a lot like that. A boss fight. Rachel and I now faced a wind so violent that even the
Candid Camera
producers would have been like, nope, totally unrealistic, they’ll never buy that. The grade was as steep as any we’d seen, the smoke a woolly mitten reaching down to smother us, the surrounding forest scorched to blackness, and in that blackness I pictured grizzlies and mountain lions and other somethings preparing to pick us off like à la carte items.

Rachel and I couldn’t talk, couldn’t even really scream, over the wind. But I could see—via the rearview and, in moments of exceptional bravery, via direct eye contact—that her eyes were bleary, reddened, defeated. I’m sure I looked just as haggard. After ten miles I was possessed by a seething hatred for the wind, struggling to keep my legs moving, terrified of the mountain lions and the setting sun and the knowledge that if this kept up much longer Rachel and I would never speak again. I tried so hard to go her speed and tell her I love you in eyelid Morse code, but it was worthless, and she was slowing more and more, until she just stopped, in the middle of the road, and got off her bike. I stopped too and stood beside her, and yelled encouraging words and asked questions and waited patiently, but she didn’t respond. Just closed her eyes. Breathed. And after a few minutes, she got back on the bike.

When we finally crawled up to the summit and saw it, I braked so suddenly that Rachel almost rear-ended me. Before us were mountains upon mountains upon mountains, dusted in snow, bathed in glorious platinum light bursting through the overhead murk. After so many miles in the Plains, this landscape seemed logically impossible. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see unicorns, Care Bears, Jesus on a golden chariot. The wind was still deafening, and neither of us could really think of much to say beyond “wow” and “fucking wow.” So we just smiled giddy smiles, eyes glistening from the exertion or the wind or the relief or all of the above and more, and then we pushed off, tucked low, and dove into the valley.

I
n a hiker-biker campsite on the eastern edge of Glacier National Park, I sat on a picnic table, sipping Scotch ale and cataloging all the ways the hellride from Dupuyer had maimed me. My skin was windburned, my eyes puffy, my legs a molten mess. The muscles of my neck and back had fused into one throbbing megaknot, and my knuckles ached from hours of strangling the handlebars. Rachel was in even worse shape. Beyond the exhaustion, she was suffering from a needling burn in her right hand, a backache, and, as she put it, an acute case of crotch stink. But none of that mattered now. We’d made it.

Rachel began stripping her Fuji of its panniers. She placed them on the table, one by one, then wheeled her denuded bike away and parked it behind a big pine.

I nodded at the bike. “Behind the tree?”

“Yep,” she said. “I don’t even want to look at that thing.”

“You’re going to hurt its feelings.”

“Well, it hurt my wrists. And my butt. And my sunny disposition.” She came back to the table and dumped out her panniers. “Fair’s fair.”

I looked over at my Fuji, blew a kiss, and said, “Don’t worry. I still love you.”

Now Rachel began picking out the items she planned to use in the park: toiletries and towel, journal and pens, camp clothes and book, phone and yarn and needles. She repacked this pile in one of her panniers, then crammed the other three with Lycra, her gloves, her helmet, basically everything that might remind her she was on a cross-country bike trip. These bags she stuffed, rather unceremoniously, into the bear box.

“Much better.” She opened a beer. “I am so ready to be off that bike.”

“I get that about you.”

I drained my can and pulled another from the six-pack. We’d stopped at a store in St. Mary, the but-for-the-grace-of-Glacier town just beyond the park’s eastern border, and there we’d found a cooler brimming with microbrews. It had been nothing but Bud and Miller since we left Minnesota, and so I’d felt something close to arousal while considering that wall of stouts and IPAs, ambers and Scotch ales. We’d chosen a six-pack of the latter, and the first sip tasted something like my first orgasm had felt—surprising and personal and possibly life-changing.

“Wanna set up here?” Rachel asked. She pointed toward a spot behind the table.

I shrugged. So far, we had this hiker-biker site to ourselves. A fire pit, a couple of picnic tables, and a half-dozen sandy tent pads to choose from. For five bucks apiece. Back at the ranger station, we’d both made sure to note (loudly) that car campers were paying four times that much, just for a parking space and a bit of privacy. And, well, now we had this quite private site, and I’d parked my bike on a tent pad, which was kind of like a deluxe parking space. I smiled a smug smile. No one was around to notice, but I figured a little practice couldn’t hurt.

The sun was sinking, the temperature with it, so I set up the tent while Rachel prepared a feast of boxed mac ’n’ cheese, Fritos, and two beers. An hour later we were in the tent, well fed and half-drunk and groping for each other. And twelve minutes after that, I was asleep.

 • • • 

I
woke to voices and crawled out of the tent to find people scrubbing dishes at the water pump and walking by with loaded packs. Up above, beyond the evergreen canopy, it was big sky. Blue and smokeless and beckoning.

I shook Rachel awake.

“What time is it?” she asked, yawning.

“Late,” I said.

I had no idea what time it was. Didn’t matter. Whether it was half past dawn or pushing noon, we needed to get outside. Because we were in Glacier. Because the smoke had cleared. And because Wisconsin’s eight-month winters had conditioned me to regard sunshine with a sort of manic reverence. I’d have rather been caught masturbating than sitting inside on such a bluebird day.

Within the hour, we were on a bus, heading up Going-to-the-Sun Road, the fifty-mile miracle of engineering that snakes through the heart of the park. The views were stupefying. All around us were giant, ragged anvils streaked with the blackest of shadow and the whitest of ice, every one bowing toward the massive Saint Mary Lake, her heart a heretical blue, her shallows an upside-down still-life of shoreline evergreen and snow-dusted daggers. You could see why this place was called the Crown of the Continent.

The road itself was equally stunning. Also terrifying. More often than not, its narrow lanes were trapped between, to the north, a wall of dynamite-blasted rock, and to the south, just inches past the shoulder, a stomach-twisting drop-off. There were too few guardrails and too many blind corners, and the grade was steep enough that, when I faced forward, I felt gravity’s pull less in the soles of my feet than in the small of my back.

I couldn’t wait to ride it.

The bus had these floor-to-ceiling windows, and our fellow passengers were plastered to the glass, gawking at the views, which, okay, were definitely gawkworthy. Still, I couldn’t help but pity these
tourists
. They couldn’t see Glacier. Not like Rachel and I could. We had put in the work, had spent weeks searching for beauty in the beigest of beige-scale borescapes, and we could now see colors and textures that defied the imagination of your average American car camper.

I leaned into Rachel and whispered, “I can’t imagine just driving here.”

She put her hand on my shoulder. “You’ve got a pretty pathetic imagination.”

We got off at the park’s best-named trailhead, Gunsight Pass, and followed the path into the woods. Hiking felt weird. For the past month, we’d walked very little. We’d taken some strolls in the towns we visited, done some pacing around grocery stores, but mainly we’d been in the saddle. My legs now felt heavy in this peculiar way, as if I’d just returned to flat ground after an hour on a trampoline.

The trail descended into a river basin, then climbed to a broad plateau surrounded by mountains, all of them ice freckled and skirted in evergreen shag. Now I was the one gawking—slack-jawed and dizzy and mumbling in the general direction of Rachel. I’d gotten it wrong on the bus. My search for subtlety hadn’t prepared me for anything. It had simply reduced my tolerance for grandeur. I felt like I’d spent three weeks nursing a snifter of scotch, only to wake in Glacier and slam an entire bottle.

I dropped my eyes from the mountains and saw that Rachel had stepped into a postcard. She was walking through high grass the color of a legal pad, about to enter a tunnel formed by the tangled fingers of a few scrubby pines, and in the distance snow-dusted mountains towered over an alpine lake. I pulled out my camera and framed a shot. Against the pine and powder blue and distant saw teeth, Rachel looked tiny. Engulfed.

Still holding up the camera, I began to think of a different photo, a photo I’d seen a million times, a photo very similar to the one I was framing. And . . . well . . .
click
.

 • • • 

F
our years before his death, Sam Larsen went backpacking in Glacier with our mutual friend Josh. The two of them had the best time anyone has ever had doing anything anywhere. For weeks, they spoke of nothing else. They regaled our group of friends with stories of goat stampedes and sixty-foot cliff dives, force-fed us stacks of photos, used words like “epic” and “spiritual,” finished each other’s sentences and shared the kind of swoony gazes usually reserved for a couple newly pregnant with its first child.

I hated their stupid stories about their stupid trip, by which I mean I loved the stories and hated Sam and Josh for having lived them. Without me. Months earlier Sam had locked me out of his life. My offenses, as I understood them, included (a) serial one-upmanship, (b) flagrant sniffling about my first big breakup (because at least I’d
had
a girlfriend), (c) making out with a girl on whom Sam had a crush, and (d) being, on the whole, a self-absorbed jackass. I was eighteen years old. Years later, I would discover my own reasons for keeping him at a distance, would parse the ways in which he’d been right and wrong about my self-absorption. But that summer, I just felt like I’d been dumped. And I saw his trip with Josh as a targeted snub (see “self-absorbed”).

The photo I hated most was a wide-angle shot of Sam crouched beside a goldenrod-yellow tent, his head raised toward a set of glacier-stamped saw teeth that rimmed the glassy lake on whose shores he and Josh had set up camp. The shot seemed to capture not only the visual majesty of Glacier but also the euphoria—profound and private—of my estranged friend. The first time I saw the photo, in Sam’s company, I blinked away tears. The second and third and forty-first times, when it was framed and proudly displayed in Josh’s apartment, I told myself I’d call Sam later that night. The forty-second time, Sam Larsen was gone.

Ever since, when I’d pictured Sam it was in Glacier, in that photo, his image reflected in glacial runoff, his mind full of big thoughts. Thoughts that transcended the grotesquely small bullshit that had pushed us apart. Thoughts that sprung from the firm and fertile ground where I’d hoped we might reconnect.

I was now standing on that ground.

I lowered the camera. Jogged to catch up with Rachel. “What day is it?” I asked.

“Tuesday,” she said.

“No, what’s the date?”

“Um. I don’t know.”

“Can you check the phone?”

“Let’s see . . . It is the twentieth day of the eighth month of this, the year of the zebra.” She held out an upturned hand. “That’ll be three dollars, please.”

I stared through her. “Wow.”

“Okay. Two dollars.”

I shook my head. “Sam died three years ago. Well, three years and a day, I guess.”

“Oh.”

“And he was here. I mean, right here.”

“Didn’t he . . . Didn’t it happen in Lake Superior?”

“Well, yeah. But he was here a few years before, and Josh took this picture, and . . .” I looked off to the right, as I always do before saying something incoherent.

“And?”

What I wanted to say was this: And now I’m here, on this of all days, in this place Sam loved in a way I couldn’t understand, and now I might kind of understand, and I wish I could talk to him, and maybe by being here I am talking to him, and—well shit, Rachel—I wouldn’t even be here if not for you, you brought me here, and I know this is going to sound ridiculous, but I feel like I’m watching a movie of myself and this is something like an ending.

But those words weren’t available. Not in that order. In any order. So I shrugged and said, “I don’t know. I’m just happy we found this place.”

I pocketed the camera and kept walking toward the lake.

 • • • 

W
e spent a full week in Glacier. For the first four days, we didn’t even touch the bikes. Rachel may have even succeeded in not looking at them.

Mainly what we did was walk. And talk. See, Glacier was teeming with signs and pamphlets and ruddy-cheeked rangers warning us to
BE ALERT
and
MAKE NOISE
because
DON’T
SURPRISE BEARS
, and though we felt bad about verbally polluting a landscape that all but demanded silent reverence, we felt even worse about the prospect of getting mauled by a surprised bear. So we made noise. We
conversed
, unlike most of our fellow hikers, who seemed to believe the only way to
MAK
E NOISE
was, at ten-second intervals, to holler, “Hello, bears!” or “Yoo-hoo, bears! Here we are!” Which, I mean, yuck. Like everyone else, Rachel and I had a keen interest in avoiding violent death, but as seasoned veterans of the unstructured outdoors, we knew better than to be so fucking gaudy about it.

We decided, during that first hike to Gunsight Pass, that we’d
MAKE NOISE
by asking each other “big questions.” This seemed easy enough, but then I tried to think of a single such question and blanked. I kind of felt like I knew all there was to know about Rachel.

And yet.
BEARS
.

I started simple, asked what she missed most about living in Xela. She answered (speaking Spanish, buying thirty-cent avocados, getting her ass kicked at soccer by Raúl, a seven-year-old boy who lived at the shelter where she volunteered) and then turned the question back on me (also the Spanish, piping-hot street-corner arroz con leche, and watching Soltura’s sax player, Fernando, cheese it up while playing the melody to “My Way”). From there, the conversation started flowing. We talked about a two-week silent meditation retreat Rachel had been on years back. This had been mentioned but never described. Same for my clumsy college activism, and both of our vague daydreams about life in Portland, and even some of the whens and whys of our on-the-road frustrations.

These conversations followed us from the woods to the bus to the campsite, then back to the woods the next day, and the next, and I’d like to think we walked right past several grizzlies, all of whom were like, “Damn, that is one attractive and emotionally healthy couple, and even if they did startle me, they didn’t insult my intelligence, and by golly I wish them well.”

 • • • 

W
hen we weren’t hiking, we were drinking microbrew on the shore of Saint Mary Lake, or taking irresponsibly long showers, or having responsibly quiet afternoon sex, or eating breakfast pie at a little café just outside the park, all the while getting pampered by complete strangers. One morning a camp neighbor, with whom we’d spoken for like two minutes, handed us a twenty-dollar bill he’d found by his tent and told us to treat ourselves to a meal because “I think what you’re doing is really cool.” Another guy we met, who had the double virtue of being a fellow Wisconsinite and a fellow Brian, offered to drive us to the bus-inaccessible Ptarmigan Trail, and the hike ended up being our favorite of the week.

Everything felt easy. I wasn’t thinking about where I was or wasn’t headed, what I did or didn’t deserve. I was just enjoying myself, my memories of Sam, the beauty of the park, the generosity of strangers, and, especially, I was enjoying Rachel. My frustrations seemed so distant. I’d just needed to step back and see her outside the rearview. I was seriously considering tossing that thing in the trash. It never showed me the Rachel I wanted to see: the woman who could land somewhere and instantly know how she wanted to spend her day, who had the most infectious laugh I’d ever heard, who knew who she was and wanted to be, who had such a voice that sometimes I got hard just listening to her speak.